A bit of detail on the rest of the year for Cardano

Hi everybody, Charles Hoskinson here. This is going to be a fun video. We're going to talk a little bit about the future. The one with flying cars and spaceships and all those cool things. So let's talk a little bit about...

Open up my whiteboard here. One second. Aha! There we go, nice whiteboard. Let's talk a little bit about where Cardano is going throughout the rest of the year.

Okay, so we're here in July. And we are marching towards the hard fork date, which is set for the 29th. And that looks pretty good. Unless our exchange partners or security auditors throw something unexpected our way. But all things considered, the node is at 1.

16, the SPOs are running it, and that's good to go. And we're just getting addressed unidentalist where it needs to be. So at that point, the month of August, there's really two things that are happening in August. So first, there's the whole SPO thing. So staking.

So basically all those people that ran on the ITN and were pioneers helping us migrate over the Haskell code, they're going to start turning on their infrastructure. And with the 29th, that translates to 3IPX. It's August 18th is when they start taking over, making blocks, rewards are flowing, stuff is getting done. So this is kind of thread one is the staking thread. And during that time period, throughout August, September timeframe, we also have Atlas coming out.

And we have all kinds of, and that's our Explorer. And we have all kinds of new liquidity coming and exchanges and all this stuff. And so there's a whole unit of activity, August and beyond, which is obsessed with the staking. And that D parameter is going to be counting down. The K parameter will be increasing.

And that's kind of the flow of things from August on is the increasing decentralization of the network. In addition to that, our network team is going to be running peer-to-peer experiments, because basically what they need to do is turn on the peer-to-peer governor and start parameterizing it properly so that the peer-to-peer governor can actually enable full peer-to-peer for the system. So that means relays are being turned off, peer-to-peer is being turned on. Some of the stakeable operators are running their own relays. So the network is beginning a systematic decentralization, which is pretty deterministic and inevitable.

Now, while that's going on, we also have the Voltaire thread. And Voltaire is basically all about governance. So right at the tail end of July, there's this concept of ballots. And those ballots will start being submitted from the community, you for the DC fund. And so a big part of the conversation from August on will be all about basically who should get money.

And for what. So during that time period of August, if you go to our Reddits or Telegram groups or Twitter, anything Cardano related, there's going to be a lot of news items, a lot of discussion around the DC fund, ballots that have been submitted, who should get money and for what. And every six to eight weeks, a new fund is going to start. They'll get larger and larger over time. More ballots will come.

The voting tools will get more sophisticated. So we'll launch likely the first fund with a cell phone application. And then we'll backport all those capabilities into Daedalus. And hopefully UROI will also support them for a rich voting experience that will run in parallel with your staking experience. During this time horizon as well, we're going to upgrade Ledger and Trezor.

we've had a hell of a time with some Ledger and Trezor related things. And we've actually had to do a firmware update to get the experience that we want. We were originally planning June to do a hardware wallet center in Daedalus Flight. And unfortunately, we couldn't get it done because there was a unique hardware ID that we needed and we didn't have it. So we had to modify the firmware of the devices to get that so we could have a good experience.

You could have multiple hardware wallets and et cetera, et cetera. And also that we could start looking into things like YubiKey. So we're really keen to actually get YubiKey into the stack. So you can use it for access control, wallet restoration, and you can use it for spending passwords. Because that would add a lot of security and allow you to also maintain a wallet in a shared space.

So between July and August, that's the conversation that we're going to be having as a community. And that's going to be a big deal. Everybody's got to learn how to do this. And it's real when we turn it on. And boy, it's going to be a tsunami wave.

And in the meantime, a lot of things are happening in the backdrop. we're doing a lot of big upgrades to Daedalus. We're doing a lot of exchange integrations and just ongoing efforts. And then, these peer-to-peer experiments are running. And August is also going to be a big cleanup month.

So our engineers are super tired. A lot of them have been working overtime, paying them a lot of money to work overtime. And they're doing their job. And we really admire the fact that they've been pushing so hard to make sure that we hit these deadlines, which are super important for everybody. But they're human beings.

And so August, they're going to take a little bit of time off. We're going to scale down a little bit and let the core engineering team rest and recover. And then there's things like technical debt reduction, documentation, backfilling. There's a lot of little stuff like that that has to be done. You can't work people really, really hard for super long periods of time and not expect them to really need a rest.

