To figure out what the heck a Cardano is (hint: not a card game), one needs to first understand blockchains in the world of cryptocurrency. With transactions happening by the nanosecond, records need to be kept, and no one wants some central authority like a bank to do the record keeping.
The blockchain was invented in 2008 to serve as a public record of cryptocurrency transactions. The main goal was to prevent double spending where devious users tried to use the same coins to make multiple purchases. The records arrive in the blockchain in the form of blocks that contain a timestamp and transaction data. And, believe it or not, it is managed by a “peer-to-peer network” that validates new blocks of information. Once the block is recorded, no one can make any changes without the approval of a majority of the network.
So Cardano serves as a computing platform that runs the blockchain for the ADA cryptocurrency. This currency operates its own blockchain that has two layers: the Cardano Settlement Layer and the Cardano Computation Layer. Both support ledger transactions, contracts, and decentralized applications. It's believed that ADA coins will soon become one of the top six crypto coins that everyone wants to own, thanks in part to the Cardano blockchain technology.