But how did IOG, the blockchain engineering company that designed and built Cardano from the ground up, achieve this? This paper highlights the importance and impact of the research and development driven by IOG since the inception of the Cardano mainnet. Two years, thousands of GitHub commits, and hundreds of hours of study later, the first version of Cardano – Cardano Byron – shipped in September 2017. The heart of the Cardano network, Ouroboros is the first proof-of-stake protocol based on academic, peer-reviewed research, with a mathematically-proven level of security. The Byron reboot updated multiple components of the Cardano network, including the Cardano node, the Cardano explorer, and the wallet backend, and also delivered Daedalus, IOG’s official desktop wallet.