How to Buy Cardano

Cardano coin is the coin behind the Cardano platform, so the two technologies are closely interconnected. Cardano calls itself:

“A blockchain platform for changemakers, innovators, and visionaries, with the tools and technologies required to create possibility for the many, as well as the few, and bring about positive global change.”

When Was Cardano Coin Started? Who Started Cardano Coin?

Input Output Hong Kong (IOHK) launched Cardano in September 2017. Charles Hoskinson, one of the IOHK founders, is responsible for coming up with the concept of Cardano. He already had extensive blockchain experience, including as an Ethereum co-founder. Hoskinson founded IOHK in 2015 with Jeremy Wood.

Importantly, there is no whitepaper, as Cardano did not start with one, which is common among open-source projects. As experts describe it:

“Rather, it embraced a collection of design principles, engineering best practices, and avenues for exploration.”

According to Hoskinson, Cardano is part of the third generation of blockchains. Bitcoin and money transfers were the first generation, with Ethereum and smart contracts being the second.

The Team Behind Cardano Coin

The Cardano team is somewhat decentralized and includes three independent entities.

Cardano Foundation

This independent standards body supervises and oversees Cardano and its ecosystem’s advancement. It is the Cardano brand owner and the protocol’s legal custodian. The Foundation drives platform adoption and supports the Cardano community. It also works with other industries related to blockchain, including legal frameworks, awareness, education, and integrating with legacy systems.

It features a governing Council, as well as community managers and a professional executive team. The Cardano Foundation is based in Switzerland.

IOHK

IOHK is an engineering and technology company that builds blockchains and cryptocurrencies for government entities, enterprises, and academic institutions. Jeremy Wood and Charles Hoskinson founded it. IOHK has a contract with Cardano to design, maintain, and build the platform.

IOHK prides itself on being “a fully decentralized company.” It has innovative and dynamic teams around the world, all working towards the common goal. The company aims to use peer-reviewed science to meet the highest standards of software engineering. IOHK is also committed to using open-source principles and following purpose-driven and ethical business, creating technology to benefit everyone.

EMURGO

EMURGO is a Cardano protocol founding member. It supports, incubates, and develops commercial opportunities, as well as helps businesses with their Cardano integrations. This is the for-profit division of Cardano, aiming to drive adoption using commercial ventures.

This branch of Cardano has live projects and offices in Indonesia, India, Japan, Singapore, and the United States. It also has vast blockchain expertise and a network of global industry and blockchain partners. EMURGO also encourages blockchain education, including the EMURGO Academy in India, with students from S&P, Morgan Stanley, Target Corporation, GE, Boeing, Dell, IBM, Bank of America, and Accenture, among others.

The Community

To counter the somewhat centralized nature of those three entities’ roles in Cardano, the project also has a decentralized community that includes thought leaders, engineers, and scientists.

Brief History of News to Date

The following are some highlights in the history of Cardano and ADA – the Cardano coin:

• $63 million raised during Cardano ICO
• September 2017: Cardano launching
• March 2018: Centra crypto wallet added to supplement Daedalus wallet
• September 2020: Cardano gets a new CEO, who plans to prioritize its longevity

Price History: If you are interested in the price history of Cardano to date, the following chart shows the changes visually.

The Future of Cardano and Road Map

The Cardano road map is divided into five phases or eras, as shown below.

Each era is focused on adding a set of functionalities that Cardano will deliver across several code releases.

The various eras will occur in chronological order, but the Cardano team is working on various phases simultaneously. You can view the goals and progress of each era in more detail on their respective pages. The following shows the progress so far for the Byron era:

You can also view the relevant research on each era’s page, with at least some research already completed or in the draft stage for the first three phases.

What Problem Does the Cardano Coin Solve?

According to the official website:

“Cardano exists to redistribute power from unaccountable structures to the margins – to individuals – and be an enabling force for positive change and progress.”

• Cardano aims to bring back trust to the global systems via its ability to use science to create more sustainable and transparent foundations. Those foundations let people exchange and transact, enterprises grow, and systems govern.
• Cardano places emphasis on sustainability, such as explaining its new, open, and inclusive technology standard. It aims “to challenge the old and activate a new age of sustainable, globally distributed innovation.”

The sustainability of Cardano includes not only its ability to sustain itself but also its minimal energy consumption to help the planet.

