Update 01/17/2020

hi everybody this is Charles Hoskinson broadcasting live from warm sunny Colorado always warm always sunny always Colorado anyway good to be here good to talk to everybody I'm representing my etherion classic shirt today because the theorem classics doing really well in the marketplace I would love to do something in that ecosystem and we at the very least are fans and supporters and it was so much fun working on mantis and such a joy and you always have to call people out who have had good days - has also recently had some great days and so kudos to - nation you guys are killing it and I'm glad to see success for projects that are really doing the work and having things be fun that said we're all hands on deck for Caridad right now and things are looking good and so I want to to talk a little bit about where we're at where we're going the last six weeks have been very illuminating for me as a CEO because we've changed a lot of our product project and other management estimations and we're starting to see some great outputs from that we have this beautiful Gantt chart where everything's coming together and we're seeing when Shelley's going to hit and how we risking the delivery of Gogan and basho and we're starting to gather all those requirements for Voltaire and we're having great dialogues with all the different stakeholders americo the Cardinal foundation the ambassadors and so forth we're now on to a wonderful release cadence so every week we are releasing a new version of the Haskell wallet back end it's called the address dia project so that includes the wallet backend core libraries development kits and the Explorer infrastructure and we've been having great conversations with many of our exchange partners about how we can take that make that more useful for them make that more portable and package' before them and we've also been having great conversations about staking as a service because something many of our exchange partners are very interested in and so nicknamed vac is doing a great job they're leading those discussions and getting things done and it's nice to see every week that software mature and evolve similarly a Haskell is now on a two-week release cadence so we just did a release I think today and two more weeks we'll have another one and we're slowly working our way towards the Shelly Haskell test that the instead of eyes test net is on a weekly release we did our first release of the New Year this Wednesday it has huge release notes and if you're curious dimitra's the project manager for the instead of eyes test that went ahead and did a video and we just released a video today it was unlisted yesterday but we got it out today I listened to it and I said everything's great but please buy a new microphone so I I sent him a link on Amazon to do that and next release you'll have a much better microphone but the content is still good and every Wednesday hereafter for the foreseeable future the next few weeks we're gonna keep having releases for the incentivize test that and we're going to systematically work through a lot of the issues you guys have reported from connection issues to other such things to improve stability and get that user experience where it needs to be the team is super excited about that Daedalus is also on a weekly release cycle now I and we're starting to really see some great speed up progress there looks like four on the last mile for hardware support so at some point you should be able to restore your ledger devices into Daedalus and we're talking about now management features so you could net ledger accounts and keep your private keys on the ledger device we're also spec'ing out what hardware multi-sig and we're specking out what Colts taking is going to require so we can hand that batch of work to our partners to do a firmware update all in anticipation for a four shellye released for that so things are screaming along looking really good and we're starting to now get to the nuts and bolts of Gogan and start preparing some great launch requirements there and we're certain and I have a lot of discussions about various applications and cool things that we're doing and I've just never seen the company really this unified moving this quickly we're also having great conversations with our partners on events for example tomorrow I'm flying to Switzerland we're going to Davos so this is the first time I've ever attended events around the World Economic Forum there's going to be a lot of great things there a lot of networking there we're having some conversations with many of the different thought leaders and people in our industry we've also started setting up a relationship with PwC they're going to come in hold a workshop with us that'll start in February and the output of that should come in March and I believe next week to get the first output of the McCann relationship and so we'll be able to take a look at their recommendations for the brand refresh and we can start talking about some of the core us piece of card ana recently I was just at real-world crypto and I had a great conversation with a Guillou SAR chief scientist and we got to see what's left for Ora Boris we also got to have a lot of discussions about what we're doing with Hydra simulations are underway and it looks we're still on target for the February launch of the paper for Hydra we also have some great news our work with the European Union for the decentralized software update program that we're doing with IBM research and the horizons 2020 project is progressing quite well we have a 39 page paper we've produced about decentralized software updates which is a component of Voltaire and we're going to go through another revision of that paper and once that revisions done