Summary

Cardano started in 2015 as an initiative to innovate the way cryptocurrencies are designed and developed. The overall goal was to provide a more balanced and sustainable ecosystem that better recognizes the needs of its users as well as other entities seeking integration.

Cardano did not begin as a white paper that was released to in an effort to raise millions and then develop the product, but rather it embraced a collection of design principals, blockchain engineering best practices and new avenues for exploration.

From this list of ideas, the principals working on Cardano began both to explore cryptocurrency literature and to build a toolset of different concepts.

These include the following:

• Separation of accounting and computation into different layers
• Groups of top academics in their fields working with developers competing on new research
• Heavy reliability of interdisciplinary teams of developers including early contributors from InfoSec experts
• White papers constantly updated and re-iterated, implementation and new research required to correct issues that have been discovered by experts
• Developing the ability to upgrade post-deployment systems without negatively affecting the network
• A long-term view on an improvement of the design of cryptocurrencies so they can work on mobile/wearable devices with a secure user experience
• Involving stakeholders closer to the operations and maintenance of their cryptocurrency
• Continuously enhancing the need to account for multiple cryptocurrencies in the same ledger
• Learning from optional metadata in order to better conform to the needs of legacy systems
• Learning from 1,000+ altcoins by embracing features that make sense to the end user
• Building a standards-driven process that has been inspired by the Internet Engineering Task Force using a dedicated foundation to hold final protocol design
• Discovering the social elements of commerce
• Finding a middle ground for regulators and commissions to interact with commerce without compromising core principals that were inherited from Bitcoin

Team Analysis

The development, management, and operations team consist of a large global collection of in-field expert engineers and researchers. The overall team is comprised of three different organizations that together, contribute to the growth and development of Cardano.

Cardano Foundation

The mission is to standardize, protect and promote the Cardano Protocol to the masses. The goals are simple, yet achievable when done right.

• To study and propose blockchain and cryptocurrency regulation
• To act as a blockchain and cryptocurrency standard body
• To project, enhance and evolve the cardamon ecosystem
• To aggregate, educate and grow the Cardano community
• To serve as an objective organization for enterprises to join

Foundation Members Include:

Michael Parsons FCO, Chairman

Source: cardanofoundation.org

Michael Parsons has over 25 years’ experience as an executive and consultant in the banking industry, with a strong emphasis on technological innovation. An early evangelist for Bitcoin, he has become one of the UK’s leading authorities and thought leaders on blockchain distributed ledger technology for financial services and a sought-after speaker and advisor on the subject. He currently serves as the Chairman and Executive Director of the Cardano Foundation, which promotes and supports the new Cardano blockchain protocol. There his mandate is to promote the protocol and associated Cardano ecosystem as well as positively influence the emerging commercial and legislative landscape for blockchain and cryptocurrency technologies.

Tom Kelly, Marketing & Community Manager

Source: cardanofoundation.org

Tom is an experienced marketing professional, with a background focused on growing technology businesses from the ground up. Previously Tom was VP of Marketing at Busy Rooms a software company which optimizes revenue for the global hotel industry. More recently Tom was Head of Growth & Marketing at Homeshift, a technology business improving the customer experience in the home utility sector. He first got interested in blockchain while consulting for a client and after further investigation become passionate about the potential of the technology. Tom graduated from Oxford Brookes University with a degree in Business Innovation & Enterprise.

Steve Wagendorp, Head of Technical Operations

Source: cardanofoundation.org

Steve joined the Cardano Foundation having recently managed operations for an asset manager in Zurich focusing on fund administration, compliance, regulatory matters and IT. As a technology enthusiast, he developed a natural interest in blockchain technology and decentralized application development. Steve graduated from the University of Cape Town with a degree in Geomatics engineering.

IOHK Cardano

Input Output is a uniquely collaborative approach to steadily build a precisely engineered cryptocurrency and product that brings together disciplines as a distributed system, mechanism design and cryptography contributing to the development and maintenance of Cardanos Protocol.

Their team consists of 34 expert developers, designers and, cryptographic scientists all contributing to Cardano.

Emurgo

Emurgo is firm that specializes in supporting commercial ventures and help integrate businesses into Cardano’s decentralized blockchain ecosystem. They are a large contributor to the Cardano ecosystem.

• They invest in companies looking to build on Cardano
• Promote the Initial Offerings of companies building on Cardano
• Research and development on the Cardano ecosystem

Proof of Stake

Cardano decided to embrace the Proof of Stake model due to its nature to add a mechanism in a secure voting system, a capacity to scale out, and permits the exotic incentive schemes.

Cardanos Proof of Stake is called Ouroboros, it has been designed by a talented team of cryptographers from five academic institutions: the University of Connecticut, University of Athens, University of Edinburgh, and the Tokyo Institute of Technology. This team is led by Professor Aggelos Kiayias of the University of Edinburgh.

The innovation behind all this is that it allows for the composition of many different protocols to enhance functionality, even a rigorous cryptographic model has been put into consideration when building.

It allows:

• Delegation
• Side-chains
• Subscribable checkpoints
• Better data structures for light clients
• Different forms of random number generation
• Different synchronization assumptions

ICO

The Cardano ICO started in September 2015 and was completed in January 2017. The ICO completed a total sale of approximately 26,000,000,000 of the 45,000,000,000 total supply of ADA token. At the completion of the ICO Cardano successfully raised a total of US$63,000,000, that is approximately US$0.02 per ADA token.

ICO Demographics

During the ICO there was a heavy Know Your Customer (KYC) requirements. Primarily marketed towards Japanese whom accounted for 95% of investors. 2.56% of the buyers were Korean, and 2.39% were Chinese.

ADA Economics

Cardano's ADA token will be used in a democratic manner on the Cardano ecosystem. The concepts sound familiar to Ethereum and NEO, but ADA differs on numerous variables.

ADA token value of the Cardano blockchain

Source: Cardano

Cardanos ambition is to be an adaptive system, to always stay ahead of innovation and grow collectively with the Cardano community.

Here is an example of how exactly the Cardano (ADA) Economics will work within the ecosystem:

• "Token holders can vote on how to change the protocol, capturing stakeholder intent and reducing the potential for fragmentation. Updates to the software will need to be made through soft forks. Governance has been carefully designed, and every ADA holder can take part."
• "Cardano uses a treasury system, which allocates a percentage of the block reward into a pool of capital for costs deemed necessary for the network, and a voting system for stakeholders to decide what to fund. This could include competing development teams; marketing efforts; hackathons; venture capital."

Metrics on the Cardano Mainnet

Source: Cardano