Cardano:

A new generation
in smart contract platform design

February 2022
 Table of Contents
1. Introduction 3
2. Technology 11
3. Web3 Ecosystem 26
4. Network Growth & Adoption 31
5. Conclusion 36

Disclosures
This report has been prepared solely for informative purposes and should not be the basis for making investment decisions
or be construed as a recommendation to engage in investment transactions or be taken to suggest an investment strategy
with respect to any financial instrument or the issuers thereof. This report has not been prepared in accordance with the legal
requirements designed to promote the independence of investment research and is not subject to any prohibition on dealing
ahead of the dissemination of investment research. Reports issued by Payward, Inc. (“Kraken”) or its affiliates are not related to
the provision of advisory services regarding investment, tax, legal, financial, accounting, consulting or any other related services
and are not recommendations to buy, sell, or hold any asset. The information contained in this report is based on sources
considered to be reliable, but not guaranteed to be accurate or complete. Any opinions or estimates expressed herein reflect a
judgment made as of this date, and are subject to change without notice. Kraken will not be liable whatsoever for any direct or
consequential loss arising from the use of this publication/communication or its contents. Kraken and its affiliates hold positions
in digital assets and may now or in the future hold a position in the subject of this research.
1.
Introduction

Cardano initially took on notoriety among a class of ICO-craze-driven projects in 2017

following the network’s launch. While the ICO-wave gained infamy from the number
of overpriced assets that ultimately disappeared into crypto dust, Cardano finds itself
among a subset of ICO Warriors that persisted the treacherous perils of a dark and quiet
crypto winter—bloody, beaten, yet hungry for more. With Cardano’s Shelley hard
fork in July 2020, a long 3 years after the blockchain’s launch, the project regained life,
seeing a momentous surge to hold a strong position in the top 5 crypto assets by market
capitalization for much of 2021.

While the blockchain space is seemingly saturated with Layer-1 (L1) smart contract
platforms, Cardano’s approach and philosophy is quite unique relative to its L1 peers,
which may give Cardano a competitive edge if developments prove to be successful.
Importantly, Cardano is very much a value-driven project, emphasizing community
governance, academic peer-review, and the importance of high assurance programming.
Cardano’s values have noticeably directed the project’s developments and design
decisions, and as a result, the blockchain looks like it has been designed with the purpose
and standards of providing decentralized, global, financial infrastructure rather than
only focusing on providing a Web3 experience. This could be a driving factor behind
why Cardano won a recent poll by Ethereum founder, Vitalik Buterin, which asked
his followers which currency they preferred to support the global financial system in
2035.1 Ultimately Cardano’s design and values have earned it a few notable government
partnerships as well as a strategic collaboration with DISH Network.

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That being said, some of Cardano’s design decisions have also come at the cost of
extended development times and launch dates, a potential threat to the network’s
adoption as the demand for Web3 is here and now, and users are willing to sacrifice values
of decentralization and safety for the financial opportunities introduced by DeFi, NFTs,
and more. Nonetheless, Cardano has built a strong community around the project, as
reflected by on-chain and off-chain data, and with the roll out of dApps now underway it
seems Cardano is just getting started.

In this report we will take a deep dive into Cardano, its background, and its technical
design, particularly what features distinguish it from its L1 peers and the associated
tradeoffs. Additionally, we’ll cover major developments and announcements to date,
including a brief analysis of some on-chain metrics. Lastly, we will take a peek into what
is yet to come for Cardano in the near future particularly regarding dApps and scaling of
the network.

What is Cardano?

Cardano is an open-source, permissionless blockchain network based on Proof-of-

Stake (PoS) built on the work of over 120 academic papers.2 The heart and soul of the
project is the Cardano base layer blockchain. More generally, the project aims to build
a sustainable, community-governed, decentralized ecosystem anchored by a borderless
and trustless settlement layer for peer-to-peer payments and digital contracts. Derivative
innovation on top of this ecosystem is anticipated to seamlessly adapt and provide new
functionality over time and scale to support global adoption.

Central to Cardano’s mission, the project aims to empower and bring digital and financial
identity to the estimated 2 billion to 3 billion people in the world that don’t currently
have it, with an initial focus on Africa.3 Cardano’s lead development arm, IOG, is already
working with government organizations in three different countries.

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With ambitious goals, Cardano recognizes the necessity for their infrastructure to run
correctly the first time it runs. This is in contrast to a “launch now, fix as we go” philosophy
employed by many Silicon Valley development teams. Therefore, Cardano fosters a
culture based on academic peer-review and formal verification, emphasizing security,
reliability, and sustainability around their finished product. While these characteristics
are intuitively desirable, this approach comes at the cost of slower development rollout.

Founding & Organization

Cardano was created in 2015 by Charles Hoskinson and Jeremy Wood, both of whom
are also considered co-founders of Ethereum.4 The project’s development is driven
through the collaboration of three founding organizations, each of which have their
own specific role:

• Input Output Global (IOG or IOHK)—a for-profit blockchain research and

engineering company founded by Hoskinson and Wood, which leads the research,
development, and engineering of the Cardano blockchain.
• EMURGO—a for-profit global blockchain solutions provider that focuses on the
promotion of Cardano-based commercial applications.
• Cardano Foundation—an independent, Swiss-based non-profit which oversees and
supervises the development of the Cardano blockchain and currently contracts IOG
to develop the Cardano blockchain.

The separation of roles and powers, particularly for-profit from non-profit organizations,
is a common approach taken by many blockchain projects and open-source software
projects, separating business interests from the development of community-owned,
public infrastructure. In particular, the separation between the non-profit Cardano
Foundation and the original development team is another demonstration of the project’s
commitment to community ownership and governance.

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Third-Generation Blockchain

Cardano is considered to be a 3rd-generation blockchain, which are blockchain networks

designed to provide smart contract functionality with an emphasis on scalability,
interoperability, and sustainability. These blockchains attempt to address commonly held
views on the limitations of networks like Bitcoin and Ethereum, which are considered 1st-
generation and 2nd-generation blockchains, respectively.

• Scalability—ability of a blockchain to support a growing number of users and

devices. With global adoption in mind, for most of these projects that means users
in the billions. Common measures of scalability are throughput (i.e. transactions
per second or TPS) and latency (i.e. the time it takes for a transaction to be
confirmed).
• Interoperability—ability of a blockchain to interact with other blockchains and
external resources such as APIs, whether that is to share state or information
between two platforms or to trigger execution/computation on each other’s
platforms.
• Sustainability—this comes in two forms: environmental sustainability referring
to the protocol’s ability to operate with low energy consumption and protocol/
ecosystem sustainability through the use of on-chain governance and a community
treasury or funding resource.

