Research
Cardano relevant research papers and specifications.
Foundation
Byron
A period dedicated to building a foundational federated network that enabled the purchase and sale of ada. The network ran the proof-of-stake Ouroboros consensus protocol.
Papers
Decentralization
Shelley
A period of growth and development occurred for the network, focusing on ensuring greater decentralization. This phase led to enhanced security and a more robust environment, following the transition where the majority of nodes became operated by network participants.
Papers
- Ouroboros Praos: An adaptively-secure, semi-synchronous proof-of-stake blockchain
- Ouroboros Genesis: Composable Proof-of-Stake Blockchains with Dynamic Availability
- Stake-Bleeding Attacks on Proof-of-Stake Blockchains
- Reward Sharing Schemes for Stake Pools
- Account Management in Proof of Stake Ledgers
- Flexible Formality: Practical Experience with Agile Formal Methods
- Coalition-Safe Equilibria with Virtual Payoffs
Smart Contracts
Goguen
The Goguen era introduced smart-contract functionality, enabling the construction of decentralized applications while supporting multifunctional assets, fungible, and non-fungible token standards.
Papers
- The Extended UTXO Model
- UTXOma: UTXO with Multi-Asset Support
- Native Custom Tokens in the Extended UTXO Model
- Functional Blockchain Contracts
- Scripting Smart Contracts for Distributed Ledger Technology
- Marlowe: financial contracts on blockchain
- Marlowe: implementing and analysing financial contracts on blockchain
- Unraveling recursion: compiling an IR with recursion to System F
- System F in Agda, for fun and profit
- Translation Certification for Smart Contracts
Scaling
Basho
An era of optimization, improving the scalability and interoperability of the network. Enhancing the network performance, Basho will introduce sidechains, new blockchains, interoperable with the main Cardano chain, with immense potential to extend the network’s capabilities.
Papers
Governance
Voltaire
The development era is currently enabling the Cardano network to become a self-sustaining system. Voltaire is introducing a voting and treasury system that allows network participants to use their stake and voting rights to influence the future development of the blockchain.