Some Updates

hi everyone this is Charles hoskinson broadcasting live from warm sunny Colorado always warm Always Sunny sometimes Colorado today is March 7th 2022 and I have a few updates for everybody so this is a big week for the entire cardano project whole Cardinal Foundation executive leadership Senior Management is here in Colorado and we're having a lovely time in a series of seminars workshops and discussions about structuring a better open source project for cardano so as many of cardano's code is under an open source license but the curation of it has been rather Federated in nature and we've gotten to a point where there are so many people in the community so many projects in the community there's I think more than 400 daps that are being built right now and a lot of those bias towards the second half of the year after the fossil hard Fork but in the event there's tons of Engineers floating around in many different companies from DC spark to tweaked well typed and obviously our company in the foundation itself and so there's a big question about how does one structure all of that put all those pieces together and we've been working really closely with a lot of different people in the last nine months to to have those conversations and we're starting to converge on a strategy that will be kind of built in layers and these workshops are a pivotal component of that so we'll give you guys an update on the back end of them of all the things discussed and we've learned and commitments made and hopefully maybe be able to get some timelines out about how new government structures look at but we've looked at a lot of different successful open Source projects for example the Mozilla Foundation the Apache Foundation the Linux foundation and we've tried to really look at how they handle everything from how does one become a contributor how do you measure Merit of contributions what type of Standards processes need to be followed for example ethereum has things like eips and ercs well analogously we we have cips and we're talking about what a standards process would look we're also examining things like formal methods how far down that stack we want to go there's an i o viewpoint on how to do formal methods and all of those specifications are public and you can see that we've connected those to the code but moving forward should we move to more of a polyglot ecosystem or maintain Haskell is the reference client and then still maintain the same formal methods methodology so these are all discussions that are being held there's also a lot of discussions about documentation training and other such things if you look at the Linux foundation in particular they do a very good job evangelizing open source and training people to become open source contributors so there needs to be a whole pedagogy that's assembled there other things on the agenda are things like mastering cardano things on the agenda like special purpose courses for plutus and for core technology of cardano I'm going to be attending a learning conference in London in May that actually has has lots of vendors who specializing these things and my hope is to be able to Outsource a big chunk of curriculum development from our internal education division to repeatable courses for the for the community so we're having a lot of discussions along those lines and there's a Litany of other little things to deal with here and there but all things considered a lot of progress there's also been a lot of talk about well what is the cardano vision 2025 2027 as many of I've repeatedly said that our goal is commercial comparability sustainability and self-determination as kind of a goal post for this year things like pipelining and input endorsers mithril side chains these things in that bucket really get us where we need to be in that first category in terms of sustainability there things like utxo HD a lot of the improvements we've made to the system and optimizations we've made alongside mithril that sustainability category we think will be fine meaning that the network can scale to Millions to billions of users and it's not going to fall in on itself and then finally on self-determination really have to get to a point where not only is there a bureaucracy that is very inclusive for the community that bureaucracy is legitimized by the voting of the community the endowment of the community and this is somewhat implicit but it needs to be made explicit through catalyst so we're well on schedule for all of these things it's been a colossal effort and I'd like to thank all the people involved in it more than 500 people across multiple organizations I've had a say internal and external it's been just a lot just getting cardano done this concept of what is required to really make a great impact with Basho Voltaren cleaning up the remainder of things in Gogan and Shelley it was certainly a definitely a work and program and project management and it's really impressive to see what's been done but rubber has to hit the road a few other updates as well if you want to see me in person I will be at consensus June 6 June 9th to 12th I believe that's going to be held at Austin Texas usually they hold it New York but because of covet I guess they moved it to Texas because it's a little easier to put on big events there and we're going to try to have a a big cardano event there as well and bring a lot of the cardano community especially dap developers the foundations and others a lot more to say on our efforts with the VC side so there many of about the C fund and it's trying to take positions and help out people in the D5 ecosystem of cardano we'd also like to replicate that for geography specific funds starting with Africa so not much to say today but we will