Third-generation blockchains include a family of projects such as Ethereum 2.0, Cardano,

Polkadot, and Solana. These projects are often branded in Twitter circles as “Ethereum
killers” as they are considered a threat to Ethereum’s reign in the smart contract platform
sector. However, efforts to engineer interoperability suggest these projects strive to co-
exist alongside Ethereum, as well as one another, resulting in a multi-chain, decentralized
Web3 ecosystem. Ironically, despite the “Ethereum Killer” label, Cardano is actually
far more reminiscent of Bitcoin, particularly with respect to its tokenomics, consensus
protocol, and accounting style.

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Tokenomics

The tokenomics of Cardano’s cryptocurrency, ADA (₳), were intended to mimic those of
Bitcoin with the adoption of a maximum supply such that no more than ₳45 billion will
ever exist. Similar to Bitcoin, the rate at which new ADA is minted decreases over time
such that the circulating supply (currently ₳33.2 billion) asymptotically approaches the
maximum supply (see figure 3).

Initial Token Distribution

The initial supply of ADA was distributed through an initial coin offering (ICO) that
consisted of 5 rounds of public sales held between September 2015 and February 2017.5
The rounds resulted in the sale of ₳25.9 billion for a total $79.2 million. A total ₳5.2
billion was then distributed to the three founding organizations, resulting in a total initial
supply of ₳31.1 billion, leaving ₳13.9 billion for the network’s reserve to be distributed
over time.

Cardano’s decision to distribute 83% of the initial circulating supply (58% of total supply,
reserve not included in circulating supply) to the public distinguishes them relative to
peers such as Solana, Flow, and Avalanche, each of which issued more than 40% of their
initial token allocations to insiders and founding organizations (i.e. founding team,
company, venture capitalists).6

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Figure 1 Figure 2
Initial Distribution of ADA Current ADA Supply Distribution

IOG (5.5%) Emurgo (4.6%) Treasury (1.7%) Reserve (24.4%)

₳2.46B ₳2.07B ₳788M ₳11.0B

Public Sale (58%) Reserve (31%) Circulating

₳25.9B ₳13.9B Supply (73.8%)
₳33.2B
Cardano
Foundation (1.4%)
₳0.65B

Source: Kraken Intelligence, Messari⁷ Source: Kraken Intelligence, adapools.org

Plenty of debate exists over the ethics of initial distributions particularly in PoS systems.
This is because in PoS systems, the native coin stores both value and voting power rather
than just value as in Proof-of-Work (PoW) systems. Additionally, issuance of new tokens in
PoS systems is often based on ownership, meaning initial distributions do not get diluted
unless the owner sells or otherwise distributes their assets, whereas in PoW systems, new
issuance is based on performing work for the network and initial distributions are likely
to dilute at a faster rate over time. Therefore, the initial supply distribution in PoS systems
can introduce voter concentration depending on the free market accessibility to initial
supply distributions.

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Monetary Expansion & Treasury

Though the Cardano blockchain launched in September 2017, staking rewards issued
from the reserve did not begin until after the Shelley hard fork event in July 2020. The
depletion of this reserve, referred to as monetary expansion, currently targets a depletion
rate of 0.3% per epoch (every 5 days).8 This depletion rate results in a 4–5 year “reserve
half-life", or in other words, it will take 4–5 years to reduce the reserve supply by 50%.

Figure 3
ADA Supply Emission Schedule

Source: Kraken Intelligence, adapools.org

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When rewards are distributed, 80% of available rewards—sourced from monetary
expansion and transaction fees—are allocated for distribution to stake pools and
delegators. The remaining 20% is allocated to the treasury, which currently holds ₳788
million ($867 million) and is used to fund network growth and maintenance objectives
voted on by the community.

Roadmap

The development of Cardano is broken out into 5 primary phases with each phase
focused on critical milestones that lead to Cardano existing as a community-governed,
self-sustaining network.9 The project is currently developing projects in the Basho and
Voltaire eras in parallel while simultaneously tying up loose ends from the Goguen era.

• Byron—Marked the initial launch of the base layer of the Cardano blockchain in
September 2017, which ran as a federated (permissioned) network whereby nodes
were operated by IOG and partners.
• Shelley—Introduced decentralization by slowly transitioning from a federated
network to a permissionless network run by community nodes, whereby anyone can
join to participate in the protocol by running a node.
• Goguen—Introduced multi-asset support (i.e. user-defined tokens, NFTs) and smart
contract functionality to the blockchain, enabling dApps, DeFi, and more.
• Basho—Introduces scalability and interoperability via supplemental layers and
sidechains.
• Voltaire—Introduces governance to ensure long-term self-sustainability of the
Cardano blockchain regarding community governance of protocol upgrades,
treasury spending, and more.

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2.
Technology

On the surface, almost all L1 smart contract platforms look the same—they are all
decentralized ledgers that have the capability of running smart contracts. The difference
between them is their technical details which may not carry much significance early on
when users are in the millions, but will make or break long-run ambitions as 1) users
scale potentially into the billions and 2) more entropy (i.e. randomness) is introduced
to the network with respect to stake distribution and network participants (i.e. as more
unknown and untrusted entities participate in the system).

Cardano’s design is fundamentally unique among most of its peers particularly as its
design closely reflects a PoS-based, smart contract-enabled version of Bitcoin, due to the
design of its base protocol and accounting model, rather than an iteration on Ethereum.
Key technical features that distinguish Cardano from its L1 peers are its base protocol
Ouroboros and its secure delegator-friendly design, the Extended Unspent Transaction
Output (EUTxO) accounting model, the project’s Haskell base, unique Layer-2 (L2)
solutions, and community focus.

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Ouroboros

At the heart of every distributed ledger technology (DLT) is the underlying protocol, or set
of rules and algorithms that define how the nodes of the network are to participate. Two
primary components of a blockchain protocol are:

1) the consensus protocol, which defines how nodes come to agreement on things
such as the validity of transactions.
2) the sybil resistance mechanism, which defines how often a node participates in
adding new transactions to the blockchain (e.g. PoS, PoW).

Ouroboros is the blockchain protocol implemented on Cardano which utilizes Nakamoto-

style consensus, similar to Bitcoin, where nodes follow the “longest chain rule” to come
to agreement. However, unlike Bitcoin’s PoW mechanism that uses hashpower or energy
to create a new block, Ouroboros implements PoS which uses the network’s token (i.e.
ADA) to influence how often a node is chosen to create a new block. The combination
of Nakamoto consensus and PoS differentiate Cardano relative to other major 3rd-
generation protocols, which often combine PoS with Byzantine Fault Tolerant (BFT) style
consensus protocols. Instead of following the longest chain rule, BFT-style consensus
protocols come to consensus in a quorum vote, where a 2/3 majority is required to confirm
a block.

