Cardano Documentation

Welcome to the central hub for Cardano documentation

Here you will find content that describes and supports the components and features that are live on Cardano mainnet and Cardano testnets. If you notice any areas of this documentation that could be improved, please feel free to submit a pull request with your proposed changes.

If you are interested in developing on Cardano, please visit Cardano Developer Portal.

Cardano explained

Cardano is a decentralized third-generation proof-of-stake blockchain platform and home to the ada cryptocurrency. It is the first blockchain platform to evolve out of a scientific philosophy and a research-first driven approach.

The Cardano platform has been designed from the ground up and verified by an industry-leading combination of top engineers and academic experts in the fields of blockchain and cryptography. It has a strong focus on sustainability, scalability, and transparency. It is a fully open source project that aims to deliver an inclusive, fair, and resilient infrastructure for financial and social applications on a global scale. One of its primary goals is to bring reliable, secure financial services to those people who do not currently have access.

Cardano has been designed with security as one of its founding principles. It is written in Haskell, a functional programming language. In a functional language like Haskell, building your system using pure functions is encouraged, which leads to a design where components are conveniently testable in isolation. Furthermore, advanced features of Haskell enable us to employ a whole range of powerful methods for ensuring correctness of the code, such as basing the implementation on formal and executable specifications, extensive property-based testing, and running tests in simulation.

Cardano is a smart contract platform which seeks to deliver more advanced features than any protocol previously developed and serves as a stable and secure platform for the development of enterprise-level DApps. In the near future, Cardano will use a democratic governance system that allows the project to evolve over time, and fund itself in a sustainable way through a visionary treasury system.

You can read more about Cardano on the official Cardano website and watch a summary of the mission of Cardano in this explainer video.

Creating PRs and suggesting changes to this repository

To suggest an improvement to this repository please create an issue or checkout a feature branch with your changes and then create a pull request into the master branch.