What is ouroborous?

Unlike other consensus protocols, this started as a white paper that was presented to the cryptographic community and written using mathematics. The protocol has been peer reviewed and accepted by those communities who are experts in this field.

Once the protocol was proven to be secure, it was converted to Haskell by the engineers at IOHK.

Many have claimed that this protocol is a copy of the delegated proof of stake consensus algorithm used by Bitshares and Steem. However, my understanding of it after watching some very long and technical videos from IOHK is that it they have rebuilt the proof of stake protocol from the ground up.