“Unlike other blockchains, Cardano does not require exponentially more energy to increase performance and add blocks.”

Cardano has several approaches in place to balance performance and sustainability, including:

• Side chains
• Parallel transaction processing via multi-party state channels
• Multi-ledger

What Is the Vision Behind the Cardano Coin?

Cardano is proud to be the first blockchain platform founded based on peer-reviewed research and was developed using evidence-based methods. The platform delivers sustainability and security for decentralized applications, societies, and systems, thanks to the use of “pioneering technology.”

Cardano describes its vision and purpose as:

“A platform built for a sustainable future, to help people work better together, trust one another, and build global solutions to global problems.”

The project began with the vision of a world that does not rely on intermediaries and where the many share power. The vision includes individuals having control of their data, interactions, and transactions. It also features businesses being able to grow independently from bureaucratic and monopolistic power structures.

According to Cardano:

“We, alongside our community and partners, are defining a new future: a decentralized future without intermediaries, in which power is returned to the individual.”

Longevity

Although a recent addition, the new CEO of the Cardano Foundation Frederik Gregaard, also aims to prioritize demonstrating to others that Cardano is here to stay. His appointment was announced in late September 2020. He said:

“When you have an open project like this one, to convey this certainty to the larger corporations that we are going to be around in the next 10 to 20, 30 years. So you can build on us also for the long term, that we are sound not only in terms of finances but also in terms of team and people.”

What Makes the Cardano Coin Special Compared to Other Coins?

One of the big differences between Cardano and other coins or platforms is that it is based on peer-reviewed research. It was also developed using evidence-based methods. The use of formal methods and evidence-based methods is typically reserved for high-stake applications.

Cardano argues that the importance it places on research helps set it apart from other coins and other blockchain projects. The project always conducts peer-reviewed research, then specifies technology, and proceeds to develop the technology. As mentioned, that peer-reviewed nature helps Cardano stand out as it lets others challenge the ideas behind the technology and platform before the team validates them.

Not only is Cardano based on research, but the platform shares the research with you. You can view it to better understand the technologies and research behind the platform. The research library has more than 85 papers, most of which are fairly technical and require some familiarity with the subjects.

The development of Cardano also follows an agile approach. This helps the project respond and adapt to new innovations as well as emerging requirements.

One of the goals that the developers set out to achieve with Cardano is energy efficiency, something which they achieved thanks to Ouroboros.

“Cardano is able to securely, sustainably, and ethically scale, with up to four million times the energy efficiency of Bitcoin.”

While there are other proof-of-stake protocols used by cryptocurrencies and blockchain platforms, there are also many proof-of-work ones, such as Bitcoin. Proof-of-work consumes much more energy as it progresses, hurting sustainability and scalability.

Many cryptocurrencies have incentives of some sort, but most are reserved for the miners. By contrast, all ADA holders are incentivized by the ability to form their own stake pool or delegate coins to an existing stake pool.

The incentive mechanism is based on scientific research spanning game theory, mathematics, and economic theory.

“Incentives are used to ensure the longevity and health of the Cardano network and ecosystem.”

To help you determine approximately how much you could earn by staking or delegating your ADA, Cardano has a staking calculator.

Yet another difference between Cardano and other blockchains is that it features two layers, while most others only use one. The Settlement Layer was built first and is the layer that lets you send and receive ADA. The Computation Layer lets users create smart contracts and enter those agreements.

Overview: How Does the Cardano Coin Work and How Is It Similar/Different to Other Well-Known Coins?

Cardano is a blockchain platform that uses proof-of-stake. It is developed with the Haskell programming language, which is known as a functional programming language. It is built on the Ouroboros proof-of-stake consensus protocol.

Ouroboros

Ouroboros is the blockchain protocol behind Cardano, and it is the first of its kind to be verifiably secure and peer-reviewed. Cardano is the very first blockchain that implements Ouroboros, although others can participate in the future.

Ouroboros combines mathematically verified mechanisms and unique technology, along with economic philosophy and behavioral psychology. These combined approaches allow it to guarantee sustainability and security.

Thanks to Ouroboros, Cardano is able to be decentralized. The protocol also allows for the platform’s sustainability while scaling to meet global requirements without any compromise to security.