At the end of the day, there is no perfect algorithm as they all have their strengths and
weaknesses. Often when you try to solve one problem it exposes another as there are
trade offs in design decisions. For example, an increase in throughput typically comes at
the expense of decentralization or security. Additionally, PoS is far more energy efficient
than PoW, with Ethereum 2.0 expected to use ~99.95% less energy than Ethereum.10
However, PoS protocols can expose new ethical concerns such as whitelisted access to
initial supply distribution and plutocracies, as well as security vulnerabilities such as
stake grinding where an adversary controlling some amount of stake performs heavy
computation to bias the outcome of future leader elections of the consensus protocol in
their favor, typically through simulation of future elections.11,12

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In addition to explicit network attacks, even social engineering, market manipulation,
and extortion, tactics traditionally only concerned with obtaining value, can be
considered security attacks to PoS systems. This is because network tokens represent the
mining resource of the network and an explicit “vote” in network security. Unlike mining
hardware in PoW systems, new tokens cannot be minted (inflationary tokenomics aside),
so once an attacker obtains a certain stake in a network, they own that stake until they
decide to sell or distribute.

Ouroboros Upgrades

Ouroboros is unique due to its combination of PoS and Nakamoto-style consensus and
an emphasis on formally proven security. The result is a robust and secure PoS protocol
that is protected against a wide range of attacks and security concerns including stake
grinding, a common pitfall of PoS protocols that came before it such as Peercoin.13,14

In addition to security, the design of Ouroboros resulted in improvements on throughput

compared to Bitcoin and Ethereum (7 TPS and 15 TPS respectively), reaching up to 257
TPS at its base layer in initial testing.15 This number is significantly lower than L1 peers
which boast throughput into the thousands of TPS, but as we will discuss later, a single
transaction on Cardano can do more than a single transaction on many other networks
(i.e. due to features like token bundling, what is done in 1 transaction on Cardano may
require 2 or more transactions on another platform to perform the same work). That said,
the current Basho era introduces Hydra, Cardano’s L2 scaling solution, which initial tests
suggest will be capable of supporting throughput into the millions of TPS.16 While no
protocol is perfect, the solutions presented in Ouroboros have earned it many citations in
the academic community, including reference in Polkadot’s BABE protocol.17,18

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Staking & Stake Distribution

On Cardano, validators earn rewards in the form of ADA for running nodes that operate
and secure the network. To invite more egalitarian participation, Cardano offers stake
delegation, where a stakeholder can delegate their ADA to another validator if they
don't have the technical knowledge or desire to run a node themselves. In exchange,
the delegator receives a share of the total staking rewards that go to the validator
proportional to their ownership of the total ADA staked by the validator, minus operating
fees. For this reason, validators are referred to as stake pools on Cardano as they pool the
stake of many delegators into a single validator. The person/organization that runs the
validator is called the stake pool operator (SPO).

Figure 4
Cardano Staking Summary

Total Value % Circulating Distribution

ADA Price Total ADA Staked Staked Supply Staked APR% Frequency

$1.10 ₳23.9B $26.3B 70% 5.0% 5 days

Source: Kraken Intelligence, adapools.org

Stake Distribution

An important measure of the decentralization of a PoS protocol is the distribution of the

stake among network participants. On Cardano, there is currently ₳23.9 billion staked
across more than 3,100 stake pools supported by over 1 million delegating wallets.19 About
72% of these pools and 17% of the active stake are run by single pool operators while the
rest are run by groups, or organizations that operate multiple stake pools.20 As seen in
figure 5, Binance is the largest group, operating ~12% of the total stake, and the top 21

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groups (over 300 stake pools) combined represent 50% of the staked supply. While that
may not seem like much, Cardano is one of the most decentralized protocols in the
industry, particularly with respect to stake distribution across groups of nodes that are
known to be related. In comparison, the top 4 mining pools control 57% of the hashrate in
Bitcoin, and the top 3 pools control 55% in Ethereum.21,22

Figure 5
ADA Stake Distribution by Group

Source: adapools.org

Delegation Experience

Following the project’s ethos of being a community-oriented protocol, Cardano’s

delegation mechanism was designed with the delegator in mind as to maximize
participation in the consensus protocol. Delegation participation is important because in
PoS, and any democratic system for that matter, greater participation results in a more
representative result and therefore greater security. For example, if only 30% of the total
supply is staked, then an adversary only needs to control 15% of the total supply to execute
a 51% attack. Therefore in a well-designed protocol, promoting participation in delegation
results in the most secure network.

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Aside from staking rewards, delegation participation on Cardano is further promoted
through the use of liquid democracy, the omission of slashing, and accessibility. These
design decisions could be why Cardano possibly sees the highest participation among
major L1 protocols in staking by percent of circulating supply staked, as seen in figure 6.

Figure 6
Staking Statistics on Major L1s
% Circulating Supply
Network Staked Est. APY% Unbonding Period (days) Slashing

Cardano 70% 5.0% 0 No

Cosmos 62% 13.3% 21 Yes

Polkadot23 53% 14.0% 28 Yes

Solana24 59–72% 5.7% 2 Yes

Source: Kraken Intelligence, stakingrewards.com, Solana Beach, The Block Research25

Liquid Democracy

Typically in PoS protocols, when delegators decide to stake their funds it requires they
lock up their staked funds such that they can’t immediately access or withdraw the funds
while they are staked. When the delegator does want to unstake, the funds often undergo
a cooldown or unbonding period in which the delegator’s funds remain locked up and
illiquid and do not accrue rewards. In some cases, these periods can last for days or even
weeks. Cardano’s delegation mechanism is designed to reflect a liquid democracy, meaning
funds are never locked and no unbonding period is inflicted upon delegators. This is in
contrast to the majority of other PoS protocols such as Polkadot, Cosmos, and Solana in
which users’ funds are subject to 28, 21, and 2 day unbonding periods, respectively.

While projects have technical reasons for implementing unbonding periods, from the
delegator’s perspective they are inconvenient and inflict an opportunity cost on the
delegator. This inhibits and disincentivizes network participants from changing their
delegation, which in most cases is a change intended to increase a delegator’s reward

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and to reduce the risk that the active stake concentrates to a small set of groups or stake
pools. In particular, extended unbonding periods make delegators more vulnerable to
bait-and-switch scams where the SPO (or network equivalent) will advertise low operating
fees and high rewards for delegators, thereafter ramping up fees once the delegator(s) is
locked in.

Regarding liquidity, locked funds and unbonding periods disincentivize participation

in staking following the intuition that holders prefer having a portion of their funds to
remain liquid for trading, DeFi, and NFTs, for example. If staked funds are liquid (as in a
liquid democracy), then one would expect participation rates to be higher as delegators
can immediately unstake their funds to use their balances shortly thereafter. This may
partially explain why Cardano has 70% of its circulating supply staked while Polkadot
and Cosmos see 53% and 62%, respectively, as shown in figure 6.

Slasher No Slashing!

Most PoS protocols, including Ethereum 2.0, Polkadot, Solana, and Cosmos,
disincentivize bad behavior through slashing which occurs when a validator is caught
acting maliciously and loses a portion or all of its staked funds; depending on the
protocol, this can also mean your funds as a delegator are at risk as well.26 Due to the
design of the Ouroboros protocol, a slashing mechanism is not needed on Cardano.
Therefore, delegators’ staked funds are not at risk of being taken by the SPO or the
network. The absence of slashing may increase delegator participation as in figure 6.

