Concordium (CCD)

Concordium (CCD) is a public, permissionless Layer 1 blockchain that combines proof-of-stake consensus with an identity layer built into the protocol. Founded in 2018 by Lars Seier Christensen and Lone Fønss Schrøder, the project ran a long testnet phase and launched its mainnet on 9 June 2021. CCD is the native token used for transaction fees, validator and delegator staking, and on-chain governance.

The defining feature of Concordium is its on-protocol identity layer. Every account is linked to a real-world identity that has been verified off-chain by an accredited Identity Provider, but everyday transactions remain pseudonymous through the use of zero-knowledge proofs. Identity disclosure can only be triggered through a court order routed via an authorised Identity Disclosure Authority. This design targets enterprise and regulated use cases such as payments, supply-chain tracking, tokenised assets and Web3 applications that need to meet KYC and AML requirements without exposing user data by default.

Concordium’s consensus protocol is a custom variant of Ouroboros Praos called Simplified Ouroboros Praos, supplemented by a finality layer for fast deterministic settlement. The platform supports smart contracts written in Rust and compiled to WebAssembly, with later support for Solidity-based contracts via the Concordium Smart Contract Module. Academic research is performed in collaboration with the Concordium Blockchain Research Center Aarhus (COBRA) at Aarhus University and with ETH Zürich. Total supply currently sits at roughly 14.46 billion CCD with around 12.57 billion in circulation; the token has no hard cap and continues to be issued as block rewards for validators and delegators. The network can be inspected on CCDScan and the Concordium mainnet dashboard.