Ethereum has been the lead player in the smart contract platform space. Now a new competitor (Cardano) is blowing up into the cryptocurrency market. And Charles Hoskinson, former Ethereum CEO, is the man steering the ship.
Last week, IOHK( Imput Output Hong Kong) a blockchain development firm launched Cardano, a new blockchain. Trading under Ada (ADA), the platform’scryptocurrency,was listed under America's biggest exchange Bittrex.
The ten thousand Ada ico holders who participated in the earlier crowdsale can now download the ADA wallet known as Daedalus and use it to their tokens to begin trading.
The main token holders are in Japan, as the company wanted to focus their attention into the Asian market. Many people across the world can now buy and sell through bittrex.
If all goes to (IOHK’s)plan, Cardano will evolve into a full-fledged smart contract platform within 2 years.The blockchain will hold alibrary of protocols that developers can use to build their Dapps.
History of the project
Hoskinson was an an early founder of Ethereum, who left and set his attentions on building a company - as a result IOHK was formed.
IOHK gained interest by a group of Japanese business men and women who where interested in creating a blockchain that would function as a cryptocurrency and a smart contract platform, while meeting the needs, for the increasing regulators oversight in the blockchain community.
For development funds raised, the group focused the (ICO) on Asian markets. “They said it would be really nice to do a large-scale distribution in Asia which is already saturated with cryptocurrencies,”said Hoskinson during an interview with a popular Bitcoin Magazine.
IOHK's task is to build software to help with nessasary compliance during the sale.Attain,another Japanese company, was brought in to coordinate the sale while the Cardano Foundation handled the oversight and auditing of the project.
The crowdsale(September 2015 - January 2017) raised $62 million!! The results?30 billion Ada vouchers sold. 45 billion Ada will ever exist.
No American citizen took place in the ICO meaning the sale wasn't picked up by the U.S. Security and Exchange Commission . “There was someadvantages to offshoring it,” said Hoskinson.
IOHK will have to build Cardano under a 5 year contract. Emurgo will be to Cardano as what ConsenSys is to Ethereum.
Haskell-Based
So what is Cardano ? It's s a full blockchain, built from scratch using the computer language Haskell. Philip Wadler is the principal designer of the Haskell language and will be running the Cardano project.
''Code can be written more precisely, resulting in a more secure and reliable protocol'' claims Hoskinson.
At the heart of Cardano lies Ouroboros, a proof-of-stake consensus algorithm.
Developing a secure proof of stake is exceedingly difficult. Ouroboros comes with a mathematical proof of security, which has gone through a rigorous peer reviews, As a result ,acceptance and presentation at Crypto 2017, a major cryptography conference.
Smart Contracts
IOHK is currently developing its VM. This will become the computation layer of the platform, where self-executing code will live. Hoskinson said he expects the Cardano VM to be available sometime in the first half of next year.
Cardano will also have its own smart contract language called Plutus, a lighter version of Haskell.
But the good news is eventually it will allow users to write decentralized apps in languages such as Java, C++ and JavaScript.
“You have to be pragmatic,” said Hoskinson. “People are not always going want to write high-assurance code.”
Also the plans for a governance system in which decisions about the future of the protocol are made on-chain and a treasury system in which a portion of the transaction fees are retained for future development.
Overall, Hoskinson made it clear that this is to be a slow and steady launch, with the goal of creating a secure, reliable platform that will span decades.
“Cardano is a rigorous, systematic project,” he said. “It has a lot of principles behind it.
Price Prediction
Who knows what the future holds in terms of the Cardano (ADA) price. Making a powerful statement and blasting into the top 20 cryptocurrencies, Cardano lists at number 17 on coinmarketcap (at the time of writing). With a 24 hour volume of 2,338 BTC and a market cap of $557,372,384 it certainly suggests big things are going to happen.
In my personal opinion, I'm stocking up on as much cardano as possible. Prices at $0.02 cent, I think this has major potential in a few years to compete with ethereum and some other blockchain and smart contract platforms.
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