Caravan Moving On: MicroSummits

hi everyone this is Charles hoskinson broadcasting live from warm sunny Colorado always warm Always Sunny sometimes Colorado still November 23rd been a long day but nearly done with it and I wanted to make a quick video it's about time we have some positive stuff it's about time we talk about some good things happy things fun things so one of the ideas that we've been batting around a bit for 2022 is we've been having some discussions about the DAP ecosystem for cardano and it's really nice what we've been seeing there's meld in Sunday Swap and Cody with Chad and Charlie and the cnft marketplace and hundreds of fan tokens and other things that are floating around and what we've noticed is that everybody's kind of looking at things in a different way and there needs to be some logical groupings that occur where we bring domain experts together and they all kind of just have a focused conversation the discussion about a topic area we've been doing this internally for things the light wallet we've been doing this internally for prism we've been doing this internally for a lot of re-architecture stuff of how do we improve the performance of the cardano node and what features to have like for example the light wallet Workshop we had over 30 people attend and I think that was either in Portugal or Spain I can't remember where it was but it happened when I was in Africa so we started brainstorming the idea of many Summits that are scoped to a particular domain as an opportunity for dap developers who are building in that domain to come together interact with each other and interact with i o staff members merko staff members and Foundation members so the first that we're going to try is some form of Dex convention dexcon and bring a lot of the people that are building dexes on cardano together we had a chance to take a look at some of the Sunday swap stuff I believe some of our people met with milled people today and we've been floating around to provide technical assistance and advice and of course a lot of developer questions come up and everybody has their own different way of viewing various things like automated Market making where liquidity comes from how to handle your order book pattern how it work concurrency comes from what sits off chain what sits on chain and their favorite models on how to do distribution and so forth and there's a lot of lore in each of these things these Community things and what's happening is that things are starting to roll out as the PAB is in the test net and it's being utilized people are building with it and then what's happening is that's leaving and it's going to main net and at some point people are very comfortable with that so probably December January just depends on the Cycles and things like Sunday and others will start waking up on cardano more likely not this year so that's just the first and what's going to happen is there's going to be lots of evolution and iteration and it's important that the DAP developers have direct access to the core pollutist team The Ledger team and network team and other people as well as stay cool operators to kind of have discussions about features they'd like to see new functionality and priorities that they have that they need in order for commercialization to work properly so we're going to have Micro Summits starting with a Thicket decks convention and my hope would be to do that in February February to March somewhere in that time frame right around the Babbage heartful combinator event I think that's enough time for the PAB to reach a certain level of maturity for the next generation of polluted stuff to come out and also for the certification program to evolve a bit more many of that we built plutus and cardano with dap certification in mind 10.5 billion dollars worth of waste Fraud and Abuse has occurred in the D5 space in 2021 so one of the things that was a design requirement for cardano was making sure that when people build dapps on the settlement layer they have an obvious path to establishing levels of certification and that software this is very important for the end user because they need visually to be able to look at something and know that that code has gone through some sort of demonstration of quality and there's been some oversight to look at that and normally that's done through centralized curation but it would be nice to have certification levels that are based on formal methods and they can verify proofs that the thing is correct and they can look at a lot of blockchain based stuff so we've been building that certification ecosystem with Partners cubic twig well-typed runtime verification and surgic are the five that we've been talking most to and there's some security Auditors like kadelski trail of bits others that we've had many conversations with throughout the world quad stamp was another and basically the idea is that we can get three certification levels now all of the dexes that have been talking to us they have either committed to or already are in some process of getting certification either from certek or talking to well type or working with runtime verification right around the February March time frame the case semantics for plutus will be done and I think we're going to have a lot of great certification tooling from automated tooling like what cubic is doing for basic stuff all the way up to manual certification getting more mature so design patterns are materializing we published the blog post on concurrency showing some patterns to use to create concurrency within your application and every Dex has their own idea of how to achieve concurrency on cardano for their domain with various different techniques so it makes a lot of sense to bring them all together the certification people together people who host infrastructure together plutus developers together the plutus core team together and the dexes together the core teams of those people for a scope focused event where everybody can kind of talk it through and I'd like to do this for each step categories so it'd be really cool to do this for the dexes building on Cardinal there's algorithmic stable coins building on Cardinal oracles building on cardano and so forth nft marketplaces these things and so this is not meant to be a giant public event the summit with a hundred thousand people rather it's meant to be a really fun few days for maybe 30 people to 50 people and the point of the