This protocol builds on foundational research and was encouraged by a vision of more transparent and secure global payment systems, along with the ability to fairly redistribute control and power.

Ouroboros combines mathematical game theory, combinatorics, and cryptography to guarantee the integrity of its protocol. This same combination also guarantees the performance and longevity of the network and all distributed networks using it.

Some key features of Ouroboros include:

• Provably Secure: Its security against attackers is mathematically verifiable. It has guaranteed security as long as 51% of the Cardano stake (ADA coins) is owned by honest participants. This comes partly from the random selection of leaders.
• Energy-efficient: Ouroboros overcomes the problem that blockchains like Bitcoin face: an increasing energy requirement to achieve consensus. To put Ouroboros’ efficiency in perspective, consider that it can ethically, securely, and sustainably scale up while being as much as four million times as efficient as Bitcoin.
• Rewards and Incentives: The incentive mechanism is Ouroboros rewards participants, including delegating an ADA stake to one of the stake pools or operating stake pools. The rewards come as ADA.
• Stake Pools and Stake Delegation: As a proof-of-stake protocol, Ouroboros distributes the control of the network across various stake pools. Each stake pool is a node operator that has a sufficient infrastructure to deliver a reliable, consistent network connection. A stake pool gets assigned as slot leader for every slot, with the stake pool receiving rewards when it adds blocks. By delegating your ADA stake to a stake pool, you can increase that pool’s chances of becoming the slot leader, which would lead to its earning the rewards, and you can get a share of them.

For those interested, the following explains how Ouroboros works:

• Chains from transaction blocks are divided into epochs.
• Epochs are divided into time slots.
• Each time slot gets a slot leader who adds a block onto the chain.
• Slot leaders must consider the past few blocks as transient. Only the chain prior to a certain point is settled, something called the settlement delay.
• Settlement delay lets the ledger pass securely between participants.

You can view the Cardano blockchain explorer to see the latest epochs, including when they started and stopped, and the number of slots, blocks, and transactions.

ADA

ADA is the Cardano coin and the native token of the platform. Its name (ADA or Ada) honors Ada Lovelace, the first computer programmer and a 19th-century mathematician. The most basic functionality of Ada is as a digital currency that lets anyone use it as a secure value exchange without any need for intermediaries. Transactions are recorded on the Cardano blockchain and are secure, permanent, and transparent.

You can buy or sell ADA on various exchanges and store it in a range of wallets. Cardano officially recommends the browser-based Yoroi and the full-node wallet Daedalus.

ADA Holders

Holders of the Cardano coin receive a vote in a democratic manner. Holders can not only vote on proposals that will determine the future direction of development or upgrade the platform, but they can also submit their own proposals.

Cardano carefully selected this governance model as a way to allow for and encourage future development and growth, specifically by introducing capabilities that are tailored to the needs of users.

ADA holders have two main options to use their stake in the network:

1. Delegated to Stake Pools: If you choose to store ADA in a wallet, you can delegate it to one of the stake pools, letting you earn rewards and participate in the network’s running.
2. Pledged to Stake Pools: Or you can pledge the ADA to a stake pool, which will increase that pool’s chances of receiving rewards.

Future ADA Functionality

In the future, you will be able to use ADA for services and applications that will be part of the Cardano platform.

Incentivized Participation

The incentivized participation of Cardano helps encourage people to participate, including as stake pool operators and stake delegators. Protocols for enhancement and improvement build and expand the platform, with a governance system that aims to be democratic.

The direct rewards for participation help Cardano ensure that participants act in their best interests and, at the same time that they act in the best interests of the network as a whole. This design encourages healthy ecosystem development, so the network can continue to be robust and healthy with endurance.

Stake Pools

As more stake pools are added, the Cardano network grows. During this process, Cardano sets and adjusts parameters to determine how attractive each stake pool is.

Any ADA held on the network is a stake in the Cardano network. The size of the relevant stake is proportional to the quantity of ADA. As mentioned, ADA holders can either run a stake pool themselves or delegate their stake, so it becomes part of a stake pool that someone else runs. Stake pools can be private or public, with private ones not allowing other ADA holders to delegate their stake to the pool.

One primary method Ouroboros uses to choose the next slot leader to add a block is via the amount of stake delegated in the stake pool. Up to a certain amount, having a greater stake increases the chances of a stake pool being chosen.