So August will be a super important month. Certain teams are going to continue the velocity, the Voltaire team, because they're launching, getting things done. The core team is going to need a little bit of time. But they're still going to do a lot of things that involve cleanups and backfilling and just things that couldn't quite get done for that deadline on the 29th. We're also working on with a security auditor called Quantstamp.

This is the second audit. So we had Route 9B do our first audit. And there's a second auditor that the Cardano Foundation retained. And we just got the first Quantstamp report. So we have to remediate that report as well.

There's some issues here and there that are connected. And we're right now identifying which ones need to be fixed before the 29th and which ones we can fix in the following updates that are nice to have but not mission critical. So there's a lot of stuff happening there. Okay. So then after August, there are some threads that are running.

So Volterra is going to be every six to eight weeks stuff is happening. Rapid updating, rapid progress there. That team is never going to slow down. Those guys just love what they do. But on the big stuff, we have kind of native assets.

And we have Plutus Foundations. So after we've taken the time to recover the core teams and they've had a chance to relax a little bit and also backfill the documentation deficits and other things that are identified and also resolve anything that comes up, they're going to start working first on the native asset integration. So Polina, Jared, and others, Rob Cohen, they've all been talking a lot about the ledger rules and what we need to do for native assets. And the Daedalus team has done a really good job envisioning what Daedalus needs to do to have a rich native asset experience. So we have a candidate standard for native assets.

And we right now have a competing team led by Bruno, who's looking at this native asset candidate standard against things like security tokens and things like stable coins. So we're using those as reference points. I'm also going to contract a firm on a fixed cost contract to do a ERC-20 converter. So basically what this means is that this team is going to go to Ethereum, take all the existing ERC-20 tokens and build a converter to redeploy them on our testnet once we have the native asset standard deployed as a proof of concept of how to port an ERC-20 token to our native asset standard. Okay, so there's a lot of things that are being thought about here.

And these things we're going to start touching in August, but then the real heavy lifting is going to start in September. And because we're building on granite and everything is solidified now from the Adrestia side, the Node side, we don't have that Sarah Kelp-Jones code to work with anymore. We have a lot of velocity in these things. And so we should be able to get native assets out in a reasonable timeframe. So this is kind of the September-ish, October-ish timeframe.

And September-October, Volterra is running, things are being upgraded, features are being rolled out on Daedalus Flight really fast. And then on Plutus Foundations, Plutus Foundations, we're also doing that work in parallel. And so there's a lot of stuff happening in September. And that's going to keep going past October, probably November. That's a target date, and then summit to December.

And the point of Plutus Foundations is that that will actually enable people to write smart contracts, rich smart contracts, and build lots of off-chain things. The commercial team and the C-Fund and the partner team has been working with a lot of partners. They understand Plutus and they kind of get what they need to do. And we're going to be building apps alongside them. We're following a strategy called ACID.

And ACID stands for Adoption, Collaboration, Incentives, and Deployment. So anyone who wants to write a DAP on Cardano, there's going to be an adoption strategy to find people who want to do it, a collaboration strategy to give help and support resources, particularly development resources and platform-level resources incentives. This is the C-Fund, the CCI Fund from the Cardano Foundation, the CCI Initiative, and then the DC Fund. And of course, EMURGO has its own investment portfolio that they're pursuing. So that provides some money to do these things.

And then actually, what we're likely going to do on the Atlas side is help a little bit with the deployment and actually build some form of an app interface in the Atlas interface. It makes a lot of sense, the same place that people go to visualize stake pools, assets, and the state of the network to also look at apps that are built on Cardano. And then we'll build some things into Daedalus as well to assist with that. Okay. So a lot to do.

Everybody's kind of working and pushing and building. And what's really exciting is it's just all coming together. It's coming together in a beautiful way, and we're real happy about it. Our critics are critics, and they say horrible things, but at the end of the day, they've built nothing. And the complexity of what we're deploying to market is pretty astounding.

We're changing the tires on a car while it's driving, and that's the hard fork accommodator. We went from Byron to Shelly. We had completely rebuilt Byron to get to Shelly, and now we're at Shelly. We're maintaining our schedules that we've self-imposed. And now we're building all this stuff out.

