THE CARDANO MAP

1.N Byron

The Byron phase of the settlement layer (Cardano SL) was launched by IOHK, Cardano Foundation, and Emurgo. It enabled the launch of ada cryptocurrency and allowed users to transfer and trade ada.

Live Oct 2017

Shelley Rollout Timeline

1.5 Last Byron / First Shelley Update (backend only) Introduction of Ouroboros BFT

1.6 Decouples Deadalus Wallet from Oroboros backend, Deadalus able to connect to RUST Cardano and new Haskell code. Icarus style addresses

1.7 Rust AND new Haskell work with new system

Cardano CHAIN, Cardano NETWORK replaces Cardano SL and Carano CL and introduced into Daedalus wallet backend

Hard Fork Complete Feb 2020

Address changes: Introduction of a SPENDING KEY, STAKING KEY, ENTERPRISE Addresses

1.8 Staking goes LIVE in slow rollout weaned off of Ouroboros BFT slot production (BFT get's no rewards, all rewards go to slot producers in stake pools)

2.N Shelley

The Shelley phase will transition Cardano SL (Cardano Chain) to a completely decentralized system which will allow all users to participate in the protocol, and get rewards for producing blocks by staking individually or within stake pools.

3.N Goguen

The Goguen phase will bring the second collection of protocols with the computation layer (Cardno CL) deployed as side-chains, with support for smart contracts. (Cardano NETWORK)

4.N Basho

The Basho phase will be focused on performance, security, and scalability improvements. It will enable Cardano to scale to millions and billions of users.

5.N Voltaire

The Voltaire phase will add a treasury system and governance, enabling sustainability and self-sufficiency for Cardano.

Full (Official)

Light Clients

Icarus (Code Base)

3rd Party Wallets and Exchanges

Hardware

edu.clio.one

Scalability

Need to scale to Bilions of users and able to process many tx/sec. including off-chain. See Ouroboros Hydra released on Mar 7, 2020.

Threshold Multi-Sig (TMS)

NIPOPOW/S

Interoperability

There will not be just one coin to rule them all. Transactions crypto to crypto are empowered on the ADA blockchain

Meta-data

Compliance

Enterprise Addresses

Sustainability

Decentralized projects need systems in place to ensure trust-less longevity. Without a centralized point of development (or failure) a solid foundation for sustainability is paramount. Cardano offers a unique approach to blockchain sustainability.

DAO / Treasury / On Chain Governance

Incentives / Staking

Future Development

Founded in 2015 by Charles Hoskinson and Jeremy Wood, IOHK is a technology company committed to using peer-to-peer innovations to provide financial services to the three billion people who don't have them.

We are an engineering company that builds cryptocurrencies and blockchains for academic institutions, government entities and corporations. We are a decentralized company that loves small, innovative teams forming and executing ideas that cause cascading disruption.

Research

Design

Build

Maintain

Educate

EMURGO was founded in 2017 and is a registered company in Japan. We develop, support, and incubate commercial ventures and help integrate these businesses into Cardano’s decentralized blockchain ecosystem. Cardano seeks to power the financial stack for the developing world, and EMURGO's mission is to help these economies emerge through blockchain technology.

Commercial Ventures

Develop

Support

Incubate

Integrate

Businesses

Governments

There are three organisations that are contributing to the development of Cardano. As one of these three entities, Cardano Foundation is an independent body based in Switzerland with core responsibilities to help oversee and supervise the development of Cardano and its ecosystem. We are committed to protecting and promoting Cardano and to advocating on behalf of the users and community of the protocol. We will work alongside Input Output HK (IOHK) who are contracted to design and build Cardano and Emurgo, the for-profit arm working to boost the Cardano ecosystem through commercial ventures. The three entities are wholly separate in ownership and leadership.

Standardize

Protect

Promote

Educate

Official Networks

Community Leaders

Ambassador Program

Cardano Empowered

Cardano Compatible

Cardano Developers

Why Cardano?

Comprehesive Layman's Scope

Why Haskell?

More in-depth about "Why Haskell?"

The Ada Oracle is the interactive overview of the entire Cardano ecosystem. est. Jan 15, 2019
For delegators, please consider supporting the Ada Oracle project by delegating with the [ORCL] stake pool. Thank you!

