# What is Cardano ? By [crypto-kingpin.eth](https://paragraph.com/@crypto-kingpin-eth) · 2023-02-24 --- cardano defines itself as an alternative to ethereum. it’s mainnet went live in 2017 and it has the 7th biggest market cap among all the coins ### What is special about cardano? cardano uses a novel proof-of-stake consensus mechanism called ”**ouroboros**” which allows cardano to process around 500 transactions per second, this number for BTC is 7. cardano isn’t the fastest blockchain but it is one of the most decentralized, with 3200 staking pools. this decentralization comes from a unique feature of cardano which is called “**k** **parameter**“, that decreases the staking reward if too much ada is being staked in one pool, and this method increases the number of pools which makes the whole network more secure also it is important to note that more than **70%** of all the ada in circulation is being **staked**, the main reason for this is because there is **no lock-up period** and **no slashing** risk involved. ### Why Cardano Gets too Much Criticism? 1. **a lot of** cardano projects are **not** open-source. the reason is the difficulty of writing smart contracts with **haskell** language. projects are afraid that the competitor projects can steal their solution, and this keeps the community from growing faster. according to [cardanocrowd.com](https://cardanocrowd.com/) there are only **73** dapps in cardano network and most of them are **no-name** dapps 2. this is very **upvoted** quote from cardano’s **reddit** page: “I love Cardano, I think it's a great project, but Charles presents himself as arrogant and regularly shit-talks other crypto projects touting how much better Cardano is than all of them. He seems like he'd be a nightmare to do business with. It's like having a great company with a dog-shit CEO” 3. cardano doesn’t have strong connections with ecosystems of other smart-contract blockchains, which makes cardano the lone wolf of the crypto --- *Originally published on [crypto-kingpin.eth](https://paragraph.com/@crypto-kingpin-eth/what-is-cardano)*