What is ADA Coin?
Cardano’s native cryptocurrency is ADA Coin.
Cardano has its own native wallet which can store ADA coins--Daedalus. However, be wary, as there have been a number of reports throughout the crypto community that this wallet has had issues such as inability to connect to the network, sync blocks, and transactions never reaching the recipient. Scary.
Similar to the way in which Bitcoin is used, ADA aims to meet the Cardano team’s goal of processing “tens of thousands” of transactions per second, which would make it close to the perfect payment system.
ADA coin also functions to allow people to create smart contracts and DApps. For more information on ADA Coin, please watch the instructional video here.
Verifying ADA Coin Transactions
Cardano uses the “Ouroboros” model alongside its Proof-of-Stake (PoS) consensus mechanism. For those individuals, or validators, who want to help validate transactions, they are required to freeze a certain amount of ADA coins, establishing their “stake” in the system. Once a validator helps verify a transaction, they receive additional ADA coins as their reward.
The higher their stake, the higher likelihood a validator has of receiving their reward.
What is “Ouroboros?”
While there are many other PoS blockchains out there, Cardano sets itself apart because of its claim that they offer an actual, true random way of selecting a validator. This, according to the developers is why they built their Ouroboros protocol on top of the standard PoS model.
Ouroboros uses stake as the primary resource to identify the leverage participants have in the system. As it requires very little physical resources to run, Cardano is considered to be extremely environmentally friendly.
The protocol also guarantees the dynamic availability a PoW system never could. In other words, it continues to operate, according to Kiayias, even if an arbitrarily large number of participants decide not to stake and maintain the ledger.
The process of joining and participating in the protocol, according to Kiayias, doesn’t require the availability of any special shared resource such as a checkpoint. When engaging in the protocol requires nothing more than the public genesis block of the chain and access to the network, it eliminates the point of failure that is a trusted shared resource.
Many believe Ouroboros to be a game-changing protocol.