Cardano Foundation

Cardano is a public, permissionless layer 1 blockchain made of open-source, patent-free protocols for value transfer, identity and governance. The network is named after Gerolamo Cardano, an Italian physician and mathematician of the 16th century, and its currency ada after Ada Lovelace. One ada divides into one million lovelaces, which is the smallest unit of the currency.

Consensus runs on Ouroboros Praos, a proof-of-stake protocol that secretly draws a stake pool as leader for each slot to build the next block. Ada holders delegate their stake to a pool without transferring their ada, which is how staking works on Cardano. The Foundation counts more than 3,000 operators securing the network and nine years of uptime without interruption.

Two extensions of Ouroboros are in development: Leios adds larger endorser blocks for higher throughput, and Peras lets stake pool committees vote on recent blocks so that transactions settle in about two minutes. Cardano also uses the extended UTXO model, in which each transaction output can carry data and script logic. Because validation depends only on the outputs a transaction spends, its fee and its result are known before submission, and this also holds for smart contracts on Cardano.

Holders of ada decide on chain about treasury withdrawals, parameter changes and other governance actions of the network. Each governance action needs approval from at least two of three groups: Delegated Representatives (DReps), stake pool operators and the Constitutional Committee. The Cardano Foundation sat on the Interim Constitutional Committee from September 2024 to September 2025.

The Foundation is itself a registered DRep and votes according to the ethos and principles it published under the name Our Cardano. To spread voting power, it has delegated more than 300 million ada to over 15 community DReps in categories for builders, adoption and operations. These delegations come without any expectation about how the DReps vote, and the Foundation reviews them against participation and published voting rationales.

Reeve writes accounting events and financial information to the Cardano blockchain as a tamper-proof ledger that connects to existing ERP systems. The Foundation published its own 2025 activity and financial report on chain with Reeve, and for the first time Grant Thornton Switzerland attested the financial statements on chain. Each accounting transaction recorded with Reeve stays traceable and auditable on the public ledger.

Veridian is a digital identity platform with a mobile wallet for Android and iOS, built on KERI decentralized identifiers and ACDC credentials. Companies use it to verify people and organizations without handing their credentials to a central provider, and the Foundation designed it with post-quantum security in mind. Cardano Wallet gives applications an HTTP API and a command-line interface to send, receive and manage ada and other native assets.

For banks and fintechs, the Foundation points to the deterministic fees and finality within seconds of Cardano. Institutions can build KYC and AML rules into the asset itself, and bonds, funds, receivables and other real-world assets can be issued, transferred, settled and reported on one auditable ledger. According to the Foundation, more than 11 million assets already live on the Cardano blockchain.

On regulation, the Foundation offers a free white paper template for crypto-assets under the European MiCA regulation and is a member of the blockchain association INATBA. It has also answered public consultations of the British FCA on staking and a Swiss consultation on stablecoin rules in the Financial Institutions Act.

The Cardano Foundation promotes Cardano as public infrastructure for companies and public institutions and advises them from the first conversation to the integration. In the Cardano Accelerator Program, eight startup teams receive ten weeks of coaching and contributions of CHF 10,000 each. The Foundation gives no grants and refers funding requests to Project Catalyst, the community fund of Cardano.

The registered office of the Cardano Foundation is at Dammstrasse 16, 6300 Zug, Switzerland, under the legal name Cardano Stiftung. The Foundation is one of the blockchain organizations in the Swiss Crypto Valley. Press inquiries go to the address press@cardanofoundation.org, and other questions go through the contact form of the Foundation.

Frederik Gregaard is chief executive officer and brings more than twenty years of leadership experience, including his time at PwC. Andreas Pletscher, the chief operating officer, worked before at PwC Switzerland, Bank Vontobel and IBM. Nicolas Jacquemart leads legal and policy work as chief legal officer and previously worked at the Swiss Financial Market Supervisory Authority FINMA. Stephen Wood is chief financial officer of the executive team and was finance director at Copper before.

The Cardano Academy offers online courses for companies, governments, educators and individuals, and more than 10,000 learners have used it so far. The Cardano Blockchain Certified Associate (CBCA) course covers blockchain basics and the architecture of Cardano in four modules, while the Cardano Blockchain Certified Professional (CBCP) ends with a proctored exam. Certificates and digital badges are issued through Pearson VUE and Credly, and one course shows how to direct an AI coding agent on Cardano.

Since March 2026, customers in Switzerland can pay with ada at 137 SPAR stores across the country. DFX.swiss processes the payments with the Open Crypto Pay standard directly from the wallet of the customer, without a central intermediary. The Foundation reports that retailers pay nearly two-thirds less in transaction fees than with traditional payment providers.