Cardano (ADA): A Research-Laden History and Roadmap

Cardano (ADA) is decentralizing the consensus and governance process. The long-term goal of Cardano is to provide economic empowerment to people who need it the most.

Summary

Cardano is an open-source blockchain system named after Italian polymath Gerolamo Cardano, which was launched in 2017. Ada Lovelace, an English mathematician, is honored with the Cardano (ADA) coin.

The project’s research-driven culture and focus of applying complex technical theory to the realm of blockchain are reflected in these two names’ scientific references. Cardano has a unique two-layer structure, and the network employs Ouroboros, a patented Proof-of-Stake (PoS) consensus algorithm.

Cardano’s decentralized governance decisions are made possible through ADA, which is used for smart contracts, transactions, and user engagement.

The ADA currency also contributes to blockchain-related research, development, and business adoption. Transactions, smart contracts, IoT, DeFi, inventory monitoring, NFTs, and dApps are among the present and potential use cases for this high-throughput blockchain, as mentioned below.

Cardano is a decentralized social and financial network built on blockchain technology. Cardano is a platform for building new technologies, discovering new ways to engage, and creating new ways to work, developed by a global team of outstanding academics and engineers.

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Since the first release of its Byron mainnet in 2017, Cardano has been in a steady pace of development. Cardano’s original objective was to revolutionize the way blockchains gained consensus.

Cardano was able to accomplish this thanks to its unique Ouroboros Proof-of-Stake (PoS) algorithm, which ushered in a new era of energy efficiency for block validation with the release of Shelley, an update designed to democratize the consensus and governance process and push power back to the edges.

Through cryptographic proofs, formal verification, and over a thousand community-led staking pools, Cardano’s brightest minds have created a blockchain that is many times more environmentally friendly than previous Proof-of-Work (PoW) blockchains, while also providing unparalleled security and decentralization.

The Cardano Foundation: Development and Decentralization

The Cardano Foundation is a Swiss not-for-profit organization tasked with keeping the Cardano blockchain safe. Its mission is to encourage innovators and changemakers in the blockchain industry.

The Cardano Foundation aspires to a future based on blockchain technology that is both inclusive and transparent.

The foundation’s goal as an independent institution is to empower decentralized era architects, determine the course for governance as a service, and promote economic empowerment.

The transformation of decentralization is one of the Cardano Foundation’s main goals.

Despite the fact that the Cardano blockchain is one of the most decentralized in the world, there are still entities that have direct influence over key components of it.

By democratizing access to Cardano’s open-source infrastructure, passing the protocol over to the community, and assisting enterprise users in leveraging Cardano’s powerful solutions, the Cardano Foundation, along with its ecosystem partners, is attempting to alter this.

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EMURGO: Enterprise Adoption and Utilization

The EMURGO team, one of Cardano’s founding entities, is working to make blockchain technology more popular by encouraging governments, businesses, universities, and other organizations to use Cardano’s vast functionality, extensive security, and high transactional throughput.

EMURGO is working on and investigating a variety of use cases, including initiatives focused to:

Tamper-proof document verification
Internet of Things (IoT)
Decentralized finance (DeFi)
Anti-counterfeiting solutions for retail
Inventory tracking

IOHK: Fundamental Blockchain Research and Engineering

IOHK is a blockchain engineering company that is responsible for meticulously upgrading Cardano’s software and facilitating roadmap goals. It is another founding member of the Cardano ecosystem.

Since its inception in 2015, IOHK has placed a heavy emphasis on formal procedures and peer review, publishing more than 90 papers at academic conferences in support of Cardano and the larger blockchain sector.

Cardano is built on solid underpinnings and verifiable, high-reliability code by IOHK in collaboration with researchers and engineers at leading institutions across the world.

This engineering technique, which is similar to that used on spacecraft for mission-critical infrastructure and in high-frequency trading software, has contributed to the Cardano protocol’s robustness, which extends to the applications built on top of it.

IOHK is exploring collaboration with industry partners in addition to leading Cardano research and engineering. Beefchain, a cattle-traceability solution that leverages a Cardano-based inventory tracking technology called Atala Trace, is one of IOHK’s successful pilots.

Other projects in the luxury goods market and beyond are being investigated.

Cardano’s Structure and Consensus Algorithm

The Cardano Settlement Layer (CSL) and the Cardano Computational Layer (CCL) are two layers of Cardano’s structure (CCL).

The Cardano (ADA) native coin can be transferred to other blockchain participants during the CSL, also known as the ‘Byron’ phase. Like other Layer-1 cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin, it also allows for the immutable recording of transactions.

The CCL is a separate layer that supports tokenization, smart contracts, and decentralized apps by combining numerous components published throughout the Shelley and Goguen eras (dApps).

Cardano’s engineers are constantly looking for ways to bring in new participants through the deployment of domain-specific languages and cutting-edge software development kits, and they are constantly looking for ways to bring in new participants through the deployment of domain-specific languages and cutting-edge software development kits (SDKs).

Ouroboros, Cardano’s unique Proof-of-Stake (PoS) consensus system, is one of the project’s most significant achievements to date.

Ouroboros is the first PoS algorithm to be scientifically peer-reviewed, as well as audited and confirmed independently.

By allowing ADA coin holders to delegate to a stake pool, which acts as a node on the Cardano blockchain, Ouroboros achieves consensus and validates transactions.

Each node has a chance to be elected as a slot leader and validate a block, with the likelihood of becoming a slot leader increasing in tandem with the amount of ADA staked in their pool until the pool reaches saturation. Following that, stake pools are rewarded for correctly verifying blocks.

These awards are subsequently allocated to the stake pool’s delegates, allowing individuals to earn ADA for participating in the consensus process.

The blocks are divided into epochs by Ouroboros, each of which lasts five days.

Epochs are further broken into slots, which last 20 seconds apiece. Each slot is assigned a slot leader at random, who adds a block to the Cardano blockchain for their assigned space in exchange for newly minted ADA.

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Cardano’s Programming Languages

Cardano (ADA) was the first blockchain system to be built entirely in Haskell, a functional programming language. Many consider Haskell and comparable functional programming languages to be more precise, formally verifiable, and better suited to applications that demand high assurance.

Haskell and other functional programming languages are typically utilized in academia and high-importance software development.

Plutus and Marlowe, Cardano’s unique smart contract programming languages, are available as a collection of Haskell libraries, leveraging existing Haskell documentation, toolkits, and a highly competent community to create a foundation for building secure and enterprise-grade smart contracts.

This allows Plutus and Marlowe smart contracts to be carefully implemented in exact, formally validated code from the start, providing a high level of certainty.

IOHK funded a charity initiative to boost Haskell adoption and use in November of 2020.

To encourage non-technical users to create smart contracts and dApps on Cardano, IOHK is working on domain-specific languages (DSLs), which will allow subject matter experts, such as finance professionals, to easily write and deploy smart contracts in a visual programming language environment without having to write complex code.

ADA and Cardano’s Future

Looking ahead, Cardano has identified three core components and missions that are crucial to the long-term success of the company.

The emergence of native tokens, as well as the growth of the Cardano staking and delegation ecosystem, will allow the Cardano blockchain to explore new ways of representing value on-chain. Second, the Cardano Foundation and IOHK have said that they would explore options for more decentralized governance, including on-chain voting and Governance-as-a-Service (GaaS) capabilities.

Finally, the Cardano blockchain’s most significant long-term objective is to deliver economic identities to the billions of individuals around the world who lack access to financial infrastructure and sovereign economic identities – empowering communities that need it most.

Cardano has already gained significant market traction and appears to have a bright, decentralized future ahead of it.

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