The third anniversary of the Cardano blockchain was celebrated recently, as recalled by the CEO Charles Hoskinson himself, who expressed his gratitude through a small live broadcast.
Happy 3 Years Cardano! https://t.co/fODGnQhOa8
— Charles Hoskinson (@IOHK_Charles) September 28, 2020
On this occasion, let’s review some highlights of the history of this blockchain, nicknamed the Ethereum of Japan since, during the ICO (Initial Coin Offering), in which about 62 million dollars were raised, 95% of the participants were Japanese.
Not everyone knows that the origin of the name of the ADA cryptocurrency was not chosen at random, but from Ada Lovelace, recognized as the first computer programmer in history and daughter of the famous poet Lord Byron.
The smallest unit of ADA, 0.000001, is in fact called Lovelace for this very reason.
Byron was the name chosen for the launch of the first release of Cardano on September 29th, 2017, just a few months before what would be remembered as the speculative bubble of Bitcoin (BTC), which caused the prices of crypto assets to rise.
During that period ADA reached a value of $1.20 at the beginning of 2018, while today it is traded around $0.09, thus recording a loss of value of 92%.
Beyond the economic aspect, it is interesting how at that time there was already talk of a PoS (Proof of Stake) system developed with the Haskell programming language.
Ouroboros came soon after and then the Daedalus wallet was created to manage ADA. Whereas smart contracts use the programming language called Plutus.
Behind Cardano’s project is the private company IOHK (Input Output Hong Kong), created in 2015 by Jeremy Wood and Charles Hoskinson. This is precisely where the Cardano Foundation was created, a non-profit organization with the aim of supporting Cardano’s research and development, but also managing the community around the world.
The development, support and incubation of commercial ventures is entrusted to a Japanese company called Emurgo.
Cardano, the road is still long after the third anniversary
Even if this blockchain has made great strides in these 3 years, there is still a lot to do and the following steps after Byron and Shelley still need to be completed:
- Goguen: it will allow to create and execute smart contracts on the Cardano network also through the use of Marlowe, a DSL (Domain Specific Language) for financial contracts;
- Basho: it will address the scalability of the network and will also lead to the introduction of sidechains that can be interoperable with Cardano’s network and have both a UTXO model and an account-based model;
- Voltaire: this will be the governance to manage this blockchain autonomously, introducing a voting and treasury system, derived from the network fees (which is given by the formula a+b*size, which translated is equal to 0.155381 ADA + 0.000043946 ADA/byte * the size of the transaction in bytes). Participants will be able to stake their tokens and vote with the acquired voting right, thus obtaining a decentralized and self-governed blockchain.
For sure in the future, this blockchain will still generate a lot of discussions and with each new update, the price usually has a positive consequence, as seen recently with a double-digit increase.
