The simplest answer is that Cardano is an open-source, decentralized smart-contract and blockchain platform established in 2017. It takes its name from a great polymath Gerolamo Cardano which is based on proof-of-stake protocol. The Cardano token is called Ada (named after the probably first programmer in the history of human kind: Ada Lovelace).
The project founder is Charles Hoskinson. In the past he was a co-founder of Ethereum. Because of the dispute between him and Vitalik Buterin, he decided to start his own blockchain. As you may have guessed, this was the birth of Cardano. This decision was made by the fact Charles wanted to capitalize on Ethereum, which wasn’t accepted by Vitalik. In this way Ethereum is non-profit organization till this very day.
IOHK stands for “Input Output Honk Kong” and it is a research and engineering company established by Charles Hoskinson and Jeremy Wood in 2015. The company is officially responsible for creating Cardano. Besides that, the other projects of IOHK are Daedalus, Atala PRISM and Mantis. The first one is the most connected to Cardano. What is Daedalus? It’s simply a wallet, where you can keep and stake your ADA coins.
As I mentioned before, Cardano is based on proof-of-stake protocol. This means, that any owner of Ada coins can stake them and get money for it. The average APY is about 5%. The entire process of staking is pretty easy for the staker. To do this, you only have to download Daedalus, install it, send your Ada coins to the wallet, choose the pool you want to stake on and that’s all. Every five days you will get some Ada coins. Why every five days? This is how long one Cardano epoch (cycle) takes.
Every ADA owner is entitled to participate in the process of governance. The more coins you have the more the power decision you get in regards to Cardano development. IOHK created a special mobile application for it. The application – Catalyst Voting works with Android and iOS.
Ethereum is known for its high gas fee and instability, when it comes to this aspect, Cardano is a totally different story. Gas fees are much lower. That’s why it encourages little investors to participate and invest in projects based on Cardano blockchain. This wouldn’t be possible with Ethereum, because the difference between ADA and ETH price of the gas fee can reach into thousands of percent.
Another difference is the programming language Cardano is written in which is Plutus, that’s the name of the language that provides a very high level of security. The down side of Plutus is the complexity. Creating code in this language is much harder, than in Solidity on which Ethereum is based on.
The huge advantage of Cardano is the ability of handling a huge number of transactions and be very energy-efficient the same time. In the future Cardano may process 1 million transactions per second which is extremally fast.