I'm really wondering what Cardano is really about, and how a three billion market capitalization is justified. I mean yeah, sure the fact that it's just another smart contract platform is clear, but what does it offer than NEO or ETH doesn't? The only thing I've read about the project is that it's build with scientists and academic.. which is nothing new. There are many great projects that have smart teams and that shouldn't be enough to justify such valuation. These NEO's and Cardano's and all these stuff kinda remind me of Bitcoin Gold, Silver, Diamond etc. They are all just copies of Ethereum and each of them is trying to offer the same thing but with some "adjustments". But hey, at least they are not naming their projects Ethereum Gold, or Ethereum Diamond.. I'll have to give them that.
For starters, if you have read this
https://whycardano.com/ you'll know why. As for smart contract, that will reside on its CL (computation layer). Their platform is based on haskell. They'll be using k framework for VM, if you're familiar with it. It support many languages such as C, C++, Java, Javascript etc and they are integrating more languages, the goal is to have many languages as possible. That lowers the barrier of entry to development. In this way, as a dev you don't have to learn new language as you can code on what you're comfortable with. Plus, you can choose where to deploy your contract to any blockchain that support interoperability with cardano., currenctly they're working with eth classic. When comparing it to eth, eth smart contract is convoluted into one layer hence you have experience those bottlenecks recently. Thus, Cardano is built in layers to accommodate future updates and to prevent contentious hardforks that may destroy the community. And I don't think any other blockchain project has a process involving academic peer-review and iteration with mainstream cryptographers before pushing the code into production which separate Cardano with everyone else.