What is Cardano?

Although Cardano (ADA) was initially announced in 2015, the cryptocurrency with a market cap of over $1.8 Billion was officially launched on the September of 2017 which makes it a little over a year old. One of the reasons Cardano is unique or very different compared to other cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin is because it is built around peer-reviewed papers.

So in the case of other cryptocurrencies including the big ones like Bitcoin and Etherum, the developers write a whitepaper and then after coding the cryptocurrency they launch it to the world. However, in the case of Cardano, it was different; the team first prepared a whitepaper then instead of coding it right away they called experts from all around the world.

The experts reviewed the whitepaper, and the project was only coded if they approved it. If the experts disagreed on the results with the developers, then that part of the project didn’t be developed.

Cardano (ADA) Price Today – ADA / USD

Please enter CoinGecko Free Api Key to get this plugin works.

Cardano; a third generation cryptocurrency

The developer behind the platform claim that Cardano is the third generation of cryptocurrencies. Talking about generations Bitcoin was the first generation of cryptocurrencies.

Bitcoin which is also known as “digital gold” faced a scalability issue. The second generation of cryptocurrencies initiated with Etherum. The special idea behind Ethereum was smart contracts, and although to an extent the scalability issue was solved, but it still wasn’t enough to become a currency which could be used all around the globe.

Cardano and even IOTA are considered to be the third generation of cryptocurrencies. Cardano aims to solve a few big issues which are present in the first and second generation of cryptocurrencies. The first issue it aims to solve is the scalability issue, and the scalability issue can be fixed by working on the transactions per second, the data storage and the network bandwidth.

In order to be a digital currency which can be used worldwide the transactions per second needs to be high. Visa the payment processing company, for example, processes a staggering 24,000 transaction in one second. Ripple (XRP) the cryptocurrency, on the other hand, has the ability to process about 1,500 transactions per second.

Cardano has an Ouroboros system which uses the concept of Proof of Stake (POS). If you have been in the world of cryptocurrency lately, the chances are that you have heard of the concept of Proof of Work (POW) and Proof of Stake (POS). Bitcoin and a lot of other Altcoins use Proof of Work. As a result, people mine the cryptocurrency and get a small reward in Bitcoin.

Proof of Work requires a lot of computing power and time. In the case of Cardano or ADA, the system has a handful of nodes which have the power of mining. The bandwidth issue is solved by splitting the massive network into sub-networks. RINA or Recursive InterNetwork Architecture is used to make the split possible.

The final problem isn’t a big one. The world’s top 9th cryptocurrency will be using Pruning, Compression, or Partitioning to solve the storage space issue. Although none of these techniques have been used yet as there is plenty of storage on Cardano at the moment.