It is a full blockchain, built from scratch in the functional programming language Haskell. Haskell is similar to math in its approach, code can be written more precisely, resulting in a more secure and reliable protocol.
"Cardano develops a smart contract platform that seeks to provide more advanced features than any previously developed protocol, a research-based approach. a vast global team of engineers and expert researchers ", as specified on their site.
Essential to Cardano is IOHK, a unique engineering company that builds the Cardano platform. Charles Hoskinson and Jeremy Wood, the founders of IOHK, have extensive experience in blockchain, with Charles formerly serving as CEO of Ethereum. IOHK has a world-leading team working in the Haskell language, which is the bedrock for Cardano's rigorous security.IOHK hired Philip Wadler, a principal designer of the Haskell language to work on the Cardano project.
IOHK Launches Cardano Blockchain; Ada Now Trading on Bittrex
So far, Ethereum has been the lead player in the smart contract platform space. Now a new competitor is steadily creeping into the game. And, in an interesting twist, the effort is being led by a former Ethereum CEO.
Last week, blockchain development firm IOHK, led by Charles Hoskinson, launched Cardano, a new blockchain and Ada (ADA), the platform’s native cryptocurrency, began trading on the U.S.-regulated exchange Bittrex.
If all goes according to IOHK’s plans, these events will mark the beginning of a two-year process that will see Cardano evolve into a full-fledged smart contract platform with an impressive library of protocols that developers can use to build their decentralized apps.
How It All Began
Hoskinson was an an early founder of Ethereum. He left the project before the network launched and eventually went on to form IOHK with colleague Jeremy Wood in 2014.
The following year, IOHK was approached by a group of Japanese business people interested in creating a blockchain that would function as a cryptocurrency and a smart contract platform while meeting the needs for the increasing regulatory oversight in the blockchain space.
To raise funds for the development, the group wanted to do an initial coin offering (ICO) focused on Asian markets. “They said it would be really nice to do a large-scale distribution in Asia, as opposed to the Western world, which is already saturated with cryptocurrencies,” Hoskinson said, in an interview with Bitcoin Magazine.
So the group hired IOHK to build software to assist with compliance during the sale. The Japanese company Attain was enlisted to coordinate the sale, and another entity, Cardano Foundation, handled oversight and auditing.
Meanwhile, the crowdsale, which ran from September 2015 to January 2017, raised $62 million and resulted in the sale of roughly 30 billion Ada vouchers. (Only 45 billion Ada will ever be in circulation.)
Because none of those vouchers were sold to U.S. citizens, the sale did not fall under the umbrella of the U.S. Security and Exchange Commission rules. “There was some regulatory advantages to offshoring it,” said Hoskinson. “And there were also some cultural advantages; mainly we had a blue sky, wide-open marketplace.”
The Japanese group, which has come to be called Emurgo, also hired IOHK to build Cardano under a five-year contract that will end in 2020. Emurgo will become to Cardano what ConsenSys is to Ethereum: a studio for designing smart contracts and decentralized apps that will run on the platform.
Haskell-Based
At the heart of Cardano lies Ouroboros, a proof-of-stake consensus algorithm. While Bitcoin and most other cryptocurrencies rely on proof of work, where miners solve a cryptographic puzzle to reach consensus on the state of the ledger, proof-of-stake systems reach consensus by coin-holder vote.
As a result, proof of stake is vastly more energy efficient than proof of work. It also enables faster transactions and opens the door to governance schemes, where coin holders can have a say in how the protocol evolves.
Yet, developing a secure proof of stake is exceedingly difficult. To that end, Ouroboros comes with a mathematical proof of security which has gone through a rigorous peer review, resulting in its acceptance and presentation at Crypto 2017, a major cryptography conference.
Efficient, safe, adjustable, durable and reliable, all based on the original concepts of peer-to-peer networks, "Something as good or better than Ethereum, with more concise mathematics, faster, safer?"