Published on Feb 21, 2020
Cardano is a technology platform that runs the Ada cryptocurrency. Released by blockchain development firm Input Output Hong Kong (IOHK) and led by Charles Hoskinson, former co-founder of BitShares and Ethereum, the platform aims to run smart contracts, decentralized applications, side chains, multi-party computation, and metadata. Daedalus is the official cryptocurrency wallet that holds Ada Currently, ADA is the main cryptocurrency featuring in the Cardano blockchain. Cardano develops their currency around a Recursive InterNetwork Architecture (RINA).
The national research and education network of Greece plans the first Cardano pilot project by verifying student diplomas via Cardano's blockchain. Hoskinson and team increased the frequency and detail of text and video briefings and Q&A in late 2017 including a lecture on January 8, 2018 in Cambridge Mass. USA. Cardano uses the Ouroboros proof of stake algorithm to achieve decentralized consensus in its network. A paper on the Ouroboros Secure Proof of Stake was accepted by the International Association for Cryptologic Research in 2017. In this protocol, slot leaders generate new blocks in the blockchain and verify the transactions. Anyone holding a Cardano ADA coin can become a slot leader
Cardano uses Haskell, a programming language with a high degree of fault tolerance. The goal of the Cardano is to use blockchain technology to bring banking systems to places where they’ve previously been too expensive to implement, like the developing world.
Cardano is being developed in two layers that separate the ledger of account values from the reason why values are moved from one account to the other. This separation enables the smart contracts that are written on the platform to be more flexible. IOHK is developing its own virtual machine (VM), akin to Ethereum's EVM.
This will become the computation layer of the platform, where self-executing code will live. Along with that, Cardano will have its own smart contract language called Plutus, a lightweight version of Haskell. Plutus is intended for high-assurance contracts where a security breach could have devastating consequences. New capabilities will allow users to write decentralized apps in legacy languages like Java, C and JavaScript.
Cardano also plans for a governance system in which decisions about the future of the protocol are made on-chain, and a treasury system in which a portion of the transaction fees are retained for future development.
