Cardano is a blockchain platform for changemakers, innovators, and visionaries, with the tools and technologies required to create possibility for the many, as well as the few, and bring about positive global change. Cardano is a decentralized third-generation proof-of-stake blockchain platform and home to the ada cryptocurrency. It has been designed from the ground up by a team of top engineers and academic experts. Cardano has a strong focus on sustainability, scalability, and transparency and is a fully open source project that aims to deliver an inclusive, fair, and resilient infrastructure for financial and social applications on a global scale. It is powered by Ouroboros, the ground-breaking proof-of-stake consensus protocol. Cardano is one of the biggest blockchains to successfully use a proof-of-stake consensus mechanism, which is less energy intensive than the proof-of-work algorithm relied upon by Bitcoin. Although the much larger Ethereum is upgraded to PoS. The project has taken pride in ensuring that all of the technology developed goes through a process of peer-reviewed research, meaning that bold ideas can be challenged before they are validated. According to the Cardano team, this academic rigor helps the blockchain to be durable and stable — increasing the chance that potential pitfalls can be anticipated in advance. Cardano is used by agricultural companies to track fresh produce from field to fork, while other products built on the platform allow educational credentials to be stored in a tamper-proof way, and retailers to clamp down on counterfeit goods.

We hosted an AMA session with Cardano on 5th October.

Mr. Ramsy was the host from Crypto Miners and Mr. Lars was the guest. He shared with us the features and functions of Cardano.
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Segment 1️⃣: Introduction

Ramsy | Crypto Miners:
Hello everyone 👋 Welcome to Our Another #Special AMA session With Cardano

To help us learn more about Cardano, We are lucky to be joined By Mr. Lars

Hey Lars 👋

Lars Brünjes:
Hello everyone!

Ramsy | Crypto Miners:
Welcome here Mate

Thanks for bringing Us Cardano 🤩

Lars Brünjes:
Very welcome — always excited to talk about Cardano!

Thanks for inviting me!

Ramsy | Crypto Miners:
First of all Can You Introduce Yourself To the community?

Lars Brünjes:
Of course!

My name is Lars, I’m 50 years old (for another three days), I have a PhD in mathematics and am a software engineer and educator. I live in Germany and work from here when I’m not traveling around the world.

I am the Director of Education at IOG, the blockchain engineering company building the Cardano blockchain.

Ramsy | Crypto Miners:
Glad to have you today Lars ❤️

Lars Brünjes:
Thanks again for having me! 🙂

Ramsy | Crypto Miners:
So Now Let’s Explore About Cardano if you’re ready!!

Lars Brünjes:
Always!

Ramsy | Crypto Miners:
So Let’s Start 🚀

1. Give us a concise and brief introduction about Cardano.
Tell us features of Cardano that makes it superior and special as compared to its competitors?

Lars Brünjes:
Cardano is a “science first” blockchain, whose core development is done by IOG, the company I work for. At IOG, we build on solid scientific principles, everything we do is rooted in peer reviewed research and built with security in mind. Cardano was the first provably secure Proof of Stake blockchain — sustainability and efficiency are very important to us.

And so is education. We believe in free education, and there are tons of material available for everybody wanting to learn more about our technology — including the new Haskell Bootcamp and the ongoing Plutus Pioneer Program (which I have the honor of teaching).

Ramsy | Crypto Miners:
Thanks Lars for this well start about Cardano

So What was Cardano’s Vasil Hard Fork which was some days ago? What changes it brings in Cardano Blockchain?

Lars Brünjes:
Vasil enhances Cardano’s smart contract capabilities through Plutus v2, which adds greater efficiency to an already powerful smart contract platform.

With Vasil, smart contracts can potentially become much smaller and cheaper — one NFT project reports size reduction of 90+% and cost reduction of 75%.

Another key feature Vasil brought was diffusion pipelining, which will offer another improvement to the consensus layer, thus giving greater scope for further adjustments, by improving block propagation times, enabling higher throughput.

Ramsy | Crypto Miners:
Moving on…

Cardano is PoS. Ethereum shifted to PoS somedays ago. What are your views about this? Because Ethereum is the big competitor!

Lars Brünjes:
Other than Ethereum (which I by no means want to bash), Cardano’s core infrastructure is the result of years of peer-reviewed research and community collaboration; with thousands of active stake pool operators and majority of liquidity staked via millions of wallets, the network is designed to reduce the number of single, centralized influencers.

It’s great to see other networks adopting PoS; however, Cardano benefits from years of commitment to perfecting the consensus model, focusing on reducing energy consumption, creating scalability solutions, and increasing overall network performance, all without compromising security settings.