Staking and delegation are supported by both the Yoroi and Daedalus wallets. When you earn rewards via staking, those get added to the delegated stake or to your stake pool.

Voltaire (Governance Technology)

Cardano’s governance structure is designed with decentralization in mind, via its Voltaire system. Voltaire is an update to the Cardano platform that lets the community make decisions regarding technical improvements, funding decisions, and software updates. These are called the Cardano Improvement Proposals (CIPs) and the Funding Proposals (FP’s).

Open Source: One of the key aspects of Cardano is that it is open-source. Part of this is providing access to relevant documentation on the website.

Fees from Cardano do not go to the producer of the block directly. Instead, Cardano pools all the fees from an epoch and then distributes them to all the stake pools that created blocks within the epoch.

The Cardano fees are low and calculated based on –x + y x size. In this formula, x is a constant that is 0.155381 ADA and y is a constant that is 0.000043946 ADA/byte, with the size referring to the transaction size in bytes. This transaction fee is still subject to change, but it is very low, especially given the low price of ADA.

Cardano was designed to be highly scalable, offering tens of thousands of transactions per second. The transaction speed should increase in the future, thanks to the March 2020 release of a paper on Hydra, a new scaling solution for the proof-of-stake mechanism. When implemented, it should process more than a million transactions a second. This new paper is the result of more than five years of research by more than two dozen full-time developers.

The Cardano network grows as it gains more stake pools. The fact that the best interest of the network and those of individual participants are aligned also encourages scalability. Cardano claims that its scalability and sustainability are enough to meet the demands of societal, financial, logistics, and identity global systems.

Even early tests, as far back as late 2017, indicated that Cardano is more scalable than Ethereum or Bitcoin, as it processed 257 transactions a second. In the long term, Cardano should be able to process tens of thousands of transactions per second.

In addition to its other purposes, Ouroboros helps provide Cardano with scalability. Cardano describes it as:

“A protocol with proven security guarantees able to facilitate the propagation of global, permissionless networks with minimal energy requirements - of which Cardano is the first.”

Cardano goes into more detail regarding Ouroboros and scalability:

“At the heart of Ouroboros is the concept of infinity. Global networks must be able to grow sustainably and ethically: to provide greater opportunities to the world while also preserving it. This becomes possible with Ouroboros.”

Essentially, the project argues that Ouroboros allows for continuous scalability by allowing for the creation of new networks that are distributed and permissionless and can support new markets.

Cardano is considering RINA, Recursive Internetwork Architecture, to help with network scalability. John Day created RINA, which aims to develop a heterogeneous network that offers scalability, transparency, and privacy.

To ensure that security, all platform integrations, and protocol implementations are researched, challenged, modeled mathematically, and tested before being specified. The specifications are then used to inform the development, which Cardano has independently audited. All of these steps combine to help create “an unrivaled level of assurance.”

Cardano also builds security and trust into its platform, allowing for secure interactions and transactions between two parties that do not trust or know each other.

Much of the security in Cardano comes from Ouroboros, which helps the platform be provably secure against both Sybil attacks and bad actors.

Additionally, Ouroboros allows for every interaction, exchange, and transaction to be immutable and transparent. It also helps all transactions with secure validation via the innovative extended UTXO model and securely validated with multi-signature.

Cardano prides itself on having a governance structure that includes giving every participant a democratic vote. The fact that participants and token holders can vote on or submit proposals indicates a fair level of decentralization.

Cardano’s governance structure encourages decentralization by letting the community submit Funding Proposals and Cardano Improvement Proposals, as well as to vote on them.

To further decentralization, every ADA token holder has a stake in the Cardano network. They are incentivized and allowed to vote on the various proposals. CIP voting occurs via a CIP GitHub repository, while FPs are voted on via a dedicated app.

Cardano markets itself as powering more secure, globally scalable solutions that are new. The combination of leading-edge technologies, methodologies, and models help enterprises, developers, and individuals make changes while enriching their lives.

Enterprise Solutions

Cardano is working to accommodate a range of use cases, including applications for the education, government, agricultural, health care, and retail sectors. Many of the solutions already in place come from IOHK or EMURGO, and they span a range of industries.

