Cardano is a Proof-Of-Stake multi-level blockchain platform written in a programming languageHaskelland designed to create decentralized applications based on smart contracts .
The platform is named after Gerolamo Cardano (1501 – 1576), an outstanding Italian mathematician, physicist, biologist, chemist, astrologer, philosopher, writer and gambler.
It is only fitting that Cardano’s creator, mathematician Charles Hoskinson, named after Cardano a project aimed at creating a flexible and interoperable form of programmable money using scientific methods based on mathematical proofs and game theory.
Cardano’s native cryptocurrency token, ADA, is named after Augusta Ada King, Countess of Lovelace (1815-1852). The daughter of the poet George Byron, Ada Lovelace was a mathematician and the author of the description of the first calculating machine, for which she wrote the world’s first program. She is considered the first programmer in history.
The subunit of the ADA cryptocurrency (0.000001 ADA) is called Lovelace.
Who invented Cardano and when?
- Charles Hoskinson is the founder of Cardano, a mathematician and entrepreneur who was at the forefront of Bitshares and Ethereum.
- Jeremy Wood is the co-founder of Cardano, director of strategic development of the project. At the end of 2013, he served as the Executive Director of the Ethereum Foundation, after which he acted as a consultant on a number of other cryptocurrency projects.
- Aggelos Kiayas is the project’s chief scientist, cryptographer and professor at the University of Edinburgh.
In June 2014, Hoskinson left Ethereum due to disagreements regarding the further development of the project, after which, together with Wood, he founded Input Output Hong Kong (IOHK), which in 2015 began developing and developing Cardano.
On February 7, 2017, IOHK developers presented the whitepaper of the Ouroboros blockchain protocol.
The official launch of the Cardano platform took place on September 29, 2017. Token trading began on October 1, 2017.
Who is developing Cardano?
- The Cardano Foundation is a non-profit organization registered in Zug, Switzerland, whose main function is to “standardize, protect and develop Cardano technology”. She is responsible for communications with financial regulators, government agencies, the public, and also develops strategic partnerships with other projects.
- IOHK (Input Output Hong Kong) is an engineering and technology company founded by Wood and Hoskinson. IOHK is engaged in cryptocurrency development and research activities. The company is bound by a contract with the Cardano Foundation, under which it will remain the main developer of the platform until 2020.
- Emurgo is an investment fund with offices in Singapore, Japan, USA, Indonesia and India. Its mission is to “grow and support businesses and help integrate businesses into the Cardano ecosystem.”
What is the Cardano blockchain model?
Currently, Cardano uses a model to make transactions.UTXO, which is used in bitcoin . At the same time, the Shelley era also allows the use of an account model (similar to Ethereum / EOS). Addresses of this format are used for rewards. Cardano takes advantage of both models.
Inputs and outputs contain information about the origin and movement of funds: inputs tell you from which address the funds originate, and outputs tell you from which address the funds are transferred.
To prevent double spending, every node on the network keeps a record of transactions. When a new transaction becomes available (either in a block or in a mempool ), it is analyzed to see if it modifies the unspent output associated with each address in the network.
The UTXO model cannot optimally support smart contract functionality . To address this issue, Cardano plans to release its own customized version of UTXO called Extended UTXO ( EUTXO ).
EUTXO uses mechanisms that divide the execution of a smart contract into many transactions: each transactional output contains a data field with randomly selected information associated with a particular smart contract. The EUTXO model is expected to be fully implemented during the Goguen phase .
The Cardano blockchain has two types of blocks: core and genesis blocks . The main block consists of a header and a body (internal part of the information object). The header contains block metadata, and the body contains transactional data. Like the main blocks, the genesis blocks also have a header and a body, but they are generated once per epoch, being indexes for the main blocks with which they are associated.