And then we have this beautiful release cadence with Voltaire, where it just keeps evolving. It keeps growing. The funds get larger. The participation will get larger. The innovation management will get more sophisticated.

You'll have a whole class of experts materialize from within the community who are incentivized to participate and improve things. A lot of auditing oversight will happen. So there's been some open questions about how long will IHK stick around. Technically, our contract was only slated to December of 2020, but here's the reality. I don't leave until what's done is done.

So Goga needs to be done. Shelly needs to be done. We need to get Voltaire to a point where the system can pay. And then we're resurrecting Hydra. We put that on hold a little bit because we wanted to see where everything was moving.

But Rob Cohen is reforming that team. So what we're going to do is evolve Hydra to a point where we feel very comfortable that multiple teams can pursue it. We'll pursue a reference client, and then other teams will pursue their own things. And we wanted to see how that staking ecosystem was going to grow out so that we could make design decisions in Hydra. Hydra is actually four protocols in one.

The paper that we published with the head protocol, then you need a tail protocol, then you need a head-tail protocol, and then you need a routing protocol. So the head is done. We're still working on the tail. So this is ongoing. And then, head-tail is the next and the routing is the next.

So the scientists are very hard at work on all these things. And we've been learning a huge amount along the way, running simulations and prototypes. It's not an easy matter building these types of things. But the good news is that Hydra as a total unit actually doesn't require any hard or soft forks and can be easily layered on top of the stake pool experience that we have. So whenever it's done, it's done.

And we can push that out to stake pool operators and other actors who want to run these channels. And we actually have a whole different team that's looking into cross-chain communication. So the cross-chain communication team is trying to understand if we can take these protocols that we're building here and make sure that we can build a network that will allow people to use Hydra to send value to and from other major systems like Litecoin and Bitcoin. And actually, we're looking at Hydra emulation as well on other accounting models. And so that means that you can go from UTXO to extended UTXO with a subset of capabilities or Ethereum-style accounts to extended UTXO.

And what that means is that you can then use these emulation bridge to send transactions from Ethereum into Cardano or Litecoin into Cardano or something and vice versa, at least as a payment service. And then hopefully also for state transmission so you can use it to move computation around. So we have a whole team that's going to be doing cross-chain communication. Rob is resurrecting this. We needed to pull him into getting Shelley out.

He led the documentation surge and a list of other things. And now we're getting back into that. And, Gogan and Shelley are well underway. And, the heavy, heavy, heavy hard fork lifting is what's happening here. And then in Q1 of 2021, there's going to be a whole bunch of infrastructure and tooling that we build, other partners build to add a lot of dimensions and capabilities to Plutus and make Plutus far more useful for lots of people.

And there's a lot of experiments we have to conduct the ERC-20 converter and things like that. And so that's what the rest of the year kind of looks like. There's some cleanup, a lot of hard forks, at least two, maybe three. We'll have a dedicated video talking about our ACID strategy, adoption, collaboration, incentives and deployment. And I think there's a lot of room we have there, given that we have a unique group of people we can go for and incentivize and push.

And we already have a lot of partners that we're working with. And of course, we'll fill out a nice, beautiful DeFi portfolio and have a lot to say at the next Cardinal Summit, Gogan edition. And we'll announce that date soon. In the meantime, hold on to your butts, because it's going to move pretty quickly. This is really the floodgates here.

And August is going to be just like, okay. And then every month thereafter, there's going to be a crazy cadence of news and a lot of community activity. The existence of the DeFi fund means that we're going to see a lot of ambassadors, podcasters, developers, independent people getting full-time funding to work on Cardinal. So we should see a dramatic increase in the amount of content produced and use and utility coming to the platform, especially in later funds. Perhaps this initial fund will be getting some people who should be paid by the community, paid by the community, the Cardinal effect, for example.

But subsequent funds are definitely going to be all over the board, all over the place, and y'all are going to be real busy with it. And it's going to be a lot of work with it. Also, the existence of native assets is going to be a really fun conversation, because we can talk a lot about USPs that exist solely within our model, which make our platform far more attractive for people to issue assets on. And this is not really a far-out horizon. It's extremely close, if you think about it, for that conversation to begin.

