Charles Hoskinson Brief Comments on Goguen - 29/10/2020
(Written by @Eric_Czuleger IOHK)
On October 29th Charles Hoskinson sat down to give a brief update on Goguen after the monthly product update.
October update
IOHK recently had the October product update and we hope that it has given everyone a chance to see how complex Cardano actually is. Making this all work together is necessary and it is a commercial reality of working as a smart contract platform in the crypto space. We also hope that it gives our followers an idea of how many plates are currently spinning with IOHK.
During the initial phases of creating Ethereum there was less expectation. In 2020 the reality is very different. Furthermore, there are massive deficits in how Ethereum is constructed today. This is why actors like PolkaDot and Algorand and other competitors have risen. It was a different world. In 2020 to build great things with real use and utility great answers need to be provided to potential partners.
Raising Marlowe
Marlowe for example leverages 20 years of history in financial contracts and 30 years in domain specific languages. This allows clarity to be generated between the entrepreneur, the writer, the client and anyone else. Up until this point there has never been semantic clarity. What we are doing with Marlowe as a DSL is creating a common experience between all of these actors.
Over a period of the next six months applications will be developed and then adopted. This requires a starting point and we have worked the last five years to lay the foundation for provably correct contracts. We can use theory which was generated over the last 40 years to lay this groundwork. Ultimately the point of this is clarity.
We can lend clarity to sectors like the medical industry. Now a common language will be spoken to bring the right people to the table. When we look at a DSL like GLOW, we can see what happens when people want to build cross blockchain applications. This is a unification language which works across the blockchain space. This ensures that Cardano will never be left behind and it will benefit from more users, technology, and adoption.
Orchestrating Plutus
As we look at Plutus, we see this as the conductor of the orchestra. Plutus has a great deal of design requirements. We wanted to make sure that it was always predictable. We wanted to make sure that these were serious tools and not toys. Everyone needs to know the operating costs for their businesses. We designed Plutus for practicality both on and off chain. There are many objects in the blockchain space to manipulate, this includes identity, DAOs, and on and off chain resources. Simply put, we needed a conductor. That is why we decided to use an ecosystem with over 30 years of history.
We are a founding member of the Haskell Foundation and we are prepared to continually invest in making the language more competitive. This makes Plutus a perfect conductor language. We will soon be talking about IELE as well. We believe that it will bring a great deal of value alongside GLOW, Plutus, and Marlowe.
Native assets
One of the most important things about all of this is the native asset standard. We want to ensure that we can create non-fungible assets, stable coins, coins with fixed monetary policy, and so on. Ultimately we need to provide a litany of tools which allows everyone to build with Cardano. The ERC20 converter is similar to this because it helps people migrate to or build on Cardano. We have enormous advantages with the Cardano standard over Ethereum.
One of the benefits that we have over Ethereum is that in Cardano, assets are all treated as first-class citizens. All native tokens issued on ada have the same benefits as ada. This means better UX, faster transactions, lower transaction costs, and even the ability to pay transaction fees in the asset itself. This is a series of huge advantages that we have over Ethereum.
Beginning with metadata
Goguen has already started with metadata. This means that individuals can go from moving ada to adding applications in identity and other benefits. We will be rolling out more advancements in Goguen through HFC events. The next will be in November\December. We will announce the next dates as we move into the next product updates. We had to space them out like this in order to allow for deployment and population of the infrastructure.
Currently, we are populating the infrastructure. With the ERC20 converter and the Mint test people have a safe sandbox to play in. This means that when they deploy to the mainnet they can ensure security. We are affording our commercial partners time by launching in this fashion. We will continue to roll out full support for assets, Plutus infrastructure and Marlowe throughout subsequent HFC events.
The Shelley team is continuing to upgrade the Shelley experience. We are currently working through stake pool rankings and examining crucial parameters. We are improving the software to accommodate a 1000 k parameter so that we can have a well functioning stake pool set. We need many more advancements, improvements in SMASH, an identity center in Daedalus, and a litany of other things. Currently 4 companies are working on this.
Pride in progress
We have seen 7 CIPs including CIPs which relate to reward functions. We know that this is a process all told. We launched Shelley at the end of July and in spite of that the ecosystem has doubled in size and growth is happening at an incredible pace. We are now becoming a more holistic ecosystem. There is no greater example of this than what we have accomplished in the last three months with exchanges.
We are proud of the work that we have done with Binance and Bittrex. We have created an incredible enterprise grade listing experience which is reliable constantly. We are continuing only to get better. With the Voltaire Catalyst project we have seen some incredible gains. Small pools of people have now grown to thousands competing for funds to build up Cardano. This gives the proper incentive to developers to realize their dreams and get paid for it.
Improvement through community
The next iterations will include a voting center in addition to the Catalyst app. We will continue refining this along with everything else. Meanwhile, we have Basho. We are examining and designing a way of moving value and locking it within our framework. This helps us with interoperability and scalability will grow from there. We have seen great progress on all fronts to derisk Hydraās roll out.
We believe that the majority of Hydra can be run in Plutus. This allows us to roll out without a HFC event. We still have room to make our TPS exponentially higher than Ethereum when Hydra is fully onboard. Furthermore, the community will be able to roll out many implementations of Hydra. Cardano was designed for Hydra, but protocols like Bitcoin were not designed for things like Lightening. This reduces our friction demonstrably.
Cardano is becoming an incredibly mature ecosystem and we are inundated with requests for partnerships. Cardano is very different now than we were 6 months ago. We are glad that the community has continually remained constructive and productive. Money canāt buy character and we have created a community full of character. We believe that with our supporters we can achieve the dream of becoming the worldās financial and social operating system.