Education, Credential Verification, and Digital Identity

This use case of Cardano overcomes the heavily centralized nature of issuing academic certifications. That centralization can be problematic, especially in cases when the original credentials are lost or damaged, and the institution does not exist anymore. It is also very challenging to share the credentials since they are usually physical.

The Atala PRISM solution aims to overcome this as a credentials and ID solution that uses the Cardano blockchain. It secures certifications using a tamper-proof, immutable ecosystem. This allows institutions to verify credentials instantly and students to own as well as share achievements. Students are in control of their achievements, without any need to worry about intermediaries or inefficiencies.

Government and Digital Identity

Atala PRISM also has use cases for the government. The current methods of issuing and verifying credentials have problems, including the fact that the issuer remains in control of the documents, instead of the individual. This causes people to rely on third-party agencies, including for verification, leading to high costs in terms of time and money. Atala PRISM gives the users control of credentials, letting them instantly share and verify them as they wish.

Finance and Onboarding (KYC and AML)

Atala PRISM’s use cases for Cardano extend to the finance sector, where onboarding can be incredibly time-consuming and difficult due to anti-money-laundering (AML) and know-your-customer (KYC) regulations. In some countries, this results in it taking weeks to open a bank account. Via its ability to streamline issuing and verifying credentials, Atala PRISM can add efficiency to onboarding.

Helping the Unbanked

As is the case with several other cryptocurrency projects, Cardano also hopes to help those who are unbanked. Hoskinson, one of the Cardano founders, has said that:

“Cryptocurrencies are important as you can go into the developing world with an arc of time, several years…a decade. You can actually teach people how to use this technology and make it theirs.”

Fans of Cardano see many strengths including:

• Strong Development Team: Fans of Cardano point to the development team, including the fact that they have worked on Ethereum and BitShares.
• Scalability: Theoretically, Cardano should have no scalability problems, easily handling tens of thousands of transactions per second.
• Energy-efficiency: Supporters of Cardano and ADA point to the fact that the proof-of-stake consensus mechanism is environmentally friendly, consuming significantly less energy than proof-of-work systems, like those used in Bitcoin.

Most of the criticism is centred around the project still be a work in progress:

• Problems with the Daedalus Wallet: There was some early criticism regarding the Daedalus wallet, namely, that users were experiencing issues with connecting to the network, transactions not reaching, and syncing blocks.
• It Is Not Complete Yet: Another common criticism is that Cardano is still being developed. As such, there is no way to tell whether it will meet its lofty goals regarding technology, use cases, and scalability.
• Not Quite Decentralized: Some argue that despite the proof-of-stake system set up for decentralization, the fact that IOHK, the Cardano Foundation, and EMURGO play such a large role means it is not truly decentralized.

Cardano is off to a good start and has already developed some solutions, but it still needs to prove itself and has a ways to go in its road map.

• Purpose / Vision: Cardano has a clear purpose and vision, providing scalability and efficiency, along with the other benefits of the blockchain.
• Adoption: Cardano is still in the very early stages of adoption, but it has already been used to create multiple solutions, most of which are from organizations involved in Cardano. Its very much a technology looking for use cases !
• Fees: Fees are low, but the fee structure is not immediately clear.
• Speed: Cardano can already handle hundreds of transactions per second and should be able to handle a million transactions once the Hydra solution is implemented.
• Scalability: Cardano has better scalability than Ethereum and Bitcoin, and this should improve in the future.
• Security: here are multiple security measures in place, and Cardano has not yet faced any security scandals.
• Decentralization: The presence and involvement of IOHK, the Cardano Foundation, and EMURGO raise some concerns about decentralization, but Cardano’s other aspects, including its proof-of-stake system, add decentralization.
• Team: The team behind Cardano has vast experience, including an Ethereum co-founder.

Is Cardano Coin Safe?

Cardano coin is as safe as any other cryptocurrency. To keep your ADA safe, make sure to store it in a secure wallet.

How to Store Cardano Coin Safely?

Minimize the amount of ADA that you store on exchanges and instead opt for wallets, like Daedalus or Yoroi.

Will the Cardano Coin Price Go Up?

There is no way to tell for sure whether the price of the Cardano coin will increase, but as its adoption grows, it will theoretically rise. Some experts predict it will continue to rise, but any purchase is at your own risk.