IOHK | WHY WE ARE BUILDING CARDANO | 06/28/2017    needs to be an efficient process through which social consensus can form around a vision for evolving the underlying protocol. If this process is enormously burdensome, fragmentation could break the community apart. Finally, money is ultimately a social phenomenon. In the effort to anonymize and disintermediate central actors, Bitcoin and its contemporaries have also discarded the need for stable identities, metadata and reputation in commercial transactions. Adding these data through centralized solutions removes the auditability, global availability and immutability — which is the entire point of using a blockchain. Legacy financial systems such as those composed of SWIFT, FIX and ACH are rich in transactional metadata. It is not enough to know how much value moved between accounts, regulation often requires the attribution of actors involved, compliance information, reporting suspicious activity, and other records and actions. In some cases, the metadata is more important than the transaction. Hence, it seems reasonable to infer that the manipulation of metadata could be as harmful as counterfeiting currency or rewriting transaction history. Making no accommodation for actors who want to voluntarily include these fields seems counterproductive to mainstream adoption and consumer protection. Sojourn's End The aggregation of our principled exploration of the cryptocurrency space is two collections of protocols. Respectively, a provably secure Proof-of-Stake [1 ][2 ] based cryptocurrency called the Cardano Settlement Layer (CSL) and a set of protocols called the Cardano Computation Layer (CCL). Our design emphasis is to accommodate the social aspects of cryptocurrencies, build in layers by separating the accounting of value from complex computation and address the needs of regulators within the scope of several immutable principles . Furthermore, where it is sensible, 1 we attempt to vet proposed protocols through peer review and check code against formal specifications . 1 See Regulation section for list WHY WE ARE BUILDING CARDANO  Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License Page 4 of 44