Cardano ADA

Cardano ADA is present on the following networks: binance_smart_chain, cardano.
Binance Smart Chain (BSC) uses a hybrid consensus mechanism called Proof of Staked Authority (PoSA), which combines elements of Delegated Proof of Stake (DPoS) and Proof of Authority (PoA). This method ensures fast block times and low fees while maintaining a level of decentralization and security. Core Components 1. Validators (so-called “Cabinet Members”): Validators on BSC are responsible for producing new blocks, validating transactions, and maintaining the network’s security. To become a validator, an entity must stake a significant amount of BNB (Binance Coin). Validators are selected through staking and voting by token holders. There are 21 active validators at any given time, rotating to ensure decentralization and security. 2. Delegators: Token holders who do not wish to run validator nodes can delegate their BNB tokens to validators. This delegation helps validators increase their stake and improves their chances of being selected to produce blocks. Delegators earn a share of the rewards that validators receive, incentivizing broad participation in network security. 3. Candidates: Candidates are nodes that have staked the required amount of BNB and are in the pool waiting to become validators. They are essentially potential validators who are not currently active but can be elected to the validator set through community voting. Candidates play a crucial role in ensuring there is always a sufficient pool of nodes ready to take on validation tasks, thus maintaining network resilience and decentralization. Consensus Process 4. Validator Selection: Validators are chosen based on the amount of BNB staked and votes received from delegators. The more BNB staked and votes received, the higher the chance of being selected to validate transactions and produce new blocks. The selection process involves both the current validators and the pool of candidates, ensuring a dynamic and secure rotation of nodes. 5. Block Production: The selected validators take turns producing blocks in a PoA-like manner, ensuring that blocks are generated quickly and efficiently. Validators validate transactions, add them to new blocks, and broadcast these blocks to the network. 6. Transaction Finality: BSC achieves fast block times of around 3 seconds and quick transaction finality. This is achieved through the efficient PoSA mechanism that allows validators to rapidly reach consensus. Security and Economic Incentives 7. Staking: Validators are required to stake a substantial amount of BNB, which acts as collateral to ensure their honest behavior. This staked amount can be slashed if validators act maliciously. Staking incentivizes validators to act in the network's best interest to avoid losing their staked BNB. 8. Delegation and Rewards: Delegators earn rewards proportional to their stake in validators. This incentivizes them to choose reliable validators and participate in the network’s security. Validators and delegators share transaction fees as rewards, which provides continuous economic incentives to maintain network security and performance. 9. Transaction Fees: BSC employs low transaction fees, paid in BNB, making it cost-effective for users. These fees are collected by validators as part of their rewards, further incentivizing them to validate transactions accurately and efficiently.
Cardano uses the Ouroboros consensus mechanism, a Proof of Stake (PoS) protocol designed for scalability, security, and energy efficiency. Here’s a detailed explanation: Core Concepts: 1. Proof of Stake (PoS): Validators (called slot leaders) are selected based on the amount of ADA they have staked, rather than solving complex computational puzzles. Validators propose and validate blocks, which are added to the blockchain. 2. Epochs and Slot Leaders: Cardano divides time into epochs (fixed time periods), each of which is subdivided into slots. Slot leaders are selected for each slot to validate and propose blocks. Slot leaders are chosen randomly based on the amount of ADA staked. More stake increases the probability of being selected. Validators are responsible for confirming transactions during their slot and passing the block to the next slot leader. 3. Delegation and Staking Pools: ADA holders can delegate their tokens to staking pools, which increases the pool’s chances of being selected to validate a block. The pool operator and delegators share the rewards based on their stakes. This system ensures that participants who do not want to operate a full validator node can still earn rewards and contribute to network security by supporting trusted staking pools. 4. Security and Adversary Resistance: Ouroboros ensures security even in the presence of potential attacks. It assumes that adversaries may attempt to propagate alternative chains or send arbitrary messages. The protocol is secure as long as more than 51% of the staked ADA is controlled by honest participants. Settlement Delay: To protect against adversarial attacks, the new slot leader must consider the last few blocks as transient. Only the blocks preceding these are treated as finalized, ensuring that chain finality is secure against manipulation attempts. This mechanism also allows participants to temporarily go offline and resynchronize as long as they are not disconnected for more than the settlement delay period. 5. Chain Selection: Cardano's nodes adopt the longest valid chain rule: each node stores a local copy of the blockchain and replaces it with any discovered valid, longer chain. This ensures that all nodes eventually converge on a single version of the blockchain, maintaining network consistency.

