Introduction to Ardor

What is Ardor?

Ardor is a scalable, open source, blockchain-as-a-service platform that allows businesses and organisations to use blockchain technology without the need to develop their own solution. The tools provided work out of the box to allow for the creation of new cryptocurrencies, e-commerce systems, dividend payments, voting and much more.

What problem does it solve?

The term blockchain bloat refers to when the number of transactions grows too large and the blockchain becomes difficult to store or download. Though seemingly unimportant, bloat can lead an entire network to severe performance issues and deter potential new nodes from entering the network.

Ardor solves the bloat problem by splitting the blockchain into a parent and child architecture, where a single parent chain takes care of the security and proof of stake while the child chains record operational transactions like votes or asset transfers. This unique feature can reduce recorded transactions by a factor of 1:100.

Ardor history

Amidst the rush of multiple clones of Bitcoin being created in 2013, Nxt was introduced as a second-generation cryptocurrency, expanding the use of blockchain beyond supporting a currency and a simple transfer of value. Nxt is the first blockchain protocol to use an entirely Proof-of-Stake instead of Proof-of-Work consensus mechanism, so its power consumption and hardware requirements are very low.

Ever since the launch, the platform has been running securely with 100% uptime and has experienced no systematic failure. Actively used in production and in a state of constant development, the Nxt platform has been able to stand the test of time due to its advanced architecture and solid design. Being open source, it has also been subjected to multiple code reviews by independent experts from various backgrounds.

Ardor vs other blockchains

Ardor uses proof of stake, flexible transaction types and prunable transactions.(...)

This provides a simple and scalable platform for developing decentralized applications. Some use cases will still require Ethereum ultimate flexibility but many use cases will map nicely into the APIs that Ardor provides out of the box.

For a more in-depth comparison, please see our Ardor vs other blockchains section.

Use cases

Ardor offers a main chain that handles blockchain security and decentralization plus customizable child chains that come ready to use, right out of the box, for various business applications.

Payments Voting

Please check my simple tree example.

Getting started

• Client installation
• Getting your first ARDR
  • Faucet
  • Exchanges
• Your first transaction
• Next steps