Staking from within Smart Contracts

A function rather unique to Cardano is users can continue delegating their ADA to their
SPO of choice from within smart contracts. As Ryan Matovu, founder of Ardana (an
upcoming stable asset decentralized exchange on Cardano) explains, Ardana users will
be able to take out a loan on their ADA and use the staking rewards to pay off the loan,
similar to the services offered by Celsius and Nexo.27

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This functionality has serious implications not only for DeFi, but also for the security
of Cardano, as it increases accessibility to staking and allows users to leverage their
ADA while still retaining their “vote” in the security of the network. Enabling this
functionality increases participation in PoS and does it in such a way that the stake
isn’t aggregated into a single SPO chosen by a decentralized exchange (DEX), centralized
exchange (CEX), or decentralized autonomous organization (DAO). Instead, the user still
retains the ability to delegate to the SPO of their choice while utilizing the network.
Currently, CEXs retain a high proportion of stake as a result of this concept, reflected
in figure 5. Enabling staking while engaging with smart contracts helps to mitigate the
concern of stake concentration.

Extended UTXO Model

One feature of Cardano that makes it incredibly unique to most other smart contract
platforms is its accounting model, which refers to the way transactions are handled
and how wallet/account balances are maintained and updated. There are two common
approaches in blockchain accounting design, each with their own costs and benefits.
Firstly, the Unspent Transaction Output (UTxO) model made popular by Bitcoin, and
secondly the Account-based model made popular by Ethereum and used in other networks
such as Solana, Polkadot, and Algorand.

For Cardano, the team at IOG was drawn by the UTxO model’s features and benefits,
but they also wanted to retain Ethereum’s programmable smart contract functionality.
Therefore, Cardano implements the Extended UTXO (EUTxO) model which is an extension
of Bitcoin’s UTxO model that facilitates the use of smart contracts. The features and
benefits of the two models are summarized in figure 7.

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Figure 7
Summary of Tradeoffs between UTXO & Account Models28

UTXO Account

Type cash-like model bank account-like model

State emphasizes local state through each transaction updates the

the use of UTXOs which are global state of the network by
immutable, single-use objects incrementing/decrementing
that act as the input and output balances
of transactions

Determinism the outcome of transactions is the outcome of transactions has

highly deterministic higher uncertainty

Parallelization great for parallelization parallelization is very difficult

Concurrency not great at concurrency, decent at concurrency since each

as transactions can run into transaction locks access to global
contention if they depend on state
the same resource (i.e. the same
UTXO) at the same time

dApp Design more challenging due to dApp design is much simpler as

emphasis on local state and each transaction has access to the
concurrency challenges global state

Miner Extractable Value (MEV) transactional ordering within a transactional ordering within a
block does not matter block does matter

EUTXO Upgrades

In a traditional UTxO model, the outputs of a transaction contain a value (e.g. the amount
of BTC) and an address (i.e. address of the owner). The EUTxO model extends this model by
enabling the addition of metadata and scripts (smart contracts).

• Metadata—enables users to add custom metadata to UTxO’s (instead of just a value),

enabling native assets and allowing outputs to maintain a state such as for a smart
contract.
• Scripts/Smart Contracts—Allows UTxOs to be unlocked by scripts, enabling the
support of smart contract functionality. Traditional UTxOs are locked/unlocked
using public addresses and signatures.

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As a result of these upgrades, the EUTxO model enables features similar to those seen
on Ethereum, such as user-defined tokens, programmable smart contracts, and dApps.
However, while these features sound similar at a high level, the way in which they are
implemented is fundamentally different in comparison to Ethereum.

Deterministic Execution & Fees

Due to the UTxO’s nature of local state and immutability, the result of smart contract
execution is highly deterministic (i.e. the outcome is highly predictable) using the EUTxO
model in comparison to the account model.29 As a result of deterministic execution, users
can verify whether a transaction will fail or not prior to execution, and it is guaranteed to
succeed if all inputs are present.30 This prevents users from submitting failed transactions
which they are ultimately charged for on most blockchain networks. Last, users can
calculate exactly how much a transaction will cost to run in ADA prior to execution
because Cardano employs a deterministic fee structure as opposed to Ethereum’s gas
model which is non-deterministic.31,32

Native Tokens
As previously mentioned, user-defined tokens are defined in the metadata of the UTxO;
therefore, they exist on the same layer as the ADA coin, using the base accounting ledger
for transacting, making them native tokens. This is fundamentally different from the
way non-native, smart contract-based tokens are implemented, such as ERC-20 tokens,
which are defined in a smart contract that creates its own local account ledger, and
defines its own rules on how to mint and transact the token, which is prone to bugs and
hacks. By existing on the base layer, native tokens are generally more efficient and secure
than non-native tokens and adopt a majority of the features of the ADA coin, including
governance features once implemented.

Additionally, the native token design enables token bundling in which users can bundle
tokens, sending multiple tokens of various types (fungible and non-fungible) in a single
transaction. This has big implications for transacting in the metaverse and gaming,
where a set of NFTs are often grouped in exchanges (e.g. an avatar with added shoes and

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clothing). With token bundling, a whole set of assets can be sent in a single transaction
while the same action on an account-based system would require multiple transactions.
Therefore, the EUTxO model enables users to do more within a single transaction because
all of the assets exist on the same layer.

Babel Fees
The EUTxO model enables what IOG terms babel fees, which will allow a user to pay
network transaction fees in any user-defined token (e.g. USDC, wBTC, wETH) instead
of ADA. To extend upon this, IOG is also investigating the notion of stablefees where
transaction fees are defined by a deterministic relationship with a stablecoin that is
pegged to a basket of assets (e.g. fiat, gold) instead of ADA.

Overall, the EUTxO model used in Cardano is considered by many a revolutionary

advancement to smart contract platforms, and the model promises several benefits in
comparison to account-based platforms. That being said, while Cardano has launched
smart contracts, the network has yet to see the proliferation of many dApps on its
mainnet, so much remains to be seen.

Functional Programming & Haskell

A topic that is often overlooked when discussing blockchains is the programming

language they are architected on. By nature this topic is a bit more technical, but
ultimately it is a key concept to be aware of when understanding how Cardano
fundamentally differs from most other platforms and why its development has taken
relatively longer.

