The technology was conceived in an Osaka restaurant more than two years ago and from that small beginning Cardano has been built into a leading cryptocurrency. The project has amassed a team of experts in countries around the world, has generated more than 67,000 lines of code, and has a strong and growing community in countries across Asia and beyond. Along the way, Cardano has set new standards for cryptocurrencies with best practices such as peer review and high assurance methods of software engineering. The official launch was held in the district of Shibuya in Tokyo on Saturday October 14 for an audience of about 500 people, who had each won a ticket through a lottery held on social media. Excited cryptocurrency enthusiasts, Ada holders and business people from across Japan queued to get Cardano t-shirts and souvenir physical Ada coins, before going into the main hall to hear about how Cardano was created and the vision for its future. "The first thing we did when we knew the project was real was to build great partnerships," Charles Hoskinson, founder and CEO of IOHK, told the audience. "Our chief scientist is based at University of Edinburgh, it is a wonderful place, where they built the heart of Cardano. We have a lot of wonderful people at the University of Athens, they are rigorous, making sure that the theory works. And we have people at Tokyo Tech who work on multi party computation and look to the future, and work out how to make Cardano last a long time." The vision for Cardano, Hoskinson said, was that it would pull together academic research and bright ideas from computer science to produce a cryptocurrency capable of much more than its predecessors.

This "third generation" cryptocurrency would be able to scale to a billion users, using a proof of stake algorithm, Ouroboros, which avoided the huge energy consumption of proof of work cryptocurrencies. Features that would be added to Cardano to help it scale included sidechains, trusted hardware, and RINA, or recursive internetwork architecture. Sustainability would be part of the design by way of a treasury system to fund development indefinitely, allowing stakeholders to vote on proposed changes to the protocol. Meanwhile, the computation layer of the technology, would be innovative in using a tool called K Framework to allow developers to write smart contracts in the programming language of their choice, he said. Security is paramount to cryptocurrency because flaws in code increase the risk of hacks and the loss of coin holder funds, unfortunately witnessed too often. With that in mind, Duncan Coutts, head of engineering at IOHK, explained how the company approaches software development: cryptography research papers are translated into code using the technique of formal specification. This involves a series of mathematical steps that progressively take the cryptography closer to the code that the developers write, a process that allows checks to be made that the specifications are indeed correct.

Duncan Coutts, IOHK Director of Engineering, presenting at the Cardano launch event

"I’m passionate about bringing clever ideas from computer science and using them in Cardano," Coutts said. "And I’m obsessive about software quality. Beautiful software is like beautiful mathematics or poetry." Aside from engineering, the other twin pillar of IOHK is research, and Bernardo David went on stage to talk about the rigour supporting the papers that IOHK produces. David is an assistant professor at Tokyo Tech where IOHK has a research partnership, and was one of the team that produced Ouroboros, a provably secure proof of stake algorithm. On the question of whether people should accept the quality of the research, he pointed to the paper’s peer review through its acceptance to Crypto 2017, the annual cryptography conference held in California. "This is the first proof of stake paper that was published in a big conference so you can trust the largest and most respected cryptography conference in the world," he said. "You don’t have to take my word, you can trust all the other cryptographers."

Michael Parsons, Chairman of Cardano, speaking at the Cardano launch event

The launch event introduced the other important organisations supporting Cardano, such as the Cardano Foundation. The Swiss-based standards body acts as the guardian of the protocol and its duties include providing information to the community and working with governments to shape regulation. Michael Parsons, chairman, announced that Ada holders would be able to store their coins in the Ledger hardware wallet and integration was being worked on. Plans for the future included working with a respected London think-tank to produce blockchain research. Thanking the community, he said: "Cardano is a blockchain protocol with integrity. We are dedicated to helping it derive its full potential and make the world a better place. You supported us to help make Cardano what it is, so thank you." The third organisation supporting Cardano is Emurgo, which is based in Japan and extends support and advice to anyone wishing to build applications on the software.

Ken Kodama, CEO of Emurgo, emphasised the advantages of Cardano’s technology over older cryptocurrencies, and said: "Emurgo sees a bright future that Cardano will provide a more trustable way of identifying individuals and also a reasonable, and faster payment method to people who don't have them now. Emurgo will play an important role in plugging developers and startups to the Cardano ecosystem." Kodama, along with Darren Camas, senior adviser to Emurgo, spoke about how a network was being established in other Asian countries to support its growth. Camas said: "The question for us is how do we help Ada become the fuel that powers financial technology, not only in the developed world but in Malaysia, Vietnam, Argentina, Nigeria… How do we bring more people from across the globe to transact in the Cardano ecosystem?"

