User talk:IOHKwriter/Cardano

Cardano is a cryptocurrency network and open source project that aims to run a public blockchain platform for smart contracts. Cardano's internal cryptocurrency is called ADA with a maximal total supply of 45 billion units. The development of the project is overseen and supervised by the Cardano Foundation based in Zug, Switzerland.

History
The platform began development in 2015 and was launched in 2017 by Charles Hoskinson, a co-founder of Ethereum and BitShares. According to Hoskinson, he had left Ethereum after a "boardroom brawl" over keeping Ethereum nonprofit. After leaving he co-founded IOHK, a blockchain engineering company, whose main business is the development of Cardano, alongside the Cardano Foundation and Emurgo. IOHK's stake in Cardano is worth at least $1 billion. The platform is named after Gerolamo Cardano and the cryptocurrency after Ada Lovelace.

In 2017 IOHK helped the University of Edinburgh to launch Blockchain Technology Laboratory.

Charles Hoskinson claimed 2017 that the technology behind Cardano is scientifically studied and peer-reviewed by experts, and believes that cryptocurrency platforms will reduce reliance on banks.

A valuation of cryptoassets from August 2018, published by the independent equity research provider Satis Group and distributed by Bloomberg, rated Cardano (ADA) on top of speculative velocity, economic velocity and blended velocity.

In 2020, IOHK the company behind Cardano, donated $500,000 in Ada as a gift to University of Wyoming to support the development of blockchain technology.

Governance
Cardano's growth and advancement is driven by three bodies:


 * 1) Cardano Foundation: Drives adoption and support of Cardano through partnerships with governments, third-parties, and the wider community.
 * 2) EMURGO: Works towards the spread and integration of Cardano through commercial growth.
 * 3) IOHK: Produces scientific research and handles product development of the Cardano platform.

Atala
In 2018 Charles Hoskinson build a collaboration with the Ethiopian government at which he expressed planes to deploy the enterprise framework Atala for industries seeking blockchain adoption.

In 2019 The Education Minister of Georgia, Mikheil Batiashvili and Charles Hoskinson signed a memorandum of understanding with the Free University of Tbilisi to use Cardano and Atala to build a next generation credential verification system for Georgia. Atala is a decentralized identity solution built on Cardano.

Footwear manufacturer New Balance Athletics will use distributed ledger blockchain to track the authenticity of its newest basketball shoe. The platform will be built atop Cardano blockchain.

Catalyst
To enable governance and voting on the Cardano ecosystem, the project Catalyst got started to bring collective innovation to Cardano. It is running at the IdeaScale platform and a beta version of the Catalyst voting-app got released on Google Android Market in October 2020 to enable voting on proposals at project Catalyst for owners of the Cardano cryptocurrency ADA. IOHK, the firm behind the development of Cardano (ADA) has announced that it has released $250,000 worth of ADA from project treasury to fund the first phase of Project Catalyst.

Ouroboros protocol of Cardano
The current proof-of-stake consensus protocol used by Cardano is called Ouroboros Hydra. It evolved out of four prior elaborations:


 * 1) Ouroboros: A Provably Secure Proof-of-Stake Blockchain Protocol . This paper was significant for being the first to describe a provably secure proof-of-stake blockchain system. In addition, it provided game-theoretic analysis that showed participants in the Cardano blockchain are incentivized to behave honestly, which addresses common attacks that other cryptocurrencies are vulnerable to.
 * 2) Ouroboros-BFT: A Simple Byzantine Fault Tolerant Consensus Protocol
 * 3) Ouroboros Genesis: Composable Proof-of-Stake Blockchains with Dynamic Availability
 * 4) Ouroboros Praos: An adaptively-secure, semi-synchronous proof-of-stake blockchain
 * 5) Hydra: Fast Isomorphic State Channels

Technical aspects
As an alternative to proof of work system, Cardano uses proof of stake technology. With Bitcoin, the genesis block (first blockchain entry) and the longest chain (chain with the most computing power) is used to determine the honest chain. Cardano uses only the genesis block however, as the honest chain is calculated locally without the need of a trusted party.

Development
Cardano's smart contract language provides an integrated development environment for writing both on and off-chain code in a single code base. This allows developers to run end-to-end tests on their program without leaving the integrated development environment or deploying their code.

Smart contracts made in Solidity for the Ethereum Virtual Machine can be translated with a compiler and thus also run on the Cardano Virtual Machine.