When considering investing in any altcoin in the crypto space, research is a must. It’s always best to get a good understanding of the coin’s background and inception. As a result, before we can go into any details about Cardano’s token currency (ADA), we will provide a brief overview of the developers behind Cardano as well as their specific affiliations with cryptocurrency. Are you ready for in-depth Cardano review?

Charles Hoskinson

As it stands, Charles Hoskinson is regarded as one of the foremost experts to step into the cryptocurrency ecosystem. However, there are many conflicting viewpoints about Hoskinson as an individual and his ethical standard of conduct. Be that as it may, very few people will dispute the fact that his innovative ideas for blockchain technology are legitimate. Below is a short biographical summary of Charles Hoskinson that can be found online with little to no effort (Which is a good sign when looking into a coin’s development team, information about them should not be hard to find).

(Source: Everipedia.org)

Charles’ involvement with the Ethereum project helped the world become familiar with him. A few years ago, Charles worked with Vitalik Buterin to start the Ethereum project circa 2013/2014. To summarize the events of what happened next, time went by, and Hoskinson and Buterin had a falling out. This argument was a debate over the decision to monetize Ethereum like a business or make it open-source. Hoskinson wanted to monetize the Ethereum project like a business, and Buterin did not. After a while, Hoskinson decided to simply abandon the Ethereum project, and go forward with his own endeavors in 2014.

If you haven’t guessed already, this wasn’t a cordial parting of ways. Hoskinson more or less vowed to create a rivaling cryptocurrency capable of eventually ‘dethroning’ Ethereum. Soon after his departure, Hoskinson started a team called IOHK with a man named Jeremy Wood.

Input-Output Hong Kong

Founded in 2015 by Charles Hoskinson and Jeremy Wood, IOHK is a technology company committed to using peer-to-peer innovations to provide financial services to the three billion people who don’t have them. 
We are an engineering company that builds cryptocurrencies and blockchains for academic institutions, government entities, and corporations. We are a decentralized company that loves small, innovative teams forming and executing ideas that cause cascading disruption. – IOHK.

Cardano Review

Cardano is a decentralised public blockchain and cryptocurrency project and is fully open source. ADA is developing a smart contract platform which seeks to deliver more advanced features than any protocol previously developed. It is the first blockchain platform to evolve out of a scientific philosophy and a research-first driven approach. The development team consists of a large global collective of expert engineers and researchers – Cardano.

Essentially, the Cardano technology is another blockchain which can also be a method of payment. The blockchain allows users to create smart contract projects and activities on the primary ‘settlement layer’ for ADA. To facilitate this, Cardano uses 3 layers. This means that ‘gas’ isn’t necessary to power the transactions on the network which is how Ethereum operates. While the merits of whether or not this could be considered an inherent advantage, I feel as though this is simply a difference worth noting. You can also identify this distinction in the Ethereum Classic protocol. This is pretty much signaling that it’s a manifestation of the IOHK ideology of how cryptocurrencies should work and operate.

The principle behind Cardano is fairly similar to what can be seen with Ethereum. Even though Cardano is constantly being compared to bitcoin, it shares far more similarities with Ethereum. Check out this quote from the developers at Cardano:

After the settlement layer that will run ADA is complete, a separate computing layer will be built to handle smart contracts, the digital legal agreements that will underpin future commerce and business. Cardano will also run decentralized applications, or dapps, services not controlled by any single party but instead operate on a blockchain

A Proof of Stake Consensus

The ADA blockchain uses a proof of Stake consensus algorithm called Ouroboros Praos. If you’ve never heard of this before, it’s likely because it’s a very new concept. This consensus only entered the spotlight once ADA introduced it to the world. Quoted directly from the IOHK website, here is a description of the PoS consensus method:

We present “Ouroboros Praos”, a proof-of-stake blockchain protocol that, for the first time, provides security against fully-adaptive corruption in the semi-synchronous setting: Specifically, the adversary can corrupt any participant of a dynamically evolving population of stakeholders at any moment as long the stakeholder distribution maintains an honest majority of stake; furthermore, the protocol tolerates an adversarially-controlled message delivery delay unknown to protocol participants. 

To achieve these guarantees we formalize and realize in the universal composition setting a suitable form of forward secure digital signatures and a new type of verifiable random function that maintains unpredictability under malicious key generation. Our security proof develops a general combinatorial framework for the analysis of semi-synchronous blockchains that may be of independent interest. We prove our protocol secure under standard cryptographic assumptions in the random oracle model. 

What this means

Cardano states that they have a consensus algorithm where if over half of the nodes (over 50%) on the network don’t face interference by a fraudulent party (a hacker trying to attack the network) then the network will remain safe. It’s true that there is nothing about this concept that is revolutionary. It is also true that it’s nothing you need to pay attention to. In fact, the Byzantine Fault Tolerant consensus method implemented by NEO looks better on paper. Over 66% of the potential actors on the network need to be corrupt for the dPoS to be truly ineffective.

Be that as it may, this is a huge step in making a consensus that doesn’t require more energy than all of Scotland to function. The proof of stake algorithm is very energy efficient, requiring almost no electricity in comparison to ASIC or GPUs to work properly.

ADA Ouroboros

Ouroboros is often described as Proof of Stake mining specifically for Cardano. Essentially, the main idea Ouroboros revolves around is a combination of the Proof of Work and Proof of Stake consensus algorithms. The PoS concept means that a person can validate or mine a block of transactions at a certain speed according to how many coins they have. Meaning that the more ADA a miner owns, the more power (or hash rate) that miner has. The PoW concept works by a miner acquiring powerful hardware and using large amounts of electricity and processing power in order to solve computational problems on the blockchain in order to validate transactions.

While the above Proof of Stake definition gives you a rough idea of how PoS truly works; there are differences when exploring how this works for Cardano. An important thing to note is that the stake on the Cardano network is determined by one’s relative stake when compared to all others on the network. Meaning if there are 10 coins on the network and you own 6 of them, you have a 60% stake. As this is a high number, you would have the largest stake of all nodes on the network.

Charles Hoskinson: Cardano Foundation Can Grow After Parsons’ Resignation https://t.co/YHBsEkiDc5 pic.twitter.com/1TmreLslPN

— Ethereum Price Canada (@EthereumPriceCa) November 14, 2018

Conclusion

Cardano is a 3rd Gen Cryptocurrency platform that is building methodically. Using peer-reviewed technology, the Cardano team attempts to address many of the privacy, scaling and technological problems faced by today’s 2nd Gen blockchains. Cardano uses an advanced proof of stake consensus paired with a unique governance and treasury system. Be that as it may, despite all the benefits that come with Cardano, it’s difficult to give it a realistic valuation. For Cardano to be a successful cryptocurrency, it needs a vast number of active users.

I think that Cardano’s many strengths, as well as the team behind it, are an affirmation that it is well suited to become a strong alternative to Ethereum and even Bitcoin. The Cardano platform could potentially provide its users with more flexibility as well as security. Currently, all we can do is keep our eye on Cardano and see if it sticks to its roadmap. If more industries, enterprises, and investors take notice, Cardano could potentially become a powerhouse amongst other cryptocurrencies.

If you’re interested in Trading ADA, we offer no fees when trading ADA/BTC pairs on our cryptocurrency exchange. Will you be trading ADA or mining it? If not, which altcoin do you think supersedes Cardano?

What would be your review of Cardano?

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