About

This documentation is intended to guide you through your journey of developing smart contracts on Cardano with Plutus. The insights shared here are based on the work done by the Gimbalabs PPBL team and hopefully it will be helpful to you. This documentation is meant to be living documents and will evolve.

Overview of Cardano

Cardano is a third generation blockchain ecosystem. What makes Cardano quite unique is that it is developed from the ground up with original research backed by peer reviewed whitepapers. Back in 2017, Charles Hoskinson did a whiteboard session about Cardano wherein he explained what are the challenges Cardano intends to solve. It is definitely a recommended watch. You can find the video at the IOHK YouTube channel: Cardano whiteboard - Overview with Charles Hoskinson

The original essay from 2017 Charles Hoskinson outlining the background, philosophy and inspiration behind the Cardano blockchain can be found here.

Suggested reading for theoreticl understanding

Suggested reading for theoretical understanding In case you would like to gain a theoretical understanding on the science and maths behind Cardano the following resource amongst many others will help.

  1. Public key cryptography
  2. Consensus and Byzantine fault
  3. Scripting smart contracts for distributed ledger technology
  4. The eUTXO model
  5. Blog about the deterministic nature of Cardano’s eUTXO model and its advantages by Polina Vinogradova . Part 1 and Part 2.
  6. Proof of Stake
  7. Ouroboros protocol

Suggested sources for learning Haskell

  1. Learn You a Haskell guide available online as well as in print.
  2. If you would like to take up a course to learn Haskell, typeclasses.com is one which we found to be a good option.