Charles went live on YouTube to discuss the upcoming staking testnet. Watch it here:
Summary of Video:
Charles streamed live to discuss the upcoming staking testnet. IOHK have been trying to get everything ready for playing and testing registration of stake pools and the delegation mechanics.
The roll-out of the testnet will:
- start with a command line client
- then move from the command line client to eventually full GUI
- and once it reaches a certain threshold of quality, it will roll out into the mainnet
Staking in Cardano will be a different protocol from other projects. Because of this, we’ve seen many of the same types of questions and concerns being asked over and over. Therefore, it makes more sense to consolidate these questions into a single location for people to self-explain.
In the video, Charles explains that a taskforce will be created from the community. It is open for anyone to join.
- If you have questions about staking or are interested in running a stake pool/playing with the staking testnet. Please fill out the form here. Please include your telegram ID in the notes section.
- It’s important to get everyone into one place, so please join the Telegram channel that we have set up specifically for this purpose.
- Here, you have the opportunity to ask any questions or raise concerns about staking.
- Users who join this group will need to elect someone or a group of people who can filter and aggregate questions.
- These questions will then be pushed through to IOHK for the teams to answer systematically.
- IOHK will also use these questions and answers to create graphics, videos, informational material to describe how staking works in Cardano. With the community’s help, we will be able to create content so that everyday people can understand how staking works, what is registration, what is a stake pool and the dynamics behind Ouroboros.
- Those who are interested in running stake pools will be rolled over into the testnet once ready, so its important you fill in the registration form as well.
To add, Charles also talks about the recent workshop which happened in Berlin. The output from this workshop will be the completion of the ledger specification and the delegation specification. They are estimated to be ready in 1-2 weeks and will be publicly released. Right now, there is a formal and mathematical description of staking works but this is not consumable by the general public. If you are interested, they are technically available now in the IOHK github repo.
At this stage, the specs are being refined. Few things needed to be updated and changed and/or drawn out more. This is natural when engineers, scientists and formal methods team all come together and realize there is a little delta between what they wrote and what they need.
Gerard, Director of Operations at IOHK, is cleaning up the specs and will also be merging the Byron spec with the Shelley spec. Following refinement and merging, in short order, IOHK will also add the extended UTxO and multi-asset models. These will allow users to issue their own assets and smart contracvts.
Merging of these two specs is necessary. If you look at how the Cardano system works, they are changing the way validation works from ledger. In many cases, the changes are to simplify and make easier to understand and implement. Shelley will be massive improvement from Byron. But in order to be able to validate older transactions and run old chains, there needs to be old legacy rules that continue to work.
Finally, in terms of getting from testnet to production, it is explained how there are two competing, independent repos. Basically the wallet backend for Cardano (what was released in 1.4) is being decoupled from Cardano and its in its own repo. Once decoupling is done, it will be in a position to connect to either the Rust code or the new Haskell code. Whichever one is done first will end up being the first release of Shelley. Currently, Rust is a little ahead in terms of having the ability to run a testnet. So it will probably be the codebase for the upcoming Shelley testnet, which will work to build up a population of stake pools. To get there, there is a series of events that need to occur. Firstly, the Ouroboros BFT update (which is Cardano 1.5) and then the Cardano decouple (which is 1.6). After both these events, then the team can connect Rust or Haskell.
The reason IOHK decided to have two teams with different processes is to derisk delivery. In the event that one team is delayed for an unforeseen reason, the other team may be able to overcome the challenges faster.
Also with this rolling out, it should be noted how the network will gradually decentralized. OBFT
will run for all slots in the first epoch. Then, in the next epoch, some percentage of slots will be turned over to the stake pool. If they make all their slots or majority (meaning they’re correctly operating) then with the next epoch, it’ll double and more and more. Over a period of epochs and through this gradual winnowing, it will go from OBFT running all the slots to none.