Designing blockchain systems is a challenging endeavor. It is also a continuous process, as these systems are long-lived and aim to capture requirements that evolve during their lifetime. It follows that a blockchain project’s community often faces difficult decisions that ‘fork’ the future of a blockchain system in different ways, with consequences that are hard to fully…

Facilitating transactions in cryptocurrency platforms stumbles on the dual utility of the platform’s underlying asset. On the one hand, users can hold and trade it as part of their investment portfolios. On the other hand, it supplies the necessary “fuel” for processing transactions. This duality suggests that the system should have a mechanism for adjusting transaction costs…

In Douglas Adams' classic The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, a Babel fish is a creature that allows you to hear any language translated into your own. This fantasy of universal translation ensures meaningful interaction despite the myriad different languages in the galaxy. 

In the cryptocurrency space, smart contract platforms enable the development of a myriad custom tokens…

In the previous article, we identified the objectives of the reward scheme in Cardano, and we gave general guidelines regarding engaging with the system.

Taking a more high-level view, we will examine from first principles, the general problem of reward sharing in blockchain systems. To recall, the two overarching objectives of any resource-based consensus system is to…

As a project, decentralization remains arguably our most important and fundamental goal for Cardano. Protocols and parameters provide the foundations for any blockchain. Last week, we outlined some of the planned changes around Cardano parameters and how these will impact the staking ecosystem and thus accelerate our decentralization mission.

Yet the community itself – how it sees itself, how it behaves, and how it sets common standards – is a key factor in the pace of this success. Cardano has been very carefully engineered to provide “by design” all the necessary properties for a blockchain system to operate successfully. However, Cardano is also a social…