Obligatory, no this is not an April Fools' Day joke. Now that's out the way...
What is Cardano?
Cardano is considered third-generation crypto and is building a proof-of-stake (PoS) blockchain network, being developed into a decentralised application (DApp) development platform with a multi-asset LEDGER and verifiable smart contracts. Based on peer-reviewed academic research, Cardano is working towards building a blockchain that is viable for real-world applications, by making it scalable, interoperable and sustainable.
Cardano started in 2015 with the aim of cracking all three of these challenges. Two years, thousands of GitHub commits, and hundreds of hours of study later, the first version of Cardano shipped in September 2017, and the Byron era began.
The Eras of Cardano
- Byron - Foundation (COMPLETE)
- Allowed users to buy and sell the ADA cryptocurrency.
- Ouroboros is the first proof-of-stake protocol created on the basis of academic research, with a mathematically-proven level of security.
- The Byron era also saw the delivery of the Daedalus wallet as well as the Yoroi wallet (lighter wallet)
- During the Byron era, the network was federated.
- Shelley - Decentralisation (COMPLETE)
- The majority of nodes are run by network participants making Cardano more decentralised and enjoying greater security and robustness as a result.
- Introduction of a delegation and incentives scheme.
- A reward system to drive stake pools and community adoption.
- The delegation and incentive scheme allows and encourages users to delegate their stake to stake pools – always-on, community-run network nodes – and be rewarded for honest participation in the network.
- The Shelley era makes the network more useful, rewarding, and valuable for users.
- Shelley was designed to prepare the community for a fully distributed network, a new DApp ecosystem and much more.
- Goguen - Smart contracts (UNDERWAY)
- Smart contracts! The Shelley era decentralised the network, the Goguen era is set to add the ability to build decentralised apps on the Cardano network.
- Developers have been working on Goguen in tandem with Shelley. When complete, everyone, no matter their technical capabilities, or lack thereof, will be able to create and execute functional smart contracts on the Cardano network.
- Plutus, a purpose-built smart contract development language and execution platform using the functional programming language Haskell is one of the major goals of this era. Plutus is already available for testing and allows one codebase to support both on and off-chain components.
- Marlowe is a way to make Cardano accessible to a wider, less technical userbase, allowing them to create smart contracts.
- Marlowe Playground is an easy-to-use application-building platform that non-programmers can use to build financial smart contracts.
- In short, Marlowe + Plutus = more real-world implementation.
- Goguen will also see the addition of a multi-currency ledger enabling users to create new natively-supported tokens.
- This will allow the creation of fungible and non-fungible tokens, support for the creation of new cryptocurrencies on Cardano as well as the tokenisation of many types of digital and physical assets, as well as easier integration of smart contracts and DApps involving multiple cryptocurrencies.
- Basho - Scaling (TO COME)
- This era seeks to optimise, improve the scalability and interoperability of the Cardano network.
- Basho will see the introduction of sidechains, which are essentially new blockchains interoperable with the main Cardano chain.
- These sidechains will extend the capabilities of the network can be used as a sharding mechanism to reduce the load on the main chain, as well as introducing experimental features without affecting the security of the main blockchain.
- Introduction of parallel accounting styles, resulting in greater interoperability for Cardano.
- Voltaire - Governance (TO COME)
- Having a decentralised network is only part of the work. There must be an infrastructure in place that will allow for decentralised maintenance and network improvements through stakeholders.
- This era will see the formation of a voting and treasury system, allowing network participants to use their stake and voting rights to influence the future development of the network.
- The idea is to make Cardano a self-sustaining system.
- The treasury system will fund future development of the network by using a fraction of all pooled transaction fees, which are pooled following the voting process.
- When this happens, IOHK will have no hand in managing Cardano. It will all be in the hands of the community.
As of today, 1st April 2021, 1,800 community pools are now responsible for 100% of block production. The more blocks made by stake pool operators, the more rewards are earned by those pools and subsequently given to users that have staked their ADA with those pools. Plutus, the platform that will host smart contracts of Cardano is set to deploy between the end of April and the beginning of May. The Alonzo testnet will allow developers to create smart contracts.
