Cardano is a proof-of-stake blockchain platform with the lofty ambition of redistributing power to individuals and away from unaccountable central authorities through decentralised applications. It promises use cases across education, healthcare, agriculture, government, finance and retail. It was founded in 2015 by Ethereum co-founder Charles Hoskinson following a dispute with Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin..
Hoskinson wanted Ethereum to be a for-profit organisation whereas Vitalik wanted to keep it running as a non-profit organisation.
Cardano is run by the Cardano foundation based in Switzerland. The platform uses Ouroborus proof-of-stake technology, which is designed to improve upon traditional proof-of-work technology’s scalability limitations. It also uses its own smart contract system - the Plutus Platform.
The currency used on the Cardano platform is called ADA - named after the mathematician Ada Lovelace - with the platform itself being named after italian polymath Gerolamo Cardano.
The ADA token is designed to give holders the chance to participate in governance of the network. Thus, holders of ADA are granted voting rights on software development and other governance decisions.
Cardano is one of the biggest proof-of-stake blockchain networks and also prioritises peer-reviewed research in development decisions. All technology that is implemented into the Cardano platform has to pass peer-review and be published which is quite unique to Cardano and something the project is proud of.
Cardano has a five era roadmap laid out that goes through development phases focusing on foundations, decentralisation, smart contracts, scaling and governments. These development eras are named after five famous thinkers Byron, Shelley, Goguen, Basho and Voltaire respectively.
In 2020, the decentralisation period Shelley began focusing on increased decentralisation and growth of the network. Hoskinson has said that by the end of this development era, Cardano will be the most decentralised blockchain network in the world by a factor of at least 50, though that has yet to be conclusively demonstrated.
Cardano is now in the process enable developers to build out decentralised applications and rival Ethereum.
Who is using Cardano?
Much of Cardano's real world use case is expected to come following the full release of its blockchain mainnet and smart contract capability.
Right now Cardano serves agriculture businesses that use the platform to track food supply and education institutions to securely store certifications. Increasingly ADA is seen as a strong rival to proof-of-stake currencies such as Eth 2.0 and Polkadot with a daily transaction volume of over $3 million. ADA is ranked #7 on coinmarketcap.com for transaction volume making this no small alt coin.
16% of ADA tokens were distributed to the project's founders upon launch with the remaining being split amongst investors.
Google trends shows that whilst there was a surge in interest during the 2017 ICO craze recently Cardano has shown its highest ever levels of interest. This is likely due to the price growth of ADA as a result of the Shelley development upgrades and the increased interest in crypto during the Covid19 pandemic.
Regionally the UK, North America and Australia have the highest interest with European nations such as Norway and Switzerland also having a strong showing. This makes sense with Cardano being based out of Switzerland.
Whilst the platform does have an appeal globally, compared to BTC and Ethereum this is limited suggesting that whilst Cardano has made a good start since it’s 2017 launch there remains a long way to go for it to rival crypto’s two biggest platforms. Much hinges on delivering on the promise of smart contract functionality, as that will open the doors to a wider ecosystem.
What is the size of the Cardano network?
Cardano has over 1,000 validators on the network with over 72% of ADA staked. This means there is plenty of room for growth and scale of transactions validated on the platform over the years to come. The max supply of ADA is 45 billion tokens with 100% of this now in circulation.
The platform has a live market cap of over $41 million with $3 million 24 hour trading volume. Coinmarketcap.com estimates that Cardano makes up just under 2% of the crypto market and so whilst these numbers may seem big Cardano won’t be rivalling BTC anytime soon.
What is the size of the Cardano community?
The Cardano community employs over 200 people fulltime to work on Cardano and the foundation has just under 400,00 followers on Twitter. Reddit has a similar sized audience with 371,00 community members. Whilst this isn’t in the millions like the Bitcoin and Ethereum communities these numbers are certainly large enough to be classed as a mid-large sized crypto community.
How much Cardano is traded?
The top exchanges for trading ADA are Binance, Huobi and Coinbase. The top trading pairs are ADA/USDT (US Dollar Tethered) and ADA/BTC.