Cardano is built using the Haskell programming language. Haskell is a functional

programming (FP) language that differs vastly from more popular object-oriented
programming (OOP) languages (e.g. Java, C++, Python, Rust) that most projects in the
blockchain industry are built on. In short, FP enables developers to write code that runs
more reliably in comparison to OOP and can be formally verified to run as expected. The

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Cardano Foundation argues this is critical, considering the higher standards on safety
and security required of a crypto network to support the settlement of vast sums
of money and participation by entities like government organizations and legacy,
large-cap companies.33

While FP boasts reliability and security benefits, Haskell has a notoriously small network
of developers due to its more complex nature, and this has introduced challenges for
Cardano in building a dApp community since Plutus, Cardano’s general purpose smart
contract language, is also based in Haskell. Additionally, Cardano’s adoption of Haskell
has resulted in the project having to build up infrastructure around the language to
support their use cases, resulting in extended development times.

To address concerns surrounding the dApp community, IOG is developing Marlowe,

a smart contract language built on top of Plutus specifically for financial contracts
and designed to be used by financial contract professionals that do not have
programming skills. Additionally, Cardano’s founding organizations have partnered with
external development firms such as Five Binaries and Runtime Verification to speed up the
development of supporting infrastructure and make smart contract development on
Cardano accessible to developers of any language including Solidity, C++, Rust,
and Java.34,35

To summarize, Cardano adopted Haskell in an effort to build a product with unmatched

advantages in reliability and security and to position itself as a viable solution for
institutional-grade, global financial infrastructure. The decision to adopt Haskell came
with initial costs of a smaller developer community and a delayed rollout in order to
build up supporting infrastructure. These costs have resulted in a less-explosive rollout
of dApps; however, the project is committed to building support for the sea of developers
outside of Haskell, which if successful, could open the floodgates to rapid and broad
innovation on a platform with institutional-grade performance standards.

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Layers & Sidechains — A Modular Approach

Blockchains are generally built in an orchestration of modules and layers, where each
layer and module serves its own purpose or function. This approach is necessary for
scaling and the introduction of new features such as on-chain identity. Hoskinson asserts
the modular approach to blockchain design is analogous to biological organisms where
different tissues and organs are specialized to carry out specific tasks (e.g. stomach, eyes,
hands, feet).36

Cardano adopts this modular approach at its core by separating transactional settlement
and computation into separate layers. In this sense, the base ledger is reserved strictly for
keeping record of the transfer of native tokens/assets and validating smart contracts.
Therefore the base layer is designed to be simple, robust, and secure while more
specialized functionally and computationally intensive operations are left off-chain either
to run on a user’s machine, L2 protocol, or sidechain and refer back to the base layer
blockchain as needed. Noteworthy L2 solutions and sidechains in the Cardano ecosystem
include Hydra, Atala PRISM, and Milkomeda.

Figure 8
Cardano L2 Solutions & Sidechains

Name Description

Hydra • IOG’s L2 scaling solution designed to maximize throughput and minimize

Layer-2 Scaling transaction fees to enable microtransactions. 37
• Similar to Bitcoin’s Lightning Network (LN), using state channels to parallelize
transactions instead of LN’s payment channels.
• Capable of enabling over 1 million TPS in throughput and sub-second latency (i.e.
transactions can be confirmed in less than one second). 38
• Designed to scale horizontally (i.e more nodes results in greater performance), with
each node capable of performing up to 1,000 TPS in initial testing. 39
• Has been designed in conjunction with the base layer protocol unlike many L2
solutions in the industry. This gives engineers a great advantage while developing
the technology.
• Utilizes the EUTXO model, so the same smart contract functionality available on
Cardano’s base layer will also be available in Hydra. 40

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 Name Description

Atala PRISM • IOG’s L2 decentralized identity solution.

Layer-2 Identity • Users own their identity and control how their personal data is used and accessed.
This is in contrast to the Web2 architecture where identity is stored in a central
database at a large tech firm or government organization.
• Partnership with Acuant which will integrate Acuant AssureID and Acuant
Compliant to enable seamless DeFi compliance and on-chain KYC/AML, and
more. 41
• Has seen much attention in IOG’s partnerships including deals with government
agencies and DISH Network.

Milkomeda • EVM sidechain project by dcSpark, a group of developers out of EMURGO.

EVM Sidechain • Will enable users to execute Solidity smart contracts from Cardano through the use
of wrapped smart contracts. 42
• Transactions paid for using wADA (wrapped ADA).
• Launched testnet in December 2021, and “close” to a beta mainnet release. 43
• Will eventually build sidechains for other non-EVM L1’s like Solana and Algorand.

Catalyst & Governance

A core value of Cardano is building a community-owned and governed protocol.

Project Catalyst is Cardano’s primary solution for the community-based management
and governance of community treasury spending. Through Catalyst, community
members place proposals on how they wish to further develop the Cardano ecosystem.
Stakeholders (i.e. anyone that owns ADA) register to vote through the Catalyst mobile
app in which they associate themselves with their Cardano wallet upon registration.
Stakeholders then vote on said proposals where their “voting power” is weighted by the
amount of ADA in their wallet. Eventually, Catalyst governance features will also be
extended to native assets (e.g. user-defined tokens, NFTs), a feature enabled by Cardano’s
EUTxO model. 44 This means in the future, DeFi protocols and DAOs on Cardano can
simply adopt Catalyst governance features instead of having to write their own
governance protocols.

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In contrast, not all L1 projects are prioritizing the development of community governance
infrastructure. For example, on Solana, 38% of the initial supply of SOL was allocated
to a “community reserve” where funds are used for growth of the community and
partnerships; however, the fund does not exist in a smart contract, and it is under the
management of the Solana Foundation rather than governed by the community.45,46
Further, the Solana Foundation seems to have stopped their transparency reports in
December 2020, so it is not clear to the community how the funds are being used.47
Transparency is important to point out because it is something that comes inherent with
community governance (​​i.e. if the community is governing the expenditure of treasury
funds, then there is, by definition, transparency on how the funds are being spent).
Transparency aside, neither approach is necessarily better than the other, as it is entirely
possible that community-based governance, while more democratic, results in inefficient
decision-making. Regardless, this serves as a comparative example for how Cardano has
prioritized community governance by building the infrastructure to support it.

So far, Project Catalyst has held six funding rounds, and is currently running its Fund7
round. The treasury currently holds over ₳788 million ($867 million) and is expecting to
see another ₳1.1 billion ($1.2 billion) or more flow in over the next 4–5 years.48

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3.
Web3 Ecosystem

Each L1 protocol establishes a base layer for which an entire ecosystem, or Web3
ecosystem, of wallets, dApps, NFTs, and more is built. The Web3 ecosystem for Cardano
is still very much in the works. Nonetheless, there is a wide range of projects developing
on the network, as seen in figure 9. While smart contracts launched as part of the Alonzo
hard fork in September 2021, Cardano has yet to see many dApps go live on its mainnet.
However, in early January 2022, Cardano saw its first DEX, MuesliSwap, go live and the
highly publicized DEX, SundaeSwap, launched a beta version of its DEX on the network just
recently on January 20th.49,50

Figure 9
Cardano Web3 Ecosystem

Source: CardanoCube.io—interactive map of the Cardano ecosystem.

