What is Cardano (ADA) and should you invest or not!

There is quite a buzz around the hyped #ADA, the coin that hit the #Bittrex exchange a few days back. We have seen the crazy volumes on bittrex for the first few days, which crossed even 10k btc at times. Lets see whats inside Cardano.

Prices started to decline from the first day itself, and many people claimed it to be yet another shitcoin but believe it or not, Cardano might be the future of smart contracts, it is much more than just a cryptocurrency.

On the day it was released, we saw it in the top 15 cryptocurrencies according to the market cap, which seemed to be quite strange, as it made itself big on the first day itself. If you dont believe, check it out for yourself :)

Lets come to a few stats first!

Details of Cardano

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Official website: https://www.cardanohub.org
The project:

The team:

1. The Cardano Foundation: http://cardanofoundation.org
2. Input Output : http://iohk.io
3. Emurgo : http://emurgo.io

Official Wallet:

Daedalus Walllet: https://daedaluswallet.io

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So far, Ethereum has been the lead player in the "Smart contract" platform space. The new player in the market, a.k.a ADA is steadily creeping into the game. An interesting twist is that the efforts are led by a former Ethereum CEO, Charles Hoskinson.
So it has been only a few days since the blockchain development firm IOHK led by Charles launched Cardano, a new blockchain and began first trading on bittrex.

The first 10,000 users who took part in the ICO can now download the dedicated "Daedalus wallet" to redeem the ADA tokens and begin trading on the US regulated Bittrex. The ICO was mainly focussed in Japan and the asian markets.

The ICO raised $62 million and resulted in the sale of roughly 30 billion ADA vouchers, and 45 billion ADA will be ever in the circulation.

If we see the roadmap, we can still see it has not yet been developed fully, and this event will mark the beginning of a two-year process that will see Cardano develop into a full fledged Smart contract platform.

The Japanese team called Emurgo hired IOHK to build Cardano under a 5 year contract, which will end in 2020. Emurgo will become the studio for designing smart contracts and design Decentralised Apps that will run on the platform.

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So, What is Cardano basically?

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It is a full blockchain, built from scratch in the functional programming language called Haskell, which, according to Philip Wadler, a principal designer of the Haskell Language and also working with Cardano, uses a math based approach that results in a much more secure and reliable protocol. The blockchain is also research-first driven, so we may actually see a lot of advanced features than ethereum. And being an Ethereum ex-founder, Charles, who already knew about the shortcomings of Ethereum researched about these things.
Cardano uses a multi layered approach, which is sustainable for future growth.

Lets now come to the mining algorithm.

The proof of stake mining algorithm used by Cardano is named as Ouroboros, which determines how individual nodes reach consensus about the network. Ouroboros is a major innovation in the field of blockchain, and supports proof of stake consensus, which depends on the coin holders' vote. As a result, proof of stake is vastly energy efficient than the proof of work.
Proof of work is used by majority of the coins, like bitcoin and most other cryptocurrencies. We can infer one thing, even ethereum is now planning to switch to the proof of stake mining in future with a fork.
Ouroboros comes with yet another innovation, with a mathematical "Proof of security", and uses the first ever Provably secure proof of stake algorithm.
But since the coin is still in the initial stage, and is still locked in private nodes, it may take another 4-6 months until the system gathers momentum, according to Charles.
Cardano Transactions are super fast, and work in a flash! I transferred some from my bittrex account to my Daedalus wallet in my laptop, and the coins got reflected in the wallet in just a minute!

The next major release is bound to happen in the first half of 2018, and the system will evolve into a full fledged independent cryptocurrency! And other features like Smart contracts, Side chains, Multi-party computation, metadata, and more, so by that, we can assure that even if the entire IOHK team shuts down, Cardano will run forever in that form, which means Beginning of 2018 might see a huge adoption in Cardano.

There is even another "Trusted hardware" feature to be added, which will allow off chain payments starting from 2019.

IOHK is building their own VM, much like ethereum's own Ethereum Virtual Machine, which is also scheduled to launch next year. The language that will be used to develop smart contract on Caardano platform is called Plutus, which is a lightweight version of the Haskell language, just as we use Solidity on Ethereum platform. New capabilities are to be added, which will allow users to code on Java, C, and Javascript, so we can see a glimpse of the robust platform already from now on.

This seems to be a slow, but steady and systematic approach, which will take at least a couple of years to be functional as it has a lot of principals behind it.

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Cardano has got a very active community, with regular blog posts and updates on what they are doing, and Just have a look at their massive IOHK team! Input Output Hong Kong is a Massively funded global team

And Have a look at their awesome website!

Cardano combines Engineers, Blockchain Experts, and Researchers, all under one roof, so we can see some serious development, and a huge potential in future! If all goes well, Cardano should be the best blockchain after Bitcoin!

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Look at what Charles has to say about Cardano from their official youtube link!

Still thinking whether to invest or not? I bet you won't wait! ;)

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