The role of IOHK company in Cardano

Table of Contents

In this article, we will view the role of the IOHK company in Cardano. For each company, you will find the relevant article below.

Cardano is respectively the son of three companies:

Article about the companies that make up Cardano: introductory article to the Cardano ecosystem and the companies that it consists of.
Article on Cardano Foundation: defines itself as a non-profit organization based in Zug, Switzerland, whose main purpose is to standardize, protect and promote the Cardano protocol technology, regulate its financial relationships, government agencies, and develop strategic partnerships with other projects.
Article on Emurgo: last entity that participates in the creation of Cardano is Emurgo. This company focuses on the support, incubation, and development of the business initiatives of its partners. Emurgo, based in Japan, is responsible for developing the business around Cardano and is driving its adoption and its ecosystem through commercial initiatives.

IOHK: brief company history

IOHK was created in 2015 by Charles Hoskinson, now CEO of the company itself, and Jeremy Wood. Hoskinson had already operated in the world of blockchain, having previously co-founded BitShares and Ethereum, and then later “disconnected” from both projects.

Operationally, IOHK is among the leading research and blockchain infrastructure companies in the world. The company’s efficiency is given by the particular decentralization of its activities, which have allowed it to grow and prosper. Today, the company is dedicated to building blockchains for a wide range of clients, whether they belong to the public or private sectors. Furthermore, the reliability of IOHK is such that it has been allowed to obtain government orders.

The role of IOHK company in Cardano is to also represent the core work of Cardano, the open-source project aimed at creating a public platform operating through blockchain, which allows for better managed smart contracts. As evidence of the size of the company, IOHK shows off a team of more than 400 employees located in over 50 countries around the world. This has allowed the company to expand considerably, as well as expand its customer base constantly.

From this point of view, the strength of the company is achieved by the mixture of different personalities within the operational teams. These professionals come from different places with extremely varied cultures and skills.

Main IOHK characters: Hoskinson and Wood

The strength of IOHK, therefore, derives from a variety of forces in the field. The company’s operational team is made up of highly specialized professionals with previous experience in the field of blockchain.

However, a particular interest is deepening the history of the main figures of the company, Charles Hoskinson on the one hand and Jeremy Wood on the other.

Starting with Hoskinson, CEO of IOHK, the company founder attended two different universities, the Metropolitan State of Denver and the University of Colorado Boulder. His main interest has always been the world of mathematics, as evidenced by his university studies dedicated to analytic number theory.

Since 2013, aware of the enormous potential of cryptocurrencies, Hoskinson began to play the role of consultant within the Bitcoin Education Project; His entry into the team that took care of the foundation of Ethereum dates back to 2013. This team was made up of eight people and laid the foundations of the new blockchain.
However, something has changed since 2014. With the arrival of the new year, Hoskinson expressed the need to give Ethereum a more solid structure; this added friction with the other founders of the blockchain concerning the acceptance of capital risk.

Soon, therefore, Hoskinson decides to abandon the Ethereum project, choosing to take a break of about six months.
After a short time, the former founder of the blockchain was contacted by Jeremy Wood, who was also involved in Ethereum in the past. The two collaborated to create a new project dedicated to engineering and research, calling it IOHK (Input Output Hong Kong).

The core of IOHK’s activity is the creation of a new blockchain called, as is well known, Cardano. The latter stands out for its being a public platform, essential for better managing smart contracts. The ADA cryptocurrency is getting used, and in a short time, the project affirmed itself thanks to its originality and its validity.
Hoskinson defined Cardano as much more efficient, from an energy perspective than Bitcoin, the latter known for exploiting the PoW (Proof-of-Work) protocol.

The platform designed by Hoskinson and Wood makes use of the PoS (Proof-of-Stake) protocol, which is extremely less expensive than Bitcoin and makes the whole project even more valid and satisfying.

The bond between Hoskinson and Wood

The success of IOHK and Cardano allowed Hoskinson to greatly expand the size of the blockchain project. All this, however, would not have been possible without the work of Jeremy Wood, who is credited to have founded Cardano together with Hoskinson himself. Wood studied in Indiana, attending Purdue University, and then moved to Japan in 2008. Five years later, the man is one of the founding members of the Kansai Bitcoin Meet-up: in essence, a very similar path to what led his partner to become passionate about the blockchain. Wood was struck by the potential of blockchains and decided to increase his knowledge by joining Ethereum in 2013. However, Wood was also quick to abandon Ethereum, choosing to devote himself to the personal study of cryptocurrencies. It was in 2015 when the collaboration with Charles Hoskinson was born, with whom he will give life to the Cardano project. In 2018 Wood returned to the United States to follow the evolution of the blockchain more closely, from which he will only detach in 2020.

The future of fintech and IOHK: an outlook

Wood is strongly convinced that the future of Financial Technology, also known as “FinTech” or “techno-finance”, lies precisely in the opportunities of experimentation, as well as in the possibilities guaranteed by the collaboration between different organizations and groups. Only in this way will it be possible to achieve significant progress in the sector, similar to what happened to him and Hoskinson, who came into contact by pure chance and ended up giving life to a successful project. Yeah, but what are the prospects for IOHK? How can the platform be implemented in the future? The company sees the world as a large interconnected organism, characterized by the combination of hundreds of complex systems incorporated together. From this point of view, the goal of IOHK is to try to significantly increase the interconnections between the various existing systems in order to further refine the dynamics of blockchains. All this will be made possible by the large number of professionals present in IOHK; a company made up of researchers, technical managers, members of the development area and so on.