Cardano
Cardano.svg
Original author(s)Charles Hoskinson
Developer(s)Cardano Foundation, IOHK, EMURGO
Initial release27 September 2017 (4 years ago) (2017-09-27)[1]
Stable release1.34.1 / 7 March 2022 (2 months ago) (2022-03-07)[2]
Development statusActive
Written inHaskell
Operating systemCross-platform
TypeDistributed computing
LicenseApache License
Active hosts4,672[3]
Websitecardano.org

Cardano is a public blockchain platform. It is open-source and decentralized, with consensus achieved using proof of stake. It can facilitate peer-to-peer transactions with its internal cryptocurrency, ADA.[4]

Cardano was founded in 2015 by Ethereum co-founder Charles Hoskinson. The development of the project is overseen and supervised by the Cardano Foundation based in Zug, Switzerland.[5][6] It is the largest cryptocurrency to use a proof-of-stake blockchain, which is seen as a greener alternative to proof-of-work protocols.[7]

Background

The platform began development in 2015 and was launched in 2017 by Charles Hoskinson, a co-founder of Ethereum.[8][9][10] Hoskinson left Ethereum after a dispute with one of its co-founders, Vitalik Buterin; Hoskinson wanted to accept venture capital and create a for-profit entity, while Buterin wanted to keep it running as a nonprofit organization. After leaving, he co-founded IOHK, a blockchain-engineering company, whose primary business is the development of Cardano, alongside the Cardano Foundation and Emurgo.[10] The platform is named after Gerolamo Cardano, while the cryptocurrency itself is named after Ada Lovelace. The Ada sub-unit is the Lovelace; one Ada = 1,000,000 Lovelaces.[11]

Technical aspects

Atypically, Cardano does not have a white paper. Instead, it uses design principles intended to overcome issues faced by other cryptocurrencies such as scalability, interoperability, and regulatory compliance.[12] Cardano claims that it overcomes problems in the crypto market: mainly that Bitcoin is too slow and inflexible, and that Ethereum is not safe or scalable.[13]

Cardano uses a proof-of-stake protocol named Ouroboros;[14] this is in contrast to Bitcoin and Ethereum, which use proof-of-work protocols.[15] Proof-of-stake blockchains use significantly less energy than proof-of-work chains.[15] In February 2021, Hoskinson estimated the Cardano network used 6 GWh annually, less than 0.01% of the 110.53 TWh used by the Bitcoin network as estimated by the University of Cambridge.[16][17]

Within the Cardano platform, Ada exists on the settlement layer. This layer is similar to Bitcoin and keeps track of transactions. The second layer is the computation layer. This layer is designed to be similar to Ethereum, enabling smart contracts and applications to run on the platform.[13]

Like Bitcoin, Cardano uses a UTXO ledger model, though it is an extended version (EUTXO)[18][19] to facilitate smart contracts and scripting languages.[20]

Cardano implemented decentralized finance (DeFi) services on September 12 2021, including an upgrade to enable smart contracts and the ability to build decentralized applications (DApps).[21] Also included is Plutus, a Turing-complete smart contract language written in Haskell, and a specialised smart contract language, Marlowe, designed for non-programmers in the financial sector. Cardano's smart contract languages allow developers to run end-to-end tests on their program without leaving the integrated development environment or deploying their code.[22][23]

History

Cardano was funded through an initial coin offering (ICO).[24] The currency debuted with a market cap of $600 million. By the end of 2017, it had a market cap of $10 billion, and reached a value of $33 billion briefly in 2018 before a general tightening of the crypto market dropped its value back to $10 billion. Cardano reached a market cap of $77 billion in May 2021 and solidified its position as the biggest proof-of-stake cryptocurrency.[25][26]

IOHK has partnered with universities for blockchain research. In 2017, IOHK helped the University of Edinburgh launch the Blockchain Technology Laboratory.[27][28][29] In 2020, IOHK donated $500,000 in Ada to the University of Wyoming to support the development of blockchain technology.[30]

Applications

In 2019, the Ministry of Education in the country of Georgia signed a memorandum of understanding with the Free University of Tbilisi to use Cardano and Atala to build a credential verification system for Georgia.[31]

