About Cardano

Cardano is the first global blockchain platform to evolve out of a scientific philosophy. Powered by the ADA cryptocurrency, Cardano is a third generation blockchain system, elevating cryptocurrency innovations by the Bitcoin (1st gen) and Ethereum (2nd gen) blockchains to become the most secure, the most decentralized and the most feature rich platform on the market today.

With the end goals of economic and social inclusion and geographic diversity, Cardano is quickly becoming the industry platform for globally decentralized financial and social systems. It is a network built through peer-reviewed scientific research and formal verification, to ensure strong standards are met and its code verified mathematically. Some features that separate Cardano from the pack are:

Differentiators

  • Groundbreaking Proof of Stake algorithm, Ouroboros
  • A design verified by peer reviewed academic research – 100+ papers published to date
  • Industry leading decentralization – over 1300 Stake Pools throughout the world competing for representative staking privileges – and still growing
  • A treasury system that will ensure the sustainability of the protocol for years to come
  • A Smart Contract platform that enables non technical players to define and deploy safe and secure financial smart contracts
  • The first cryptocurrency to be based in Haskell code, an industrial strength product that delivers the resilience necessary for mission-critical systems and avoids critical coding errors that can break smart contracts

What is Proof of Stake?

Proof-of-Stake is a consensus algorithm that uses a cryptocurrency as stake to help validate or mine blocks for a blockchain. Bitcoin uses computation power to increase the likelihood of validating blocks, while Proof-of-Stake uses sheer amounts of the cryptocurrency to increase one’s chances of making a block.

Holders of ADA can stake their ADA to a stake pool on the Cardano blockchain using a wallet like Daedalus or Yoroi, to aggregate the currency and increase a stake pool’s likelihood of validating blocks.

By staking ADA, delegates shall receive rewards when the stake pool they delegated to creates blocks. The expected ADA return over a year of staking is 4 – 6%.

When staking, you do not send ADA to a stake pool, so your ADA stays in your wallet. Rewards are automatically transferred to your wallet by the stake pool at the end of every epoch.