Objectives

Support

Submit Suggestions / Edits / Errors / Broken Links

Skills and Checks

What technical knowledge must one have to run a pool effectively?

Server maintenance and devops/sysops experience will be a very big plus. Linux system administration skills.

Will setting up a stake pool be similar to creating a master node? Will there be scrpts written to assist those of us who may be less technical?

There will be tools to assist the installation, but potential pool operators are expected to have basic sysop skills for this.

I want to run a pool. How do I get started? Is there a list to sign up to? Instructions?

You can participate in the testnet stakepool by following the instructions on the testnet site when it is published. Similar instructions will be provided online when it is deployed to mainnet.

How do I set up my computer to run the stake pool? Is there software that I need to download?

You will need to download a Cardano node and run it.

Is it possible to run more than one stake pool?

Yes.

How much will the generation of the pool certificate cost?

We have not yet arrived at the cost for the pool certificate.

Stake Demands

Is there a minimum amount of ada required to starta pool?

To operate a public competitive stake pool, the owners of the pool have to pledge ada to their pool. The details of this are covered in the documentation on staking incentives. No minimum amount of ada is required to run a pool or to delegate to a pool, though you do need some ada to pay the transaction fees.

What amount of ada is considered a large stake?

This is a market decision made by the combination of individual delegators making their individual decisions based on their perceptions of competing stake pools.

What are the risks of staking? What arethe risks of joining a pool? Any cons one should be aware of?

No risk, except that this pool will go down, and you will start getting no rewards, so you need to monitor if they are doing well, and re-delegate to someone else if they are bad.

If I'm already staking on another coin on my computer will that affect the staking?

It will not affect your Cardano staking as long as you provide 100% uptime for your node

Can a wallet, say with 100,000 ada, have lots of staking keys, say 25,000 for each key, or does staking require breaking down the stake into wallets with smaller balances?

You can have many staking keys in one wallet. The initial release of Daedalus and Yoroi will only support one stake pool delegation choice for a wallet. This may change later, with support for many accounts in a single wallet, each with its own delegation choice. Third-party wallets are free to implement other policies.

Will you be able to stake with a paper wallet?

Yes, you will be able to delegate to a pool from a hardware wallet or paper wallet.

If we delgate to different pools will we have several reward accoutn addresses?

Yes.

Can a single base address have several staking keys?

No.

Marketing

Rewards and Costs

What is it?

OFFICIAL FAQ

Hardware

What is the minimumhardware needed to run a stake pool?

There is no minimum. We have tested running a stake pool on a small single-board, running at 4-7 watts. But that is unlikely to be optimal, and operators will need to experiment to get the right combination of cost, performance, and energy efficiency to maximize their pool’s profitability and attractiveness to delegators.

On a scale of 1 to 10 (1 very low, 10 very high), what kinds ofcomputer skills/proficiencies should a stake pool operator bring to the table with regards to: network security, network administration, and ability to monitor network traffic?

Network security: 7
Network/system administration: 6
Ability to use monitoring tools: 7

Is domain address required? Or is a static IP enough?

You need an IP and port open to the internet with a decent bandwidth.

What is the minimum required bandwidth to run a stake pool?

The exact minimum bandwidth needed for a competitive stake pool is not yet known.

Will Cardano staking pool software be compatible with distributed computing (as a way to create redundancy) or are there limitations in place that prevent this?

The Cardano network is a distributed system, but each stake pool will require running only a single node (plus relay nodes that help with distributing information across the network). Load balancing core nodes with the same key is seen as adversarial by the system. The node itself does not have huge requirements on storage or processing power, and is thus designed to run on a single machine.

How well balanced will Cardano be across CPU cores? Is it better to have fewer cores, higher frequency, or more cores with less frequency? In testing, our findings were high-frequency CPU bursts were more important. Do you agree?

We expect the requirements on CPU(s) to be fairly moderate. We have designed the code for Shelley in a way that deliberately avoids the bursts in CPU activity that you observed in the currently deployed Cardano SL code.

Will faster broadband internet connection and higher speed CPU/GPU/RAM be any advantage?

