Charles Hoskinson Brief Cardano Update & IOHK 5-Year Anniversary- 11/3/2020
(Written by @Eric_Czuleger)
Charles Hoskinson sat down for a brief update on 11/3/2020. There he discussed the five year anniversary of IOHK. He took a glance back at what we have accomplished and looked towards future goals.
Summary:
Today marks the five year anniversary of IOHK.
The Byron reboot will likely go forward this month.
The Byron reboot will be followed by the launch of the Haskell Shelley testnet. After that has completed, we will announce the potential time frame for the Shelley mainnet
We will have a dedicated episode of the Cardano Effect to explain the benefits of Ouroboros Hydra coming up soon.
Aparna Jue will now be responsible for announcing timeline updates with regards to Cardano.
Happy Anniversary IOHK
Today is the five year anniversary of IOHK. The company was founded by Jeremy Wood and Charles Hoskinson in 2015. We would like to thank all of the individuals that have worked alongside us during the last five years. It is a humbling experience to see an idea turn into a company. It is even more humbling to see that company build a product and see it being used by the community. Happy five year anniversary IOHK.
We believe that the Byron reboot release will go forward this month. Dates related to Cardano will be announced by Aparna Jue in the future. With the Byron reboot we will do a dedicated video explaining its features, performance metrics, and security features. Connecting to the network will be easier, sync times will go down, wallet restoration will be faster. We will likely move to the BEC32 address standard so addresses will now be half the size. We will announce the Byron reboot date soon, we believe that it will be this month. A video explaining all of this will be launched this month.
Rebooting Byron
When the Byron reboot comes out we will announce the release of the Haskell Shelley testnet. Once the Haskell testnet comes out, Aparna will announce the date range for the Shelley mainnet. Everything is moving forward at a rapid pace. If users are curious about day-to-day happenings they can go to the Cardano GitHub repository to see weekly updates. This will discuss progress with the wallet backend Adrestia project’s evolution. Overall we are still keeping with the monthly product updates. Going forward the product team will be announcing key dates rather than Charles Hoskinson.
The Byron reboot has been 18 months of hard work. There are a lot of crucial improvements in the completely rewritten code. This is built with high-assurance software and Haskell programming. Furthermore, it is the code that we have chosen to live with until the end of time. If users have worked with the Incentivized Testnet, we are confident that they will not encounter the same performance difficulties in the Haskell testnet. This will be significantly more polished than the ITN.
Welcoming Ouroboros Hydra
We are now working with our sister companies to develop the execution team for Hydra. Robert Cohen is the product manager on this and he will be briefing users on it as soon as he has developed a team. Hydra needs some unpacking and announcing to the general republic. Reading the 55 page paper that we recently released is a daunting task for many. We fully appreciate that it is a hard paper to read, so we are providing experts to the Cardano Effect so that wider audiences can understand the importance of Hydra.
Hydra gives us the ability to take certain actors, specifically stake pools, and build extensions that can rapidly accelerate transactions and smart contracts. This makes them viable for micropayments and things that require fast finality. Meanwhile, the stake space can be sharded so we can run as many heads as the protocol desires. This allows us to achieve an enormous level of scalability.
We have to make a great many decisions about transaction routing and networking between heads. These are unique challenges which will be discussed by Rob Cohen. This is the first time that a protocol like this has been used with the extended UTXO model. Whichever approach that we decide to use is not interoperable with Tezos, EOS, or Ethereum 2. That means that this is a scaling system that only Cardano can use at the moment.
We can however build applications on top of Hydra which allow it to be used for cross chain communication. While we gain interoperability, we also know that our accounting approach is required for people to natively put transactions on the ledger. It can’t easily be copied or ported unless they use the extended UTXO model. This would mean that they are using our smart contract model. We are glad to have the first mover advantage there.
Explaining Hydra
The Cardano Effect episode, the blog post on Hydra, and the blog about the Byron reboot will be coming out shortly. We also hope that the Root9B audit report will be remediated soon and it can be released to the general public. We believe that they found some good items to work on, but nothing that requires an immediate announcement. We are excited to get the reboot and the Shelley Haskell testnet out.
Aligning with Cardano stake pool community and ecosystem entities in London
We recently sat down with stake pool operators in London to discuss desirable features to integrate in the future. Users of the ITN should notice that stability and throughput have begun working at a far higher level. We have several more updates which will complete the product end to end. While this could be Shelley if we wanted it to be, we prefer to ship with the high assurance code and the Byron interoperability. It is exciting to see all of the processes clicking in.
We encourage our users to resist the FUD on the forums and to stay positive in light of the global market downturn. In the event of the worst-case scenario regarding the markets and a global pandemic we remain confident that crypto will fare quite well. We believe that individuals will prefer financial freedom instead of the constraints of legacy systems. If the corona virus dies out because of seasonality then we believe that markets will rebound and the crypto space will be bolstered. However, while our fundamentals and principles are sound there will be volatility in the market.
Still, the science and engineering side of Cardano are delivering. We believe that this can lay the foundation for building the future of the world financial and social operating system. In conclusion, happy birthday to IOHK and we are looking forward to this next upgrade cycle.