Ramsy | Crypto Miners:
Cool 👍

What does Cardano provide to developers and builders to be built on it? Also tell us more about ‘Atala’

Lars Brünjes:
On top of a rock solid, energy efficient and highly decentralized blockchain, Cardano offers native tokens that are totally independent of ADA and powerful smart contracts — they can be either written in Plutus or Marlowe (which is simpler, but restricted to the domain of finance).

Cardano also offers a thriving and friendly Community that comes up with new tools and infrastructure every day.

Atala PRISM is a self-sovereign identity (SSI) platform and service suite for verifiable data and digital identity (DID).

For example, IOG partnered with Ethiopia’s MoE to implement a national, blockchain-based student and teach ID and attainment recording system.

Atala PRISM’s identity solution enables authorities to create tamper-proof education credentials across 3,500 schools, 5 million students, and 750,000 teachers.

Ramsy | Crypto Miners:
Wow, That’s Impressive 👏

Now tell us about the native coin $ADA, what are its usecases and utilities in Cardano ecosystem?

Lars Brünjes:
ADA can be used to store and transfer value, of course. And for staking — where Cardano is special in that our ADA are not locked up while you’re staking, you can spend them at any time and never give up control.

The of course there are the above mentioned native tokens, which developers and enterprises can use it seamlessly to create tokenization-based business models. Since any token created on Cardano is treated natively (independent from ADA), creators can use them as reward mechanisms for things like customer loyalty, governance, voting systems, and more.

Ramsy | Crypto Miners:
That’s Good for the developers 👍

Lastly, what important updates and developments we’ll get in coming months and years in Cardano ecosystem?

Lars Brünjes:
The Cardano ecosystem is continuing to evolve, with a number of key governance initiatives in the pipeline to empower the community to help set the future direction of Cardano’s development.

From an engineering perspective, with a robust research agenda that extends throughout 2023–2024, Cardano continues to optimize and scale, ensuring the network can grow to support increased demand as new features come on board.

As part of meeting this demand, IOG is focused on things like Hydra, Mithril, crypto primitives, interoperability solutions through sidechains, etc. to facilitate our scalability vision for the network.

(Hydra is a bit like Bitcoin lightning, enabling lightning fast and very cheap transactions, Mithril will allow synchronizing the blockchain much faster.)

Ramsy | Crypto Miners:
Thanks Larc for this well detailed introduction about Cardano

Lars Brünjes:
You are very welcome!

Always exciting for me to talk about it.

Ramsy | Crypto Miners:
That’s the Conclusion of the first part of the AMA session ✅

So Let’s proceed to our Twitter Questions section

Segment 2️⃣: Twitter Questions

1.Ouroboros is the first peer-reviewed, verifiable secure blockchain protocol and Cardano is the first blockchain to implement it. Could you give some information about Ouroboros? For what purpose exactly will it work?

Lars Brünjes:
It’s a general-purpose consensus algorithm that works in a Byzantine settings: As long as 51% of the stake is “honest”, it’s provably secure and “lively” (i.e. progress is made).
Same properties that Bitcoin’s Proof of Work has, but a millions times more energy efficient.

It works by replacing the PoW “lotteries” where a lottery ticket has higher chances of winning of you have more computing power by a lottery where your chances of winning depend on your stake in the system.

Ramsy | Crypto Miners:
2.Cardano Summit will be held where one can nominate their favourite games. How can I nominate my choice of game? Is the nominations open? Where will this Summit be held?

Lars Brünjes:
I’m not involved in the organization of the summit, so I’m afraid I can’t answer the first part.

As for the second — it’s decentralized in several cities around the world. I know one is in Lausanne, Switzerland, another in Buenos Aires, Argentina.

Ramsy | Crypto Miners:
3.One of the benefits of Cardano’s EUTxO architecture is scalability due to local state. Meanwhile the folks over on Ethereum are claiming that ZK Rollups are the path to scalability. But how do ZK Rollups solve for global state issues?

Here is our last question from Twitter

Lars Brünjes:
I’m no cryptographer and don’t no anything about ZK Rollups, I’m sorry — you’ll have to ask the Ethereum crowd.

The EXTxO architecture, though, is really great — not only for scalability, but also for security: The result of a transaction on Cardano is completely deterministic. You know what will happen before you even submit the transaction. So it can’t happen that you have to pay for a transaction that later fails when it hits the blockchain.

And much easier to analyze: In order to understand what will happen (and can possibly go wrong), you only need to look at one transaction and its inputs and outputs, not “the whole world” like on Ethereum.