After the presentation crowds formed outside the hall to have their photos taken with the Cardano team. Some people who came along were longstanding supporters of the project, such as Naomi Nisiguchi, from Mie Prefecture. She works as a manager in the construction industry and has had an interest in cryptocurrency for four years. "Around two years ago I heard about Ada and that Charles Hoskinson was involved," she said. "I’ve been following the news on Facebook and I’m very interested to learn how the project will move on."

Ken Kodama, CEO of Emurgo, speaking at the Cardano launch event

Many people had plans regarding Cardano. Takashi Kawaguchi set up Fintech Academia last month to give Japanese people information about cryptocurrencies, and came along because he believes Cardano has the potential to rise up and be on par with Bitcoin and Ethereum. His website would provide educational resources that would help people understand and trust crypto, he said, and learn that it wasn’t an enemy, but represented the future.

Other people at the event were planning business interests, such as Nobuyoshi Hayashi from Tochigi prefecture, who owns a consultancy and wants to begin offering cryptocurrency advisory services. The launch itself is only the beginning for Cardano, with many new features to be added during the next three years that will cement its position as the leading cryptocurrency. Mario Larangeira, specially appointed associate professor at Tokyo Tech, was in the audience, and said it was a great time to be working in cryptography. "To be part of this project is challenging, complex but also very exciting," he said. "Now we are working on multi party computation and putting even more cryptography into Cardano, for example with Kaleidoscope, new research that is being produced at Tokyo Tech with Bernardo David and Rafael Dowsley."

Bernardo David, IOHK Research Fellow, speaking at the Cardano launch event

There was much hard work ahead, agreed Charles Hoskinson, and holding an event in Tokyo with Cardano partners was a very special occasion. "This is a really fun event," he said. "Cardano has its largest community here in Japan and we felt it was so important to have a launch event to thank the community for being so supportive, loyal and patient. The point of this event has been to talk about where we came from and where we plan on going, and meet some new people and make new friends."

No taxes, no government and the principle of doing others no harm are the founding ideals for a proposed new sovereign country where citizens can live as they choose. This vision of a libertarian utopia created through the purchase of sovereign land was laid out last week in Aspen, by early bitcoin investor Roger Ver, who told an audience that he was in talks to buy land. Rules for the proposed sovereign territory were few, such as no exporting of weapons or drugs and that there would be an age of consent. There would be no membership of the United Nations and no nuclear weapons. "As long as it’s peaceful, you can do whatever you want," said Ver, calling for libertarians and constitutional experts to join his plan. "Even if you love government control, you should love our project," he said, "so all us crazy libertarians can go off and create our own land. All you government loving people can sit back and say to us ‘look how you screwed things up’. But I don’t think we are going to fail," he concluded to applause from the audience.

Ambitious ideas like Ver’s Free Society weren’t in short supply during the three-day Nexus conference at Colorado’s Aspen Institute. The institute – surrounded by mountain peaks carpeted in red and gold fall colours – is more used to hosting the global elite rather than the dreamers and doers pushing for new ways of doing things at Nexus, whose conversations centred around liberty, decentralisation and the future of finance. Blockchain was a core theme of the event, with a predictable number of attendees planning an ICO, but there was also discussion of the future of cryptocurrencies.

Panel at Nexus 2017. Left to right: Roger Ver, Stacy Herbert, Max Keiser, Charles Hoskinson.

Charles Hoskinson, CEO of IOHK, explained how cryptocurrencies would have to develop before they could fulfil some of the transformative roles that have been predicted for them. "The third generation of cryptocurrencies that are coming are really going to be valuable, to change things and allow us to grow," said Hoskinson. "And allow these things to get enough users where they can really start influencing law and governments and central banks. Those cryptocurrencies will require governance, scalability, interoperability." Governance would mean that there would be a democratic way to make improvement proposals and changes to the blockchain, Hoskinson said. And cryptocurrencies of the future would have metadata attached to them, to allow financial transactions to reveal more about the story behind them than simply showing that A sent money to B. Interoperability would allow new blockchains to interact with legacy financial systems. "Interoperability’s incredibly important," he said, "otherwise you have two financial systems which are at war with each other."