A reliable internet connection of sufficient bandwidth is needed, but there is no particular advantage for faster CPUs or any GPU, provided it is over the baseline requirements.

Do we need reserved IP for staking or can it be dynamic? Should every node have its own IP, or can it be shared? Between virtual instances within the same server, for example?

The stake pool node itself can be completely firewalled from the internet, so long as one or more public relays are provided and the stake pool node can communicate through the firewall with the relays.

Will the network messages/protocols (TCP/UDP ports) between pools be any different than the messages between wallets/clients? If so, can IOHK track a list of IPs/hosts of pools so that we can create firewall rules to limit that traffic to other pools?

No. When you run a Daedalus wallet you run a full node. And the protocol is the same as between pools because pools are just full nodes.

Do stake pools need to be [100% uptime]?

Yes, stake pools need to provide near 100% uptime.

What are the storage requirements for the blockchain? How much storage is expected to be used per month?

Currently, it takes 3-6GB. A guesstimate is less than 50MB per epoch using similar parameters to the mainnet, but it depends on overall usage of the network.

Is it possible to load balance across multiple nodes on a LAN or WAN, such as two sites with different WAN addresses, each with load-balanced nodes on the LAN?

No. Load balancing core nodes with the same key is seen as adversarial by the system. Only one core node should be creating blocks in a given stake pool.

What is the comparison of staking efficiency IOS vs PC?

If you are talking about delegating from a wallet on an iOS device or a PC, there is no difference

Given your earlier benchmarks, is it still understood that the wall is 20 core nodes? If not, what is the new tipping point number?

Writing the code for Shelley, we are removing the inefficiencies that we found during the benchmarks that limited us to fewer than 20 core nodes.

Live OCT 2017

Technology

Test

Ouroboros Iterations

Ouroboros Praos (Jun 12/17)

Ouroboros BFT (OCT 30/18)

Ouroboros Genesis (May 3/18)

Ouroboros Hydra (Mar 7/20)

Ouroboros Philos

Ouroboros Crypsinous (Nov 20/18)

Smart Contracts

(Suggestions of Metadata in the Extended UTXO could function as rudimentary smart contracts that would significantly empower the power of simple transactions)

Block Explorers

Official

Smart Contracts

Technology

Domain Specific Languages (DSL)

Financial

Virtual Machines

"“Ouroboros”, the first blockchain protocol based on proof of stake with rigorous security guarantees. We establish security properties for the protocol comparable to those achieved by the bitcoin blockchain protocol."

"Ouroboros is unique in that it was designed in tandem with a formal security model and a mathematical proof that it implements a robust transaction ledger. This marks a fundamental shift in the methodology of blockchain system design."

Comparison of Block Expectation Time for Various Consensus Algorithms. (Bitcoin vs GHOST vs Ouroboros)

Plutus is the innovative development and execution platform for distributed contract applications on the Cardano Chain and Cardano Network.

It is the backbone for the industry of building smart contracts with the highest possible degree of security, auditability and correctness.

It allows developers to write a single source, in Haskell, from which is generated both on-chain and off-chain code.

Marlowe is a domain-specific language (DSL) which is designed to be usable by someone who is expert in a particular field: in the case of Marlowe, financial contracts, rather than requiring programming skills to use it.

Using a DSL has many advantages beyond its use by non-programmers:

We can ensure that certain sorts of bad programs cannot even be written by designing those possibilities out of the language, and by doing this we can aim to avoid some of the unanticipated exploits which have been a problem for existing blockchains.

We can also more easily check that programs have the properties that we want: for example, in the case of a financial contract we might want to make sure that the contract can never fail to make a payment that it should.

Because it is a DSL, we can build special-purpose tools to help people write programs in the language. In the case of Marlowe we can emulate how a contract will behave before it is run for real on the system; this helps us to make sure that the contract we have written is doing what it is intended to.

Peer Review

Peer Review Explained

Formal Methods

Formal Methods by Philipp Kant

IELE had 3 forces that drove the design.

