From: http://www.altcoinworld.it/2017/10/08/cardano-project/
Cardano is a project that began in 2015 as an effort to change the way cryptocurrencies are designed and developed. The overall focus beyond a particular set of innovations is to provide a more balanced and sustainable ecosystem that better accounts for the needs of its users as well as other systems seeking integration.
In the spirit of many open source projects, Cardano did not begin with a comprehensive roadmap or even an authoritative white paper. Rather it embraced a collection of design principles, engineering best practices and avenues for exploration. These include the following:
Separation of accounting and computation into different layers
Implementation of core components in highly modular functional code
Small groups of academics and developers competing with peer reviewed research
Heavy use of interdisciplinary teams including early use of InfoSec experts
Fast iteration between white papers, implementation and new research required to correct issues discovered during review
Building in the ability to upgrade post-deployed systems without destroying the network
Development of a decentralized funding mechanism for future work
A long-term view on improving the design of cryptocurrencies so they can work on mobile devices with a reasonable and secure user experience
Bringing stakeholders closer to the operations and maintenance of their cryptocurrency
Acknowledging the need to account for multiple assets in the same ledger
Abstracting transactions to include optional metadata in order to better conform to the needs of legacy systems
Learning from the nearly 1,000 altcoins by embracing features that make sense
Adopt a standards-driven process inspired by the Internet Engineering Task Force using a dedicated foundation to lock down the final protocol design
Explore the social elements of commerce
Find a healthy middle ground for regulators to interact with commerce without compromising some core principles inherited from Bitcoin
From this unstructured set of ideas, the principals working on Cardano began both to explore cryptocurrency literature and to build a toolset of abstractions. The output of this research is IOHK’s extensive library of papers, numerous survey results such as this recent scripting language overview as well as an Ontology of Smart Contracts, and the Scorex project. Lessons yielded an appreciation for the cryptocurrency industry’s unusual and at times counterproductive growth.
Cardano is a next-generation blockchain platform with more advanced features than any protocol yet developed, and the first to evolve out of a scientific philosophy. Our large team of expert engineers and researchers drawn from around the world started by deconstructing the concept of a cryptocurrency. Then, incorporating our groundbreaking Proof of Stake algorithm, Ouroboros, the IOHK team employed a first principles approach driven by peer reviewed academic research to build Cardano from the ground up.
This uniquely collaborative effort steadily constructed the most precisely engineered cryptocurrency yet, a product that brings together such disciplines as distributed systems, mechanism design and cryptography. The result is the first cryptocurrency to be based in Haskell code, an industrial strength product that delivers the resilience necessary for mission-critical systems, in this case securing investment.
Cardano’s multi layer protocol performs advanced functions, and has at its foundation a settlement layer that is elegantly linked to a control layer. The settlement layer will have a unit of account, while the control layer will run next-generation smart contracts. The control layer will be programmed to recognise identity, assisting compliance and allowing blacklisting for instance.
As a whole, the protocol’s design is geared towards protecting privacy rights of users, while also taking into account the needs of regulators. In doing so, Cardano is the first protocol to balance these requirements in a nuanced and effective way, pioneering a new approach for cryptocurrencies. In addition, while the platform has been solidly composed, we also recognise the need for it to evolve and adapt to changing needs. Consequently we have designed a system that can be upgraded by way of soft forks, and are installing a treasury system that will ensure the sustainability of the protocol.
Completely open source and patent-free, Cardano was built in a spirit of collaboration. And engineered for efficiency and scalability, the Cardano ecosystem is developing out into the most complete and most useful cryptocurrency ever constructed.
From https://www.cardanohub.org/en/home/
https://iohk.io/projects/cardano/
