why cardano

Fast, secure, and green blockchain technology.

Cardano is the first blockchain to evolve from scientific peer review and cryptographic research methods. It has been designed from inception to be environmentally friendly and offer an open-source blockchain platform to host decentralized applications that can provide accessible economic services to the world.

benefits

Providing accessible economic services to one and all.

Open-source, decentralized

Cardano seeks to provide economic services for everyone by supporting applications for finance, creative property, identity, governance, and more.

Backed by science

The first blockchain to be developed through scientific peer review and research-driven methods.

Good for the planet

Environmentally friendly through the use of Ouroboros, a proof-of-stake algorithm to power its blockchain that maximizes energy efficiency.

Scalable

Designed to be scalable for millions of users, sustainable to last for generations, and interoperable with legacy systems and other blockchain ecosystems.

Flexible

Faster, less expensive, and more predictable as a blockchain platform for individuals and businesses.

Want to know more about the development of Cardano?

Watch the Cardano whiteboard overview

Byron

Foundation

Named after George Gordon Byron, 6th Baron Byron or Lord Byron as he was known, was an English Romantic poet. The Byron era is the first era of the Cardano blockchain, and the kickstart of the entire Cardano blockchain.

The actual start of Cardano can be tracked back to 2015, as the founders of Cardano identified three blockchain-specific challenges to solve: scalability to onboard more users and improve blockchain throughput, interoperability to integrate functionalities and features with other systems, and sustainability for Cardano to last for generations.

In order to solve these challenges, a new open-source, decentralized blockchain network needed to be designed and developed.

With that objective, the Byron era officially began in September 2017 with the launch of the federated era of Cardano. In this era, the founding entities of Cardano would establish the basic infrastructure for Cardano including launching the Ouroboros proof-of-stake consensus protocol to enable transactions, developing user wallets, facilitating exchange listings for its native cryptocurrency ADA, and building the worldwide Cardano community.

cardano milestones

Important Cardano milestones

In Cardano, important upgrades are implemented via a hard fork combinator (HFC) event, a technical term used to indicate the combination of certain processes or things. In this case, a HFC merges protocols, thereby enabling the smooth transition of Cardano without blockchain network interruption or restart.

Some of the important Cardano hard forks to date are:

Shelley

The Shelley era as mentioned above transitioned Cardano to a decentralized network and was marked by the Shelley hard fork.

Mary

The Mary hard fork started the multi-asset support of the Cardano blockchain. During the Byron and the start of Shelley eras, ADA was the only asset on the Cardano ledger.

Alonzo

The Alonzo hard fork introduced smart contracts to Cardano with Plutus, the Cardano blockchain’s smart contract programming language which is based on Haskell.

Vasil

Vasil is a continuation of the upgrades from Alonzo and also belongs to the Goguen era.

Hydra

Hydra is the creation of state channels in Cardano. It is a Layer-2 scalability solution for Cardano, which aims to increase the speed of transactions and minimize transaction costs.

The point of collective innovation is that thousands of people are coming to build and bring new things, new experiences. It’s going to be so much fun

Ken Kodama

Founder and CEO, EMURGO Group