event is really an exchange of ideas and knowledge and of airing of grievances of of things that they say we can do better on and build up either it be better things to do with the PAB or it be new features and functionality included some syntactic sugar in the language new libraries for certain things or other improvements and and so forth this would also be an opportunity to kind of have a lot of community influence on the June and October hfc events as many of they're going to be three hfc events it's next year February June and October and a big Hallmark is moving all of these into a large well-distributed open source project to handle these moving pieces so the February hfc event is fairly saturated for the changes that are coming at polluted script compression a lot of optimizations involving utxohd and so forth and like new things and new functionality and we're having lots of discussions about pollutist templates and read all the utxo some will be in February some will be in June but that's pretty saturated in February for the Babbage form but June is not yet saturated so having events in February would give Apple time for an Agile development cycle to add some additional features and functionality that certain members think a lot about but also very cool to have a regulatory bend on this the next generation of dexes and get a sense of what would future proof dexes in a way to make people more comfortable and bring in some Voltaire people because Catalyst provides Dow capabilities right now they're being utilized for cardano and all next year a complete feature set is being built so that you can have it on chain governance system but because of the Native asset standard that cardano has if you issue an asset on cardano it's treated like Ada so that functionally means that you're able to then reuse the government's mechanics that ADA has to run a dow for your application and I think this is going to be extremely useful for algorithmic stable coins and extremely useful for dexes so it's very important that all these people come together they talk to each other and they have a great time together and we learn a lot so my personal preference would be if there's enough room to do this in Spain at Alfred's hotel cardano hotel I think he'd be a phenomenal host and maybe we can make that happen but I'm open for some ideas from the community and again at the point is just to bring the dexes together bring some regulatory ideas together bring the certification people together the governance people together bring included core team elements of it together for a few days and basically have a big workshop and everybody shares ideas they get drunk together they learn a lot of stuff about what they're doing and then we do a bunch of presentations to kind of showcase some of the things that they're building and doing I fully expect that in the next 60 days you're going to see a lot of dexes turn on and cardano and some preliminary traffic occurring so probably nfts trading and other such things and what's going to happen is there's going to be a long tail on dexes just you see with ethereum with uniswap and Sushi Swap and these other exchanges basically they've gone through multiple iterations I think unit swap is already in version three for example and vexes are going to rapidly iterate and evolve on cardano as well so right now is the time to start establishing patterns best practices certification standards and building some standardized on and off chain infrastructure another closely related topic is the police application backend and we've been having a lot of conversations about building a web-oriented PAB in addition to the Haskell PAB the original strategy was build once compiled everywhere so haskelled running on Windows and Linux and Macintosh but then also in the browser and then hopefully a path to getting it on cell phones and we did this through the asterious project at twig for GHC to webassembly so Haskell to webassembly and then and then also the gsg.js project that's still ongoing but that's an r d project as much as it is a commercial project and so it makes sense to start taking a look at PAB and saying can a lightweight version of that be built in typescript as a JavaScript Port so basically it's a native JS library and infrastructure and I think from an open source project it makes a lot of sense and there's some complementarity between these two approaches that could mutually be beneficial I'd like to get that started before the end of the year and I'd like to have some form of beta available by the first Dex con if we can do that and then I think that that that would be a perfect example of where an open source project conversation can happen and Serendipity can occur now if this model is successful I think we can replicate this model as I said amongst different D5 classes that are coming through cardano like algorithmic stable coins and so forth and basically it can be events that can be run at a fairly low cost on a fairly regular basis and it gives people the latest and greatest of state of the art for what's going on in that particular category in different domains so very multi-disciplinary in that respect and I feel this is something that perhaps the foundation could subsidize and ensure is a reoccurring thing so they can still have the cardano summit but then there's also these quarterly community events where there's new things coming and coming make it coming for developers so anyway it's that idea that we've been batting around for a little bit now and I figured it's gotten to the point where it makes sense to start talking to the community because dexes are imminent on cardano they're under construction they're being tested on the test net they're getting to a point where there's they're doing code Audits and they're doing performance testing these types of things and so as a consequence of of that project progress the positive side is the first time ever we get to see it the negative side is that there's going to be a lot of replication of effort and unless there's a lot of effort for teams to talk to each other then what's going to happen is people are going to make the same mistakes again and again so it's pivotal that in the early nascent days of the DAP ecosystem of cardano there's a an open welcoming very floss Centric free Libre open source software notion of sharing ideas because at the end of the day we are all in this together we all have