1. To serve as a uniform lower-level platform for translating and executing smart contracts from higher-level languages.

2. To provide a uniform gas model, across all languages.

3. To make it easier to write secure smart contracts.

Unlike the EVM, which is a stack-based machine, IELE is a register-based machine, like LLVM. IELE also directly supports functions, like LLVM. It has an unbounded number of registers and also supports unbounded integers.

The KEVM is a high quality, formally-verified smart contract virtual machine. The KEVM testnet is implemented on Mantis, the standards-compliant Ethereum Classic client designed within the specification of the K framework. The K specification defines the formal semantics for elements such as the configuration and transition rules of EVM. The K framework provides the platform within which to work and also provides an executable.

The KEVM is a stack-based machine, as opposed to a register-based machine. The primary difference between these two architectures is in the way in which operands and their results are stored and retrieved.

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HOW STAKING WORKS

Can I stake from Daedalus?

You will be able to delegate to a pool from Daedalus or Yoroi.

Will we need to freeze or lock our ada for aset period of time to allow staking?

Your coins never leave your wallet and are never locked.

When is the start date for staking?

The Incentivized Test Net (ITN) went live Nov 2019. End of support will be March 31, 2020 but it will likely continue to run after that.

Is pledged stake at risk if a pool is seen to be behaving maliciaously?

No, for now there's no slashing.

As an ada investor, my question is: will staking allow any burn-off of ada? And will it be significant enough to educe the supply ie, lead to gains in the price?

No coin burns.

I'm not a programmer/coder. Is there any computer experience required to stake?

You will be able to delegate to a pool with no computer experience just by using a Daedalus or Yoroi wallet.

Is staking possible if a wallet is on an exchange, such as Binance or Kraken?

No. At this time it’s not possible to delegate from an exchange, but we may enable this and some exchanges may support delegating in the future.

Will we be able to write smart contracts to accept other currencies like bitcoin and stake them in Cardano besides ada?

On Cardano you can only stake ada.

If a stake pool is offline, can participants retrieve their stake and put them in another pool?

Yes. Your coins never leave your wallet, and you can change your delegation choice at any time.

Will we ever be able to stake our ada without 24-hour internet access? When will I have the ability to stake my ada na dwhat will the rewards be like?

You can delegate to a stake pool with even only a few minutes of internet access, but you cannot run a stake pool without being up 24/7. This is by design as the node that is staking needs to make blocks and the rewards for the node are based on its performance.

Can you block people from staking in your pool?

No. Anyone can join any pool; all pools are open, visible, and transparent.

What happens if nobody joins our staking pool?

Then its stake share stays equal to the founder’s stake. Nothing special happens.

Can a single base address have several staking keys?

No.

Is the ability of pool creators to determine cost and profits intended to allow for more incentive to join one pool over another?

Yes, that’s one of the aims.

Is the staking done in the test network or for real?

We will first introduce staking on a testnet, to gain some experience, and deploy the feature to the mainnet later.

Would it be possible for a pool to donate, say 1%, to a Cardano-related charitable cause, for example, Guardians of Cardano, or perhaps a less controversial group? Who might you suggest?

In the current design, it will be possible to automatically send the rewards that the pool operator would get (cost, margin, and rewards for their own stake) to a charity. Giving only a fraction to charity in an automated way is not something that is in the design, but if people want that, it should be possible to add that feature (possibly after the initial release). Good idea, by the way.

I don't see why a non-myopic pool operator wouldn't lie about his costs and run his pool at a loss (charity) with the long-term vision of gaining a lot of delegations. It seems an effective way to get ranked high in attractiveness through lying about costs (set it to zero).

Costs are likely to be a race to zero. And that's not too much of a problem.

What are the anti-virus exclusion recommendations? Which folers and processes to exclude from scanning? What would be the firewall port requirements?

Initially only Linux will be supported for running stake pools, so no anti-virus software is required, but we recommend operators use best practice when securing their platform.

What protection mechanisms are in place for pool operators to defense against DDoS or equivalent attacks? Unlike proof of work, these nodes are tiny and can be overwhelmed quickly

None, it’s up to the pool operator to secure their systems and ward off attacks.

Subtopic

ORCL STAKE POOL

ITN delegators, please consider supporting the Cardano Map project by delegating to the ORCL stake pool. Thank you!