Dear Readers,
It has been another exciting week for the Foundation. We spent a number of days in Lisbon with our partners, IOHK, who are holding their annual global summit this week, with more than 100 people from various countries around the world in attendance. Many of the presentations focused on Cardano development, covering topics from the ongoing research into Ouroboros, the algorithm powering Cardano, to sidechains, which are currently being researched and aim to allow Cardano to become interoperable with other blockchains.
Representatives from Emurgo, the organisation responsible for commercial partnerships within the Cardano ecosystem also joined us.
We spent time looking at the project as a whole and discussing the future roadmap and how best to serve you, the community. We also took the opportunity to meet the individuals from the IOHK development team who had flown in from all over the world!
The first official Cardano Foundation webcast
A highlight of the week was the webcast which took place on Monday afternoon. Featuring Michael Parsons Chairman Cardano Foundation, Charles Hoskinson CEO and Founder IOHK, Duncan Coutts Director of Engineering IOHK and host Jon Moss from Cardano Foundation. It was great to see that in total we welcomed over 5000 live viewers.
The webcast proved to be incredibly popular with the community submitting and voting questions within our official Cardano Forum.
Examples of the questions that were asked were:
I’m a developer at the concept phase of a blockchain project. I would like to eventually deploy on Cardano. How far away are we from developer tools? Is there anything I can do to prepare for prototyping and testing?
What are Cardano’s thoughts and strategy to stay relevant in this rapidly evolving industry? Is there no fear that other crypto projects may lean on Cardano’s already peer reviewed tech, and deliver a similar product faster, making Cardano obsolete?
We have a recording of the webcast just in case you missed it live or would like to watch it again. Please be aware that the recording does break up at points due to a technical issue with Crowdcast’s 3rd party hosting provider.
The Cardano forum has seen tremendous growth since we launched in November. The quality of discussion is second to none and we recently celebrated 1 million page views in less than a month!
Registration takes seconds and means you can actively contribute to the community. For example, we posted a review and feedback request about the webcast here.
Latest Cardano whiteboard: Sidechains by Dionysis Zindros, IOHK
IOHK have just released the latest in their whiteboard series covering sidechains. The idea behind sidechains is that they will allow multiple blockchains to work with one another, as opposed to traditional cryptocurrencies where each blockchain is independent. As such, sidechains are a key component of third generation blockchains in that they enable interoperability. An asset on one blockchain would be able to be moved to another and back without going through a counterparty.
IOHK Blockchain Visualisation
At the conference, the IOHK team also launched another project, Symphony of Blockchains. This beautiful 3D audio and visual depiction of the Bitcoin blockchain uses real Bitcoin data to show how blocks of various sizes are created and maps the internal data structures of each block. Later releases will visualise Cardano and other cryptocurrencies, and there are plans for physical sculptures, a virtual reality experience and an exhibition.