Cardano Price

Cardano is a proof-of-stake blockchain built around peer-reviewed research. Its distinguishing claim is procedural rather than technical: protocol changes are published as academic papers and reviewed before implementation, an approach the project describes as evidence-based development.

The network launched in September 2017, following a genesis token distribution that ran from October 2015 to January 2017. Charles Hoskinson founded Input Output Group, the company that built it; the Cardano Foundation and EMURGO complete the three organisations present at genesis.

Its consensus protocol, Ouroboros, is described by the project as the first provably secure proof-of-stake protocol — meaning its security properties were demonstrated mathematically rather than assumed from operation. Time is divided into epochs and slots, and a slot leader is chosen for each slot to add a block, with selection weighted by stake.

Cardano's accounting model is also distinctive. Rather than adopting Ethereum-style accounts, it extends Bitcoin's unspent-output model into what it calls EUTXO, where outputs carry scripts and arbitrary data. The practical consequences matter more than the acronym: a transaction's validity and exact fee can be determined off-chain before submission, transactions cannot fail partway through execution and consume fees for nothing, and transactions touching different inputs can be validated in parallel.

That determinism is the main argument for the design. The main argument against it is complexity — developers must think in terms of inputs and outputs rather than mutable contract state, which makes some patterns harder to express.

Cardano's development has been deliberate to the point of slowness, with smart contracts arriving four years after launch. Whether that caution reads as rigour or as delay tends to depend on who is describing it.