What is Cardano?

After Cardano's recent pump over the past few days, more and more people have started to look into Cardano. I thought it would be a good idea to take a brief look at it myself and summarize what the project is about! Enjoy!

Cardano is a decentralised public blockchain and cryptocurrency project and is fully open source. Cardano is developing a smart contract platform which seeks to deliver more advanced features than any protocol previously developed.

Cardano is home to the Ada cryptocurrency, which can be used to send and receive digital funds.

This digital cash represents the future of money, making possible fast, direct transfers that are guaranteed to be secure through the use of cryptography.

Platform:

Cardano is also a technological platform that will be capable of running financial applications currently used every day by individuals, organisations and governments all around the world.

The platform is being constructed in layers, which gives the system the flexibility to be more easily maintained and allow for upgrades by way of soft forks.

After the settlement layer that will run Ada is complete, a separate computing layer will be built to handle smart contracts, the digital legal agreements that will underpin future commerce and business.

Cardano will also run decentralised applications, or dapps, services not controlled by any single party but instead operate on a blockchain.

Ouroboros:

Cardano uses a new proof of stake algorithm called Ouroboros. Ouroboros determines how individual nodes reach consensus about the network. This algorithm is a crucial part of the infrastructure that supports the Ada cryptocurrency and is a major innovation in blockchain technology.

Ouroboros eliminates the need for an energy-hungry proof of work protocol, which stands as a barrier to blockchain scaling up for much wider use.

Designed a team led by IOHK Chief Scientist, Professor Aggelos Kiayias, Ouroboros is the first proof of stake protocol that has mathematically been shown to be provably secure, and the first to have gone through peer review through its acceptance to Crypto 2017, the leading cryptography conference.

The level of security demonstrated by Ouroboros compares to that of Bitcoin’s blockchain, which has never been compromised.

Wallet:

To use Ada you must download Daedalus. Daedalus is a secure, multi-platform, HD (hierarchical deterministic) wallet for the Ada cryptocurrency.

Beyond being used to send and receive Ada, the Daedalus wallet has many special features, which make it easy to use and give you a high degree of confidence about its security. These include:

Encrypted private keys and spending passwords, offering protection against security threats such as malware.

Wallets can be exported to paper certificates, giving the maximum security option of placing funds in cold storage.

Ada redemption is built directly into Daedalus and supports encrypted and unencrypted redemption certificates.

Configurable transaction assurance level monitoring, allowing users to be sure when transactions become irreversible.

Wallet Tutorial:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=178&v=jfv7Ha8cPps

Engineers are in the process of designing and building many more useful features. Plans for development include:

Ethereum Classic and Bitcoin support.

A mobile wallet for Android and iOS.

Staking, which enables Ada holders to participate in the block generation process, and earn more of the currency.

An application store with community-built applications and support for virtually any cryptocurrency.

Roadmap:

Link: https://cardanoroadmap.com/

Final thoughts:

Cardano is a promising cryptocurrency and investment in my opinion. The team is developing a new platform on the Ouroboros which interests me very much. They have a well thought out road map with alot of things planned for the future. The wallet also interests me very much.

I hope you learned something from this brief summary of Cardano! Please leave your thoughts on Cardano below!

Are you invested?

Source: cardanohub.org