Cardano: A Short Profile
Cardano is an open-source, public blockchain and decentralised application platform. The Cardano project aims to improve upon the shortcomings of Bitcoin and Ethereum via improved scalability, interoperability with other blockchain projects, speed and sustainability. This blockchain project has its basis on peer-reviewed academic research, and a global team of renowned experts continuously develop and improve the platform. For instance, Charles Hoskinson, who is also the co-founder of Ethereum, founded Cardano. He also co-founded and is the CEO of IOHK (Input Output Hong Kong), an engineering and research company that builds cryptocurrencies and blockchains. IOHK are Cardano’s primary development team.
The Cardano project ensured that their technical staff come from a pool of computer language developers who have written or contributed to developing successful programming languages. Because of this strategy, the project attracted such renowned talent as Professor Philip Wadler. Professor Wadler is a professor of theoretical computer science at the University of Edinburgh, and he is one of a 25-member team of academic researchers across banking, finance, law and other fields working on the project. Charles Hoskinson also aims to attract dot-net developers such as Java, PHP, Ruby and Python developers, to develop for and on the Cardano platform.
The Cardano project roadmap aims to accomplish decentralisation, scaling via modularity and governance. Concerning decentralisation, the Cardano blockchain project is 68% decentralised at the time of writing and aims to be 100 times more decentralised than Bitcoin. Many blockchain projects run on the Ethereum platform, and Cardano is built with full Ethereum support, thus making it interoperable with these projects. According to Hoskinson, Ethereum-based apps will work one-to-one on Cardano’s blockchain platform, but better, faster and cheaper.
In summary, the Cardano project is a financial operating system that aims to give economic identity to individuals around the world who do not have one and aims to offer new ways of representing equities. For instance, the project aims to offer the substantial $5.6 trillion of ‘locked’ wealth in the African continent a means to liquidity. The project has created the scientific foundations for various industry sectors and has published 91 research papers. Cardano has immense potential, and its cryptocurrency (ADA) can have a very substantial ROI if the team realises the aims of the project.
Why is the Cardano project primed for success? Consider the population of unbanked individuals — individuals who do not have any financial or economic identity. According to the World Bank, there were about two billion unbanked adults in the world in 2014. By 2017, this figure had dropped to 1.7 billion. The Cardano project aims to empower these unbanked individuals, mostly in emerging economies in Africa and South Asia. For investors in it for the money, increased user volume will likely result in higher returns. For those investing based on principle, it is a lofty project to support.
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