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Part of the delay in dApp rollout on Cardano has been due to the paradigm shift
introduced by the EUTxO model that makes it such that dApp developers cannot simply
copy and paste code from Ethereum-based dApps. Instead, developers must rethink the
fundamental logic of many dApps to accommodate the UTxO model, such as how to
design a liquidity pool for a DEX.

Another major reason for the delay of dApps is that developers are waiting for the
rollout of the Plutus Application Backend (PAB). PAB isn’t required for dApps to launch,
but it provides a critical set of infrastructure for developers to support common dApp
functionalities such as wallet backend infrastructure for interacting with the blockchain.
PAB also enables easier testing and overall faster dApp development. There is no single
launch date for PAB. Instead, it is being delivered in bits and pieces, and developers can
choose to integrate various functions into their dApps if they find them helpful. Thus far,
PAB has seen a few “pre-releases” released throughout November and December 2021.

In another major development regarding dApps, IOG is working on a new browser-based

wallet, which is expected to contain the Plutus dApp Store, similar to Apple’s App Store.51
However, different from Apple’s App Store, the Plutus dApp Store will be tailored to the
Cardano ecosystem, community-governed, and permissionless such that anyone can add
a new dApp. This sort of dApp store would be a first of its kind for the industry where
dApps are often discovered by word-of-mouth.

CNFTs

Cardano-based non-fungible tokens (CNFTs) have been live on Cardano since the Mary
hard fork event in March 2021. CNFTs are similar to NFTs on Ethereum, but they differ in
that CNFTs are native tokens while Ethereum NFTs are embedded in smart contracts (ERC-
721 and ERC-1155 tokens). As a result, CNFTs operate more efficiently than Ethereum-
based NFTs.

Since smart contracts weren’t live until the Alonzo hard fork in September 2021, CNFTs
had been trading via escrow either through Discord channels or platforms like CNFT.
io and Tokhun.io throughout the summer of 2021. However, after the launch of smart

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contracts, some individual projects such as Spacebudz and DEADPXLZ (seen in figure 10)
rolled out their own smart contract-based marketplaces tailored to their projects, and
CNFT marketplaces Tokhun.io, CNFT.io, and jpg.store followed soon thereafter.52,53,54
Nevertheless the extended rollout couldn’t stop the NFT craze from hitting Cardano with
over ₳144 million in NFT volume, including a Spacebudz NFT that sold for over $1 million
in October 2021.55,56 Since the start of 2022, the network has seen a surge in CNFT volume,
reaching new highs breaking ₳3 million in daily volume.57

Figure 10
CNFT Samples

Spacebudz (left) launched the first SC-based NFT trading on Cardano with DEADPXLZ (right) that soon followed.

Figure 11
Top CNFT Collections by All-time Volume

Collection Volume Floor Price Wallet Holders Assets Minted

Spacebudz ₳19M ₳5100 ($5610) 2.8k 10k

Pavia ₳15M ₳880 ($968) 9.7k 60k

Clay Nation ₳15M ₳1448 ($1593) 3.8k 10k

Boss Cat Rocket Club ₳9.2M ₳3050 ($3355) 3.9k 10k

Yummi Universe - Naru ₳4.7M ₳450 ($495) 4.8k 10k

DEADPXLZ ₳3.7M ₳995 ($1095) 2.1k 10k

Source: Kraken Intelligence, opencnft.io

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Initial Stake Pool Offerings

The growth of any Web3 ecosystem requires a funding source of some type. A creative
solution the community has come up with, and something that has caused a bit of
contention, is what has been dubbed the initial stake pool offering (ISO or ISPO). In an ISPO,
teams planning to launch a dApp or project on Cardano announce that delegators will
receive project tokens upon launch of the dApp by delegating to a specific stake pool
often run by the project team. The SPO typically then increases the pool margin of the
stake pool to 50% to 100%, meaning the SPO keeps 50% to 100% of the staking rewards
generated by that pool. Projects are effectively funded by Cardano protocol staking
rewards and do so by leveraging delegators who are signing up for early access to a
project’s token at launch.

In a sense, ISPOs are similar to crowdloans on Polkadot, as delegators aren’t at risk of losing
the ADA they delegate, but the mechanisms differ in two primary ways:

1. In ISPOs, the project directly receives ADA staking rewards, whereas in crowdloans
the project does not receive any funds, only the right to a parachain slot.

2. ISPOs directly affect the security of the network as SPOs attract more stake and
produce more blocks in their pool as a result—whereas crowdloans are separate
from the PoS protocol, and therefore crowdloan contributions do not directly alter
the proportions of blocks produced by validators.

Recognizing this security issue, the team behind SundaeSwap, a recently launched DEX
on Cardano, came up with a solution where the community voted for 30 SPOs that act
as the SPOs for the team’s ISPO, consequently spreading out the concentration of stake
across 30 stake pools.58 The concept of ISPOs were not intended in the original design of
Cardano, so it will be interesting to see how the concept progresses and which norms are
perpetuated over time. Like many other initial offering or mint events in crypto, anyone
participating in these events should certainly do their due diligence and research to
protect themselves.

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Overall Cardano’s Web3 ecosystem is still very much in its nascent stages, but the network
is finally seeing its first dApps rollout, and it currently has over 130 dApps in development
racing to follow.59 It is not clear exactly how long it will take for the ecosystem to take
on a fuller form and resemble something comparable to the vibrant ecosystems seen on
Ethereum and Solana, but with so many projects and teams working together it’s possible
that a breakthrough dApp will bring others.

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 4.
Network Growth & Adoption

Cardano saw a massive uptick in adoption starting late 2020 and throughout the course
of 2021, as reflected by the metrics in figures 12 & 13. The network experienced much of
this growth as the result of major protocol upgrades as well as broader adoption seen
across the crypto industry. In figure 12 we see Cardano underwent exponential growth in
nearly every adoption metric listed, both on-chain and off-chain. There are now nearly
3 million wallets (1348% annual growth) on the network and over 1 million delegated
wallets (870% annual growth).

Figure 12
Cardano On-Chain and Off-Chain Adoption60

Start of 2021 Present Growth

ADA Price $0.18 $1.10 520%

Total Wallets 203,519 2,947,691 1348%

On-Chain

Delegated Wallets 112,468 1,090,912 870%

Daily Active Addresses 19,881 203,773 925%

New Wallets/Day 1,438 11,431 695%

Stake Pools 1,494 3,135 110%

Twitter 162,568 1,245,036 666%

Socials

Youtube 31,300 132,000 322%

Reddit 94,750 687,621 626%

Source: Kraken Intelligence, CoinMetrics, SocialBlade, Cardano Blockchain Insights

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Looking at figure 13 we can see market activity leading up to the Mary hard fork and
Alonzo hard fork events followed a common “buy the hype, sell the news” pattern.
Additionally, we see another sell off following the PAB launch due to disappointment over
the delayed rollout of dApps amid a broader market sell off.

