A blog post from IOHK’s CEO, Charles Hoskinson, provides updates on the ongoing development of the Cardano project, as it evolves into a new stage. Link to the full blog post can be found below.
Here are some of the main points:
-
Firstly, IOHK has made tremendous improvements to project management and their update release processes.
“Updates will become more frequent, higher quality and encumber less user disruptions.” -
IOHK will also continue to work on their project management methodology by becoming more public, while also creating a space for other software companies, projects and developers to benefit from and add to.
“We’d like to explore lighter weight versions of the processes for DApp development so that our developer community can follow best practices.” -
A second major development is the work going into redesigning Cardano’s architecture and API’s to become more friendly for exchanges and others, such as Ledger, to use.
“To this end, we’ve been exploring the best way of discussing a unified backend architecture. I would personally like to see dozens of wallets and great user experiences materialize for Cardano, but I’d also like to make sure that these experiences are useful, secure and easy to deploy.” -
The change to specification-driven designs will not be directly noticed by our users. But rather, will be noticed in the form of improvements such as fewer issues connecting to the network, faster functions, etc.
-
The next release headed to Quality Assurance will include paper wallets, faster wallet restoration and other numerous fixes. This will be expected to clear QA in mid-May.
-
Thirdly, Charles touches on the upcoming Shelley release. As you all may know, this is a massive project with many workstreams and social processes. Shelley is about turning the network over to users and decentralizing as much as possible.
-
IOHK has developed a custom, proof of stake protocol called Ouroboros for Cardano. This has never been used in a cryptocurrency before and therefore, requires proper and careful deployment, with regards to consensus.
“To be clear, Ouroboros isn’t a forced, delegated, proof of stake protocol like EOS or Bitshares. It’s a pure, proof of stake protocol where for epoch elections every active Ada account is factored in. Anyone who holds Ada in a normal address in the global UTXO has a probability of being elected as a slot leader regardless of the amount of Ada they hold.” -
Some more informative details regarding staking:
"However, the reality is that most will not want or have the ability to host consensus nodes and consistently show up to fill the slots they have been elected to commit. Thus, we developed a delegation system and the concept of stake pools for those users.
Briefly, anyone can run a stake pool. There isn’t a minimum threshold of Ada or a special club. Rather, there will be a blockchain-based registration system and a special transaction type to register a stake pool on-chain. Registered pools will be listed in the delegation center of Daedalus and pulled directed from the Cardano blockchain thereby preventing censorship or bias." -
And a point on delegation:
“Delegation will be done through a special transaction and from a user experience viewpoint, via the delegation center in Daedalus. A user can find a stake pool they wish to delegate to, select it, and click a “delegate” button. It’s just that simple. As we launch Shelley testnets, we’ll experiment with different user experience flows, from length of delegation to partial delegation (splitting stake between pools).” -
In the coming months, IOHK will be reviewing user experiences, interface considerations, optimization of space, prevention of attacks, while also delving into questions that pertain to the nature of decentralization and stake pool management.
-
IOHK have also planned a process that includes 50-100 independent stake pools participating in the beta testing and engaging in discussions of hardware configurations, deployment strategy, docker images.
“These beta testers will not get a special advantage or consideration when Shelley launches. They are necessary to test Shelley’s design and ensure our assumptions and choices are reasonable as well as improve deployment strategy and documentation.” -
“In closing, Cardano is a huge project. There are so many brilliant minds, great engineers and parallel efforts that it’s difficult to capture all of it in a single post, much less just convey our progress…What’s also amazing to me is how quickly our scientific research is moving from the lab to code. Ouroboros has gone through over a dozen revisions and now is converging to a state where we can bootstrap from the genesis block without a checkpoint (an industry first for proof of stake). Our sidechains research is state of the art and a paper is coming in May.”
For the full blog post, please click here.
Exciting times ahead!