Cardano is a layer 1 blockchain project that has staked over 70% of its entire currency, ADA, for network validation (a really impressive rate). Cardano was founded in 2015 to address some of the issues that the open-source community saw in the thousands of altcoins that existed at the time.

Charles Hoskinson, a former co-creator of Ethereum, is the official founder of Cardano. Multiple layers for settlements and calculations, proof of stake consensus, and the possibility to upgrade quickly in the future are some of Cardano's significant improvements.

The Cardano Settlement layer was established in 2017 and raised $63 million through an initial coin offering (ICO). Since then, the ever-expanding team of developers has been hard at work prepping the Cardano Computation Layer for the launch of smart contracts.

Development of Cardano

Cardano presently has between 100 and 150 people working on the project, and roughly 700 changes are made each week. These characteristics combine to make Cardano one of the most actively developing blockchain projects today, implying that they will be able to meet their development goals.

Cardano is already in the higher tier of Layer 1 solutions, however it still lags behind Ethereum, Polkadot, and Cosmos in terms of size and speed, as shown below in the Electric Capital Developers Report from 2020.

Smart Contracts on the Cardano Blockchain

In the third stage of its development roadmap, known as Goguen, Cardano wants to introduce support for smart contracts. The Cardano compute layer, which will support older Solidity contracts as well as its own language, Plutus, will run Cardano smart contracts.

Collaborations

Cardano has already formed relationships with a number of significant colleges, governments, and corporations, including the University of Illinois, Ethiopia, and New Balance. Hoskinson has worked tirelessly to see Cardano's potential realized in Africa, where he believes blockchain can have a significant influence. Cardano's network will also be used by New Balance to track the validity of their shoes.

Cardano's Advantages

Cardano has already shown to be proof of stake, and it has a robust development team behind it. The separation of the settlement and computing levels of Cardano leads in significantly cheaper transaction fees, which are already significantly lower than Ethereum's.

Cardano's disadvantages

With a tenth the size of Ethereum's army, Cardano is fighting an uphill struggle. Polkadot, a competitor, has a considerably larger development team and is expanding even faster. Low costs are appealing, but they often imply a lack of demand for network space.

Cardano has yet to implement its own smart contract framework, and until it does, it has little chance of overtaking Ethereum's smart contract market share.