What is Cardano?
Cardano is a security focused blockchain that harnesses the latest research and engineering insights to build a platform suitable for the highest value applications.
Built on a foundation of peer-reviewed research created through partnerships with the world’s foremost universities, Cardano aims to create a platform for decentralised applications and smart contracts that can be processed with a technique called formal verification.
This allows logical proof of the correctness of code and smart contracts, for those applications where value is high and security is paramount. Cardano combines this with an innovative layered approach that separates accounting of value from all other smart contract and computation activity.
This means functionality can be added to smart contract capabilities without changing the protocol responsible for the cryptocurrency.
The Team
Cardano is made up of three companies who each have distinct roles in the project.
Cardano Foundation:- A Swiss non-profit and guardian of the Cardano ecosystem and community. It aims to proactively work with governments and regulatory bodies, as well as forming strategic partnerships with enterprises and other open-source projects to further global adoption of the technology.
IOHK: A world-class engineering and technology company committed to using peer-to-peer innovations to provide financial services to three billion people that don’t have them. The group is contracted to design, build, and maintain the Cardano platform until 2020.
Emurgo: a company formed to integrate, develop and support businesses who want to utilise Cardano's decentralised blockchain.
What is unique about the project?
Cardano is the first blockchain project to be built on peer reviewed academic research.
This level of scrutiny of the underlying technology is an industry first. Further to this, Cardano is unique in that it’s written in the Haskell coding language.
Haskell is considered to be one of the most secure programming languages, minimizing the number of errors and adding extremely robust security to the platform. This includes use of a technique called formal verification, which allows mathematical proof of the correctness of code.
Cardano is also designed to operate in regulated industries whilst protecting individual privacy. Applications built on Cardano can be individually customised to meet regulator requirements, but individuals can protect their privacy by choosing whether they want to enter regulated domains.