What is exciting about Cardano is, is that one of its lead developers or leaders of the project used to be with Ethereum, and that's Charles Hoskinson. Maybe you've heard of him. He was, I believe, the CEO of Ethereum and I think he left before Ethereum really launched and took off, so he wasn't part of it recently, this was further back in the past. He left Ethereum and he went to IOHK, which is Input Output Hong Kong. That was the group that he formed, and some Japanese investors came to that group, the IOHK, wanting to create something. What came out of it is Cardano.
What makes Cardano special? It is a smart contract platform, much like Ethereum, but it's built on layers. These layers allow it to be able to upgrade and expand through soft forks, so the risk of a hard fork, it's not a necessary thing because of the way that this technology or this block chain is built. Talk about the layers, there's a sediment layer which is going to have its cryptocurrency on it. From what I understand, Cardano isn't the cryptocurrency. Cardano is kind of the block chain technology, and it will have a cryptocurrency built within it which is called Ada or Ada, A-D-A is how it's spelled. That's the settlement layer where the currency lives at.
Then there is a computing layer which is where the smart contracts are built at. After that, you have an application layer, much like Ethereum and other ones where you'll have your block chain applications built on top of that. This is going to be a secure, flexible, and scalable block chain technology. This is what mainly they're touting. You know, if you going to their website, that's what you're going to see most is that it's secure, that's one of their big things, and that it's flexible and scalable. Which is very important, that the cryptocurrency can grow with the community that follows it without having to have all these hard forks and everything else.
Like I said, they tout themselves as being the first block chain that has this security. This security has been proven through science and mathematics. There was a peer review done on it, is what they state on the website, and through that they gained acceptance. This would be one of the first Proof of Stake coins that has provable security, and that's very important with Proof of Stake. They tout themselves as being the first block chain technology that was built with science in a scientific way, and they have a team of leading academics and engineers as well, which is far different from what you see with other cryptocurrencies. Currently, their team of developers that is working on Cardano is 20 people strong. They also have a completely separate team of people that are working on the wallet. Their wallet is called Daedalus, and they have four independent developers working just on the wallet piece of it.
There's a lot of excitement around this coin, obviously. We didn't hear a lot about it, and that's because these Japanese investors who came to them wanted to start a Asia ICO, something that was going to be focused on Asia first, and that's why we didn't hear about it. They have apparently had great success in the Asia markets with their ICO and everything, and that's why we seen it hit the Coin Market Cap so strongly right out of the gate.
A little bit more about it and the technology from a programming aspect. The Cardano is built with Haskell, which is a proven programming language, it's been around for a while. Now, they do have their own smart contract language, which is called Plutus, I think is how you pronounce it. It's P-L-U-T-U-S. It is basically a lighter weight version of Haskell, but in the future down the road with their virtual machine that they're building, which is much like what Ethereum uses, that's what all the applications are built on, you'll be able to program with that using more traditional languages such as C, Java, and Java Script. You don't necessarily have to learn this language, but if you want to get down to the nitty gritty and you want to be able to program every aspect of it, then you're going to need to be familiar with their version of Haskell, the lighter weight version, which was called Plutus. That's important if you're a developer, this might be something that you really want to take a look into.
If you're an investor and you're looking for something new to invest in, this is something that you want to keep your eye on because Charles Hoskinson is also involved in Ethereum Classic. He came from Ethereum, branched off into Ethereum Classic, which is also under the IOHK or the Input Output Hong Kong, they manage that under that same company. Keep your eyes out for this one, see where it goes.
They don't have much on their website in terms of a road map just yet, but they do have a very well designed and laid out website with a lot of other information when you look at their, they don't necessarily call it a white paper, but they do have quite a bit of documentation which explains a lot more about it if you're interested in that. I'll have everything linked down below, so this is something really exciting and something that we all need to keep our eye on, because this could be big in the future, especially if it takes off, and when you have someone so prominent such as Charles Hoskinson, somebody that's been in it from the beginning when Ethereum started, this is something that you definitely need to pay attention to.