to figure out how to write great plutus code we all have to understand where the tooling is great and where the tooling's not so great we all have to basically solve the same collection of problems from user experience problems to problems with concurrency and other things and that's that's a thought process there's a lot of moving pieces there and there's certainly different ways to do it and Commercial Ventures will bet on which way is best but there makes no sense for people to have to ReDiscover the same technology again and again and again our goal is to try to build a great ecosystem and really move quickly so I think the mini Summit the micro Summit idea is probably the way to accommodate that and it's something where you could build a lot of great friendships and get to know a lot of people and we can go to cardano Mecca which is the the hotel Alfred has and hopefully there's enough room for something like that if not well you can at least hang around the area it'd be a good place to have those conversations and we can certainly send Dom down there and shoot a bunch of videos and people could talk a few more things so as I mentioned the typescript PAB is certainly one thing the other thing is that we brought in a new developer into the ecosystem Splendid very unique development house Splendid is a UI ux developer they specialize in nothing but user interface design this is their bread and butter and they're a very talented firm one of my big priorities in 2022 is thinking a lot about experiences so how do we get things to work fast beautiful in the browser on the cell phone because we've achieved correctness goals of the project we now know all the protocols the design space and it's now a conversation about optimization and it's a conversation about making it pretty usable and functional for the largest set of users possible so you kind of build that in parallel so as your performance scales up your usability scales up so you get a larger user population for the system well what that means is you have to bring in a diverse set of new actors to kind of worry about various different things so on Splendid side they're going to be working on the DAP store we have gone through something called The Double Diamond design process we did that internally we did many customer interviews we talked a lot with different people we did a ton of market research on how to build a beautiful dap store and there were several presentations about this in the light wallet section of the cardano summit back in September well now all the time has come to escalate that and have some domain experts come in who do nothing but build beautiful GUI and have them basically figure out how to transform the ideas that we have into a fully usable and functional user interface now UI design is something where it's deceptively simple and deceptively complicated so it's simple from the perspective that you can make very fast progress two to three weeks you could have something that you can bring up on a browser or a cell phone app demo and play with and potentially be very functional it's deceptively simple in that while you can do that very quickly to refine it and to get to a fully usable State could take dozens of iterations so you may end up spending a quite a long time so it's important to start that process once you have a really good foundation it's deceptively complex because there's a tendency to try to complicate user interface you try to do too many things at the same time when you look at the wallet ecosystem you have a voting Center and you have a Dap store you have a delegation Center you have the wallet interfaces you and it has to be multi-currency you have the hardware wallet Center and then you have third-party plug-ins that fit in and then there's probably oh there's an identity Center and so forth so there's a lot of these moving pieces that are there and each and every one of them actually has to have a unique experience and contains a bundled module for example the identity Center will carry prism the voting Center has to interface with Catalyst but then potentially be modularizable to work with third-party applications you need a Dap connector so the dapps in the DAP store once acquired can communicate with the wallet identity voting and other infrastructure because that's one of the USPS of unifying these things together now we spent about nine months talking about how this architecture is going to fit together with the light wallet next Generations of datalus and we have real good technological ideas of that architecture and and the road map and progress and how you can roll things out in three to six week cadences and add this in and each of those is a GUI discussion as well what should voting look like which these delegation centers look like in a world of partial delegation where you can delegate the multi-pools and so forth so this is the job of Splendid working with us is to to start with the DAP store and then hopefully we'll negotiate working through the other modules and we can kind of get a good sensitive of where do we sit so the micro Summits fit into this idea because we could also have a user experience question with everybody bring people together and basically talk about these things and figure these things out and so 2022 is going to be a lot of that there's going to be many events many gaps are coming out plutus is here smart contracts are running on cardano there's a lot of updates happening very quickly and things are quite malleable and at the same time there's all this scaffolding being put in and institutions being empowered to build out this great open source Corpus for cardano that is going to be multi-layered so it starts from the scientific papers to the formal specifications and protocol specifications to the consensus logic and node logic and Ledger logic and transaction logic and then you just kind of work your way up the stack and each and every level requires a different governance system and their governance approaches in order to achieve efficient execution it's been working well because is a fairly vertically integrated stack with 12 companies kind of piling in but that has to open up because the DAP developers are going to become contributors to the protocol as much so as the core developers are and stuff at the top has to come to the bottom so if the bottom has to come at the top and that needs to be a very effective communication Loop and so we can