A General Overview of Ardor (ARDR)

What is Ardor?

Ardor positions itself as a blockchain-as-a-Service (BaaS) platform for individuals and other entities. Blockchain technology has been receiving interest from all over the world in recent years. However, most of this enthusiasm is killed by its inability to develop custom solutions that meet the demands of users.

Users find that the BaaS model makes things easier as it addresses most of the challenges they might be facing. Ardor is challenging the competition of the most popular BaaS platforms such as Microsoft by taking a unique approach with regards technical elements.

Ardors unique parent-child interface relieves individuals and corporations of the hard work and technical challenges needed to utilize BaaS.

As the parent chain, Ardor takes care of all security challenges, patches, and upgrades. The Ardor child chain enables companies to build their own services. These child chains, however, enjoy the benefits of security updates and other benefits that are found on the Ardor parent chain.

In the blockchain world, a lot is being talked about with regards the concept of side chains and this explains why Ardor is getting all the attention. Not only is Ardor as a BaaS designed to offer advanced security features, it was also designed to be energy efficient. Compared to the other players in the market, this is a significant advantage.

BaaS requires a certain form of energy to run, but not anything like the energy needed to mine cryptocurrency. Ardor uses less energy because it adopts a Proof of Stake method over Proof of Work.

Also, Ardor does not hog resources. Users don’t need to spend money on getting expensive hardware or paying high electricity bills in order to run the BaaS platform. This is because consensus in Ardor happens through a distributed system that effectively eliminates mining competition.

History of Ardor

Ardor was launched on January 1, 2018 by its founding company Jelurida via a crowdsale of its first child chain, IGNIS. Jelurida was able to get $15 million. Since IGNIS is not restricted and is decentralized with features from the NXT blockchain, all the child nodes created will also have these features on them.

Ardor is NXT’s development software, which eliminates problems regarding inflating, scalability and versatility of blocks. Launched in 2013, NXT is the first blockchain to use a Proof of Stake (PoS) consensus mechanism.

NXT is built on JAVA and since its launch, has never experienced any downtime. Three years before Ardor was launched, NXT was being used to build multiple industry solutions such as data clouds, account controls, digital goods stores, monetary systems, voting systems, and more.

All these solutions are now present on all child chains of Ardor. The Ardor whitepaper explains all the features of both the Ardor and NXT platforms. It provides a comparative study of the platforms to enable the reader to understand them better.

What Problem Does Ardor Solve?

Ardor is build on the NXT platform. NXT was an attempt to expand blockchain technology towards value transfer. However, there were three main challenges facing the development of NXT, which Ardor was designed to solve. These problems were:

• Single token use
• Blockchain bloat
• Cloning concerns

Single token use: All the platform’s features must use NXT, and this includes the block generation process, transfer of value, paying transaction fees, pricing asset exchange orders, prices of items traded in the marketplace, and asset transfer over the blockchain.

The problem this presents is that developers find it difficult to design apps that use the blockchain transparently. Users should not be forced by the system to use NXT for transactions. Besides that, currency and asset values should not be forcefully fixed to NXT.

Cloning concerns: Cloning a blockchain is very easy. Maintenance is the problem most organizations encounter. The reason organizations create clones is to help obtain custom blockchain networks that meet their specific needs, complete with a token. Clones are separate blockchains that run modified versions of the blockchain software, but have no link between the original and the new blockchain.

While this might work, there are however concerns for small or medium-sized companies. A cloned blockchain doesn’t offer the kind of security that parent blockchains offer. It lags behind in security updates and future developments, and this is worse so if someone not well versed in NXT software implements it.

Blockchain bloat: Blockchain bloat is one major challenges most blockchains have. Blockchain bloat is a situation were all nodes have to carry out storage and reprocessing of transactions. NXT suffers this same issue as well. Upon creation of nodes, they have to reprocess data as soon as they are downloaded from the blockchain. This problem is a result of the lack of trustworthiness of some blockchain platforms.

The problem with bloating is that it can create a bottleneck and overload the system with increase in blockchain size. As more users come on board, there is a greater need to push transactions per second and the blockchain ultimately suffers under this load. Ardor solves the problem of bloating by allowing true scalability to make the blockchain platform future proof.

Jelurida, The Team Behind Ardor, NXT, and IGNIS

Jelurida is the company behind Ardor, NXT, and IGNIS. The Jelurida team is one of the most experienced blockchain development teams, with their origin dating back to the launch of NXT in 2013

The team is made up of experienced and respected developers with more than four years experience creating and maintaining blockchain code. Additionally, a co-founder of the team has a legal background and she manages the legal implications of open-source architecture and applications on the blockchain.

Competitors

Ardor’s predecessor, NXT, inspired the creation of the New Economy Movement, NEM. There are obvious similarities in application as well. Lisk and Aelf are other competitors that use child or side chains, although these two projects both use the Delegated Proof of Stake protocol instead of regular Proof of Stake.

Where to Buy and Store ARDR

Ardor can be bought on any of the major crypto exchanges such as Binance, Huobi, and Bittrex. It can be bought with fiat on Changelly.

Since Ardor is a NextCoin asset, the ARDR tokens can be stored in NXTWallet. If it is set, its address will be the one receiving coins. Ardor, however, offers its own wallet that can be integrated with Android, Windows and Apple operating systems. This wallet can be used to store other project’s tokens on Ardor’s child chains.

Mining

Ardor cannot be mined. Like its parent platform NXT, the site works by a Proof of Stake model and this means that all coins are issued from the beginning of the project and there are no plans to release more.