Summing up, Hoskinson said: "the good news is that within three to five years, almost all of these problems can actually be rigorously solved." And some of the most exciting developments would relate to the social aspect of cryptocurrencies, where people would have to find new ways to get consent, around issues like voting. "Cryptocurrencies are societal evolution happening in real time," he said. Later, Charles was also part of a lively panel that included the hosts of the Keiser Report show – Stacy Herbert and Max Keiser – as well as Roger Ver and Rob Viglione, founder of ZenCash. Discussion topics included why there was less drama about the Ethereum chain split compared to Bitcoin scaling, ICOs, and the claims from Jamie Dimon, CEO of JP Morgan, that Bitcoin was a fraud. Dimon was ridiculed for his lack of understanding of cryptocurrency, with Ver offering to give Dimon a tutorial. A focus on the future united most conference attendees, but equally important was the historical context that brought them to where they were. Ron Paul, who Hoskinson worked for during Paul’s 2008 bid for the Republican candidacy, came on stage to a standing ovation and chants of "End the Fed".

Despite admitting he had much to learn about how blockchain worked, the libertarian politician who is now in his eighties praised the industry’s creativity. Technology should not be an arm of the government, he warned, and the internet was being coopted by commercial interests. "Technology is helping us, in a free society it helps improve our living condition," he said. In a tour de force through libertarian thought, he recounted his early career in medicine eventually brought to an end by his interest in how the monetary system worked. Saying that there had been decades of monetary policy failure, from the collapse of Bretton Woods system in the 1970s, Paul attacked the march of Keynesian ideology and a system swollen with debt, leading to the 2008 global financial crisis. "We do want to get rid of the Fed and we should start with auditing the Fed and understanding why we need to know about it," Paul said. "The American people deserve to know what’s going on." Central banking was a relatively new concept, he said, predicting the end of a system that would self destruct as it sank under the weight of debt.

Jesse Ventura and Ron Paul

Backing what Paul said afterwards, Jesse Ventura, ex-wrestler and former governor of Minnesota, told IOHK that personal debt kept people from being free, in a system designed to lock people into debt. "If you are in debt you can be controlled," Ventura said. "If people ran their finances like the government run theirs you’d be a homeless person living on the street out of a bag. You can’t live in a world of negative money." Paul cut a humble figure as fans queued to have their picture taken with him, and later held a television studio discussion with Ventura, a tall and imposing presence sporting a Rolling Stones bomber jacket and a US Navy Seals cap – both former employers of his. Other speakers at the conference included early Bitcoin adopter and investor Eric Voorhees, and Patrick Byrne, CEO of Overstock, who spoke about his new blockchain exchange that would list ICOs, and which he said had approval to operate from the US Securities and Exchange Commission. Longtime gold bug and Bitcoin sceptic Peter Schiff debated with crypto advocate Max Keiser, who in trademark showman style tore up US dollar bills on stage.

Colin Cantrell, one of the organisers of the event, said that one of the aims of Nexus was to bring great minds together and inspire change. "We’re going through a very difficult time globally, there’s a financial crisis. At times like this we need to bring people together, to inspire people to see that we have options, not to worry about the problems but focus on the solutions. We wanted to keep it balanced, everyone has their own skills to bring to the table." Music was never far away, with bands playing on site, and in the evenings a roster of acts played at venues in the centre of Aspen. Some of those who walked round the compact town centre would chance across bears that had come down from surrounding mountains to search for food ahead of their winter hibernation.

On the last night the IOHK team saw a classic American taxi pull up in Aspen. A closer inspection into the cab revealed the unlikely sight of a keyboard, drum pad and a kaleidoscope of coloured beams, and an interior of multi coloured lights and naturally, lasers. Destination unknown, the music kicked in, with Jon Barnes drumming along with a twirl of his sticks, or hammering the keyboard, whilst also managing to drive and talk. Hunter S Thompson, Aspen's countercultural son had taken a ride in Barnes's Ultimate Taxi, of course.

"Remember what Hunter said," said Barnes. "Yesterday's weirdness is tomorrow's reason why", a quote that may resonate with many blockchain fans. We stepped out of the taxi, and he had one last trick. Holding a fan of one dollar bills, he snapped his fingers and instantly they each became 20 dollar bills. And with that he drove off into the night.