we'll publish it publicly but this combined with the voting research we're doing and the CIP process that the Cardinal foundation is doing those three things coming together will be the bedrock of what we plan on doing for Voltaire along with some lessons we've learned from - nation and from the days those guys and so forth so things are kind of checking away we'll have a lot more to say in February looks like February with a pretty high certainty we're gonna have the Oh PFT hard work occur we're still talking to our exchange partners about that and we just want to make sure all the infrastructure is lined up for it but infrastructure looks pretty good so mid-february we anticipate a no BFT hard work so there'll be an upgrade for the software for that and the haskell wallet back-end is being integrated with the haskell node for the pirate reboot it's been running that way on the test them for a while but we need to get it out to you guys so february is going to be a busy busy month big software update come to maine net and hard for coming so we'll make some product announcements there pretty soon we're getting set up for regular communications so as I said every week you're gonna get an incentivize test that update from Demetrius until that network gets shut down and we turn on the Shelley maintenance Oh huzzah there but we're also going to start doing regular updates with the entire product management team so Aparna Joo the person who's at the very top of Cardno she's going to provide an update and then it will trickle down to each component of the system so Rob Cohen will do the note till he moves on to Basho then probably Kevin Hammond the address D Assad will be done by nickname FAQ D budget will go ahead and do the gogans side of the world and then we're bringing out a product manager specifically for Voltaire to give some updates there from the I which case I'd and of course there's going to be people on the CIP committee and so forth so so lots of stuff coming there but my goal is monthly cadence for that major product update I will do weekly updates on the ITN and we have probably do bi-weekly updates for other components the foundation is going to announce pretty soon its grant program they're gonna start giving out some grants to keep people in the infant and the ecosystem bring some key actors in and we have been negotiating very aggressively with certain exchanges that shall remain nameless and I hope that we can get a great custody solution and we can get a great listing solution planned out so we're working hard on that and we'll see where that materializes we would also love to see what we can do with BitFenix that's a relationship for a long time we just wanted to close out to get a tit listed and my understanding is that that's being pursued and the foundation is doing a pretty good job with those negotiations so progress is coming and software momentum has come in route 9 beyond it's looking good hopefully we'll have something to publish soon I developers are pretty happy they're writing a lot of code I think we're still number one for github commits and we're just we're just killing it it's all hands on deck for cardano's so we're actually gonna start moving resources from a attala into Cardinal in particular we're very keen to take the identity solution that we've been building for atala called prism which involves using components of hyper ledger Andy and ID's we're gonna pull that into Cardinal and we'll make an announcement at a later date of exactly what that means but it's very important to me that we have a very strong solid first class identity solution in card on o so that can be a smart contracts can be a consumer of that we'll also make some statements about Oracle's and we'll make some statements about our multi-asset standards as we get a little closer to the release of Gogan the Foundation's also starting to work with us to plan out a hackathon master plan for the entire year so as we get the Mach chain where it needs to go then we're going to start executing that strategy and then we're just gonna every month try to have a hackathon in a major development area and make sure that people know that this is a great platform to build applications on and of course we're talking a lot about interoperability these days and we have some great ideas about how to achieve that whether that be through lightning or through other things so things are things you're moving along in that respect but overall it just feels the space is starting to wake up a little bit the markets are a lot happier they're starting to have a little bit of kick in their step and I think this this bull trend is not just an anomaly I do feel that this is probably representative sample of the of the year we were encrypted winter for quite a bit but talking to my competitor is looking at different communities and hopefully what I'll see at Davos is that people are waking up to the idea that maybe cryptocurrencies are here today and they're waking up to the idea that we actually can solve real problems for billions of people and the technologies starting to get ready to be able to do that and then hopefully I think the markets will reflect that we're also seeing a lot of great mark on infrastructure being built up options are trading futures are trading and they're projecting a more bullish opinion we're also going to start talking to a lot of the people who do research in the industry and write reports I do have an interview I think with the Masari guys and others so I make sure that when they talk about great crypto currencies and great technology that IO HK is mentioned and in particular Cardinals mentioned and what we've brought to the table is mentioned as a viable competitor in a third-generation