What is Cardano? A guide

What is Cardano? A guide

CARDANO - THE BLOCKCHAIN OF THE FUTURE

 

Cardaspians – our top performing Cardano staking pool – exists of a team of 6 people who believe in Cardano. We started at the base ourselves, looking for a worthy crypto investment project to put our own money and time in. After a thorough analysis, we came to the conclusion that Cardano might be the best blockchain and investment opportunity within that same space.
So try to follow our thought of mind and focus yourself on Cardano. In this broad article, we try to explain every factor of the most decentralized and trustworthy blockchain out there. Not only the blockchain and its core values are subject to discussion, we’re also focussing on the technical aspects, their ecosystem and their way to impact climate and charities.
A complete guide to one of the most interesting and exciting projects out there.
Ready to rumble? We are!

 Cardano token

WHAT IS CARDANO

Cardano (ADA) describes itself as a decentralized proof of stake (POS) blockchain. It was established by Charles Hoskinson in 2015, but the blockchain itself got launched in 2017.
At the time, Cardano was one of the only POS networks. Other blockchains still worked under the  less climate friendly alternative called proof of work (PoW). Cardano wants to evolve into a complete ecosystem for changemakers, innovators with the point of making a positive global change. Cardano wants to bring stability in a fast past and fast-changing world. A couple of key points to reaching this goals is their protocol which focusses on proof of stake and Ouroboros.
Next to that, an evidence based research system is in place to focus on steady but continuous growth and innovation.
Security is also important, because without security, transacting and interacting on the blockchain becomes a risky business. Cardano has a flawless state, making in one of the most secure blockchains.
It's ecosystem is open, bringing a maximum amount of incentivized participation, resulting in a maximum committed community which lies at the core of the project.
To make this all possible, the ecosystem needs to be scalable and (environmentally) sustainable.

 

CARDANO HISTORY

As mentioned before, the founder of Cardano (ADA) is Charles Hoskinson, which actually began his career as an Ethereum Co-founder.
In 2015, he decided to go his own way and decided to developed a blockchain which we consider to be and updated version of Ethereum.
Both Cardano as Ethereum have a lot of similarities, such as the use of smart contracts. Next to that, they are both decentralized systems which try to build and connect a web 3.0 space with a variety of different projects and tokens.
Cardano was the first blockchain to introduce the Proof of Stake (POS) mechanism, but ETH followed soon, because of necessity.
The innovative view that Hoskinson has for Cardano, is one where it describes Cardano as a “third generation” platform, where one of the focusses is to provide banking services to the people who are currently unbanked.
History relates to the future, so to see what happened and what’s planned, we’re taking a deep dive into the roadmap.

 

CARDANO ROADMAP

The Cardano roadmap (past – present and future) consists of 5 different eras:

Byron – Shelley – Goguen – Basho and Voltaire.
In this part, we’re going to address a short overview of each of them.
Before we do so, it’s important to know that although the implementation of these eras come at a chronological order, the work for the different eras happen at the same time.
While working on researching e.g. Goguen, Voltaire is also being researched.
The result and implementation of an era is a combination of years of hard research, prototyping and development.


The first era was the Byron era. The era started in September 2017 and it’s name is derived from Lord Byron, a famous English poet who was a huge fan of the French Revolution, which brought prosperity and freedom to all layers of society.
This era brought the possibility of buying and selling the ADA currency and the first proof of stake protocol came to life.

 

Shelley is the name of the second era, referring to ‘Percy Byssche Shelley’, a famous but rebellious English poet, with the heart on the right spot. He often shared his money with people in need.
During this era, more and more nodes were shifted towards the community itself, making Cardano more decentralized. At that time, Cardano was 50x-100x more decentralized than other blockchains. The staking reward system was implemented too, making it more useful, rewarding, and more valuable for users new and old. It was the perfect preparation for what’s yet to come.

 

Jospeh Goguen was an American computer scientist, working for the university of California and Oxford. He got the honour of becoming the impersonation of the third era. The roll-out of smart contracts on the platform became reality and it brought decentralized applications (DApps) to Cardano.
The creation of Plutus brought benefits of functional programming to smart contract creation.
Marlowe, a system which allows financial and business experts with no technical knowledge to make smart contracts, is also a huge breakthrough.