In 2019, footwear manufacturer New Balance announced a pilot program on the Cardano blockchain to track the authenticity of its newest basketball shoe.[32]

In 2018 IOHK announced a partnership with the Ethiopian government to investigate ways to deploy Cardano in the country.[33] In April 2021, IOHK and the Ethiopia Ministry of Education announced plans to launch an identity and record-keeping system on Cardano for the country's five million students.[34]

In 2021 Hoskinson began working with electronic dance music DJ Paul Oakenfold to release a full length album on the Cardano blockchain; the album is titled Zombie Lobster.[35]

References

  1. ^ "Releases - input-output-hk/cardano-sl". Retrieved 28 October 2020 – via GitHub.
  2. ^ "Releases - input-output-hk/cardano-node". Retrieved 22 April 2022 – via GitHub.
  3. ^ "ADATools". adatools.io. Retrieved 8 January 2022.
  4. ^ "Die Grundlagen der Cardano-Kryptowährung". hamburg-magazin.de (in German). 26 June 2020. Retrieved 2 July 2020.
  5. ^ "Bitcoin's Smaller Cousins". Bloomberg L.P. 20 December 2017. Archived from the original on 26 June 2018. Retrieved 25 December 2018. Cardano, backed by the Zug, Switzerland-based Cardano Foundation, is a decentralized public blockchain that aims to protect user privacy, while also allowing for regulation
  6. ^ "ZUG: Ex-Tezos-Mann geht zu Cardano". luzernerzeitung.ch (in German). Luzerner Zeitung. 20 February 2018. Retrieved 7 July 2020.
  7. ^ "What is Cardano? The 'green' crypto that hopes to surpass the tech giants". The Independent. 18 May 2021. Retrieved 22 August 2021.
  8. ^ "Ethereum Cofounder Says Blockchain Presents 'Governance Crisis'". Fortune. Retrieved 1 April 2020.
  9. ^ "ICOs explained". CNBC. 6 October 2017. Retrieved 25 December 2018. ethereum co-founder Charles Hoskinson says it has become increasingly more challenging to regulate this new asset class" and "ICO market could crash
  10. ^ a b Au-Yeung, Angel (7 February 2018). "A Fight Over Ethereum Led A Cofounder To Even Greater Crypto Wealth". Forbes Magazine. Retrieved 12 July 2020. IOHK's key project: Cardano, a public blockchain and smart-contract platform which hosts the Ada cryptocurrency.
  11. ^ "What is Ada?". Retrieved 23 October 2020.
  12. ^ "The Blockchain Galaxy A comprehensive research on distributed ledger technologies" (PDF). Deloitte. 6 May 2020. Retrieved 29 October 2020. The distinctive feature of Cardano is its "research-first" approach to design.
  13. ^ a b "Cardano: a rising cryptocurrency". Mashable. 24 February 2018. Retrieved 25 December 2018. Cardano claims it will solve most of the issues that plague well-established cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin and Ethereum
  14. ^ Badertscher, Christian; Gaži, Peter; Kiayias, Aggelos; Russell, Alexander; Zikas, Vassilis (15 January 2018). "Ouroboros Genesis: Composable Proof-of-Stake Blockchains with Dynamic Availability". Proceedings of the 2018 ACM SIGSAC Conference on Computer and Communications Security. CCS '18. Toronto, Canada: Association for Computing Machinery: 913–930. doi:10.1145/3243734.3243848. hdl:20.500.11820/7f97233f-23d4-4568-87bc-254875f7a34c. ISBN 978-1-4503-5693-0. S2CID 44109228.
  15. ^ a b Volpicelli, Gian M. "A blockchain tweak could fix crypto's colossal energy problem". Wired UK. ISSN 1357-0978. Retrieved 13 May 2021.
  16. ^ "Bitcoin's wild ride renews worries about its massive carbon footprint". CNBC. 9 February 2021. Retrieved 13 February 2021. Bitcoin has a carbon footprint comparable to that of New Zealand
  17. ^ Ponciano, Jonathan. "Cardano Surges During $300 Billion Crypto Crash As Musk Eyes Sustainable Bitcoin Alternatives". Forbes. Retrieved 13 May 2021.