cryptocurrency we have this tendency to think that just because we've done the science and great engineering that we've done is self-evident but it's very important that we actually reach out proactively to the people who are responsible for telling the world all the real crypto currencies and making sure that they give us a fair shake so we're gonna work closely with the foundation to make sure that we cover all those and on my side it means a lot of interviews and answering a lot of technical questions and due diligence questions but that's okay that's what we signed up for we're moving hard and we're moving fast all of ihk is focused on the success of cardinal it's our number one priority and everything else is secondary to that we think this is the best investment time effort money we could make it's a it's a great project and we're starting to see real tangible meaningful progress and we're starting to see the end in sight for in terms of getting everything on the roadmap where it needs to be there's still a lot more to do and there's still a long way to go but our people are here to win and we're here to fight it so thank you guys for your patience and every week you're gonna start seeing news trickle out blog posts come out videos come out lots of great events coming soon and you're going to start hearing from the entire product team on a pretty regular basis watch our repos they're screamin and please please please continue testing our software the incentivize test that KP eyes look wonderful we have almost 900 registered pools almost half of all the ADA and circulation is currently being staked the metrics are getting better every week the oversaturated pools are reducing many people are learning how to use the protocol and as we keep shipping updates I think those metrics are going to get better yeah we expected maybe 20% participation and to get something of this scale means that it's really not inconceivable to have a thousand stake pools at launch but there's a lot of work to do we're gonna have to work very closely with those stake pools to nail Patel's going to do that to make sure that there's a clear migration path from the rust test met to the Haskell Shelly test net so people have some time to burn and build up their infrastructure and we want to make sure day one when Shelly launches that we have a strong showing there we're getting where we need to go now a few more things about the incentives model in particular there's been some discussions about should we introduce punitive measures and in particular around the pledging mechanism so when you set up a stake pool there's a desirability metric when you do a pledge basically saying this ADA is connected to this pool right now it's unlocked and it could technically be moved we could set up a locking mechanism and then what we could do is introduce cryptographic proofs that demonstrate that people aren't behaving properly so in addition to lowering their metrics so that they're less desirable pools it actually could do things for example freeze the ADA that's been pledged for some period of time now this is a different type of game theory than the game theory that we've been doing the game theory we've been doing is about how do you embrace social pressure and reduce rewards to create good behavior this is game theory around punishment for bad behavior now it's very possible to and actually we've had some discussions about what would the mechanisms look and how would this be done it could be as simple as generating a cryptographic proof that anybody could send as a transaction that would basically be used to freeze funds and every time a bad thing happens basically you have an exponential increase in that freeze time that would be a simple remediation but then we'd get into the game of all kinds of non desirable behaviors and we'd have to clearly articulate quantify that construct crews for that this is one of the benefits of the instead of test that is it gives us a fertile testing ground to have these conversations and discussions what we found is that many of the stake pools that are producing blocks on diverging chains are not doing this maliciously they're doing this because the network quality isn't good enough for them for whatever reason and what they want to do is make sure that their blocks get included so they can maximize their rewards so what we're gonna do is run a few more iterations of the network stack so that's going to be probably another three to five weeks of updates to the in survice Network and then we'll see if social pressure along with improving network conditions ameliorate this problem and if it doesn't we can put a punitive measure in with the pledging mechanism sometime in the show a time horizon but this is a great example of the power of testing things in this way had we not had value at stake people simply would have never done this because they wouldn't be caring to maximize the rewards but because they want to maximize the rewards they're behaving as if they would on the main net so in many ways the incentivize test that has been a great success for us it has an ecosystem and given us a great group of people to work with that will allow us to get all the kinks out of the models throughout the foreseeable months we've also had some discussions about a donation to University of Wyoming using ADA we've also had some discussions about starting payroll at AI which K using ADA as well is something we've been wanting to do for a very long time and a lot of our employees are super excited about it so because they they've been building it they'd like to get some of it and so we're we're probably going to make it an announcement at a later date about that but it's really exciting to see the prospect of a u.s.