What better way to welcome in the new year and my new Steemit acccount than with a post about my favorite cryptocurrency - Cardano!

About a week ago I was lucky enough to meet and visit with the founder of Cardano, Charles Hoskinson.

He gave a stimulating talk in the Boston Cambridge area about the future of blockchain technology and third generation blockchains.

The audio of that talk is here: https://medium.com/g20-ventures/hoskinson-talks-third-gen-blockchain-1cfa54feea46

The video is here:

You can follow Charles on Twitter here: https://twitter.com/IOHK_Charles

Transparency.

It's something you can't take for granted in today's day and age.

Cardano is hands down the most transparent blockchain project I've seen.

Steemit to me represents a community of transparency as well.

I was amazed when I first saw that you can see exactly how much Steem power another user has and the value of their Steem.

The future of cryptocurrency will be about projects that are transparent and honest.

Charles Hoskinson is supremely aware of this.

"Cryptocurrencies are unique. They're not people. They're mirrors that show us who we really are - not who we want to be but who we are. "

If you're new to Cardano then you might not know that Charles was talking about Metadata here.

That's the story behind every transaction we make.

Think of it was the who, what, when, where, why and how.

It turns out that the legacy financial institutions like Morgan Stanley, Wells Fargo and Goldman Sachs are rich in Metadata.

But fundamentally this Metadata is ultra subjective from the perspective of commerce today.

Cryptocurrencies are magical because they take this subjectivity - the story behind every transaction - and introduce transparency.

"Suddenly, what we have been able to do is invent a natural law for commerce. Protocols. [They] are who they are, they don't change "

Transparency.

The question then becomes "how do you integrate the legacy financial system to this new system of protocols?"

Regulation.

Charles was one of the first in the cryptocurrency community to understand the natural necessity of regulation for mass adoption of blockchain technology.

IOHK, the company that Charles Hoskinson created with his friend and fellow Ethereum defector (Charles was intimately involved with Ethereum's Vitalik Buterin during the earliest days of Ethereum) Jeremy Wood, is responsible for the development of Cardano.

IOHK stands for Input Output Hong Kong and was founded in 2015 and while committing to the Cardano Project until 2020, defines itself much more broadly as "a technology company committed to using peer-to-peer innovations to provide financial services to the three billion people who don't have them."

https://iohk.io/

On their site you'll find a roadmap with every milestone planned for Cardano, links to academic papers proving the proofs of Cardano's "provably secure protocol Orouboros" and much more.

Transparency.

That's the future, and Charles Hoskinson and company are leading the way forward towards a more transparent cryptocurrency community where Steemit, if it holds true to its founding principles, will rightly have a place at the table.

Love it. Make it. Steemit.