Developing a secure proof of stake algorithm is one of the big challenges in cryptocurrency, and a proposed solution to this problem won the attention of the academic community this week in California. Several hundred cryptographers from around the world arrived at the University of California Santa Barbara on Sunday for the flagship annual event of their field, Crypto 2017. Over several days, they present cutting edge research for the scrutiny of their peers, while in the evenings they continue discussions with friends and colleagues over dinner on the university campus, with the inspiring backdrop of the Santa Ynez mountains meeting the Pacific ocean behind them.

Ouroboros, developed by a team led by IOHK chief scientist Aggelos Kiayias, made it through a tough admission process for the prestigious conference. This year, 311 papers were submitted and of those 72 were accepted. Only three papers at the conference were on the subject of blockchain. All three papers were supported by IOHK funding.

Speaking after his presentation, Professor Kiayias said: "We’re very happy that we had the opportunity to present Ouroboros at the conference. The protocol and especially its security analysis were very well received by fellow cryptographers."

"Our next steps will be to focus on the next version of the protocol, Ouroboros Praos which improves even further the security and performance characteristics of the protocol."

The Ouroboros protocol stands out as the first proof of stake algorithm that is provably secure, meaning that it offers security guarantees that are mathematically proven. This is essential for a protocol that is intended to be used in cryptocurrency, an infrastructure that must be relied on to carry billions of dollars worth of value. In addition to security, if blockchains are going to become infrastructure for new financial systems they must be able to comfortably handle millions of users. The key to scaling up is proof of stake, a far more energy efficient and cost effective algorithm, and as such this research represents a significant step forward in cryptography. Ouroboros also has the distinction of being implemented – the protocol will be an integral part of Cardano, a blockchain system currently in development.

There were two other papers presented at the bitcoin session on Monday. The Bitcoin Backbone Protocol with Chains of Variable Difficulty, was produced by a team of three researchers and included Prof Kiayias. It is a continuation of previous research into Bitcoin, which was itself the first work to prove security properties of its blockchain.

A third paper on the subject of bitcoin was presented, Bitcoin as a Transaction Ledger: A Composable Treatment.

Other notable talks at the conference included a presentation by John Martinis, an expert on quantum computing and former physics professor at the University of California Santa Barbara, who is now working at Google to build a quantum computer.

Leading cryptographers at the conference included Whitfield Diffie, pioneer of the public key cryptography that made Bitcoin possible, and Ron Rivest, Adi Shamir, and Leonard Adleman, who came up with the RSA public-key cryptosystem that is widely used for secure data transmission.

Ouroboros Praos researchers, left to right: Bernardo David, Alexander Russell, Aggelos Kiayias, Peter Gaži

Mathematicians with a curiosity about the algorithms behind blockchain came to hear Aggelos Kiayias speak at Oxford university’s Mathematical Institute on Wednesday. Professor Kiayias, Chief Scientist at IOHK, had been invited to the university to give a talk on his work on Ouroboros, a provably secure Proof-of-Stake algorithm for blockchain.

It the first time such a cryptographic protocol has been devised and is significant because its use would enable blockchains to process many more transactions, giving the technology the muscle that would scale it up for far wider use than at present.

“Bitcoin is slow,” he said in the presentation, in an outline of the problem. “The transactions per second of Visa are in the order of many thousands, for Paypal in the order of hundreds, and Bitcoin is far less than that – clearly that’s something that can’t scale to a global level.”

In addition to the much greater efficiency of Ouroboros, Prof Kiayias explained a novel reward mechanism for incentivising the protocol and used game theory to show why attacks such as selfish mining and block withholding would be neutralised.

A Nash equilibrium is a prescription of a strategy for each rational player, with the property that if other players follow it, it does not make sense for a rational player to deviate from it.

Prof Kiayias described how Ouroboros can be proven to be an approximate Nash equilibrium, thus distinguishing this blockchain system from Bitcoin, which is known to be not incentive compatible.

The Ouroboros paper was first published last December with Alexander Russel, Bernardo David and Roman Oliynykov and Prof Kiayias presented the work at the Alan Turing Institute in London last year.

A new version of the Ouroboros technical report will be available as early as next week, and will contain updated benchmarks that illustrate the performance benefits of the protocol.

