The price of the native token of smart contract platform Cardano, $ADA, has surged more than 10% so far this year, at a time in which whales on the cryptocurrency’s network have restarted accumulating.

According to on-chain analytics firm Santiment, addresses holding between 1 million and 100 million $ADA (worth around $270,000 and $27 million at the time of writing) could be a main validator to watch for a potential price breakout.

These whales are believed to have the ability to significantly impact the price of the cryptocurrency through their activity and after dumping over 560 million $ADA over the final two months of 2022 have restarted accumulating this year, adding 217 million tokens to their stash so far.