Cardano: the new coin on the block, a closer look

Many of you have surely seen the new coin that jumped to the 17th spot on coinmarketcap with a little over 500 million marketcap.  

CARDANO

Something this big we need to check and see if it is worth investing

This is not something new even if it just popped onto the radar with the appearance on www.coinmarketcap.com .  The ICO was launched mainly in Japan in 2015 and that’s where 97% of the raised capital comes from with a bit in South Korea and in China.  So over there this is widely known and it just started it existence for us with the release of their Settlement layer

The idea of doing this in the east even though most of the programmers come from the States is due to the restrictive legislations that would not allow them to raise their capital like they did. 

So here are some facts…

-  Cordero is run by the IOHK (input output Hong Kong) foundation https://iohk.io/

- One of the key people is Charles Hoskinson (he was involved in the birth of Ethereum and is still involved in Ethereum Classic)

- The Developers are building this platform with a scientific philosophy in mind and founded on mathematics by a global team of leading academics and engineers

- There will be no hard forks since the platform is built for flexibility and consists of layers

- Layer 1 is the settlement layer, this is where the ADA currency resides (built in cooperation with University of Edinburgh, the University of Athens and the University of Connecticut 

- Layer 2 is where the smart contracts are and this computation layer is expected to be released in Q1 of 2018

- Layer 3 is where the applications will be built when computation and settlement layer are active

- It is a proof of stake coin running on an algorithm called Ouroboros: a provably secure proof of stake protocol (no energy guzzling mining monopolies and low investment entry point to get some revenue) white paper for Ouroboros here: https://eprint.iacr.org/2016/889.pdf

- Consists of a really big team of 20 people on the development side and another 8 programmers just for the wallet

-the wallet is called Daedalus and can be found here https://daedaluswallet.io/

- Listed on Bittrex (Bitt and Cryptopia following soon)

- Releasing their own debit cards

- Focused on Japan for the moment 

- Hinting at complying with regulators but not a lot more information about that

- There is a block explorer that can be used to check the history of transactions that have been made on the Cardano blockchain

So what are the Downsides?

The website is kind of empty (they chose to work on a good product and not on the website but even so this does not look too well)

The main programming language is Hascall which is only being used by about 3% of programmers and they have their own simplified version called Plutus.  The plan is to have most programming languages (like C / Java/ etc) run on top of Plutus but if you really want to get down to the nitty gritty side of it this would mean learning a new coding language for most people or hiring an expensive programmer

There is already a very big market cap so will this leave a lot of space for the currency to gain in value?

All of this is coming from the Orients and Japan, not always a bad thing but with all the volatility in China and co it might have an effect (though I really doubt it since Japan is really pro crypto and adopting it all over)

I guess we will have to wait and see…  I am buying a bit of this currency (hoping to get it at a value between 0,01 and 0,015 since it seems to be dropping now) to check it out and see how everything works and might then later step up my investment depending on how it checks out and the market reacts which as you can see for the moment is not that good... but hey this is the cryptoworld and its really early days for this coin

I am not by any means an expert and all this info was gathered online but I kind of like the way this is set up. This post is also not investment advice but just my opinion. All in all this is definitely worth a second look.

Sources:

- www.Cardanofoundation.org

- www.cardanohub.org

- Youtube video

- https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/cardano/