A hard cap is a restriction put in place by the blockchain's code on the maximum amount of units that can ever be created or circulated for a specific cryptocurrency
In a few words, a candidate block is a block that a mining node (miner) is trying to mine in order to receive the block reward. So a candidate block may be described as a temporary block that will be either validated or discarded by the network. Miners compete with each other to validate the next block and add it to the blockchain, but first, they have to create a candidate block to participate in the mining competition.