Cardano

Cardano was launched in 2017. It is a blockchain platform that uses a fraction of the energy of Ethereum and Bitcoin, processes transactions faster, and has mapped out five stages that will lead to the ultimate goal: becoming a truly self-sustaining decentralized system. Developers can even host other apps and digital currencies on the platform.

The platform has recently launched smart contracts and now its work is focused on the last stages of development.

According to the study, these actions show great potential for Cardano to stand out in the long term, even if the team behind this platform sometimes tends to be a little slow to release new features.

The news comes as a number of other major cryptocurrency exchanges have been facing issues with adding new digital assets. Binance, the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchange, has been struggling to add new coins due to technical difficulties. Kraken, another major exchange, recently delisted a number of popular altcoins.

These challenges underscore the need for more reliable and user-friendly ways to invest in cryptocurrencies. Robinhood’s decision to halt additions of new coins could be a sign that the company is feeling pressure to improve its platform before expanding its offerings.

Despite the challenges, there are still many reasons to be optimistic about the future of cryptocurrencies. A number of institutional investors have been showing increasing interest in digital

Bridges and sidechains: Wanchain making Cardano interoperable

Several months ago, a team from Wanchain reached out to Input Output Global, Inc. (“IOG”) to discuss how to enable interoperability between the Cardano mainnet, Cardano sidechains, and other heterogeneous blockchain networks.

The goal? To build the infrastructure required to enable true RealFi applications spanning multiple blockchains to drive the adoption of Cardano’s ecosystem, Wanchain’s network-agnostic blockchain interoperability solutions, and support the future of Web3.

It soon became apparent that this was a monumental task requiring the input (and output!) of multiple teams. Indeed, connecting Cardano to heterogenous blockchains would be a complex undertaking, since Cardano is fundamentally different to most other blockchain networks. Of note, Cardano uses:

Different smart contract environments and programming languages: Cardano uses Plutus and Haskell, not EVM and Solidity;

Different transaction models: Cardano uses a UTXO model (like Bitcoin), not an account-based model (like Ethereum);

Different signature schemes and elliptic curves: Cardano supports EdDSA and Curve25519, not Shnorr and Secp256k1.

Each of these differences are worthy of their own dedicated post, but suffice to say that, combined, they presented a unique obstacle limiting Cardano’s potential for interoperability.

Luckily, engineers love a good challenge!

Teams from IOG, Wanchain and MLabs (an industry-best Haskell, Rust, blockchain, and AI consultancy) collaborated to design an actionable plan to make Cardano interoperable and now, with the foundation of an interoperability solution for Cardano in place, the time is right to share some details about what has thus far been an exciting endeavor.

In this article, we explain the basic infrastructure for connecting Cardano to heterogeneous blockchain networks, reveal a novel sidechain solution, and share this project’s near and long-term roadmap.