Cardano

Cardano is a decentralized Layer-1 blockchain built on Proof-of-Stake, designed as a research-driven platform for payments, smart contracts, and digital assets. The project emphasizes high assurance engineering (including formal methods), predictable transaction behavior, and a governance model intended to evolve the network through community-led decision making.

Cardano’s core design is based on the Ouroboros consensus family and the Extended UTxO (EUTxO) ledger model-an approach that keeps Bitcoin-like UTxO fundamentals while enabling more expressive on-chain logic and multi-asset support.

Key features of Cardano include:

• Ouroboros Proof-of-Stake: a PoS consensus approach secured by stake delegation and stake pools, aiming for energy efficiency and strong security guarantees.

• EUTxO ledger model: a transaction model built for determinism and clearer reasoning about state changes, often used to support safer contract design and parallel-friendly execution.

• Smart contracts (Plutus ecosystem): a contract platform where on-chain scripts validate spending conditions, with supporting tooling/languages for developer ergonomics (e.g., higher-level approaches that compile down to Cardano scripts).

• Native assets & NFTs: multi-asset support at the ledger level, allowing tokens to exist and move without being inherently dependent on a single “token contract” standard.

• Scalability roadmap & layers:

1. Hydra: an off-chain scaling family designed to increase throughput using isomorphic transaction logic,

2. Mithril: a cryptographic certification approach (stake-based) intended to speed up node bootstrapping and enable lighter verification patterns.

• On-chain governance direction: an evolving governance framework built around stake-based participation (including delegated representation models) and protocol change mechanisms.

• Interoperability & sidechain direction: efforts to connect Cardano to broader ecosystems via bridges and sidechain/partner-chain style approaches.

Overall, Cardano is positioned as a long-term, high-assurance L1 for Web3 applications where security, correctness, and protocol evolution are treated as first-class design goals.