# Cardano

## History
Cardano was officially launched in September 2017 under the so-called ‘Byron’ bootstrap phase. It is led by an early Ethereum and BitShares co-founder, **Charles Hoskinson**. The technology has been developed by a blockchain engineering firm called Input Output Hong Kong (IOHK).

## What is it
A third-generation blockchain - it builds on all the lessons learned from other coins to create a layered and distributed computing platform that places a special emphasis on security and engineering rigour

## What is so special
Cardano adopts a slow and deliberate process of formalizing a “science” for distributed systems design. This is achieved by re-evaluating everything that has been done in the industry for the past decade. This has resulted in a lot of negative criticism towards Cardano for being slow to release many updates, DApps and projects.

A lot of this negative criticism stems from the fact that a lot of Cardano competitors follow the “move fast and break things,” model while Cardano is more focused on research and academic peer review papers to ensure they do things right before going to market.

Cardano’s research-driven approach builds on a foundation of diligent, academically peer-reviewed work. This introduces extremely high standards in the space of crypto-economic theory and distributed systems engineering.

**Cardano is without a doubt, one of the most advanced, if not, the most advanced blockchain network in existence today. The network is ultra-fast, highly decentralized, scalable, cost-efficient and eco-friendly. The Cardano team has learned from the mistakes of many of their predecessors which has positioned them well with a competitive advantage where they are overcoming foreseen issues before fully rolling out and preventing issues before they arise.**

P.S. Another network that takes the slow, scientific, research and academic approach similar to Cardano is **Algorand**.

## Structure
Cardano is made up of three entities, each with their role in the project.

**Cardano Foundation**: A Swiss non-profit for the Cardano ecosystem and community. It is proactively working with governments and regulatory bodies and forming strategic partnerships with enterprises and other relevant open source projects.
**IOHK**: An engineering company dedicated to instrumentalizing peer-to-peer technologies. It is also determined to provide financial services to over three billion people that don’t have access to them. The group is contracted to design, build, and maintain the Cardano platform.
**Emurgo**: a company formed to integrate, develop and support companies, businesses and industries that want to make use of Cardano’s decentralized blockchain and computation platform.

## News
They have a number of relationships with researchers in the academic world. For example, they have partnered with the **University of Edinburgh** and the **Tokyo Institute of Technology**.

**Samsung**- Making a big announcement at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, tech giant Samsung announced that they will be working with Veritree, which utilizes the Cardano network to facilitate their 2 million tree planting land restoration efforts. This is a big sign of confidence as Samsung also announced their TVs will have direct exposure to an NFT marketplace. Perhaps it will be Cardano NFTs?

## Tokenomics
Ada

The ADA currency has a fixed supply, arbitrarily capped at forty-five billion

## Roadmap
**Basho era** – Currently underway, expected to be complete in 2022. This is Cardano’s solution to scaling. The Basho era will introduce Hydra which is a layer two scaling solution for Cardano which has been in development for over a year.

**Voltaire Era**– Also called the governance era, this introduces project catalyst which gives the Cardano community their say in determining important priorities for ecosystem growth via majority vote. This creates a powerful decentralized launching platform with a governance system for distributing valuable funds to projects.

Cardano has some very interesting developments coming down the line, with DApps rolling out in full force in 2022. Up until now, as the team was still perfecting the network, there has been little incentive for Cardano enthusiasts to want to hold the token as its only real value was staking rewards. Cardano often sees between 70%-80% of its circulating supply staked, meaning that there are a lot of Cardano Hodlers which effectively reduces the supply, leaving many to think that an increasing demand for ADA as DApps launch will send the price of ADA to moon-city.