Charles Hoskinson Brief Cardano Shelley Update - 03/092020
(Written by @Eric_Czuleger)
On September 3rd 2020 Charles Hoskinson sat down to give an update on the near future of Shelley.
Moving forward on Shelley
The roadmap for Shelley, Goguen, Voltaire and the rest are all in parallel. With this being said, we are just at the beginning of staking. August was about gaining a solid network stack with reasonable performance. Liquidity has been mostly restored and Yoroi is currently where it needs to be. Now we are looking to September and beyond.
We have a few threads here. One-to-many delegation is on the way. This will allow individuals to delegate to one-to-n pools. This will allow portfolio creation with a ratio of funds going to selected pools. Smash is also coming online and moving towards user operation. This involves how metadata is carried by stake pools. When it is user controlled settings can be changed based upon user preferences.
User Experience
In terms of stake pools we are looking at ways of presenting them differently. We are currently in conversation about how to do this from a scientific and UX perspective. We would also like to have portfolios viewable and user created\downloadable. We will find out how to do this through a series of experiments with our new UX\UI designer. We encourage users to remain flexible as we work through these experiments.
Otherwise, we have recently accepted a proposal from Vacuum Labs. This will update the Ledger and Trezor support. They will support one-to-many and delegation. We are also looking at the potential of proxy KES or proxy keys. We would like to allow stake pool operators to be able to run in both a hot environment and a cold environment. This means that everything that gives the pool the opportunity to make things should live in the cold side. This means that the hot-side can be optimized for cost but if it is compromised then transactions can be generated to a new hot environment. We would like this cold environment to be Ledgers or Trezors.
Quality of life improvements
We will also have the hardware wallet center coming to Daedalus. We care a lot about the security and safety of all users and we believe that the hardware model is a great way of dealing with this and Vacuum Labs is our partner in this. We are also looking at multisig pledging. This will allow smaller pools to come together and pledge as one. This will let them collectively pledge to count as one pool and then split up the funds generated by their pool. This will not necessarily happen in September but September and beyond.
We also have changes in our parameters. D will continue to decrement and it is on autopilot at this time. As far as K and A these are deeply connected to one another. On the science side there is a push to increase K dramatically. We are currently in the modeling phase. We believe that it would be important to do this once we have one-to-many and multisig onboarded. This also touches on a notion of ranking and we believe that all of this should be user driven.
We will be signing the contract with Vacuum Labs soon. We will also be discussing with the stake pool operators about hot and cold environments. Voltaire will be coming online in September and a budget increase has been approved to speed it to market. We are also talking to Bison Trails to be a staking as a service provider. In terms of UX we are working on a staking dashboard as well. Right now we are trying to bundle this into Rosetta which is the work we are doing with Coinbase.
Continuing onward
As usual a lot is going on. We are making environmental improvements, multisig pledge, one-to-many delegation, stakepool portfolios and discussing global parameters. All of these meaningful changes will be incorporated as we go. This is only an update for Shelley and we will have a subsequent update for Goguen towards the end of the month.
In terms of product marketing we are looking at new ways to work through comparison marketing. This will include differentiating ourselves from other competitors. We are also working on ensuring that we are a leader in the DeFi space. We have a stablecoin which is currently in development and several other DeFi applications like oracles and more.