Cardano is a blockchain project that was founded in 2014. After few years of development, cardano was released in 29 September 2017.
Cardano was discovered by one of the inventors of ethereum, Charles hoskinson. Cardano has a solid and very ambitious team in developing its smart contract platform so that Cardano is known for developing out into the most complete ecosystem, the most useful cryptocurrency ever constructed and built on a haskell code that can provide the highest level of security.
Cardano has a unique function as both a blockchain platform and cryptocurrency, and a separate governance and treasure system where The Cardano Core system can be upgraded without having to separate the network chain. But there is no dApps to use the smart contract from Cardano until now as Cardano is building infrastructure to run any Dapps at the moment. By this, the competitor might reach success earlier than Cardano which is still under developement. The marketing effort need to improve as the community need to know more about the project.