In this post we will be going over the basic features of Cardano.
Charles Hoskinson is one of the co-founders of Ethereum. In 2015 along with the Cardano Foundation he founded Cardano. Cardano is a platform composed of a settlement layer to handle cryptocurrency transactions. And a computing layer which is built to handle smart contracts.
The idea here is to separate the accounting of transactions from the reasons why transactions are being performed. The settlement layer is the first layer to be developed by the Cardano team. ADA is the native cryptocurrency for Cardano.
ADA may be used to send and receive digital funds on the settlement layer. Cardano allows for decentralized applications also known as DAPPS which run directly on the Blockchain rather than on centralized servers. Cardano features a proof-of-stake consensus algorithm called Ouroboros to validate transactions.
Ouroboros was developed by a team of cryptographers from multiple academic institutions. It is specifically designed to be modular, future-proof, and flexible as consensus algorithms evolve over time. In a proof-of-stake algorithm, the participant who will create the next block is randomly selected proportional to their size of their stake in the currency. As a proof-of-stake algorithm Cardano is not dependent on mining like proof-of-work algorithms. Like the one Bitcoin uses.
Time in Cardano is divided into Epochs, which are further divided into Slots. Slots are short time periods around 20 seconds. Each Slot has one slot leader. Only the Slot leader can create one and only one block in their assigned slot. Transaction fees in a given Epoch are collected in a virtual pool and distributed to these slot leaders. Not all participants on the network are involved in choosing the next slot leader.
In order to qualify participants must hold a minimum threshold stake in the currency. If they qualify they are considers Electors for the next Epoch. Slot Leader election is performed using a distribute method of generating a random number. The inputs are secret seeds generated by the participants and the final output is the identifier for a specific existing coin.
The owner of this coin becomes a slot leader. All concepts that are implemented in Cardano follow an academic peer review process. An interesting feature in the pipeline currently is sidechains, which will allow for greater scalability and new features without forking the blockchain.
Another is Quantum resistant signatures, which will prevent an attack from a Quantum based computer on the network.
