When I got off the plane at Bole airport in Addis Ababa on the evening of January 4, I did not know what to expect. It was my first time in Ethiopia, and all I knew was that my Canadian colleague Dr Polina Vinogradova, an IOHK formal methods expert, and I were supposed to teach a three-month-long Haskell course to a class of young Ethiopian and Ugandan women. When our students…

Building on last week’s post by Professor Aggelos Kiayias, IOHK’s chief scientist, I want to use this post to discuss another choice we made when designing Cardano’s reward mechanism. The mechanism is designed to give an incentive to stakeholders to ‘do the right thing’ and participate in the protocol in a way that ensures its smooth, efficient and secure operation. As was…

At IOHK, we are proud of our scientific approach and close collaboration with academia. We publish in peer reviewed scientific journals and present our results at acclaimed international conferences to ensure that our protocols and algorithms are built on rock-solid foundations. Our software must reflect this scientific excellence and quality, which means that we need a process…

The IOHK Haskell and Cryptocurrency course in Barbados brought together students and professionals who were interested in learning the Haskell programming language. The course ran for eight weeks at the University of West Indies. Barbados was the second time the programme was offered, after a successful inaugural course held in Athens last year. The goal of the course is to…

Why do we need transaction fees?

There are two main reasons why transaction fees are needed for a cryptocurrency like Cardano:

People who run full Cardano nodes spend time, money and effort to run the protocol, for which they should be compensated and rewarded. In contrast to Bitcoin, where new currency is created with each mined block, in Cardano, transaction fees are the only…