Cardano 

What is Cardano? 

• ADA is Cardano’s native token and keeps track of Cardano’s transactions on their Proof-of-Stake blockchain.
• Unlike Bitcoin, Cardano’s uses a Proof-of-Stake (PoS) consensus mechanism – meaning that it cannot be mined – individuals can stake their tokens to validate network transactions in return for rewards. 
• The ADA token provides a secure medium of exchange not relying on intermediaries and makes it accessible worldwide.
• Cardano stands out from its competitor for its quick, cost-effective transaction. It processes around 257 transactions each second and the average transaction cost is as low as 0.16 ADA.

Key Metrics

Ticker	ADA
Token Name	Cardano
Token Type/Protocol	ADA Native tokens
Total Token Supply	45,000,000,000 ADA.
Current Circulating Supply	See CoinMarketCap
Market Capitalisation	See CoinMarketCap
Token Creation Date	27  September 2017
Can it be mined?	No

Who is behind Cardano? 

Cardano was founded by Charles Hoskinson, co-founder of Ethereum as well as Input Output Hong Kong (IOHK).

Charles and Jermy Wood left the Ethereum team in 2015 to build Cardano with the goal of “scientific philosophy and research-driven approach” towards their open-source blockchain technology. The team has prioritized academic backed studies and has been sending research papers to professors and those who have expertise in the field of cryptography and blockchain for feedback and review.

What is the purpose of Cardano? 

Cardano’s purpose is to create a positive decentralised ecosystem and tackle infrastructure and scalability problems. It was created to solve the shortcomings of the first and second-generation cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin and Ethereum, respectively.

Moreover, it is designed to provide real-world applications as it is actively building a platform to facilitate its use in education, government,  agriculture, finance, healthcare and the retail sector by using smart contracts.

Insights

• Cardano has implemented Ouroboros – the first provably secure proof-of-stake protocol – for use in validating transactions and securing the network in exchange for rewards, which serve as an incentive mechanism.
• PoS is more eco-friendly than PoW due to the use of staking pools. This allows users to use their coins to validate blocks on the network instead of hashing. 
• The blockchain is divided into slots and each slot is further split into epochs. The slot leaders can mine a subset of an epoch or specific epoch. Those who will aid in the mining of epoch will receive a reward.
• An epoch is made in a way that it can be infinitely partitioned making the Cardano blockchain infinitely scalable – in theory. This would allow it to run any number of transactions without any bottlenecks.  
• The Cardano network is currently in the Goguen era which would enable custom tokens to be issued and smart contracts to be built.

Risks

• Cardano prides itself on building a blockchain based on peer-reviewed research at the expense of having a relatively slower development schedule. This would slow the ideation and implementation process, although Cardano has always erred to the side of underpromising on its roadmap, but rolling the changes out smoothly as compared to other projects which push out buggy releases, or push back improvement protocols.
• Cardano has only just reached the Goguen mainnet  – their release which allows for smart contracts to be integrated into the ADA ecosystem – which means that developers can only now begin building DApps on Cardano as compared to other blockchains. 

News and Updates

• Cardano has announced that it has partnered with Chainlink, the oracle solutions provider, to aid in the acceleration of the development of its DeFi ecosystem. 
• Emurgo, Cardano’s commercial and venture wing, has announced that an investment of $100 million would be made in cryptocurrency education. The funds would be used to educate people on Cardano’s blockchain efforts and boost the adoption of NFTs (non-fungible token) on the blockchain. 
• COTI has been announced as the official issuer of Djed stablecoin. The stablecoin is expected to reduce transaction costs. Running DeFi projects in Cardano would be made easier with the help of the stablecoin. 
• Cardano has partnered with DISH’s telecom services to increase the adoption of blockchain technology and transform the model of the telecommunication industry.

Disclaimer:
All investments are speculative and involve substantial risk and uncertainty. Investors should understand the nature of digital assets including the terms of return and the risk of assets. We encourage investors to fully understand the assets and the risk associated with them before making any investment.