Cardano ADA is present on the following networks: binance_smart_chain, cardano.
Binance Smart Chain (BSC) uses the Proof of Staked Authority (PoSA) consensus mechanism to ensure network security and incentivize participation from validators and delegators. Incentive Mechanisms 1. Validators: Staking Rewards: Validators must stake a significant amount of BNB to participate in the consensus process. They earn rewards in the form of transaction fees and block rewards. Selection Process: Validators are selected based on the amount of BNB staked and the votes received from delegators. The more BNB staked and votes received, the higher the chances of being selected to validate transactions and produce new blocks. 2. Delegators: Delegated Staking: Token holders can delegate their BNB to validators. This delegation increases the validator's total stake and improves their chances of being selected to produce blocks. Shared Rewards: Delegators earn a portion of the rewards that validators receive. This incentivizes token holders to participate in the network’s security and decentralization by choosing reliable validators. 3. Candidates: Pool of Potential Validators: Candidates are nodes that have staked the required amount of BNB and are waiting to become active validators. They ensure that there is always a sufficient pool of nodes ready to take on validation tasks, maintaining network resilience. 4. Economic Security: Slashing: Validators can be penalized for malicious behavior or failure to perform their duties. Penalties include slashing a portion of their staked tokens, ensuring that validators act in the best interest of the network. Opportunity Cost: Staking requires validators and delegators to lock up their BNB tokens, providing an economic incentive to act honestly to avoid losing their staked assets. Fees on the Binance Smart Chain 5. Transaction Fees: Low Fees: BSC is known for its low transaction fees compared to other blockchain networks. These fees are paid in BNB and are essential for maintaining network operations and compensating validators. Dynamic Fee Structure: Transaction fees can vary based on network congestion and the complexity of the transactions. However, BSC ensures that fees remain significantly lower than those on the Ethereum mainnet. 6. Block Rewards: Incentivizing Validators: Validators earn block rewards in addition to transaction fees. These rewards are distributed to validators for their role in maintaining the network and processing transactions. 7. Cross-Chain Fees: Interoperability Costs: BSC supports cross-chain compatibility, allowing assets to be transferred between Binance Chain and Binance Smart Chain. These cross-chain operations incur minimal fees, facilitating seamless asset transfers and improving user experience. 8. Smart Contract Fees: Deployment and Execution Costs: Deploying and interacting with smart contracts on BSC involves paying fees based on the computational resources required. These fees are also paid in BNB and are designed to be cost-effective, encouraging developers to build on the BSC platform.
Cardano uses incentive mechanisms to ensure network security and decentralization through staking rewards, slashing mechanisms, and transaction fees. Incentive Mechanisms to Secure Transactions: 1. Staking Rewards: - Validators, known as slot leaders, secure the network by validating transactions and creating new blocks. To participate, validators must stake ADA, and those with larger stakes are more likely to be selected as slot leaders. - Validators are rewarded with newly minted ADA and transaction fees for successfully producing blocks and validating transactions. - Delegators, who may not wish to run a validator node, can delegate their ADA to staking pools. By doing so, they contribute to the network’s security and earn a share of the rewards earned by the pool. The rewards are distributed proportionally based on the amount of ADA delegated. 2. Slashing Mechanism: - To prevent malicious behavior, Cardano employs a slashing mechanism. Validators who act dishonestly, fail to validate transactions properly, or produce incorrect blocks face penalties that involve the slashing of a portion of their staked ADA. - This provides strong economic incentives for validators to act honestly and ensures the network’s integrity and security. 3. Delegation and Pool Operation: - Staking pools can charge operation fees (a margin on rewards) to maintain their infrastructure. This includes fixed costs set by pool operators. Delegators earn rewards after pool fees are deducted, providing a balanced incentive for both operators and delegators to participate actively. - Rewards are distributed at the end of each epoch, where staking pool performance and participation determine the distribution of ADA rewards to all stakeholders. Applicable Fees: 1. Transaction Fees: - Transaction fees on Cardano are paid in ADA and are generally low. They are calculated based on the size of the transaction and the network’s current demand. These fees are paid to validators for including transactions in new blocks. - The fee formula is: a + b × size, where a is a constant (typically 0.155381 ADA), b is a coefficient related to the transaction size (0.000043946 ADA/byte), and size refers to the transaction size in bytes. This ensures that the fee adapts based on network load and the size of each transaction. 2. Staking Pool Fees: - Staking pool operators charge operational costs and a margin fee, which covers the cost of running and maintaining the staking pool. These fees vary between pools but ensure that operators can continue to provide their services while offering rewards to delegators. - After the operator's fee, the remaining rewards are distributed among the delegators based on the size of their stake.

The energy consumption of this asset is aggregated across multiple components:
For the calculation of energy consumptions, the so called “bottom-up” approach is being used. The nodes are considered to be the central factor for the energy consumption of the network. These assumptions are made on the basis of empirical findings through the use of public information sites, open-source crawlers and crawlers developed in-house. The main determinants for estimating the hardware used within the network are the requirements for operating the client software. The energy consumption of the hardware devices was measured in certified test laboratories. When calculating the energy consumption, we used - if available - the Functionally Fungible Group Digital Token Identifier (FFG DTI) to determine all implementations of the asset of question in scope and we update the mappings regulary, based on data of the Digital Token Identifier Foundation.
To determine the energy consumption of a token, the energy consumption of the network(s) binance_smart_chain is calculated first. Based on the crypto asset's gas consumption per network, the share of the total consumption of the respective network that is assigned to this asset is defined. When calculating the energy consumption, we used - if available - the Functionally Fungible Group Digital Token Identifier (FFG DTI) to determine all implementations of the asset of question in scope and we update the mappings regulary, based on data of the Digital Token Identifier Foundation.

To determine the proportion of renewable energy usage, the locations of the nodes are to be determined using public information sites, open-source crawlers and crawlers developed in-house. If no information is available on the geographic distribution of the nodes, reference networks are used which are comparable in terms of their incentivization structure and consensus mechanism. This geo-information is merged with public information from the European Environment Agency (EEA) and thus determined. The intensity is calculated as the marginal energy cost wrt. one more transaction.

To determine the proportion of renewable energy usage, the locations of the nodes are to be determined using public information sites, open-source crawlers and crawlers developed in-house. If no information is available on the geographic distribution of the nodes, reference networks are used which are comparable in terms of their incentivization structure and consensus mechanism. This geo-information is merged with public information from the European Environment Agency (EEA) and thus determined. The intensity is calculated as the marginal emission wrt. one more transaction.