Cardano - Cardano is a decentralised public blockchain and cryptocurrency project and is fully open source.

In the spirit of many open source projects, Cardano did not begin with a comprehensive roadmap or even an authoritative white paper. Rather it embraced a collection of design principles, engineering best practices and avenues for exploration. These include the following:

• Separation of accounting and computation into different layers

• Implementation of core components in highly modular functional code

• Small groups of academics and developers competing with peer reviewed research

• Heavy use of interdisciplinary teams including early use of InfoSec experts

• Fast iteration between white papers, implementation and new research required to correct issues discovered during review

• Building in the ability to upgrade post-deployed systems without destroying the network

• Development of a decentralized funding mechanism for future work

• A long-term view on improving the design of cryptocurrencies so they can work on mobile devices with a reasonable and secure user experience

• Bringing stakeholders closer to the operations and maintenance of their cryptocurrency

• Acknowledging the need to account for multiple assets in the same ledger

• Abstracting transactions to include optional metadata in order to better conform to the needs of legacy systems

• Learning from the nearly 1,000 altcoins by embracing features that make sense

• Adopt a standards-driven process inspired by the Internet Engineering Task Force using a dedicated foundation to lock down the final protocol design

• Explore the social elements of commerce

• Find a healthy middle ground for regulators to interact with commerce without compromising some core principles inherited from Bitcoin