do better we must do better and to ensure healthy ecosystem growth so things in 2022 are less about when and they're more about how and why and they're more about who in this respect because there's so many actors doing things there's so much momentum and work that's in cardano it's very important to keep all these things organized and that's going to be the the great challenge for the project and making sure that that momentum continues to accelerate so we're going to try a lot of new tools we're going to try and do a lot of new communication media we're going to try a lot of social stuff we're going to try a lot of smaller things that are much more focused and workshoppy the blog post will still come out on a pretty regular Cadence we're scaling that up our hope is to hire a science writer full-time to work with a scientists to increase the velocity because there's so many scientific innovations that have occurred so it's gonna be a busy year but it's going to be a pretty exciting year and it's something I'm really looking forward to and what's nice is that as this year flushes out out there's going to be so many interesting things that are happening that what's going to occur for you the Cardinal user is it's going to get more and more difficult to know where to put your focus so there's going to be things that happen in cardano where you can't keep it all in your your mind it's kind of like with the the Scientific Revolution the enlightenment it used to be right at the beginning that you could be a polymath who mastered every field like if you look at Da Vinci or leibniz or any of these great Scholars they did everything they did medicine and law and Mathematics and physics and engineering and they kind of knew a little bit about everything and because human knowledge was brought wide but shallow it was possible to master the the seminal texts of each field and then what happened is The Enlightenment continued in the Scientific Revolution continued then what occurred is it became more difficult because the depth was so big you could spend your whole life in the vertical and never know your neighbor and that's where we're going with cardano now there's so much specialization and depth in each of these things like Aura Boris is not just one protocol it's a family of protocols and a whole scientific understanding of how consensus protocols should work for cryptocurrencies it's taken us six years with a team of more than 20 scientists from more more than 10 universities working continuously to build out that Corpus so that specialization requires a lot of domain knowledge now over time it'll simplify but more stuff is occurring more attacks are being mitigated more features are being added a decoupled clock Quantum resistance private stake pool operation pipelining and input endorsers fast finality sidechain connection all these types of things are being debated and discussed in that family of protocols and the security models are being refined to add more functionality or preserve functionality but be simpler to explain so that whole domain expertise is somewhat inter related to maybe let's say the programming language side like what makes plutus core and what makes plutus surface and what makes a great language but in many cases there's no overlap and as a and as a result of that lack of overlap it it can be difficult for Neighbors to know each other so the other part of the open source project is ensuring there's effective broadcasting communication of the Innovations and Magic that's happening so that we all kind of understand how amazing some of these things are with with cardano so so it's going to be a very busy year and there's certainly a lot of things that are firing in parallel and as I've mentioned repeatedly actually every month things are actually looking better than the historical average so I'm very happy and very confident that we can bring a lot of really cool stuff out but now is the time for the community to really start getting aggressive and raising up and and pushing hard and now is the time make sure your voices are heard that's another point of these micro Summits and that's another point of this video in particular the community knows everything collectively the problem is that any individual node only has a small view so if we're doing our job with Community Management correctly there needs to be mechanisms where people can go to learn and to ask and then to interact okay so cardano stack exchange is an example of a place you can go to ask and learn and interact and if you have any question at all about protocol parameters the open source nature of the project whatever it have you we have about an 83 84 percent answering rate right now I'd like to see that over 95 as a kpi no matter how complex or simple the question may be and that's public and open and people can see that and it builds up over time a corpus of knowledge that's ubiquitously useful the discords have been very useful for interactive conversations about the development of plutus applications as these applications grow in complexity which is inevitable there's going to be enormous amounts of questions and lots of work to do and a lot of people to to kind of interact with each other so you the community it's very important that you kind of wear your hearts on your sleeves ask questions interact with each other and have a lot of say and influence over things that have to get done or should get done or ought to get done or you feel are very commercially useful to this point one of the things I told our DCF product manager to do Johnny was he he gave this beautiful presentation lots of slides and I said okay how do we put everything in these slides into a single picture an architectural map of the layers of the Cardinal open source ecosystem and we're working on getting a nice visual for that we kind of have a prototype visual at the moment and we're going to work our way through it and then make it very pretty but then once we have that I want to create a special class for people to basically get involved with cardano at one of the levels of that stack one of the most common questions I get in my amas email or other places I'm a big fan of cardano I love the ecosystem I love the ethos I love the people how do I do something here I'm a lawyer I'm a doctor I'm a fisherman I'm a truck driver I'm a developer I'm an accountant I would like to have a class that shows you all the different career