Cardano is a third generation "proof-of-stake blockchain platform: the first to be founded on peer-reviewed research and developed through evidence-based methods"1. It defines itself as "a financial system that accepts its social nature" and a financial stack for the developing/unbanked world.
The whitepaper can be found at https://whitepaper.io/document/581.
Cardano's core offerings are as follows:
- Formal verification/strong proofs a core feature of Cardano (formal methods to achieve strong guarantees)
- Delegated Proof-of-Stake as a consensus mechanism
- Decentralised funding mechanism
- Separation of concerns: separation of settlement (value transfer) and computation layers (smart contracts)
- Regulation
- Strong guarantees of fraud-free commerce through smart contracts and settlement layer
- Enriching of transactions through optional metadata: labeling of transactions and financial activity
- Authentication and Compliance
- Sealed Glass Proofs to submit compliance information to verifier who is forced to comply with policies submitted under, protecting the information from leaks
The native token can be used as digital currency on the platform for fee payment, deposits and receiving rewards.
Users can earn a share of block rewards by (delegated) staking of tokens, which are used to secure the network. Users can also interact with decentralized apps (DApps) through a recent release of general-purpose smart contract functionality2. Finally, users can also vote on project funding and network improvements, with votes weighted by stake.
The differentiating factors of the project are as follows:
- Liquid Democracy for Governance
- Staking Pools for Consensus
- Separation of settlement and computation layers for increased flexibility and security
- eUTXO model: transaction model provides enhanced security (each transaction has different address), scalability (transaction parallelism), and determinism (off-chain validation and accurate fee prediction)2
Aaryamann, Adam, Anton, Daan, Mattia, Frank