Cardano SL (or Cardano Settlement Layer) is a cryptographic currency designed and developed by IOHK in conjunction with the University of Edinburgh, the University of Athens and the University of Connecticut. Cardano SL is based on the Haskell implementation of the white paper "Ouroboros: A Provably Secure Proof-of-Stake Blockchain Protocol" by Aggelos Kiayias, Alexander Russell, Bernardo David and Roman Oliynykov.
You can think of Cardano SL as Bitcoin reimagined with a freedom to fix Bitcoin’s design flaws. Please read "What Makes Cardano SL Special?" for more info about similarities and differences between Cardano SL and Bitcoin.
Cardano SL is called a "Layer" for a reason. It is the first component of the Cardano Platform. Eventually, it will be expanded with a Control Layer, serving as a trusted computation framework to evaluate a special kind of proofs to ensure that a certain computation was carried out correctly. In gaming and gambling, such systems are used for verifying honesty of random number generation and game outcomes. Accompanied with side chains, it will make possible to accomplish such tasks as provably fair distribution of winnings in games. The application of Control Layer lies well beyond gaming and gambling. Identity management, credit system and more will be a part of Cardano Platform. We are also aiming to evolve Daedalus, the Cardano SL wallet application, into a universal cryptocurrency wallet featuring automated cryptocurrency trading and cryptocurrency-to-fiat transactions.
Supported platforms are Windows, macOS and Linux. There are installers for Windows and macOS, which include a main node and Daedalus wallet.
Linux installer is going to be released soon. For now, to get Cardano SL on Linux, please refer to the Bulding Cardano SL and Daedalus from Source chapter.
Cardano SL consists of a collection of binaries that constitute the backend, a PureScript API for the Electron-based wallet, and the Electron-based wallet called “Daedalus”.
The source code for both Cardano SL and Daedalus Bridge can be obtained from the official repository.
The Haskell Tool Stack is required to build Cardano SL. Furthermore, we strongly suggest using Nix package manager to get the correct dependencies for building Cardano SL. It will fetch the correct openssl version, but won't override the system-installed version. The following commands assume that you already has stack and nix-* programs.
As a result of building Cardano SL, you will get a set of components (binary files). This set includes the main node for Cardano SL network and various helper tools. Please read this page of the documentation for technical details.
Thank you for considering to help out with the source code! We welcome contributions from anyone, and are grateful for even the smallest of fixes!
If you'd like to contribute to Cardano SL, please fork this repository, fix, commit and send a pull request for the maintainers to review and merge into the main code base.
Please make sure your contributions adhere to our coding guidelines:
- Code must adhere to the Serokell Haskell Style Guide.
- Code must be documented with Haddock.
- Pull requests need to be based on and opened against the
masterbranch.
Please note that this project uses a custom prelude Universum instead of the default one.
Cardano SL is released under the terms of the MIT license. Please see LICENSE for more information.