Thanks Mr.Charles Hoskinson! Way to go!
Nice thorough update there. He covered a lot of stuff with a quick chat. 
Summary of Charles’ Video above:
He sends this video update from his home in Colorado. He has been travelling lots with work going from Canada, Barbados, South Africa and Switzerland! In Toronto, he attended Blockchain Futurists Conference where he was on a panel discussion with Larry King (you can read about that here). In South Africa, went to a Blockchain event and conducted Cardano business in Switzerland.
One Year Anniversary
We are coming up on the 1 year anniversary when Cardano launched to market. There will be a special video from Charles to go over all the accomplishments and special events and how we have gotten to the Top 10 cryptocurrencies.
Cardano 1.4 and 1.3.1
1.4 is a enormous update: logging changes, how we store data, wallet backend, new input selection policy, etc. As a consequence, the update has been split into 2 parts. Cardano 1.3.1, which will be shipping sometime this month, will contain little fixes (such as the issue with pinning Daedalus to the taskbar). These didn’t quite fit into the 1.3 update and also makes sense to ship now rather than to wait.
IOHK will do some added testing with 1.4. Sometime in October, testnet running 1.4 will be released. This means early adopters can install early version of Daedalus that is running 1.4 and can go ahead and play with it and send feedback or improvements. Would like to see if benchmarks on syncing and connecting are improved for users too.
Once 1.3.1 is released, it also means Yoroi (Chrome-extension wallet) will be able to enter testnet mode. This code has been security audited. There will be a short layover between testnet Yoroi and mainnet Yoroi. This will be a good product that will help lots of people and will provide diversity in the wallet ecosystem.
Ledger Support
This is also interconnected with the above-mentioned points. Yoroi will probably be the first interface that will use Ledger, there is already a well-established way of connecting these. Discussions are going to happen between IOHK and Emurgo on this. The crypto is done, rust code is done and audited and just waiting on a few more updates so cold storage is coming.
Research into Accounts Based vs. UTxO Models
Some innovations evolve around the “Ethereum” side of the world such as the accounts model and IELE and that smart contract model. IOHK has launched two testnets for this: KEVM and IELE. Working to improve K and reliability and dynamics of smart contracts. There is a good understanding on where this can go.
On the other side, the UTxO side, IOHK has “reimagined” it into a extended UTxO model including languages like Plutus and Marlowe. The goal of Marlowe moving forward will be to try to create a periodic table of financial elements. This will allow people to implement base collection of things to combine templates to replicate what a hedge fund or a Wall Street company would typically do. With Plutus, IOHK is attempting to properly understand the blockchain side, the client side and the server side. For things running locally or on a server, this will be done in Haskell, while on the blockchain, it will be a specialized language that will compile accordingly. This is a more holistic model that will be better than what is currently used in for smart contracts. This is in heavy R&D and next year is when we’ll see more of Plutus.
Chimeric Ledgers & Assets
IOHK has finished the specifications for Chimeric Ledgers and Assets. Watch this video from Sebastien at Emurgo to learn more. Basically, it is a broadening of the notion of what a native asset needs to look like. They have a good idea of how to implement and are excited about embed this into a UTxO model as there are great scalability benefits.
Ouroboros
It has evolved since what they come up with back in 2016 to Praos and Genesis. Recently, IOHK has recently an internal paper that will be released soon on a Byzantine Fault Tolerant protocol that was inspired by and complementary to Ouroboros.
Ouroboros has come a long way and now getting into the fine details of implementation. There is also a lot of research competition going on (eg. Algorand and Thunderella) where prominent scientists and projects are looking into PoS. The advantage is that we can all learn from each other.
Stake Pools
When we get to decentralization, Charles says we should have at least 1000 stake pools and the network will run fine. It is advantageous to have more than less. As always, stake pools are optional. Other projects are doing 21-101, so its great to see how decentralized we can make these systems over time. IOHK also has a paper to release that looks at the game theory of stake pools and incentives. This has been submitted to a game theory conference.
Rust - Prometheus
This is the fast moving project. Charles had a demo this week where they had a command-line client. Instead of using the API’s, you can break things down step by step. IOHK will create demo videos to show what he really means. It’s also where they are opening up the project to the community to get more collaboration. Charles also touches on IOHK’s progress made in Scala.
Update on Africa
Africa is a great marketplace for this project and they have taken a more pan-Africa approach. IOHK’s Director of African Operations is currently in Uganda and going onto Angola. There is an overwhelming amount of pilots and desire to tokenize many things. Great opportunity so as capability enhance, there will be an easier way to saturate those capabilities into the Cardano pipeline.
Daedalus
Daedalus team is making great progress on their Dapp model. Daedalus and Cardano Wallet seems like the same thing but they in fact view Daedalus more as an application platform, similar to Google Play or the App Store. It is an environment where you can deploy applications. We’re not there yet but they have put in lots of thought of how this model will look. In October, they will start doing internal demos. To the end of this year, will see an increasing separation between the Haskell wallet that has been deployed on top of Daedalus and Daedalus the platform itself. There will be more announcements on this closer to the end of the year.
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I’ve seen a lot of CEO presentations in my time …and this one rates as one of the most detailed, honest briefing updates I’ve seen .
Cheers Charles.
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Thank you for putting together this great summary. I referenced it on a few places online
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