Charles Hoskinson Cardano Update - 13/03/2020
On March 13th, 2020 Charles Hoskinson sat down to give a short update on recent developments in the Cardano ecosystem. Read it below!
SUMMARY
Cardanoupdates.com has the most up to date information about the number of commits made on Cardano.
We are prioritizing launching a Mockchain with the Plutus team to bring developers into our ecosystem.
Dor Garbash has recently joined IOHK as product manager for Voltaire (Governance era).
We are requesting that stake pool operators make short videos about their stake pools and tweet them to Charles. We are also requesting that any ideas around Critical Cardano Infrastructure be communicated on Reddit.
We are monitoring the nCov-19 situation to see if a Shelley launch in Japan is feasible. If not, we are exploring an online option.
Reporting commits
First and foremost, there is some inaccurate reporting on the amount of commits we have been doing for Cardano. This is frustrating because websites that are tracking these commits are unfortunately tracking the old Cardano SL repo. This is code which is actively being replaced this month. We have been doing our work in different repos. This means that if users are tracking the old repos then there is nothing there. We have 1561 commits just this week. This is more than some projects get in a month or a year. Cardanoupdates.com is a good website which tracks everything accurately.
There will be a refresh of the Cardano Foundation website coming soon. This will likely happen in the next few months. This will contain information for those that hold ada and those that want to participate in the governance process. It will also benefit developers and stake pool operators. The goal of this is to have a one stop shop that serves each different funnel. This website will ensure accurate information is passed to everyone who needs it.
Updates and additions
We recently discussed the importance of launching the Mockchain with the Plutus team. This will allow us to easily write smart contracts against it. It will allow us to get developers into the ecosystem full time. Meanwhile, Aparna Jue is now in charge of all of the dates in terms of shipping Cardano specific software. She will likely release dates during her project management updates. The next one will occur roughly at the end of March.
We have recently welcomed Dor Gabash as product manager for Voltaire. He will assist as Voltaire leaves the lab and enters into implementation. This requires a dedicated product manager. It is likely that next months he will join the regular product updates that are led by Aparna. He will also represent IOHK at the CIP committee. This will help us learn how to handle update proposals and decentralized governance. We now have a dedicated product manager for Basho as well.
Building Infrastructure
Many people have seen the Hydra paper. Soon, users will see a blog post and Cardano Effect podcast about Hydra. Rob Cohen will begin giving updates on Hydra once it is ready. We are also putting together funding for community led construction of what we term ‘Cardano Commercially Critical Infrastructure’ (CCCI). These are things that Cardano needs in order to be competitive against other cryptocurrencies.
We are getting to the point where Shelley is nearly out. This means we need to build CCCI and bring it into the ecosystem so that when people start building dApps and building their experiences on top of Cardano, a good deal of these will be plug-and-play experiences. We have seen many examples of this in DeFi, like the existence of stable coins. The recent instability has exposed some intrinsic weaknesses in this particular realm. It is crucial that the CCCI lays a foundation which works properly and always. The CF will make an announcement about this in the coming month.
Requests from the community
Furthermore we would like to make two requests from the community. First, if you are a stake pool operator we would like to introduce you to the community because we will soon be launching Shelley and people should know who you are. We would like you to make a video about how long you have been running your experience with the ITN, when you joined Cardano, how large of an operation you have, why you created your stake pool, and what you are doing with your fees. This could involve either being for-profit or for an individual cause. Please tweet all videos to Charles Hoskinson @IOHK_Charles. Secondly, if you have an opinion on what should go into CCCI and you would like to build some of that for us we would like to start a discussion with you about it. We care deeply about relying on our community’s ideas so please go to Reddit and let us know what you think.
We have already been looking at metadata, multi-asset standards, explorers, building stable coins, or oracles. However, we look to our supporters to think about what will make us competitive in the near and far time horizon. Thinking outside the box is one major benefit from crowdsourcing so please reach out.
Evolving the ITN
The ITN continues to evolve. 8.14 recently came out and a video has just been released about it. As usual we thank everyone for updating. Because of this we have seen a massive decline in the amount of tickets. This means that we are seeing growing stability and people are experiencing a higher quality user experience. We have also seen an improvement in ITN stats like stake pools, active stake pools and chain quality. This shows us an increasing level of maturity and competence.
We had a great time in London recently. There, we met with some of the more prominent stake pool operators to get a better look at business and technical requirements from the community. This gives us a window into what priorities we need to follow into the future. If you go to Cardanoupdates.com you will see the advances we have made through community support and product/process updates.
We are glad to finally have our CTO Romain Pellerin. He has been doing a fantastic job supporting Charles Hoskinson and the wider company. We have already seen considerable improvements on the speed of decision making. We are very happy to have him on the team.
Staying up to date
Our community can look forward to an update shipping by the end of the month. Announcements will be forthcoming from Aparna Jue. The CF is working on the CIP committee and the CCCI. Announcements will come forth about both of these shortly. Stake pool operators should tweet a short video to Charles Hoskinson discussing the specifics of their stake pool. Also, if users have an opinion about what should be included in CCCI, we encourage them to make themselves known on Reddit.
Cardano.org will shortly become an incredibly rich website which serves as a universal source of truth for all things related to Cardano. Meanwhile, we are working closely with exchange partners in anticipation for Shelley and staking-as-a-service.
We apologize that conferences are being canceled. We were looking forward to show off our SNARK Sonics at the zero-knowledge summit in London. This has been changed to being a digital conference. We are going to see if it is possible to open this digital conference up to general audiences. We believe that this is an important field to be involved in.
The end of Ouroboros research
We have another Ouroboros paper which is on the way. This is the last major paper in the Ouroboros family. This one deals with one of the lingering problems. Specifically, spikes of a dishonest majority. The assumption of Genesis works only assuming that there hasn’t been a 51 percent attack. This paper deals with what this means and how recovery can happen in a proof-of-stake system. This is the last paper in the Ouroboros research stream.
We are still cleaning up Hydra. It works specifically with the extended UTXO model. This means that it cannot be used by Tezos, Ethereum 2 or EOS. However it does allow us compatibility with lightning enabled systems.
As far as Prism is concerned it is on track for the second half of 2020. We already have some great progress made from our relationship with the Republic of Georgia. It will likely be ready to be demonstrated by the launch of Shelley. We are currently looking into options for a digital launch event for Shelley given the current global pandemic.
Launching Shelley
Shelley is a significant milestone for all of us and so we want to make sure that everyone can participate. This will be the largest release in the history of Cardano, so we don’t want to allow COVID-19 to stop global participation in this. If travel to Japan is permitted Charles Hoskinson will likely travel there to pay respect to the loyalty and faith of the nation to Cardano.
Again we look forward to having stake pool operators making videos and tweeting them at Charles Hoskinson. Any recommendations for CCCI should be placed on Reddit. We would also like to see someone generate a map of where each stake pool operator is in the world, so we hope to see some community members take the initiative to generate that content. As usual, we thank you for your support and we look forward to sharing further updates.