certainly have more to say in the coming months on that in terms of other updates I science is progressing pretty quickly there's going to be a blog post imminently on pipelining and then there's going to be a follow-up blog post in a few weeks probably on input endorsers I was kind of hoping to get the input endorsers blog put out in February but it looks like that's more of a marchy thing but generally speaking it'll kind of outline design principles challenges and why these things are interesting and what value they have for scalability and then some papers will come to follow pipelining doesn't have a paper because it's not novel from a scientific viewpoint but input endorsers actually are and I think they bring a lot to the story so I believe it's real good real good to have the community have access to that and this is one of those areas where it's a major Leap Forward in terms of skill and performance we kind of worked our way up to it we the company wrote The Parallel chains paper and then also in introduced the concept of input endorsers in in the original oroborus paper and then if you guys are really astute about our Publications you would have noticed The Ledger Redux paper as well so the Corpus has kind of been moving and stacking and moving and stacking towards a Direction but you have to put a design on the table and this is the first time where we've kind of pulled the threads together for a particular design that doesn't suffer from problems with DDOS attacks and so forth it turns out it's a tricky problem but the good news is we have a pretty good idea of of that and now it's just translating it to engineering speak for the Post fossil hard Forks to roll out so that's going to be a lot of fun to talk about another big event that is imminent so it's coming this month and next month is the launch of Mambo now Mamba has been in the works for years it's the ethereum classic code base that we took imported modified put obft on top of and now are bringing to cardano and what Mamba is is it's an introduction to the entire sidechain strategy for cardano so many of the paper I wrote back in 2016 the why cardano talked about this idea of the cardano settlement layer and then the Cardinal control or computation layer we kind of use both terms in the documentation but basically the idea is that the settlement layer would establish a route of trust be very safe and very effective and built in a way that it can easily spin up these computation layers that would have different computational and accounting models so the biggest difference between us and ethereum is we use extended utxo and plutus ethereum uses solidity and evm it's a counts based model okay so you can try to emulate that on the base Ledger but it adds a lot of unnecessary bloat and complexity and attack vectors so it makes a lot more sense to run a side chain so for years we've been chasing different ideas of how to operationalize that What technological Foundation should it be under we looked a lot at the K framework for example and other ideas but Mamba is really the first time I'd say in the Project's history where we've converged to a point where we have a very crystallized Viewpoint of not only how to connect the chains together how to operate the side chain but then also a generic footprint that if you the user want to create your own side chain how that process works now why this is so exciting for stateful operators and people who run the side chains is that it actually creates separate revenue streams if you have side chains they can have their own tokens and tokenomics and if you're a stake pool operator and you're operating not just cardano but also the side chains means that you'll actually get multiple tokens in your Revenue stream for running your consensus node which is real exciting if you think about it so there's certainly a lot to come in the next 60 days about that story and throughout the year you kind of kind of see the stuff roll out milkometer kind of demonstrated already how a third party would do that and then obviously the Mamba approach is a different way and hopefully the canonical way because it's made in abstraction so many people can follow that future chains will be things like for example the Catalyst voting Network let's run the German Gander code it'll converge the same type of technology that Mamba has and then it'll be a side chain of cardano and run by cardano and hopefully you the community will launch lots of these things so look for that as well we should have a lot more to say a consensus about it we'll do some presentations and we'll have some of the people who are core parts of that Team come out and kind of play around with it also it means you'll be able to do hackathons in both plutus as well as solidity and evm so it's really up to you and decide what programming model makes the most sense it's a Bittersweet thing when you look at all the progress that's made and where we're at it's bittersweet from the perspective that we're almost done with the original vision of all the things one would need for a third generation cryptocurrency and it's a beautiful vision it's been a long road it's been a lot of work never in my wildest dreams did I imagine that we would have made so much progress and solve so many amazing problems I and now the next phase when you say things like self-determination self-governance means that it's going to be as much you if not more so than it is anything I could ever come up with so I'm excited to work with you guys in the community I'm excited to see where these open source project structures grow as many I'm a huge supporter of floss we have a policy here at i o not to pursue intellectual property we've never despite the fact publishing 130 papers