Cardano

Cardano has two founders: Jeremy Wood and Charles Hoskinson. Both Wood and Hoskinson are Ethereum crypto co-founders, and the two left around the same time.

There are three entities behind Cardano:

• The Cardano Foundation - The Cardano foundation is a Swiss non-profit responsible for the administration and supervision of the Cardano network and the Cardano brand‌. The foundation is also responsible for making the ‌connections and building the network necessary to facilitate Cardano’s widespread adoption. Cardano Foundation also releases up-to-date news and updates to the general Cardano community in easily digestible language.  

• Input Output Hong Kong (IOHK) - The IOHK is Cardano’s engineering arm, focusing mostly on research and development. IOHK also writes and publishes Cardano’s peer-reviewed papers.

• Emurgo - a Japan-based blockchain technology company focused on the practical applications of the technology. Emurgo is responsible for plugging businesses, enterprises, and even governments to the blockchain.

These three entities work together to cover all bases to ensure the success of the project.

The question of who owns most Cardano, or ADA, is a tricky one. Since the wallets are completely private, there’s no way to tell who owns high-value wallets. Looking at distribution, however, Cardano is arguably one of the most diverse cryptocurrencies. At the time of writing, there are around 4 high value wallets that hold more than 1B ADA. Most wallets hold around 1,000 - 10,000 ADA (around 100,000 wallets), followed by those who hold around 10,000 - 100,000 ADA (around 70,000 wallets), closely followed by wallets that have 100 - 1,000 ADA (around 69,500 wallets).

How Do Cardano Smart Contracts Work?

First off, a primer on what smart contracts are: smart contracts are contracts whose terms and conditions are recorded in code. The blockchain network is a public ledger that ensures the details of the agreement are satisfied prior to allowing the transaction. The code ensures that every transaction on the platform is permanently recorded, and couldn’t be reversed.

If Ethereum is the second generation platform to Bitcoin’s first, Cardano calls itself a third generation platform. That means it focuses on the problems that plague Ethereum, in this case, scalability. Bitcoin crypto transactions contain only information like the sender, the receiver, the transaction date, and transaction amount. Ethereum has improved upon Bitcoin’s technology by allowing for the addition of more information on transaction details (also known as metadata). However, this has also bogged down the network because the more information there is, the more resources it requires to be validated.

Cardano’s smart contracts fixed this by creating two distinct layers, the Cardano Settlement Layer (CSL) and the Cardano Control Layer (CCL) to contain the core transaction details and the metadata, respectively. This allows users to take advantage of the services that they need without being bogged down by data that they don’t.

ADA coin price can reach $100, but not for a long time. Based on the price index, sources think ‌ADA will breach $1.60 by mid year 2021, and reach $3.30 by 2022. The future of Cardano coin is marked by a series of seamless phase changes and hard forks (all the ones promised by the developers have been delivered on time, with no inconvenience to holders and investors), inspiring a lot of trust and a consistently bullish attitude among Cardano supporters.

Here are some factors that you need to consider before choosing a stake pool:

• Epoch fee - A fixed value of ADA (minimum of 340 ADA) that goes to the operator at the end of every epoch (around 5 days). 

• Variable fee - A percentage of the epoch rewards that goes to the operator

• Pledge - The amount of ADA that the operators have also staked in the pool. To use a popular saying, the pledge shows you how much skin the operator has in the game. The higher their pledge is, the more incentive they have for the pool to succeed.

• Leverage - Total stake in the pool/pools of an operator divided by the pledge of that operator. The higher the leverage of a stake pool operator, the more disruption they could possibly cause in the network (which could possibly negatively affect the entire Cardano ecosystem.) The best practise is to stake with operators with low leverage, especially if they are operating multiple stake pools.

• Saturation - based on a proprietary mechanism that they call protocol K, the saturation is the cap on the rewards received by a stake pool.

• Return - With everything else considered, this is how much returns you’re going to make on your investments.

To keep the network decentralised, Cardano reduces the rewards available to a certain staking pool past a certain saturation point. To support Cardano’s vision of a truly decentralised network, it is advised to not stake your ADA on pools operated by companies that own a lot of other stake pools.

It’s possible to stake ADA tokens through a Daedalus (a full node wallet) or a Yoroi (light) wallet. Make sure to download the wallets through Cardano Foundation’s official website — there are lots of fake wallets circulating in the market today! Staking ADA is as easy as selecting “delegate” on your chosen ADA wallet. One of Cardano’s most interesting features is every user’s ability to make their own choices when it comes to staking, so it’s important to choose the best staking pool based on your values and priorities. It will be quite a research, since there thousands of up-and-running stake pools to choose from.

If you believe in Cardano’s promise of a scalable, secure financial system backed by research and collaboration, then it might be a good coin to add to your portfolio. While profit is not promised when investing in any cryptocurrency, Cardano’s limited coin supply might make it a pretty profitable coin in the future (if that’s your priority). Always remember that cryptocurrency is highly volatile. Do your due diligence before buying any cryptocurrency. Read the whitepaper, research about the price history, and stay tuned to the latest Cardano news.

No. As of writing, Paypal account owners can buy, hold, and sell Bitcoin, Ethereum, Litecoin crypto, and Bitcoin Cash, but not ADA. Moreover, only US-based Paypal owners can buy cryptocurrencies on the platform.

Where can you buy Cardano in Australia? Can you buy it with your credit card? The answer depends on the exchange that you’re buying from. Some trading platforms allow users to fund their accounts through bank transfers, while some only allow trade with another digital currency. We hope this quick Cardano coin review helped you decide whether to invest in ADA. Check back in regularly for real-time Cardano price prediction and ADA share price, and other cryptocurrency related news!