Lovelace (Cardano Unit)

Lovelace is the smallest unit of ADA, the native coin of the Cardano blockchain. One ADA is divided into 1,000,000 lovelace, so one lovelace equals 0.000001 ADA. Cardano's ledger, transaction fees and minimum balances are recorded in lovelace as whole numbers, and wallets convert them into ADA for display, much as Bitcoin's ledger counts satoshis and Ethereum's counts wei. The unit is named after Ada Lovelace, the nineteenth-century mathematician often described as the first computer programmer, after whom ADA itself is also named. The naming fits Cardano's wider habit of honouring historical figures, seen in development eras such as the Byron phase, named after her father, the poet Lord Byron. Lovelace is a unit of account, not a separate token.