This is a deep dive I wrote about the Cardano cryptocurrency, its blockchain technology and ecosystem. The 3,900+ word article was written and researched for my Medium blog in October 2022 and was later added to the Coinmonks publication.
As Ethereum raises the stakes and merges into its new identity, the hype surrounding ETH killers may appear to have calmed down somewhat. This successful transition to proof-of-stake doesn’t rule out the competition altogether. One such competitor to the throne is Cardano, a popular crypto project that is intrinsically linked to Ethereum’s history but also very different in many ways.
I might catch some heat for this one but screw it, I came to crypto to learn and earn, not join cults. The following deep dive is a non-biased review of Cardano’s background, its ecosystem and the pros and cons of its technology.
To understand Cardano is to understand Ethereum. Or at least know who some of the co-founders were. Besides Vitalik Buterin, seven other people can lay claim to having contributed to the bumpy start of crypto’s largest smart contract platform. Charles Hoskinson was one. Don’t believe me? Take a look this 2014 promotional video where Charles and Vitalik wax lyrical on Ethereum’s vision for a decentralised future.
Due to numerous differences in opinion, the most notable being Ethereum’s status as a for-profit or non-profit organisation, Charles was booted out of the project on what came to be known as Ethereum’s Game of Thrones day in June 2014. Charles proceeded to donate his 293,000 Ether to his secretary after this event and looked for another stomping ground to call home.
For those of you wishing to learn more about Ethereum’s early days, I highly recommend giving Laura Shin’s “The Cryptopians” a read.
Hoskinson got down to work and helped set up 3 entities in 2015 that would collectively create the backbone of Cardano:
Named after Gerolamo Cardano, a 16th century Italian mathematician, the Cardano mainnet went live in 2017 and is supported by its $ADA cryptocurrency. $ADA is named after Ada Lovelace, a 19th century English mathematician and daughter to famous poet Lord Byron. Similar to Satoshi sub-units within Bitcoin, a single Lovelace represents the smallest sub-unit for Cardano’s coin (0.000001 $ADA). Put 2 and 2 together and you’ll soon begin to see a mathematics theme running through Cardano’s lore.
Since launching its mainnet in September 2017, Cardano has been pursuing its roadmap which is divided into five distinct eras, each one dedicated to a specific set of functionalities.
The functionalities are delivered periodically across numerous code releases, or hard forks. The work involved actually occurs in parallel and having already founded, decentralised and smartened up their contracts, Cardano developers currently find themselves preoccupied with aspects of scaling and governance. The recently implemented Vasil hard fork brings improvements to smart contracts and provides more scalability and interoperability with other blockchains.
Cardano gets plenty of stick for its slow delivery, especially in comparison to other layer 1 blockchains. Two possible explanations for this pace of development are the choice of a more complex programming language and Cardano’s rigorous procedure of academic research and peer review. Despite the criticisms, there are indeed some interesting features to be noted in Cardano’s tech stack.
Cardano’s founders chose to build the blockchain from scratch using Haskell, a functional programming language. Diving into the specifics of functional programming is beyond the scope of this crypto deep dive, but suffice it to say that a functional programming language offers more certainty towards the correctness of the code. This is in part due to the fact that the language is more oriented towards mathematics and is considered “purer” than other forms of programming languages (which can have their outputs skewed by elements such as time, disk space and internal state).
Haskell is used in many mission critical industries such as banking and aerospace and forms the basis for two other languages within the Cardano ecosystem: