Spicy Ouroboros

Spicy Ouroboros in the nood.

The ouroboros is an ancient symbol depicting a serpent or dragon eating its own tail. Originating in ancient Egyptian iconography, the ouroboros entered Western tradition via Greek magical tradition and was adopted as a symbol in Gnosticism and Hermeticism and most notably in alchemy.

In Cardano, Ouroboros is an environmentally sustainable, verifiably secure proof-of-stake protocol with rigorous security guarantees.

Ouroboros applies cryptography, combinatorics, and mathematical game theory to guarantee the protocol’s integrity, longevity, and performance, and that of the distributed networks that depend upon it.

Spicy Gerolamo

Spicy Gerolamo in the nood.

Gerolamo Cardano (1501–1576) was an Italian polymath, whose interests and proficiencies ranged through those of mathematician, physician, biologist, physicist, chemist, astrologer, astronomer, philosopher, writer, and gambler. He was one of the most influential mathematicians of the Renaissance, and was one of the key figures in the foundation of probability and the earliest introducer of the binomial coefficients and the binomial theorem in the Western world. He wrote more than 200 works on science.

“For a cryptocurrency project that is looking to utilize scientific methods based on mathematical proofs and game theory to build highly flexible and interoperable money, I think this choice seems to match perfectly.” - C. Jerome

Spicy Hydra

Spicy Hydra in the nood.

Hydra, also called the Lernean Hydra, in Greek legend, the offspring of Typhon and Echidna. It is a gigantic water-snake-like monster with multiple heads, one of which was immortal. Anyone who attempted to behead the Hydra found that as soon as one head was cut off, two more heads would emerge from the fresh wound.

Hydra is a key layer 2 solution to further improve Cardano's scalability layering a new protocol on top of the existing layer 1 blockchain. Hydra seeks to maximize throughput, minimize latency, incur low-to-no costs, and greatly reduce storage requirements.

For each node of Cardano, a “Hydra Head” can be opened, adding nodes to the network in a process called Horizontal Scaling.

Spicy Daedalus

Spicy Daedalus in the nood.

In Greek mythology, Daedalus was a skillful architect and craftsman, seen as a symbol of wisdom, knowledge and power. He is the father of Icarus, the uncle of Perdix, and possibly also the father of Iapyx.

In Cardano, the official wallet was named after Daedalus, with a picture of a Minotaur and a labyrinth on its head is used as its logo, referring to the complex cryptographic protocols used.

Daedalus is a full node wallet. This means that, unlike light wallets, Daedalus downloads a full copy of the Cardano blockchain and independently validates every transaction in its history. In this way, users get maximum security and completely trustless operation, without centrally hosted 3rd party servers.

Spicy Icarus

Spicy Icarus in the nood.

Icarus was the son of Daedalus. Icarus and Daedalus attempt to escape from Crete with wings Daedalus constructed from feathers and wax. Daedalus warns Icarus first of complacency and then of hubris, instructing him to fly neither too low nor too high, lest the sea's dampness clog his wings or the sun melt them. Icarus ignores Daedalus and flies too close to the sun, causing the wax in his wings to melt. He tumbles out of the sky, falls into the sea, and drowns. The myth helped coin the idiom, "don't fly too close to the sun".

Icarus is reference implementation for a lightweight wallet developed by IOHK. This code base has been used as a point of reference to enable developers to create their own secure light and mobile wallets for Cardano. Most notably, Icarus was utilized by Emurgo to develop Yoroi (Japanese for ‘armor’), a Chrome-based light wallet.

Icarus is a fully open-source code base and was the first in a range of open-source initiatives to provide developers with a suite of tools for Cardano.

Spicy Charles

Spicy Charles in the nood.

Charles Hoskinson is the founder of Cardano and co-founder of Ethereum.

Cardano is the largest cryptocurrency to use a proof-of-stake blockchain, which is a greener alternative to proof-of-work protocols.

In 2017, Hoskinson and IOHK sponsored research labs focusing on blockchain technology at the University of Edinburgh and the Tokyo Institute of Technology.

In 2020, Hoskinson opened a blockchain research project at the University of Wyoming.

In 2021, Hoskinson announced a $20M gift to Carnegie Mellon University to create the Hoskinson Center for Formal Mathematics, which is dedicated to the intersection of science, mathematics, philosophy and logic.