Cardano gives individuals, developers, and businesses many ways to take part. Whether you're new to crypto or have used other blockchains, you can earn staking rewards, trade, build, and vote. Here's where to start.
Buy, Sell, and Hold ADA
ADA is Cardano's native cryptocurrency. You can buy it on most major exchanges and keep it in a self-custody wallet such as VESPR, Begin, or Lace. More options are in the Cardano wallets section. Holding ADA in your own wallet lets you take part in the activities below, from staking to governance.
Learn more: how to buy ADA and how to set up a Cardano wallet.
Earn Staking Rewards
Cardano runs on Ouroboros, a proof-of-stake protocol. Stake pools, run by node operators, produce the network's blocks.1 You delegate your ADA to a pool and receive a share of the rewards it earns. Delegating doesn't move your ADA. It stays in your wallet, you can spend it whenever you like, and nothing is locked.2
Your first rewards arrive about 15 to 20 days after you delegate, then once every epoch.2 An epoch is a period of five days.3
Learn more: how to stake ADA on Cardano.
Take Part in On-Chain Governance
Cardano's community governs the network. Three groups vote on proposals, including protocol upgrades and treasury spending: delegated representatives (DReps), stake pool operators, and the Constitutional Committee.4 If you hold ADA, you can register as a DRep yourself or hand your voting power to one, and you can switch DReps whenever you want.5 Delegating costs only a transaction fee, with no deposit.4
Vote delegation also matters for staking. Since the Plomin hard fork in January 2025, you can only withdraw staking rewards once your stake key has delegated its vote to a DRep or to the Abstain or No Confidence option.6,2
Learn more: what is Cardano governance.
Use Decentralized Applications (DApps)
Cardano supports smart contracts, programs that run on the blockchain, so developers can build DApps on it. You connect your wallet to a DApp to use it. Common types include decentralized exchanges for swapping tokens, lending protocols for borrowing against your crypto, and yield apps that pay you for supplying tokens to a protocol. The DApps section lists more.
Learn more: what is a DApp.
Buy, Sell, or Mint NFTs
NFTs on Cardano cover digital art, collectibles, and tokens that work as tickets or memberships. You can collect them, sell them, or create your own with a minting tool. NFT marketplaces such as Wayup let you browse collections and trade from your wallet.
Learn more: what are NFTs.
Play Games
Cardano also hosts blockchain-based games. Many use NFTs for in-game items, so players hold those items in their own wallets and can trade them outside the game.
Learn more: what are Web3 games.
Propose or Fund Community Projects
Project Catalyst is Cardano's community funding program and has funded more than 2,000 proposals.7 Through Fund14, anyone could submit a proposal, community reviewers were paid in ADA to rate it, and ADA holders voted on which proposals to fund, with each vote weighted by the ADA the voter held.8,9 Catalyst paused the Fund15 vote in January 2026 to reassess its strategy.9 Its 2026 pilot round instead used community curators and a review panel to select 12 teams, with part of each grant tied to adoption.7 Check the Catalyst site for the current process before you plan a proposal.
Learn more: what is Project Catalyst.
Build on Cardano
Developers write Cardano smart contracts in several languages. Aiken was designed for writing Cardano validators (scripts that decide whether a transaction can spend funds), Plinth (formerly Plutus Tx) uses Haskell, OpShin uses a subset of Python, and Pebble has a syntax close to TypeScript.10 The Cardano developer portal compares them in its smart contract course.
Cardano uses an extended UTXO (eUTxO) model, which tracks coins as separate outputs that scripts can lock. Under that model, a transaction's fee can be calculated exactly before it is submitted.11
Learn more: intro to Cardano development, or browse the development section.
Track and Verify Real-World Records
Organizations also use Cardano to record facts about physical goods and places, so anyone can check them later. 5am.earth combines farmers' field records with satellite data and anchors them on Cardano, so a lender or buyer can verify a record without seeing the farmer's personal data.12 UVerify lets manufacturers record a product's details on Cardano at the point of production, with a QR code on the packaging that links to that record.13
More projects are in the supply chain and verifiable records categories.
Connect with the Community
Builders, artists, researchers, and holders meet on the Cardano Forum, in project Discord and Telegram groups, at local meetups, and at hackathons. The community section lists news sites, newsletters, blogs, and YouTube channels.
