Cardano’s primary purpose is to facilitate transactions with its native cryptocurrency,ADA, and empower developers to build applications on its’ scalable and sustainable network.
The Cardano blockchain is split into two layers:
- The Cardano Settlement Layer (CSL) facilitates and records all ADA transactions.
- The Cardano Computation Layer (CCL) contains the smart contract logic, which determines the rules and conditions for each transaction.
Cardano uses what is known as Ouroboros, a PoS algorithm that creates blocks and validates transactions on the blockchain.This network is divided into epochs and slots, where epochs represent the overarching timeframes and slots represent 20-second intervals.
In every slot, a leader is randomly picked to add the next block onto the blockchain, and after that, the next slot leader is picked.
There are three types of nodes that operate Cardano:
- Edge - used to create cryptocurrency transactions.
- mCore – allows you to stake ADA and participate in the distributed governance.
- Relay - facilitates data transfers between mCore and the public internet.