They have a great marketing guru as CEO, Charles Hoskinson, former ethereum developer and eloquent speaker of blockchain. Moreover, ICOs lunched in the last bull market has certain advantages of collecting larger funds that they can use for marketing or even buying back coins to create a support level. Moreover, being an ERC20 token and marketed to moon, Cardano is a pipe dream for frequent crypto-traders in large number of exchanges.
RE: Future of cryptocurrency: war of utility tokens. How can Steem win the war which has lost current battles (i.e. low ranking).