What is Cardano?

Cardano is the third generation blockchain-based system powered by the ADA coin. ADA coin is the crypto-currency that is run on the Cardano platform. Cardano is indeed the most interesting and influential form of crypto-currency projects available in the market today. After the invention of Bitcoin, lots of crypto-currencies emerged. Among them, Cardano promises unique features and has become quite popular. It has borrowed elements of cryptocurrencies introduced before it like Bitcoin and Ethereum. Much like Ethereum, it uses smart contracts to run a decentralized manner.

The Digital Gold

• First Generation

The invention of Cryptocurrencies took place when people began to wonder if it was possible to create decentralized money transfer and trade without a third party involvement. This lead to the deployment of Bitcoin by an anonymous person under the pseudonym Satoshi Nakamoto. It uses blocks that contain the data pertaining to the network. They are like ledger books where the trans permanently recorded. The collection of blocks is known as block-chains.

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This brilliant invention which belonged among the first generation cryptocurrencies allowed free transactions between people without any external control. However, it allowed only monetary transactions and it was not possible to put up conditions to those transactions.

• Second Generation

This pathway opened up for the second generation of cryptocurrencies. In this kind of cryptocurrencies, a new programming language was introduced which lead to the creation of smart contracts. The smart contract involves the exchange of anything of value including money, property, and shares in a transparent conflict-free way by avoiding the services of a middle man.

Vitalik Buterin’s Ethereum was the most popular system that proved that blockchains which are simple payment systems can revolutionize financial systems with its smart contract technology.  A collectible token known as ‘Crypto-kitties’ made a wave for Ethereum. During the bull market of 2017, Crypto-kitties caught fire with more than two million dollars per day. However, Etherium faced scalability issues as the 12% percent of transactions of Kitty tokens in the entire Ethereum network itself brought the network itself to a screeching halt. The lack of a well-thought-out governance system gave room for improvement and an opportunity for third-generation cryptocurrency systems.

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How is it different from other coins?

The third-generation combined all the positive elements of the first two generations blockchains resulted in the creation of Cardano. Cardano which took two years of development was deployed in September 2017. Its creator is Charles Hoskinson who was one of the co-founders of Ethereum. Unlike other cryptocurrencies, Cardano is  Peer-reviewed papers. It makes sure that experts from all around the world read their papers review and improve them.

Cardano intends to tackle the problems of the current generations which are:-

• Scalability
• Interoperability
• Sustainability

Scalability

As it a global based transaction system, it must handle as many transactions as possible per second. While bitcoin uses Proof of work algorithm where all the users are given the power to mine new blocks. But this leads to wastage of time and computing power. It is also not economical as it leads to wastage of electricity. Cardano solves these problems with its Ouroboros operation system with the Proof of stake algorithm where the network elects a few nodes to mine the blocks these elected members are called slot leaders. For this, to work Cardano divides time into Epochs.

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Each Epoch is divided into slots, a short period of time in which the blocks are mined. Only the Slot leader can mine a block for that particular slot.  The slot leader listens to the transactions of the particular slot and verifies them. If he doesn’t verify in given time he shall be removed from the position and a new slot leader will be elected.  This technique of Cardano solves the scalability problem as an increase in epochs also results in an increase in slots where the scaling of multiple epochs possible in parallel.

The blockchains are stored in the P2P network. Each node receives a copy of each and every transaction. This causes scalability issues as there are lots of transactions that lead to a lot of bandwidth. Cardano uses Recursive Internetwork Architecture (RINA) to split the network into subnetworks and can communicate with other subnetworks.

The Cardano team is also looking forward to solving data storage issues through the methods of Pruning, Compression, and Partitioning.

Interoperability

Although there are thousands of competitive cryptocurrencies available today Carda with its own protocol and rules. The Cardano project aims to become the internet of blockchains where the assets can be seamlessly moved among blockchains.

It also solves the problems of unreliability by the government as there is no information from whom, to who or for what reason. Cardano allows people to attach meta-data to the transaction. This new feature goes hand in hand with the norms of traditional banking system traditional though this attachment is voluntary.

Sustainability

Cardano allows companies that are developed around cryptocurrencies through Initial Coin Offerings (ICO). It intends to create a treasury where it receives a small percentage of all transactions in the network and this amount is used for developing Cardano protocol where the users provide proposals to the community with the details and money needed for implementation. The most popular proposal is taken and money will be invested from the treasury as capital for the fulfillment of the proposal. The main advantage of this process is that the treasury is not controlled by anyone and the proposals are chosen through voting.

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Cardano All Time High Price

The future looks bright as Cardano, which had an all-time high of $1.1621 on April 1st, 2018.

Cardano Price Prediction 2020

Is likely to have its price rise above $1 in 2020. It has few things up its sleeve such as support to Bitcoin and Ethereum Classic, the introduction of wallets for android and ios, and its upcoming partnership with Mataps Plus which is one of the largest South Korean mobile companies.

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