ABOUT CARDANO
What is ADA (Cardano)?
ADA is the native cryptocurrency of the Cardano blockchain, a third-generation proof-of-stake platform designed for scalability, sustainability, and interoperability. The ticker "ADA" represents the first three letters of Ada Lovelace, the 19th-century mathematician widely regarded as the world's first computer programmer.
Cardano was founded in 2017 by Charles Hoskinson, one of the original co-founders of Ethereum, and Jeremy Wood. It is now maintained by three organizations: Input Output Global (IOG), the Cardano Foundation, and Emurgo. Unlike many blockchains, Cardano was built using a philosophy of peer-reviewed academic research and formal verification of its codebase.
ADA can be used to: pay transaction fees on the Cardano network, participate in staking to earn rewards, vote on governance proposals, and interact with decentralized applications (dApps) built on Cardano.
Cardano uses a unique PoS consensus mechanism called Ouroboros, which is provably secure and approximately four times more energy-efficient than Bitcoin's proof-of-work system. The network divides time into "epochs" (5-day periods) and "slots" (20-second intervals), with block producers randomly selected to validate transactions.