This third era shows the future abilities of Cardano, bringing excitement on different levels like DApps, enterprise level and mission-critical level. Development here, is at its full speed.

 

The fourth era is called ‘Basho’, honouring Matsuo Basho, one of the biggest haiku masters. He didn’t write his poems, but he spoke them, letting his disciples write them down. He focus on Buddhistic Philosophy, remembering the reader to the transience of everything he sees.
This era focusses on the optimization and improvement of the scalability and interoperability of the network. Basically, Basho is all about making the system better, focussing on the underlying performance, making high transaction volume possible.
The idea is to introduce sidechains. With the introduction of Midnight, the first sidechain has already been announced.

 

The last era is Voltaire. Although the famous Frenchman doesn’t need an introduction, we’d like to point out that he was the core of the French Revolution, influencing entire societies with his words of freedom.
This last era is to create a fully self-sustaining system. A treasury and voting system will allow stakers and network participants to influence the future development of the network by their voting rights.
When Cardano becomes truly and completely decentralized, it maintains itself through ‘Cardano improvement proposals’ leveraging the staking and delegation process.
Cardano’s future will completely be in the hands of the community.

 Cardano Roadmap

 

CARDANO TOKENOMICS

 

Cardano’s native token, ADA is derived from Ada Lovelace, a British mathematician. Ada is known for her description of the ‘Analytic Machine’, an early mechanic computer. She’s seen as the designer of the first software programme, because she wrote ‘Programmes’ to manipulate symbols by fixed rules.

 

ADA itself, the native token of Cardano, has a maximum supply of 45 Billion tokens.
From those tokens, 57,6 percent will be distributed in a public sale, and 30,9% is kept as a reserve but will be distributed amongst the public too.
1.4% of all tokens is allocated to the Cardano foundation, 5.5% is owned by IOHK and EMURGO has 4.6% in its bag.

Cardano had an all-time low in 2017, with a price of 0.015 euro.
In 2021, it reached its current all time high, touching 2.83 euro.

 Tokenomics Cardano

THE CARDANO FOUNDATION

The Cardano foundation is a Swiss-based non-profit that oversees and supervises the advancement of Cardano. They are the legal custodians of the Cardano brand and they work with Input Output Hong-Kong (IOHK) and EMURGO to ensure that Cardano is being developed and promoted as a secure, transparent and accountable solution for a positive global change. The Cardano foundation sets the direction for decentralized economic empowerment, working with regulators in different jurisdictions to shape blockchain legislation and commercial standards, and empowering the Cardano community to leverage the Cardano product protocol to solve real-life problems.

The foundation and its community are an enormous decentralized family which strives for a better, decentralized world. As a Cardano staking pool, we are proud to be a part of a community with high ethics and standards which are upheld at every touchpoint.

 Cardano Foundation

WHY WE THINK IT’S REVOLUTIONARY

One of the major differences between Cardano and other cryptocurrencies is its reliance on peer-reviewed research and evidence based methods in its development. While most of the crypto market moves fast, Cardano stands for a slower but more methodical approach. The benefit is that this makes it more likely that developers catch potential threats and that when a certain update gets rolled out, the chances of failure get minimized.

Cardano has always used the proof of stake protocol to validate their transactions.
Recently, Ethereum also changed their consensus mechanism from proof-of-work (POW) to proof-of-stake (POS). Many blockchains are forced to change mechanism. Bitcoin is one of the biggest examples of an implementation of the original consensus.

Due to the fact that Cardano implemented the proof-of-stake mechanism from the beginning, it developed the well-deserved reputation of being a green cryptocurrency.

Next to that, Cardano has more than 3000 staking pools, which became the bedrock of Cardano.
More than half of all Cardano is staked, making it one of the most trustworthy blockchains.
This is not only a sign of good ‘Return on ADA’ people can get, but also shows a lot of trust in the project itself.

Cardano and the Cardano foundation also established interesting partnerships during its existence. Most of them are released throughout the year, but the yearly Cardano convention mostly brings exciting news.

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Written by Jason & Tim

Cardano Staking Pool Cardaspians - Ticker: CASP