• Cardano price sees bulls trying to get to grips with price action and pushing it back above a key technical level.
• ADA price slips again this morning and consolidates hours before the ECB rate decision.
• Expect to see another pull lower should the ECB miss the mark and disappoint markets.

Cardano (ADA) price saw bulls rallying on the back of equity markets, unfortunately, after a promising start, the little intraday rally went nowhere and could not make any substantial difference to the overall trend. Instead, price action is consolidating, which spells bad news ahead as a big catalyst event is set to happen this afternoon.

ADA price consolidates hours before the ECB meeting

Cardano price has been trading smack in the middle of its range for the past two months as price action consolidates after the failed attempt from bulls on Wednesday. Unfortunately, it failed to reach substantial levels like the monthly pivot or the 55-day simple moving average, which would be a good support to push price action further up today. But no, bulls got met with heavy selling pressure that is still ongoing today, with over 1% downside already clocked in the European session alone.

ADA price faces a big catalyst event this afternoon, with the ECB set to hike rates by 75 bps and Lagarde scheduled to speak later in the afternoon. She will be followed by Jerome Powell around the same time. Their overlapping speeches may trigger some choppy price reactions in all major asset classes. Expect the most likely scenario to be the ECB dropping the ball on its communication as it did several times in the past few months, triggering another dump of euro-holdings and circumstantially seeing dollar strength emerging on the back of that, thus resulting in ADA price dropping back to $0.44.

ADA/USD Daily chart

Of course, the ECB could say that with their rate hike, they already see several inflationary components slowing down. That would mean that less severe monetary tightening is needed in the future and would add more weight to earlier comments this week from the RBA that stated they would start to slow down their hiking path. Cryptocurrencies would flourish on the back of such comments and rally, breaking above the monthly pivot and 55-day SMA as they should have done on Wednesday.