Among the audience was Hayyu Imanda, whose desire to specialise in cryptography for her PhD studies brought her to hear the presentation. The 22-year-old is currently in a class of 26 students at Oxford university studying for an MSc in Mathematics and Foundations of Computer Science.

“I come from a pure maths background and I find cryptography very interesting, in that it was relatively recently founded and there is so much research happening,” she says. “I see it as a bridge from pure maths into real life, with many uses in terms of security, and it’s going to be a growing field.”

Winter School on blockchain

The year got off to an invigorating start for IOHK when a team of its researchers arrived in a chilly Shanghai for the first ever Winter School on cryptocurrency and blockchain technologies.

The 121-year-old Jiao Tong University – one of China’s leading institutions with alumni including the former president of China Jiang Zemin – hosted the conference in step with a rising interest in blockchain in China, including in its capital of commerce, Shanghai. The winter school follows a similar event in Greece last year, the first Bitcoin Summer School, run by the International Association for Cryptologic Research.

The main hall at the university’s technology building was packed for the three-day event, with a cast of renowned cryptographers on the stage, including IOHK chief scientist Aggelos Kiayias. Professor Kiayias presented a double session on his work on proving the security of blockchain protocols. Jonathan Katz from the University of Maryland spoke on game theory, as well as chairing the event.

IOHK researcher [Alex Chepurnoy](/team/alexander-chepurnoy/ "Alex Chepurnoy, IOHK") gave a talk on [Scorex](/projects/scorex/ "Scorex, IOHK Project"), the prototype cryptocurrency he is working on with fellow IOHK developers [Dmitry Meshkov](/team/dmitry-meshkov/ "Dmitry Meshkov, IOHK") and [Jan Kotek](/team/jan-kotek/ "Jan Kotek, IOHK"). The project is open source, like all of IOHK’s projects, and it aims to speed up the development of blockchains.

A lively panel debate on bitcoin, blockchain and their future, saw IOHK co-founder Charles Hoskinson take to the stage with his former collaborator at Ethereum, Vitalik Buterin.

Other speakers included Andrew Miller from the University of Illinois, Loi Luu from the National University of Singapore, Joseph Bonneau from Stanford University, Vassilis Zikas from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and Hong-Sheng Zhou from Virginia Commonwealth University.

During a break in programming the IOHK delegation honed their taxi hailing techniques (Shanghai’s cabs may be empty but that doesn’t mean they will stop) to travel across town for filming. See the videos here.

Cryptography comes out of the classroom

Even earlier than Shanghai, IOHK researchers were already busy this January, at Real World Crypto in New York. The aim of the annual conference is to strengthen the links between academics and developers in the hope of bringing the latest research into commercial applications in areas such as the internet, the cloud and embedded devices.

Prof Kiayias, who is chair of Cyber Security and Privacy at the University of Edinburgh, is an organiser and member of the steering committee.

From its beginnings as a gathering of some 150 specialists a few years ago, the audience at Real World Crypto has now grown to almost four times that size.

“We’ve seen more people come each year,” says Prof Kiayias. “Our audience considers this to be the one of the primary events they go to, to get information about the applied aspects of cryptography.”

Russia-based Alex Chepurnoy also flew to the US for the conference for a presentation on a co-authored paper on blockchain efficiency.

The work, Improving Authenticated Dynamic Dictionaries, is written with Leonid Reyzin, Dmitry Meshkov, Alex and Sasha Ivanov.

Topics tackled at the conference included passwords, blockchain, and TLS, the transport layer protocol through which data is exchanged on the internet.

Designing a brand

A leaping rabbit coloured in shades from hot pink to electric blue was the unlikely contender in the shortlist to become the logo for Deadalus, the wallet currently being put together by IOHK developers. Eight choices remain after designs were put to a popular vote. Designers took inspiration from locks, keys, and mazes in their draft visualisations of the Daedalus logo, referencing the high security of the wallet provided by Haskell code and the [Greek myth of Daedalus](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daedalus "Greek myth of Daedalus, Wikipedia") – father of Icarus and creator of the Labyrinth in Crete where the Minotaur was held.

Vote for the winner in our public poll

Links

Visit the ADA faucet to join development on our test net: tada.iohk.io

Read about Cardano SL: cardano-docs.iohk.io

Download the Daedalus wallet, available soon for OSX & Linux: daedaluswallet.io