Throughout the course of 2020 and 2021, per figure 13, there was a strong correlation
between ADA price movement and daily transactions. This relationship sustained until
November 2021 when we saw the price of ADA trickle off while daily transactions saw a
slight uptick. This could be a bullish indicator for ADA that the asset is in a correction
cycle due to a drop in hype rather than exodus of the network. This is important to
consider particularly as the long-anticipated launch of dApps on the network begins to
roll out.

Figure 13
Network Activity & ADA Price Against Major Events61

Source: Kraken Intelligence, CoinMetrics

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Overall, the excitement over the launch of dApps has resulted in a surge in network
activity. Looking at figure 14, we can see the number of Plutus scripts in the network
grew massively following the initial PAB pre-release in early November 2021. Following
the MuesliSwap launch around the beginning of 2022, we see the number of transactions
interacting with Plutus scripts take off in figure 14, and this corresponds with a surge in
daily transactions in figure 13.

The excitement and activity surrounding the launch of dApps persisted throughout
the month. On 17 January, transaction volume on Cardano ($7 billion) surpassed
that of Ethereum ($5.4 billion) with total transaction fees $66,058 and $44.7 million,
respectively.62 The uptick in activity also resulted in network congestion with the
blockchain load exceeding 90% at times, resulting in some transactions taking several
minutes to go through or fail entirely upon submission.63 This may seem problematic at
first, but the blockchain has a series of configurable parameters such as block size that
can be adjusted to accommodate network demand, and IOG has a collection of upgrades
lined up for 2022 tailored specifically for performance optimization and scaling.64

Figure 14
Transactions by Type (epoch daily avg) and Live Plutus Scripts

Source: Kraken Intelligence, Cardano Blockchain Insights

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Beyond Retail

As the on-chain and off-chain data suggest, Cardano saw a massive increase in adoption
as well as a corresponding uptick in price. While its price action and adoption is often
attributed to retail interest, the project also garnered the interest of commercial and
governmental institutions. Here is a summary of the major partnerships Cardano secured
over the past year.

Government Partnerships

• Ethiopia—IOG partnered with Ethiopia’s Ministry of Education to provide 5 million

students and 750,000 teachers with decentralized identity and blockchain-based
educational records to digitally verify grades and more-efficiently track educational
performance.65 The developments behind this partnership were recognized as the
14th Most Influential Project of 2021 by the Project Management Institute.66
• Zanzibar—World Mobile and IOG announced a long-term partnership with the
government of Zanzibar to maximize the potential of the region’s Blue Economy,
that is, “the sustainable use of ocean resources for economic growth, livelihood and
careers”.68 The collaboration will be rolled out in four phases over the course of five
years starting as early as Spring 2022.

Commercial Partnerships

• Wolfram—IOG partnered with Wolfram Blockchain Labs to provide centralized

oracle services to smart contracts running on Cardano and integrate Cardano
blockchain data into Wolfram’s computational intelligence engine, making Cardano
data available to virtual assistants like Alexa and Siri.69 Smart contract developers
have the choice of whether to utilize Wolfram as the data feed for their smart
contract or to opt for a decentralized solution such as Chainlink, which IOG also
announced a strategic collaboration with in September 2021.70

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 • Scantrust—The Cardano Foundation partnered with Scantrust to implement a
proof-of-concept supply chain solution powered by the Cardano blockchain with
Georgian artisan wine producer Baia's Wine.71
• Acuant—IOG partnered with identity platform Acuant to integrate Acuant’s Assure
ID and Acuant Compliant products with IOG’s Atala PRISM, with the goal of enabling
on-chain KYC/AML for Cardano’s DeFi environment.72
• DISH Network/Boost Mobile—IOG announced a strategic collaboration with
DISH “to make blockchain a core part of [DISH’s] network and consumer strategy”,
including services for the more than 20 million customers of DISH satellite TV,
Boost Mobile, and the Sling streaming service.73,74 Developments of the partnership
include providing Boost Mobile consumers with decentralized identity via Atala
PRISM, as well as a Cardano-based loyalty program for Boost.

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5.
Conclusion

Overall, Cardano is a multi-faceted project with layers of depth and a large vision.
With roots as early as 2015, the project has persisted through treacherous markets and
development hiccups to ultimately position itself as a major contender in a competitive
space of L1 smart contract protocols.

Last year saw the emergence of a large number of L1s flood the industry, but Cardano’s
unique combination of features including its Ouroboros protocol which combines
PoS with Nakamoto-style consensus, EUTxO model, Haskell base, community focus,
delegator-friendly design, and Bitcoin-like tokenomics distinguishes it amongst its peers.
While the project has strong academic grounding to back its technology, many of these
design decisions and emphasis on security have extended the development roll out of the
network. That being said, when developments do finally go into production, the team has
historically delivered a robust product.

In the runup and adoption of L1s in 2021, Cardano rode right alongside the pack and in
some ways led it. Growth in adoption trends are represented in both on-chain and off-
chain data and further manifested in partnerships with government organizations and
commercial partnerships. While both the Mary and Alonzo hard forks brought native
tokens and smart contract functionality to the Cardano platform, dApp launches on
Cardano’s mainnet have taken longer than anticipated to rollout; nonetheless, they
are showing signs of life, with the network’s first major launches in January 2022.
Importantly, the highly anticipated support infrastructure within PAB is slowly coming
to market and early network data reflects that developers are finding it useful.

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Looking forward, much of the excitement surrounding Cardano is predicated on the
continued rollout of dApps, and much of IOG’s effort in 2022 is focused on improving the
scaling and performance of the network, as well as rolling out supporting infrastructure
for developers. In particular, Hydra is expected to be partially implemented and usable to
enable micro transactions. Also, a beta mainnet release of Milkomeda is expected to go
live, providing Cardano with EVM capabilities.75,76

If all goes well, 2022 could prove to be an exciting year for this ICO Warrior.

