ADA Retirement Calculator

Cardano was founded in 2015 by Charles Hoskinson, who co-founded Ethereum before leaving due to disagreements about its direction. The project is developed by Input Output Global (IOG), with the Cardano Foundation (Switzerland) and Emurgo (Japan) handling governance and commercial adoption. Cardano's calling card has always been its academic approach: every protocol upgrade goes through peer-reviewed research before implementation. The Ouroboros consensus paper was published at CRYPTO 2017, a top-tier academic cryptography conference.

Ouroboros is a proof-of-stake consensus protocol that divides time into epochs and slots, with slot leaders selected proportionally to their stake. The protocol has gone through several iterations (Classic, Praos, Genesis, Leios). Current throughput sits around 250 TPS, but the Ouroboros Leios upgrade, at roughly 67% completion as of early 2026, targets up to 10,000 TPS through a two-tier block system using endorsement blocks for parallel processing. Hydra, Cardano's Layer 2, has seen its first production application: Pondora launched Echo, a non-custodial DEX. Smart contracts use Plutus (based on Haskell), with over 24,000 Plutus scripts deployed. The Chang hard fork in 2025 activated on-chain governance, giving ADA holders the ability to vote on protocol changes through Delegated Representatives (DReps). The Cardano treasury holds over $1 billion in ADA, now community-governed.