Feature image by KaizenCrypto
More & more people around the world discover Cardano daily. Yet many can find the onboarding challenging. To help newcomers understand the basics of the Cardano blockchain, we’re sharing a series of Welcome To Cardano series.
Disclaimer: Nothing in these threads is intended to be professional advice, including, without limitation, financial, investment, legal, or tax advice. IO Global is not responsible for your use of or reliance on any information in these threads.
This first post in IOG’s Welcome To Cardano series is based on the recent onboarding guide. This article provides links & clear guidelines on how to get started with Cardano: Your Cardano Onboarding Guide
Getting started
To understand what Cardano is, you first need to understand what blockchain and other key concepts mean.
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Learn how a blockchain is validated and secured through consensus
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Understand the basics of Cardano’s consensus protocol – proof of stake
Once you’ve got that down, begin learning more about ada and Cardano through the comprehensive list of FAQs on Essential Cardano FAQs
Getting involved
To put your knowledge into practice, you need the right tools.
Delegating on Cardano
To help maintain the blockchain, you can delegate your ada to one of Cardano’s many stake pools. Here are useful articles to help you delegate:
Voting and decentralized governance
You can contribute to Cardano’s long-term sustainability and participate in its ecosystem’s growth through Project Catalyst – the world’s most accessible and impactful innovation engine. Through Project Catalyst, ada holders can vote for promising projects to get funding from the decentralized governance treasury.
You can get involved as an innovator, voter, commenter, proposer, proposal reviewer, community advisor, or mentor.
Understanding DeFi:
One major niche of smart contract blockchains is decentralized finance (DeFi). Learn about DeFi on Cardano by:
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CardanoCube: Discovering the many Cardano DeFi projects.
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CardanoBuilt: Explore its vast NFT universe. Cardano has non-fungible tokens (NFTs).
Cardano also has smart contracts that automatically execute transactions on DApps when predetermined conditions are met. There are two ways to create smart contracts on Cardano:
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Plutus: a set of programming tools for developers.
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Marlowe: a low code domain-specific language designed specifically for writing financial contracts.
Digital identity is key to providing the unbanked with the DeFi & RealFi tools they need to thrive financially & bridge the wide TradFi gap between them & the banked.
- https://atalaprism.io/app is the decentralized identity solution on Cardano.
Exploring educational resources:
There’s so much more to learn. Visit essentialcardano.io to discover all things Cardano. Essential Cardano is your definitive community-driven guide to the blockchain & its ecosystem.
This concludes our first thread in our Welcome To Cardano series, meant to help you with your Cardano onboarding process.
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