filed for a patent and all our software that I'm aware of is under some form of Open Source license if we ever release it in a public repo I mean there was obviously code that we write internally but we always end up open sourcing it at some point so we believe in that but it's one thing to say others can take it and do what they will it's another thing to say let's work with others towards a common goal and build and that requires a different mindset management structure mentality it also requires an acknowledgment that things may be a little tougher when it's just a small group of people or you can get everybody in a room and eat a pizza with them and talk it out you can get things done fast but when you talk about millions of people and trying to give everybody a voice that's a difficult one and that's that's something that requires a lot of more advanced governance tools and strategies and my view that is the ultimate USP of cardano no matter how smart your founder is or capable they all have their flaws and they all have their benefits but no one is smarter than everyone and no one is more capable than everyone so the better job we do at bringing the community together and giving astrolid governance and operational structure and a good bureaucracy for the open source project that is effective the faster we can converge to brilliance now there is a cost to that the longer you invest in giving everybody in voice means the slower things come out so there's always a balancing act between agility and speed and inclusivity and and due diligence of ideas so the good news is that we're not doing this alone there's more than 40 Years of history about distributed open source projects in the last 20 years in particular I'd like to believe enormous progress has been made as demonstrated by the fact that the majority of infrastructure that we use in the world is based on open source software and despite the fact that people are in great Conflict at times with each other there's nothing in the world that I know of that could bring the whole world together quite like open source software so hopefully this week we'll give a lot of clarity we've retained a small Legion of experts we've gotten a lot of consultants in who've done this a lot to kind of help us along and it is really exciting to see the transformation of cardano towards that end and it's also exciting to see merging that with catalyst because you have built in all these amazing voting tools and a treasury system which means that you have the Holy Grail of Open Source you have a place where people feel they have a voice you have a place where people can actually get things done and you have a place where funding can materialize that is truly objective and pure a lot of Institutions have to be formed moving forward some Community oriented and other ones just to counterbalance actors research institutions execution institutions standards bodies some will be embedded with an existing some will be blue ocean and created and there's already a lot of work in the community and creating things the cardano defy Alliance For example and other alliances are coming that cover core pieces of technology in the cardano ecosystem that in my view are essential for cardano to carry out its mission of becoming the financial operating system for those who don't have one those alliances will be community-led and supported of course by us I'm going to be cutting a lot personally grants to these different alliances and I know the foundation has the intention to do the same it's just a question of when and how and the exact strategy behind that which is one of the topics that will come up inevitably but it's exciting nonetheless to see that the community is rising up and they're getting things done you see it's impossible to keep everybody happy things like protocol parameters things like k a naught these things there's great debates about what they should be at how things should work for example the curve pledge was it sip 007 this is example of great well thought out work however when you measure it it looks it does reduce the Nakamoto coefficient of cardano but the burden is upon the process to explain why and how and the burden is upon the process to use these great ideas and improve them to a point where they accomplish the same thing one of the things that we've been pushing for for example are objective metrics because we like objectivity here we like inclusive accountability here it's very important to me it's very important to the project in particular you will hear again and again and again that people say we need to be more decentralized but nobody knows what decentralized means what is it what's the measurement is it a graphics card with 3D Mark can you just like run a benchmark and say okay you're 27 and that's better than 14 or something like that we don't have such a metric and then there also isn't a good metric of throughput I remember Alex chirpinoy with Dan Friedman months ago demonstrating a transaction on Ergo that had 5 000 outputs simulating that transaction in an account style model like ethereum would take many many transactions likely hundreds to thousands and that's one transaction in that system so we look at TPS and we say oh that's a metric but if one can do thousands of transactions in one shot and the other one is very serial TPS doesn't seem it's a very good metric any more so than clock speed is anymore in a processor as a child in the 90s and 2000s I remember the processor Wars between Intel and AMD and how every week they oh well we're 1.2 gigahertz one we're 1.4 gigahertz they'd always find a way to get the clock speed a little higher and we as consumers were trained to think more is better then suddenly you had chips that were 3.