Plutus Foundations is really exciting, too, because we've been working on that for years and years and years. And we've gotten to a point where we have a beautiful language and a beautiful model. And it's just like Shelley, you have to kind of get it out. So it's going to be a lot of fun to start integrating and deploying that into the system. And we'll resource accordingly to make sure that that gets done quickly.

And then, the Foundation is going to be taking the lead on the asset strategy. But we're certainly going to be right there with them, helping them every step of the way to get asset where it needs to be so that they can really hit the ground running and have a lot of great developers come into the ecosystem. One of the biggest myths is that it's hard to find developers. It's not. It's very easy to find developers, quality developers who are properly incentivized, that are deploying good applications that have real great experiences that are truly useful.

That's the hard part. So we certainly can find them. And we're going to build some things ourselves to demonstrate the capabilities of the platform. As for, the rest of these things like Hydra, a huge amount of work that has to be done there. There's also going to be a few more Ouroboros papers that come out.

Dealing with spikes of dishonest majority is something called SCATS. And we'll probably rename it. That's the working internal name that we have. And there's one or two other cleanup papers that are coming out on the theory side that will kind of capstone what we're looking at there. And then we'll be expanding into capabilities like adding YubiKey support.

And we'll probably do an additional firmware update on the Ledger and Trezor side, maybe to make them useful for stake pool operators above and beyond just cold staking for the consumer. Multisig is also coming in this timeframe. We have a beautiful design for it. The multisig spec up here is also going to include stake locking. That's for voter registration, but it can be reused.

It's our version of nlocktime. And that'll be really useful for a variety of assets and applications and things like that. So multisig is going to be a lot of fun to bring out as well. And what we're gonna do is make improvements to the network protocol. So hopefully we can do multisig where transaction routing to build the multisig transaction doesn't require a trusted server.

So after we finish all the peer to peer experimentation, that's probably the next thing that the network team will start looking at is how do we accommodate that multisig use case so that we can build transactions and use Cardano as a network to do that. And it's gonna be a lot more fun. There's gonna be a lot of product synergy that comes in like Prism, for example. Prism plus Atlas allows us to do DID registration. And DIDs can be used for everything from a friends list to secure communication channels to brand identity and unique namespaces.

So this could be for SPOs. They could do all kinds of things there. So there's gonna be all kinds of this inter-product working that occurs between now and the end of the year as well. But anyway, no urgency. We're gonna stick around.

Gogan and Shelley and get all those things done and make sure that everything looks really beautiful. And we'll make sure that Voltaire evolves to the point. And I really want to see all these hydro protocols get done and for us to get to a reference design. So when we need scalability, it's there. There's certainly a lot more to do to get Cardano to a system that's truly gonna be able to accommodate billions of people and use and utility across that spectrum.

And that's what the next five years is about from 2021 to 2025. And we think we have something really innovative to propose that will transform not only us, but the industry as a whole and other industries like Linux development and Apache development and so forth. But that's for later. We'll just keep chipping away at things and building things and getting things done. And there's a lot more that's happening behind the scenes than what I presented here.

But I see a lot of people trying to speculate. And I'm trying to manage expectations on these things. We've gotten to a point where there's 270 plus people at IO Global, a lot of people at EMURGO, a lot of people at the foundation. The foundation's scaling up rapidly and adding a lot of resources and everybody's starting to get into a good stride. So big release coming.

the dates. August is kind of a month and people have calmed down a little bit. Still some things are gonna come out and get done because we have parallel teams. We pick right back up and keep the death march in September. Not a death march.

It'll be better. But we'll have a lot of velocity and momentum in September. And really the things that we need to get out are those native assets so we can be a multi-asset ledger. And Flutus Foundation so that we have full smart contracting support. And then a lot of other people are working in the backdrop on the asset strategy and working in the backdrop on the AC fund.

And obviously the DC fund is evolving at a rapid rate as well. When that thing unloads it's gonna be gangbusters there. And then as we kind of work our way through, there's still a lot of good science happening and there's a lot of really cool things happening on the Ouroboros side still to kind of close off and get a sense of new capabilities. And then we'll just keep adding more stuff like more security with UBKey and hardware wallet support and so forth. Sorry it did take so long on that.

