Background
Cardano is a layer 1 blockchain project with over 70% of the total currency, ADA, staked for network validation (a really impressive rate).
The Cardano project began in 2015 in an attempt to take on some of the problems the open-source community saw within the thousands of altcoins in existence at the time. Cardano was officially founded by Charles Hoskinson, who is a former co-founder of Ethereum.
Some of Cardano’s key improvements are multiple layers for settlements and computations, proof of stake consensus, and the ability to upgrade easily in the future.
The Cardano Settlement layer launched in 2017 and raised around $63 million through the ADA ICO. Since then, the ever-growing team of developers has been hard at work preparing for the launch of smart contracts on the Cardano Computation Layer.