Brief Update 07/30/2021

hi this is charles hoskinson broadcasting live from warm sunny colorado always warm always sunny sometimes colorado today is july 30th 2021 just about to head to bed but the weekend is coming and i figured i'd make a quick video you guys to talk about a few things so where are we at well we are on schedule things are moving along chugging away finding bugs as usual shipping software as usual and there are kind of two parallel tracks going on at the same time for the launch of alonzo and i wanted to make sure that everybody understood those parallel tracks and let me grab some more bandwidth here one second there we go okay so track number let me click on comments there we go track number one is the hard fork now the hard four combinator event is strictly about getting alonzo capabilities to the node and meaning that if pluto's code was exit submitted it would be able to execute those transactions would be valid the other track is about building the infrastructure around that node that allows you to run both off chain and on-chain code and build full dapps inside the system so the first part is what the hard fork is required everything else is software basically you write stuff and it compiles down and runs in pluto's core so the first part to get to the alonzo hfc event we need a fully working node which we have a fully integrated wallet backend to that node which we're right now finishing up and should be finished next week and then daedalus has to click on to that and that can we've already started that integration process and it usually takes about one to two weeks when you have a new node new wallet backend for those pieces to fit together okay so when that occurs at that point as long as we're comfortable with that design and those ledger rules we can begin the countdown to a hard fork process an hfc event now everything else is about building infrastructure around that so that adaptive develop come in and they have a good development experience and they can deploy daps and so forth but none of that requires a soft or hard fork that's about waking up the infrastructure and building things and so you'll see this term plutus application back end kevin hammond and yesterday's cardinal 360 kind of went through all of the components but the application back end is is the big boy so the integration for the application back end against the wallet is starting and that is likely going to conclude in september probably september 10th is the tentative date that we have for that so every shade of alonso when you go from alonzo blue which we were at to white which we're currently at to light purple to the darker purple to red to black that's about the escalation of the infrastructure less about the hard fork right now we've got a point with blue and white where we're getting an increasingly higher level of confidence that all of the things are solid and stable for the parameterizations and for the actual ledger rules we're pretty comfortable about all of that so that means that we can do the hard fork relatively soon my belief is within four to six weeks so late august early september tentatively august 31st unless something significant comes up and then it'll delay a week or two more so the alonzo hard fork is definitely possible what does that mean means that you actually can run smart contracts the moment that that hard fork comes on cardo but at the same time that second track is going and you'll see us go from white to light purple to purple to red to black okay so they're not connected to each other where we have to go through all the colors of the rainbow before we upgrade the main net this is more about acid testing all of the plutus infrastructure and building an increasingly better environment for cardano dapps to be developed and deployed on but it's a parallel track to the hard fork that needs to be done i wanted to point this out because when people really think about it they'll think that things are sequential and they'll think that we have to go through the whole rainbow before the hard fork event happens and that's just not the case after white like purple that time frame there's enough people enough progress enough things occurring that we can actually do a hard fork combinator event and upgrade the system and therefore the alonzo era is here what that technically means is if someone had their own application backend if somebody actually had some tooling and there's already some out there they actually could build full cardano applications so the recommended way of doing it still takes some more time but you can actually run from the minute the hard fork happens all of the pluto's code and all of that software we're building around that surrounding infrastructure that we're building around that is necessary to improve the development experience and build richer dapps but it is not necessary to run the dapps from the perspective of the on-chain stuff that's what the hard fork is buying us so those are working their way through and i just wanted to make sure that people understood the difference between those two because it this nuance can be lost everybody tends to think sequentially and realize they're very different there's always going to be a long tail when people build infrastructure for developers because there's new versions of the language there's more libraries there's more development tools there's more things that you get interoperable with and there's a huge constellation of infrastructure that cardinal has the graphql stuff the rosetta support db sync etc etc etc there's dozens of things that are there there's over 100 integration partners that are using the software in some capacity from exchanges to celsius to others like nexo and so whenever you do an upgrade you have to do it in stages or else what happens is that you you inadvertently damage that infrastructure and things get shut off so from the point of alonso the goal is to get first an upgrade for those partners out of the way so they can all get on and continue what we've been doing with the beta which is every color we add more people more exercises we continue training there's well over 2000 people gone through this plutus pioneers program we continue adding companies we continue adding infrastructure and testing and these types of things and we learned an enormous amount along the way about a serialization bug the other day a couple of quirky weird behaviors we've discovered that some of the error messages or other things are not as well formed as they should be literally every week dozens of bugs or issues are being discovered as people cascade in and they look at things from different directions and we see an overwhelming degree of enthusiasm from that group of people so i still think our timelines are good august september those are holding strong and i still believe that most of the development infrastructure will be built in the august september time frame and then a long tale of iterative improvements to that infrastructure as dapps are built and deployed on cardano we are also in deep conversations with our integration partners about when and how to do the alonzo rollout but thanks to the fact that we've done mary and all these other prior hfc events we've aligned things in a way where we have it's basically an art to to deploy we understand that very well we're very good at that so everything's looking pretty good it's been exceedingly stressful and time-consuming a lot of moving pieces i've been traveling a little bit too because there's so much commercial activity going on and a few other things here and there that are related so i haven't had time to do amas recently but i'll get back to that probably next week but i did want to in in lieu of those amas make a video for you guys just to kind of let what's going on we're in the weeds and there's just so many moving pieces but so far the program is actually working better than it's ever worked before shelley was very rough for a launch we got through it but it was brutal for everyone involved and over time the l the accuracy of predictions the velocity of development and also the work life balance has considerably improved there's still some rough edges here and there especially with crunch time but this is a significantly easier time than shelley was last year however the volume of work has dramatically increased because there's not just a node anymore there's a constellation of applications and stuff there's the summit we're planning in september at university of wyoming there's a lot of new initiatives we're starting there's a lot of new commercial relationships we're starting closing out some old things opening some new things and the company keeps growing we're over 500 people in 52 countries and we we've definitely turned to page on a lot of things so alonzo is on track people are working certainly hard on that thank you so much to all the alonzo beta testers who are participating in white who completed the exercise thank you so much for all the pioneers who took the time to go through the entire program thank you so much the development partners you've been working with us we're going to get this all done and i'm glad you're here with us august is going to be a big crunch month because my hope is that we can continue the velocity that we're on and get to the hard four combinator event if not at the end of august then early september but it looks we're going to be in that time ban and i have not received any information to the contrary there and then actually after that hfc event occurs the alonzo ages here smart contracts are here and week by week month by month the development experience for those and the dap ecosystem for those will grow considerably so from day one people will be running things on the card out on blockchain and the sophistication of those things and the interfaces of those things will only get better over time and then we'll see all kinds of cool defy and realfi and all kinds of cool things and of course we're working real hard to make sure that there's some great launch applications to demonstrate the power of the extended utxo model and the ecosystem as a whole so thank you all for listening i'm gonna go get some sleep talk to you guys soon cheers