Cardano is an ambitious project aiming to solve many of the problematic issues other blockchains and cryptocurrencies face. The project emerged in 2014, and through a long-running ICO that started in September 2015, it ended up raising about USD 63M with 95% of the funding coming from Japanese investors.

The Cardano team has a grand vision of both the blockchain industry and its project. A lot of innovative technologies are proposed. With its innovativeness, the workload would be huge, and the development would be difficult. The project has a five-stage roadmap of its development and eco-system building. With years of developing and researching, it still has a lot work to do in order to fulfill its goal. Currently, it has deployed part of its features, but the roadmap is pretty vague, especially for the farther plans. For the near future, the team is going to implement the basic functions of the project. With above considerations, TokenInsight gives Cardano a rating of BBB.

Cardano is a smart contract platform much like Ethereum. It is trying to improve on many of the supposed shortcomings of Ethereum and will be built according to peer-reviewed academic research. It is also being built by the co-founder of Ethereum, Charles Hoskinson. In another break from many other cryptocurrency networks, Cardano will make use of the Haskell programming language which has a high degree of fault tolerance. The Cardano architecture will have two layers and these are the Cardano Settlement Layer as well as the Cardano Computational Layer. The Settlement layer will balance the ledger and is the main ledger on the platform. The computational layer is the second layer and will contain information on why particular transactions occur. This means that on the second layer people can create particular rules when evaluating transactions. Cardano makes use of a unique consensus protocol in the Ouroboros Proof-of-Stake algorithm. This means that the project can overcome a great deal of the scaling problems associated with PoW mining and algorithms. There are three organisations that are working to build Cardano and these are the Cardano Foundation, the Input Output Hong Kong (IOHK) and Emurgo. Cardano completed a lengthy ICO from September 2015 to January 2017 with the token hitting the exchanges in October of 2017. There is currently a great deal of volume and Coinbase is also considering its inclusion on the exchange.