IOHK | WHY WE ARE BUILDING CARDANO | 06/28/2017    Ethereum adopted the former approach by allowing users to embed subprotocols on the Ethereum blockchain as smart contracts. Cardano supports this feature through the CCL paradigm. But what about custom extensions? An elucidating example would be a cryptocurrency trader. Imagine a decentralized marketplace, called DM, that supports a set of different cryptocurrencies. A trader wants to automate his strategies acting on DM. In a fragmented ecosystem, the trader would have to install dozens of clients for each cryptocurrency and then write custom software to talk to each client in order to coordinate automated trades. If one client updates, then it could break the bespoke software. Furthermore, what if the trader wants to sell the software? Inspired from the web model of extensions, if the interface to various cryptocurrencies can be pulled into a web stack, then the trader’s task becomes dramatically easier. A universal interface can be established. Installation is one click. Distribution of software can be modeled after the Chrome web store. For Cardano, we have decided to experiment with this paradigm by deploying our reference wallet’s front end on Electron. It is an open source project maintained by Github that combines both Node and Chrome together. Cardano’s build of Electron is called Daedalus. The first generation of Daedalus will act as an HD wallet with support for many of the expected 27 accounting and security features that are industry standards, such as spending passwords and BIP39. In later generations Daedalus will develop into an application framework with a store, universal integration APIs and an SDK. The key innovations are ease of development by allowing programmers to use JavaScript, HTML5 and CSS3 to build their applications and a unified bridge for cross application communication. Complex behavior such as cryptography, managing a distributed network and database mechanics can be abstracted away thereby letting the developer focus solely on user experience and their application’s core logic. As Daedalus is intended to be a universal framework, its roadmap and evolution is somewhat independent of Cardano’s. During 2017 they are tightly coupled, but later Cardano will be just another application for a Daedalus user. We also intend on exploring extremely unique features such as a universal key management service running solely in Intel SGX. 27 Which is already available at daedaluswallet.io WHY WE ARE BUILDING CARDANO  Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License Page 34 of 44