🔴 Cardano was founded in 2015 by Charles Hoskinson, formerly working with Vitalik Buterin, the main creator of Ethereum.
🔴 The Cardano Foundation is responsible for the development of Cardano. The development of the blockchain is actually exclusively handled by Input Output: https://iohk.io/en/. This is a blockchain technology development and research company founded by Hoskinson and Jeremy Wood.
🔴 Cardano advertises itself as a 3rd generation blockchain. What does this mean? This gradation is a more or less formal way of describing the sophistication and development of blockchain platforms.
🔴 The first generation of blockchain was Bitcoin, where the blockchain had a single function. In the case of Bitcoin, blockchain functionalities focused on providing the functionality of digital money, which is Bitcoin.
The second generation blockchain started with Ethereum, being a system where we can run smart contracts. The second generation blockchain, is a ‘global computer’ that can offer multiple functionalities, thanks to its programmability.
The third-generation blockchain focuses on the development of the second-generation blockchain, trying to find the optimal solution to blockchain problems such as broad scalability, security, ability to implement updates, dispute resolution, etc.
🔴 Cardano’s blockchain cryptocurrency is ADA. The total supply is expected to be 45 billion, with over 35 billion currently on the market. 57.6% of the total supply was sold during the ICO. The POS process of creating a new cryptocurrency delegates a portion of the newly created tokens to the Cardano project development fund.
🔴 Cardano is an interesting blockchain primarily because of its scientific approach to the development of blockchain technology. One can find a lot of scientific studies justifying Cardano’s design decisions. IOHK employs specialists with a strong academic background and competent engineers. Cardano aims to compete with Ethereum, the largest programmable blockchain.
🔴 How is Cardano built and how does it work? Here are the key features of Cardano, the third-generation programmable blockchain 💬👇
🔴 Cardano is built on Haskell – a functional and, let’s not hide it, difficult programming language. The functional paradigm aims at making the software easy to maintain and ultimately reliable.
🔴 Ouroboros is the POS-type consensus algorithm used in Cardano. This means that there are no cryptocurrency miners in Cardano. It is a specialised algorithm based on scientific research and differs from Ethereum, for example, in that there are no ‘penalties’ for rogue validators (block creators) in Cardano, yet the algorithm ensures that the network works correctly as long as 51% of the ADA cryptocurrency used for POS is used by honest nodes. Consensus is a key feature of any blockchain, I will devote a separate post to it.
🔴 Cardano is similarly, like Bitcoin, based on UTXO. It is a feature of the architecture of the “ledger” itself – blockchain, i.e. the way data is stored and cryptographically secured in the blockchain. The use of UTXO is a very distinctive feature of Cardano. It has a very big impact on how smart contracts are handled, how data is read, but also how the blockchain scales. This is also a topic for separate posts.
🔴 Cardano has a technological mechanism that allows for easy hard-forks, the so-called hardfork combinator. This makes it possible to make new changes to the blockchain in a way that ensures the correct operation of the network.
🔴 Hydra is a 2-layer solution based on so-called state channels. The idea is similar to the operation of the Lightning Network. Mithril is a so-called multi-signature scheme.
🔴 Cardano has so-called ‘native tokens’, i.e. the ability to create ERC-20 and ERC-721 (NFT) tokens built into the blockchain. In Ethereum, tokens are created by uploading the corresponding smart contract to the network.
🔴 Cardano supports the construction of sidechains. IOHK is working on building an EVM sidechain to support the launch of Ethereum contracts.
🔴 A block in Cardano is 88KB and is created every 20 seconds. We can measure Cardano’s performance in hundreds of tx per second, but it is not a blockchain that promotes thousands or even tens of thousands of tx per second (such as Solana).
🔴 The average cost of a transaction on Cardano is around ADA 0.17 (currently 25 cents).