Cardano – An open-sourced, public blockchain with integrated smart contracts

I'm in love with this project. It touches a bunch of things that I love in computer science: cryptography (quantum safe cryptography in particular), distributed systems (blockchain, PoS), [Pure] Functional Programming (Haskell, Rust to some extent), OSI and TCP/IP new-age alternative (RINA), a peer-reviewed research oriented development cycle etc etc.

It certainly has its flaws though. The roadmap moves really, really slowly (blame the peer-reviews I guess). I'm not saying it doesn't move at all, but we're 1 year into the project and it still didn't bootstrap out of the 3-party centralized consensus that it runs currently, i.e., we still haven't seen the Ouroboros consensus protocol in action at scale. Also, the most recent Cardano Foundation fiasco does not help, and it shows some mismanagement or miscalculation happened in the conception of the whole development/support ecosystem.

Nonetheless, it is a very exciting project and it is one of the few crypto-craze related projects that I think will prevail after all the dust settles.