Ramsy | Crypto Miners:
That’s the wind up of our twitter segment

Now Moving on to our last segment — Live Q&A

I hope you’re ready for that !!

Lars Brünjes:
Of course! Hit me! 😁

Ramsy | Crypto Miners:
lets go then

Segment 3️⃣: Live QnA
(In this segment group was opened for 60 seconds and Miners sent hundreds of questions. Guest choose some best to answer)

1) Itz Abhi ⚡️ ️️️️️️:
In my head I compared the decentralisation of btc and cardano, but one could argue, that there is a mining pool centralization in Bitcoin as well right? What do you think about user adoption in the future? The first (or second) mover advantage is a big thing, I guess and better technology is sometimes not enough to get people from eth to cardano

Lars Brünjes:
Mining pool centralization in Bitcoin is a huge problem, yes. I was part of the team designing our Cardano reward mechanism, and we designed it specifically to avoid a similar centralization as on Bitcoin. We are arguably 1000x more decentralized than Bitcoin as a result.

2) Prashant:
I read that Cardano will be undergoing a Vasil upgrade. What is a Vasil upgrade? Is it a hard fork of some sort? What may we expect from this Vasil upgrade and what benefits does it provide to the Cardano ecosystem?

Lars Brünjes:
I already talked about the Vasil hardfork above — it makes many transactions much smaller and cheaper. And it has already happened some weeks ago.

I myself am German, and we have a big German community. The Spanish speaking community is also big and very active. We also have enthusiastic followers in Japan, Korea, India and all around the world.

3) BAD LAK:
Do you allow suggestions and feedback from the community? Are we allowed in decision making, do you put community into consideration ?

Lars Brünjes:
Community and Community feedback are extremely important for us. We already practice Community participation with CATALYST, a decentralized fund where the Community can suggest projects and vote on them and then get funded.

The next step in the evolution of Cardano will eventually result in a world where the Community has full control over all decision involving Cardano.

4) North:
I read that By helping to validate the Cardano blockchain, we earn ada rewards, how do you determine how much ada a “validator can earn”? how many validators do you have now and how many more are needed?

Lars Brünjes:
We don’t have “validators”, but anybody holding ADA can earn rewards by delegating to a “stake pool” (a Cardano node). Everybody can become a stake pool operator — it’s fully decentralized, no permission needed.

5) Munna Bhaiya:
Will there be a point in the future, where iohk will give up the “power” over the network?

Lars Brünjes:
IOG (formerly IOHK) gave up that “power” with the Shelley hardfork two years ago already. We still are influential as thought leaders, of course, but we actively do research on governance, so eventually the Community will be in full control.

6) How do you plan on onboarding and Educating more non crypto users into the space

Do you support local communities especially Non-English speaking communities

Lars Brünjes:
We try to scale by collaborating with universities all over the world. We give interview and presentation to varying audiences — from the technical to the non-technical.

As for non-English speaking countries: I mentioned Argentina before. We are building a collaboration with a leading technical university there as we speak.

7) 🇦🇪Rogina Kazem🥳:
You say Cardano is secure enough to protect billions of data. But every day, a crypto money project is attacked. Has Cardano experienced any security vulnerabilities so far?

Lars Brünjes:
Nothing man-made is 100% secure, but Cardano has been built from the ground up with security in mind. And as far as I know, there has been no serious security issue on Cardano yet.

8) i thingking about me || Buy PCX ;*:
do you have any recommendation about which stake pool, i want to stake or delegate in cardano stake pool?

Lars Brünjes:
The Daedalus wallet ranks stake pools, so you could look there.

But in general, neither I nor anybody else can recommend “the best stakepool”. The stake pool landscape is very diverse. Some donate to charity. Others do work in their local communities. Some pay higher rewards, others do other interesting things. It totally depends on your personal priorities — as it should be in a fully decentralized system.

*This segment ends here*

Ramsy | Crypto Miners:
Thankyou So Much Lars For your valuable answers and information about Cardano 🤩

Is there anything else you would like to share or you want us to know?

Lars Brünjes:
Very welcome — and thank you for having me and for all your interesting questions!

I only want to invite anybody to have a look at Cardano and get involved. There are so many opportunities for developers, entrepreneurs and users. And it has only just started.

Ramsy | Crypto Miners:
We’ll Do that 🥂

Have a nice day Lars

Community, If you would like to learn more about Cardano, here are some useful links for you:

Website: http://cardano.org/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/Cardano
Telegram: https://t.me/CardanoAnnouncements
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/groups/CardanoCommunity
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/cardano-foundation
Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/cardano/
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCbQ9vGfezru1YRI1zDCtTGg
Medium: 

Cardano Foundation