A cryptocurrency wallet that does not need to download the full history of blockchain records. Instead, the wallet links into a website where the full blockchain is accessed. This makes a light wallet faster and easier to use.
A hybrid of direct and representative democracy to be used in Voltaire. Liquid democracy enables the treasury system to take advantage of expert knowledge in a voting process, as well as ensure that all ada holders are granted an opportunity to vote. For each project, a voter can either vote directly or delegate their voting power to a member of the communit...
Cardano’s delegation mechanism is based on liquid staking, meaning that staked funds are never locked and can be spent at any time. Other platforms use a third-party protocol to make staked tokens liquid, which has the potential to introduce security problems.
The process of creating or adding new coins or tokens to support the demand for transactions on a DEX. Liquidity miners (providers) usually get rewards that incentivize them to support the user base and grow liquidity pools with deposited cryptocurrencies.
The sub unit for ada. One ada = 1,000,000 lovelaces. The name comes from Ada Lovelace, the daughter of Lord Byron who became a mathematician and programmer with her work on Charles Babbage's Analytical Engine project.
A measure used by crypto exchanges to rank coins. The ‘market cap’ is calculated by multiplying the number of coins in circulation by the coin price on the day.
A web-based platform to build and run financial smart contracts visually, without needing deep programming knowledge. Marlowe contracts are straightforward and optimized for financial transactions. This provides a faster way for financial service providers to build expertise in smart contracts and blockchain technology.
A browser-based tool for writing and testing financial smart contracts. Its purpose is to encourage developers who have no Haskell or Javascript experience to build financial products on Cardano.
How a node stores information about unconfirmed transactions. The mempool is essentially a holding area for transactions that haven't been included in a block yet.
A data structure used in blockchain applications to encode data in a secure and efficient way. The Merkle tree allows a block of transactions to be generated in a single hash, which is used to verify its validity to the original set of transactions. Using hashes is time efficient and does not require the validation of every transaction from the chain history...
Information about a digital file. In smart contracts, metadata sets out the conditions under which a deal should execute. In a non-fungible token, metadata can hold information about the ownership or intellectual rights, among other things.
Cardano's solution to streamline the speed and efficiency of data synchronization between applications. Mithril retains strong security settings and its uses include secure voting, data exchange between sidechains, and data synchronization within light wallets. It is part of the Basho phase.
A unique token stored on a blockchain. NFTs can represent digital ownership rights of real-world assets such as a building or a painting or be an asset in and of themselves. Cardano supports NFTs as native tokens. This means that anyone can mint their own NFTs on Cardano without needing a smart contract, which avoids the error-prone complexity found in Ether...
Native tokens is the feature that lets users create their own tokens on Cardano and these interact with the blockchain just like ada. Tokens can be fungible (interchangeable) or non-fungible (unique), and act as payment units, rewards, trading assets, or information holders. There is no need to create smart contracts to handle native tokens, which removes a ...
A technical infrastructure linking Cardano nodes in one unified system to process transactions. Stake pool operators run Cardano nodes that communicate with other nodes to share information about new blocks and transactions. This includes three processes: each operator runs a block-producing node (the node that verifies and creates a block) and two relay nod...
One of the computer servers or wallets making up the Cardano network. Each node holds a copy of the blockchain ledger and connects with other participants to help maintain network operations. A stake pool operator runs different types of nodes: a block-producing node and several relay nodes that are connected with each other. See Networking.