[Disclaimer] Not trying to shill, i'm really impressed with Cardano and I see a huge potential. I just want to share knowledge because a lot of people just buy it on a hunch/shill.

Heyo, i've done some research after reading the Ouroboros network paper (The PoS implementation of cardano) and a lot of reading in reddit/cardano website/etc.

I heavly skimmed it in the probabilistic part, mainly beacuse I don't have 3 months spare to study a paper lol. Without further ado,

Without further ada:

Cardano's vision

They want to become the "internet of blockchains". Sounds like smoke, but in the paper, the process is well documented. They created the concept of side-chains, which permits inter-operatibility between different blockchains, eliminating the need for a middleman and decentralizing this aspect.

They also aim to be the most decentralized network, with hundreds of peer-reviewed research. They took their time to research before actually starting development and they did a few prototypes in haskell before working on the first phase of it.

They also want to be future-proof. This will be composed of multiple features, but the one that most captivated my attention was their last phase of deployment (Q4 2k21 / Q1/2k22), in which governance will be implemented. Governance in cardano will let developers submit "Improvement proposals (IPs)" with a pre-determined funding amount needed to execute it. This IPs, are then voted by the community and funded by the treasury. Part of the fees on transacting to towards this treasury.

This will enable IOHK (The guys behind cardano) to completely separate from the project and bring it to it's true decentralized form.

Some of my subjective highlights

1. Super decentralized, it solves a lot of issues with current PoS implementations. (Refe page 58-60 of the ouroboros paper, super interesting read)
2. It's the first provably secure blockchain, by provably meaning mathematically proven.
3. This is both a pro and a con, it's language is beautiful (Plutus) and it's purely functional, based on Haskell. The downside, is that reading haskell is hard for coders who aren't used to functional programming, which might either slow adoption or make audits harder.
4. Concrete and deliverable roadmap: They deliver this complex things on schedule.
5. Parts of transaction fees go towards the treasury. The treasury is used to fund governance-based updates in a decentralized fashion.
6. It was created by ETH co-founders. Might just be a authority fallacy though so minus points on this highlight.
7. You can add custom metadata to transactions, such as who the sender was with name, etc. This is purely optional and it's added to facilitate transition from legacy financial systems to the future :^)
8. Native token creation, the tokens live on the ledger, while smart contracts smoothly run on layer 2 (Ouroboros is also 2-layered, not like our 7-layer-dips.)
9. Tokenomics are basically ETH2, but take this one with more grains of salt than the rest of the post since I didn't care reading about em much. I just know I pay with ada for transaction fees, and i can earn ada with staking.

Cons

1. Feeling like they lack someone on product with a computer science background. I wouldn't have chosen haskell (plutus) as a language (Even though I understand the WHY). I think it'll slow down adoption. But again, the treasury might mitigate this
2. Way too speculative asset, currently overvalued imo. There isn't any dapp running on it and the only reason to have ADA is to stake it.

Possibilities

1. They've opened a dev environment for smart contracts last month. We might see dapps as soon as smart contracts are deployed (Q2 i think)

Straight outta reddit (Not my own DD but checked)

​

1- Native tokens will be able pay transaction fees in their own tokens, no need to bother with ADA. There's no other crypto that even attempted such mechanism. Cardano has a solution (as outlined here) and it should come in Q2.

2- ERC-20 converter. Devs from ETH can seamlessly migrate or duplicate their dapps into Cardano.