Until now, Ethereum has dominated the smart contract platform market.
Now, a new player is steadily infiltrating the game. The initiative is under the direction of a former Ethereum CEO, which is a fascinating twist.
Cardano, a new blockchain, had its introduction last week by blockchain development firm IOHK, directed by Charles Hoskinson. Ada (ADA), the platform’s native cryptocurrency, started trading on Bittrex, a US-based exchange, yesterday.
Participants in the prior crowd sale who purchased 10,000 Ada vouchers can now download the Cardano wallet Daedalus. And use it to redeem their Ada tokens and begin trading.
Westerners who were out of the crowd sale, which primarily concentrated in Japan, can now buy the tokens on Bittrex.
If everything goes according to plan, these events will kick off a two-year process that will see Cardano expand into a full-fledged smart contract platform. With an outstanding library of protocols that developers can use to create decentralized apps.
History
Hoskinson was one of Ethereum’s original founders. He abandoned the project before the network went live, and in 2014, he co-founded IOHK with Jeremy Wood. A year later, IOHK approaches by a group of Japanese businesses interested in establishing a blockchain that would function as both a cryptocurrency and a smart contract platform, as well as meet the expectations of the blockchain industry’s rising regulatory oversight.
The group sought to undertake an initial coin offering (ICO) targeted at Asian markets to raise funding for the development. In an interview with Bitcoin Magazine, Hoskinson said, “They thought it would be extremely wonderful to undertake a large-scale distribution in Asia. Rather than the Western world, which saturates already with cryptocurrencies. As a result, the company recruited IOHK to develop software to help with compliance during the sale. The Japanese firm Attain coordinated the transaction, while the Cardano Foundation was in charge of oversight and auditing.
In the meantime, the crowd sale raised $62 million. And it resulted in the sale of nearly 30 billion Ada vouchers between September 2015 and January 2017. The sale didn’t fall within the umbrella of the US Securities and Exchange Commission guidelines because none of the vouchers sells out to US citizens. According to Hoskinson, there were some regulatory advantages to offshoring it. There were some cultural advantages as well; for example, we had a blue sky and a wide-open marketplace.
Emurgo, a Japanese conglomerate, has contracted IOHK to create Cardano under a five-year contract that would expire in 2020. Emurgo will be to Ethereum what ConsenSys is to Cardan. A design studio for the platform’s smart contracts and decentralized apps.
Haskell
So, what exactly is Cardano? It’s a complete blockchain created from the ground up in Haskell, a functional programming language. To work on the Cardano project, IOHK employed Philip Wadler, a major designer of the Haskell language. As per Hoskinson, Haskell relates to math in that it allows for more precise code writing, which results in a more secure and dependable protocol.
Ouroboros is at the heart of Cardano. Unlike Bitcoin and most other cryptocurrencies, proof-of-stake systems rely on currency holders’ votes rather than miners’ solving a cryptographic problem.
In conclusion, proof of stake uses far less energy than proof of effort. It also speeds up transactions and allows for coin holders to influence the protocol’s growth. Developing a reliable proof of stake, however, is quite challenging.
To that end, Ouroboros includes a mathematical security demonstration that was accepted and delivered at Crypto 2017, a major encryption conference. Ethereum (Casper), Algorand, and Snow White are among the other projects working on proof-of-stake algorithms.
About Byron and Shelley
The first significant version of Cardano’s platform, dubbed “Byron,” is now available. Ada lives in the first generation of the settlement stratum. However, because the platform is still in its bootstrap phase, several features aren’t available yet.
Before the system can be fully operational, it will require a larger number of coin holders. So, even though Ouroboros is operational. The consensus remains restricted to private nodes until the system gains traction, which might take another four to six months, according to Hoskinson.
Following Byron, Cardano’s next major version, “Shelley,” sets for release in the first half of 2018. The system will mature into a full-featured, self-contained cryptocurrency during the Shelley phase. Cardano could function in that form indefinitely if Hoskinson died and IOHK shut down, according to Hoskinson.
Shelley will also prepare Cardano for a variety of exciting features, including smart contracts, sidechains, multi-party computation, metadata, and more. Those protocols will add one by one as time goes on.
About Smart Contracts
IOHK is currently working on its own virtual machine (VM), similar to the EVM used by Ethereum. This will be the platform’s compute layer, where self-executing code will live. Hoskinson anticipates the Cardano VM becoming accessible in the first half of next year. Cardano will also have its own smart contract language, Plutus, which is a lightweight version of Haskell. Plutus designs for high-assurance contracts in which a security failure could be catastrophic.
Additional capabilities will allow users to construct decentralized programs in Java, C, and JavaScript. On-chain governance and a treasury mechanism where a part of transaction fees is preserved for future development are both in the works.
In general, Hoskinson stated that this will be a gradual rollout with the goal of establishing a secure dependable platform that will last decades. According to him, Cardano is a meticulous and methodical endeavor. It is founded on a number of guiding concepts.
