VIDEO: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TFezjgwuw8Y
This presentation was part of PlutusFest 2018 and introduces the design and architecture of the Plutus Platform, a Haskell-based environment and toolchain for developing contracts for the Cardano blockchain. The key features are its use of a standard purely functional programming language (instead of inventing a new language, which appears to be the popular approach), being based on a ledger-architecture that resembles a functional data flow graph (UTxO ledger, rather than an account-based ledger), and its tight integration and co-development of on-chain code (executed by block producing nodes) and off-chain code (executed on client machines).
See https://testnet.iohkdev.io/plutus/ for an online environment to write and test Plutus code and https://github.com/input-output-hk/plutus/ for the code.