Glossary
Cardano
A research-driven Layer-1 founded by Charles Hoskinson, built on UTXO accounting and the Ouroboros family of peer-reviewed PoS protocols.
Cardano launched in 2017 under IOHK, with an explicit emphasis on peer-reviewed academic research. Its consensus (Ouroboros and its variants) was the first PoS protocol with formal security proofs.
The execution model uses an extended UTXO ("eUTXO") accounting that combines Bitcoin's UTXO structure with smart-contract expressiveness via Plutus, a Haskell-flavored language. The trade-off is a steeper learning curve and slower ecosystem growth compared to EVM chains.