What Is Cardano?
readir.net
readir.net
Staking is nothing new, smart contracts are nothing new. The thing that Cardano does well is strong signaling that it’s inclusive, and based on research.
However, that’s somewhat begging the question. Their serious competitors are just as inclusive and largely just as based on legitimate research! There are a lot of low grade scammy coins out there, but claiming you’re doing better than them is not an accomplishment.
ZCash’s parent company, Electric Coin Co., has also been the source of a lot of innovation. For example, the L2 “Optimism” scaling solution that looks very promising for Ethereum uses zk rollups which is the direct result of zksnarks research deployed in ZCash.
The reason I mentioned peer reviewed research was more to provide context to the timeline and roadmap rather than to argue that it was better. Something I’ve seen a few times is that Cardano is a ghost chain which I don’t think is accurate given where they are at in their roadmap. If they don’t gain adoption after deploying smart contracts then they could become one but personally I don’t think that’s a fair characterisation at this point.
DPoS, staking, smart contracts, native tokens, metadata etc aren’t new but I do think there’s some interesting implementation details that make what Cardano are doing interesting.
Anyway, it’s not my intention to get into a religious war around crypto projects and I have no particular affiliation with Cardano or investment in it.
I meant that it appealed to people that understand the value in peer reviewed research, but weren’t about to go actually get involved with the actual research mentioned or question it. That could be for a variety of reasons.