  18. ^ Chakravarty, M. M., Chapman, J., MacKenzie, K., Melkonian, O., Peyton Jones, M., & Wadler, P. (2020) “The extended UTXO model”, in International Conference on Financial Cryptography and Data Security (pp. 525-539). Springer, Cham. https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-030-54455-3_37
  19. ^ Brünjes, L., & Gabbay, M. J. (2020) “UTxO-vs account-based smart contract blockchain programming paradigms”, in International Symposium on Leveraging Applications of Formal Methods (pp. 73-88). Springer, Cham. https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-030-61467-6_6
  20. ^ Lamela Seijas, P., Nemish, A., Smith, D., & Thompson, S. (2020) “Marlowe: implementing and analysing financial contracts on blockchain”, in International Conference on Financial Cryptography and Data Security (pp. 496-511). Springer, Cham. https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-030-54455-3_35
  21. ^ BI India Bureau (13 September 2021). "Cardano can now mint NFTs, run DApps and more — but the creators themselves are asking people to keep their expectations in check". Business Insider India. Times Internet Limited. Retrieved 7 October 2021.
  22. ^ "Say Hello to IOHK's New Cardano Blockchain Tools, Plutus and Marlowe". Crowdfund Insider. 11 December 2018. Retrieved 18 February 2019. Where programming Ethereum requires coding in two languages, Solidity for the on-chain code and Javascript for the off-chain parts, and other systems suffer a similar split, Plutus is the only system that provides an integrated language for both, based on Haskell
  23. ^ Emma Newbery (2021) "Why Cardano Could Be an 'Ethereum Killer'", The Motley Fool, July 2. https://www.fool.com/the-ascent/cryptocurrency/articles/why-cardano-could-be-an-ethereum-killer/
  24. ^ "Cryptocurrencies and blockchain" (PDF). European Parliament. July 2018. Retrieved 29 October 2020. What distinguishes Cardano from Ethereum, and from many other cryptocurrencies, is that it is (one of the first) blockchain projects to be developed and designed from a scientific philosophy by a team of leading academics and engineers
  25. ^ "What is Cardano? The 'green' crypto that hopes to surpass the tech giants". The Independent. 18 May 2021. Retrieved 6 June 2021.
  26. ^ "Cryptocurrency goes green: Could 'proof of stake' offer a solution to energy concerns?". NBC News. Retrieved 6 June 2021.
  27. ^ "Beyond Bitcoin - IOHK and University of Edinburgh establish Blockchain Technology Laboratory". The University of Edinburgh. Retrieved 31 March 2020.
  28. ^ "IOHK and University of Edinburgh establish Blockchain Technology Laboratory". finextra.com. Retrieved 25 October 2020.
  29. ^ "The University of Edinburgh is launching a blockchain research lab with one of the cofounders of Ethereum". www.insider.com. Retrieved 25 October 2020.
  30. ^ "UW Receives $500,000 Gift in Ada Cryptocurrency from IOHK". www.uwyo.edu. Retrieved 25 October 2020.
  31. ^ "Ministry of Education signs deal with Cardano Atala". Forbes Georgia. 17 June 2019. Retrieved 27 March 2020.
  32. ^ "Sneakers meet the blockchain in New Balance shoe authenticity pilot". SiliconANGLE. 17 October 2019. Retrieved 28 March 2020.
  33. ^ Phillips, Ruari (11 June 2018). "Ethiopian government-Cardano Technology team up on blockchain". East African Business Week. Retrieved 27 March 2020.
  34. ^ Sorkin, Andrew Ross; Karaian, Jason; Kessler, Sarah; Merced, Michael J. de la; Hirsch, Lauren; Livni, Ephrat (27 April 2021). "Tesla Makes Money (Including From Selling Cars)". The New York Times. ISSN 0362-4331. Retrieved 28 April 2021.
  35. ^ Sunkel, Cameron (28 September 2021). "There's a New Paul Oakenfold Album Arriving on the Cardano Blockchain". EDM.com. Retrieved 2 October 2021.

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