Firmware updates are not easy, especially with our ambitions on hardware walls. There was a lot that we wanted to do with them. And the devices just weren't where they needed to be. They had the raw hardware capabilities but not the software capabilities. And Vacuum Labs is the vendor that's been doing this work.

And Vacuum Labs is just a great company. We're really, really happy to be working with them. They just submitted the first of three PRs for Trezor. And I think the ledger stuff is nearly done as well. So they're getting to the last few weeks of that work unit.

Probably will not be available right when we do the hard fork at the end of July. But likely all that work is going to conclude in August timeframe. So right when staking begins I think hardware wallet holders are going to have easy time with that. So that's where we're at. Nothing magical to announce or propose.

But this is just how it works and how we get things done. And it's exciting because it's genuinely a really good, nice new model. And you'll notice with the F2 delays, I think they've been delayed now six or seven times this year, how incredibly hard it is to actually build a system that's proof of stake and it works and it has scale. And make that system work as a whole unit across the entire industry. And what's so cool about it is with things like AddressDM, we're building Rosetta support into that and doing tons of things with it.

So it's becoming increasingly easier to work with Cardano to integrate and list it and build a wallet with it and so forth. And it's working in WebAssembly. It's working in JavaScript. We're building bindings to lots of cool languages. And with Atlas coming out, we're probably going to have the most beautiful explorer on market.

And then it's going to add all these cool capabilities for stake pool operators and for native asset issuers and other things. So we see a true ecosystem forming. Transaction volume is definitely picking up. Media is definitely picking up. we're on our side, the IO Global side, we're bringing in a chief marketing officer and we're going to certainly do a lot of cool marketing.

And the foundation recently hired a CMO and they're doing a lot of really cool marketing as well. And you see with the Cardano.org refresh, it's the first step in many steps that are being rapidly taken to really push out the USPs and why this platform is so special. And we have all the tools to incentivize people to come in. So now the fun part begins where we actually get to use this beautiful platform that we've constructed to go change the world.

And I can't wait for that. So I hope this video helps you guys a little bit understanding what's coming. I'll try to make them often. And obviously we have our monthly product updates. And this is the first one that Dor gets to participate in, gets to share a lot of information about Voltaire.

And, that's going to keep going. We keep doing the weekly product update with Chris's side. And if you follow our GitHub, you can see the releases that come every two weeks on the node side and the releases every week that come on the wallet backend side. So certainly a great cadence and certainly great to see it all come together. One of these days, our critics will apologize for all the harsh, horrible things they said.

But I'm a little doubtful about that. But does it really matter? We're winning. We haven't even gotten it all out yet. Look how far we've gone.

Imagine what it's going to be next year when we're running full steam with 100,000 plus people waking up every day building stuff on our system and doing things on our system. I'm pretty excited about that. I really am. And it's really exciting to see what's going on in Africa as well. There's some, our best days are really ahead of us.

And I spent five years building a platform that I wanted to use to go change the world. And now we've gotten to a point where I almost have that platform and it's going to evolve as we evolve. And as we add use and utility, the platform will only get stronger. That's a super cool thing. It really is.

Not many people have had the luxury to be able to spend five years building something. And it's a great privilege. And if we're lucky enough to get the contract to do another five years, the things that we're going to be able to do are pretty remarkable and pretty magical. And what makes it most exciting is we don't have to do it alone or do it with a small group of contributors. I think there's a good chance we can have dozens of people that come along with us for that five years to build together the infrastructure and really do some cool stuff.

From quantum resistance and to one shot signatures to like incredible improvements to where Boris to maybe getting off a proof of stake to a proof of merit where your control of the system is not directly connected to the token, but perhaps other factors as well to huge improvements to the voting system. That's going to be super cool to see. And obviously on the smart contract side, there's hundreds of things to do there that would make it an even better development platform and then maybe move from a replicated storage system on the chain to a decentralized storage system. Really, the sky's the limit. And, we've created the resources necessary to fund very ambitious infrastructural improvements and research and we could write another hundred or 200 papers.

And, we had to learn how to do all that. Now that we know how to do it, we can do it probably cheaper and faster and better than anybody else in the world. So that's going to be the 2021 discussion, and I can't wait to have it with you. So until next time, everybody. Have a good day.

And I hope this video helps you get a little bit of clarity on the road ahead.