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Footnotes

1. Buterin’s Twitter poll only included 4 currencies and the results were as follows: Bitcoin (BTC - 38.4%), Cardano (ADA -
42%), Solana (SOL - 13.1%), and the US dollar (USD - 6.5%). These results are not guaranteed to portray the true opinion of
the entire Ethereum community (https://twitter.com/VitalikButerin/status/1481737970562789376?s=20).
2. ​​https://iohk.io/en/research/library/
3. https://worldmobile.io/blog/post/how-world-mobile-and-iohk-will-bank-the-unbanked/
4. https://coinmarketcap.com/alexandria/people/charles-hoskinson
5. https://messari.io/asset/cardano/profile/launch-and-initial-token-distribution
6. https://messari.io/article/power-and-wealth-in-cryptoeconomies
7. https://messari.io/asset/cardano/profile/launch-and-initial-token-distribution
8. https://adapools.org/protocol-parameters
9. https://roadmap.cardano.org/en/
10. https://blog.ethereum.org/2021/05/18/country-power-no-more/

11. https://messari.io/article/power-and-wealth-in-cryptoeconomies
12. https://www.yahoo.com/now/plutocracy-still-bad-proposed-eos-171353285.html

13. See Ouroboros page 58 for discussion on security.

14. https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=131901.0

15. https://youtu.be/fBKCbhX-dXI?t=1523

16. https://iohk.io/en/blog/posts/2021/09/17/hydra-cardano-s-solution-for-ultimate-scalability/

17. https://cryptoslate.com/cardanos-ouroboros-paper-is-the-2nd-most-cited-academic-paper-about-cryptocurrencies-and-
blockchain/
18. https://research.web3.foundation/en/latest/polkadot/block-production/Babe.html

19. https://adapools.org/groups

20. https://adapools.org/groups

21. https://btc.com/stats/pool

22. https://etherscan.io/stat/miner?range=7&blocktype=blocks

23. It should be noted, unlike the other protocols, Polkadot’s DOT asset used in PoS is also used in crowdloans where 11% of
the circulating supply is currently locked, and this likely has a negative effect on staking participation (https://parachains.
info).

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24. The percentage of circulating supply staked on Solana is not clear as non-circulating tokens are actively staked. It
is important to observe the circulating supply proportion staked in this context as it is more reflective of delegator
experience. Technically it is possible this proportion is as high as 99%, but more realistically, one may speculate Solana’s
staked circulating supply proportion ranges in the 59-72% range based on the other protocols and available incentives —
that is, 59% if 100% of the non-circulating SOL is being staked and 72% if 80% of the non-circulating SOL is being staked.
One would expect the participation rate of non-circulating SOL to be high as there is opportunity cost and inflationary
costs that are inflicted by not staking. Additionally, by the nature of the funds being locked there are limited alternative
opportunities.
25. https://www.tbstat.com/wp/uploads/2021/08/20210811_Layer1Platforms_TheBlockResearch.pdf

26. https://www.tbstat.com/wp/uploads/2021/08/20210811_Layer1Platforms_TheBlockResearch.pdf

27. https://youtu.be/HXTlDhVGsDs?t=784

28. https://sundaeswap-finance.medium.com/concurrency-state-cardano-c160f8c07575

29. https://docs.cardano.org/plutus/transaction-costs-determinism

30. https://docs.cardano.org/plutus/learn-about-plutus

31. https://docs.cardano.org/explore-cardano/fee-structure

32. https://docs.cardano.org/plutus/transaction-costs-determinism

33. https://medium.com/@cardano.foundation/why-cardano-chose-haskell-and-why-you-should-care-why-cardano-chose-
haskell-and-why-you-should-f97052db2951
34. https://cardanofoundation.org/en/news/emurgo-and-the-cardano-foundation-launch-project-to-develop-new-
decentralized-applications-tool-stack/
35. https://iohk.io/en/blog/posts/2021/05/10/runtime-verification-iele-from-interoperability-to-universality/

36. https://youtu.be/zZLOL_9kp_U?t=343

37. https://iohk.io/en/blog/posts/2022/01/14/how-we-re-scaling-cardano-in-2022/

38. https://iohk.io/en/blog/posts/2021/09/17/hydra-cardano-s-solution-for-ultimate-scalability/

39. https://docs.cardano.org/core-concepts/ouroboros-overview

40. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zZLOL_9kp_U

41. https://iohk.io/en/blog/posts/2021/09/29/acuants-new-strategic-partnership-with-iog-and-atala-prism-to-offer-
enhanced-security-in-the-defi-space/
42. https://medium.com/dcspark/dcspark-announces-development-of-new-sidechain-protocol-milkomeda-cc28ed764a89

43. https://twitter.com/dcspark_io/status/1469724188634234881?s=20

44. https://youtu.be/9glPzSBaXI8?t=1435

45. https://messari.io/asset/solana/profile/launch-and-initial-token-distribution#:~:text=Solana%20held%20a%20
Founding%20Sale,USD%20terms%20at%20the%20time.

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46. https://solana.com/transparency-report-2020-12.pdf

47. https://solana.com/tokens

48. https://adapools.org/pots

49. https://cryptoslate.com/the-first-usable-cardano-defi-daapp-goes-live-and-its-not-sundaeswap/

50. https://twitter.com/SundaeSwap/status/1484281160146509828?s=20

51. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XnsyinIBfnk

52. https://twitter.com/spacebudzNFT/status/1447223464277028870?s=20

53. https://twitter.com/pxlzNFT/status/1454907634289631232?s=20

54. https://twitter.com/Tokhun_io/status/1453877203574403077?s=20

55. https://cnftanalytics.io/php/home.php

56. https://nftevening.com/spacebudz-makes-history-as-the-first-million-dollar-nft-sale-on-cardano/

57. https://cnftanalytics.io/php/home.php

58. https://iso.sundaeswap.finance/#/welcome

59. https://youtu.be/9glPzSBaXI8?t=725

60. Social metrics track the following accounts — Twitter: @cardano, Youtube: IOHKIO, Reddit: r/cardano

61. Price and network activity plotted against major developments. Hard fork (HF), smart contract (SC). For more details on
announcements (annc.) see next section.
62. https://u.today/cardano-surpasses-ethereum-by-transaction-volume-as-ada-price-soars

63. https://datastudio.google.com/reporting/3136c55b-635e-4f46-8e4b-b8ab54f2d460/page/p_59kxcdtwnc

64. https://iohk.io/en/blog/posts/2022/01/14/how-we-re-scaling-cardano-in-2022/

65. https://iohk.io/en/blog/posts/2021/04/27/blockchain-finally-comes-of-age-with-worlds-biggest-blockchain-deployment/

66. https://www.pmi.org/most-influential-projects-2021/50-most-influential-projects-2021/atala-prism

67. https://www.cryptoglobe.com/latest/2021/10/cardano-ada-founder-charles-hoskinson-signs-mou-with-government-of-
brundi/
68. https://worldmobile.io/blog/post/partnering-with-zanzibar-blockchain-hub/

69. https://iohk.io/en/blog/posts/2020/12/17/iohk-partners-with-wolfram-to-power-cardano/

70. https://iohk.io/en/blog/posts/2021/09/25/cardano-to-integrate-chainlink-oracles-for-real-time-market-data/

71. https://forum.cardano.org/t/cardano-reveals-its-first-supply-chain-solution-in-association-with-scantrust/56519

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72. https://iohk.io/en/blog/posts/2021/09/29/acuants-new-strategic-partnership-with-iog-and-atala-prism-to-offer-
enhanced-security-in-the-defi-space/
73. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MPobkiSbx5M

74. https://iohk.io/en/blog/posts/2021/09/28/boost-mobile-and-dish-tv-call-on-cardano/

75. https://youtu.be/9glPzSBaXI8?t=3765

76. https://twitter.com/Milkomeda_com/status/1469722613165473801?s=20

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