Cardano ($ADA) was founded in 2015 by Charles Hoskinson — a co-founder of Ethereum, who decided to create a next-generation blockchain. The idea was ambitious: to combine decentralization, scalability, and scientific rigor.

The project is named after Gerolamo Cardano — an Italian mathematician of the Renaissance. And the token $ADA — in honor of Ada Lovelace, the first programmer in history.

Cardano became the first blockchain developed based on academic research, with formal code verifications and its own consensus algorithm Ouroboros.