Cardano ADA
Rank #18 by market cap
Last 7 days
▼11.50%What Cardano is
Cardano is a proof-of-stake blockchain founded in 2017 by Charles Hoskinson, one of Ethereum's original co-founders. Its distinguishing feature is method: changes are formally specified and peer-reviewed academically before they are built, an approach borrowed from safety-critical engineering.
Its Ouroboros consensus was the first proof-of-stake protocol with published security proofs. Cardano uses an extended UTXO model closer to Bitcoin's accounting than Ethereum's, which makes transaction outcomes more predictable but smart contracts harder to write.
The trade-off is delivery speed. Smart contracts did not arrive until 2021, years after launch and long after competitors shipped equivalents, and the gap between announced research and usable product has been a persistent criticism. Its DeFi and application ecosystem remains smaller than the market capitalisation implies. Whether the deliberate pace is prudent engineering or lost ground is the genuine debate about Cardano, and both readings have evidence behind them.
About the asset
Cardano has no token contract — it is the native asset of its own chain, not a token issued on someone else's.
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Cardano data synced 5m ago from CoinGecko. Figures shown in USD. This page is market information, not financial advice — and nothing here is a recommendation to buy or sell ADA.