paths and all the different things a person can do if they are desire is to work within the cardano ecosystem potentially directly for the cardano protocol when we talk about Catalyst funding next year I believe there will be hundreds of people by the end of 2022 who work for cardano paid for by cardio catalysts will the people will submit grants and say Hey I want to get a job I want to do something here's what I want to do here's my qualifications and people just make decisions and they can be ambassadors marketers developers entrepreneurs and residents these types of things the other thing is I want to build something on cardano or I want to integrate card Auto with my business so that's the other option I want to work for the protocol I want to build on or with the protocol for that second category we've had a lot of discussions about how do we create a bespoke incubation acceleration pipeline where people either can go through entrepreneurial training and there's some great programs MIT has one CMU has one Stanford has one that's just a question of who is the ideal partner and after graduating through that training be in a position where they understand how to submit a callous Catalyst proposal for their business to do something with cardano to build something on cardano and there's some normalization of those standards so those are two high priority educational tracks that exist and I think that will cover the vast majority of people who want to do something but aren't sure what they can do and aren't sure what best matches their skills now true to form I think these micro Summits are going to provide provide a window into various different interesting opportunities and problems because they can eventually be Community Driven for example a metaverse oriented micro summon an nft oriented micro Summit gaming oriented micro Summit for how to get video games and cardano deeper integrated and actual projects that are building and the basically the inclusion test is you have to have adapt working or otherwise you have to have something at a certain level of maturity to be able to attend so everybody there earned their way out in a certain respect and they know something they know something about how plutus Works they know something about how Catalyst Works they understand the underlying technology enough to be able to utilize that technology and propagate that technology so a lot of ecosystem development in this respect and now is the time for Community to wake up to to interact to listen to learn from each other to ask questions to Eric grievances if you have complaints go ahead Now's the Time because everything can be fixed everything can be Advanced and evolved and this Greek dialogue has to keep going it's one of the strengths of cardano is we have one of the strongest communities from the perspective of a dialogue people are always talking always sharing always building and when we look to 2022 we have to continue growing that base and it's going to be a continued source of great strength for us as an ecosystem now there's always going to be ups and downs and there's always going to be big challenges and things to push through but for the most part the era of giant things is over the Gogan release the Shelley release these things they were so massive so much to do literally with Byron the Shelley all the code was Rewritten so it's a completely new code base and there was a big migration to it it was extremely painful and new ideas like hfc the Hartford combinator were introduced the centralization was introduced from a static and Federated to a dynamic and decentralized system so all these moving pieces were very very difficult and they were very challenging for us as a product chick but now we're in the era of Rapid iteration rapid feedback Gogan will continue to evolve and optimize Shelley will continue to evolve and optimize and even binary technology like opft has a lot of room for optimization from we talk about the permission side chains on cardano but those are iterative and in parallel and in certain respect they don't stop they just keep going and when we look to Voltaire that's more about experimentation of what makes a good open source bureaucracy and what makes a good open source government and getting to that getting to that inclusivity that's truly Global and avoiding some of the sins of the past and that's a gradual process that you gradually build to that Basha was much the same way there are protocols that will create massive Innovations like mithril for example but then there's a long tail of optimizations week by week by week that get done to ensure that cardano continues to scale and then new protocols that when are available are available for example like side chains and so forth so a lot of optimization and iteration is going to occur and the Beautiful part is the closer we are to the community as that happens the more the iterations can be influenced to an extent where the community is the key driver of innovation and optimization and so forth in the project so this is the great challenge of doing that organization but then allowing total decentralization and ensuring consistent delivery with consistent quality of the delivery and I I think there's a lot of methodologies that we've been exploring and thinking about proactively to try to get that done and ensure that that's that's good but it's a very healthy bones and vibrant project from that perspective and it's exciting to see all of it as I mentioned in my home video stuff goes way up and stuff goes down events happen and you can spend a lot of time just obsessed with the blatant unfairness of things just for example today the etoro story I I thought it was exceedingly unfair coin Telegraph and other people how this was picked up an organization that is going for an IPO and it's de-risking itself in preparation for that decided to ring fence off certain marketplaces and that case staking activity in the United States because it seems like some Regulators want a lump staking and defy and yields and all these things together in one package and if you're if your primary goal is pursuing something a liquidity through an IPO you want to be very conservative with the things that you do they didn't delist Ada they didn't prevent the trading of it they just said certain countries are off limits but there's still over 100 countries I think that are trading and people all around the world and still there I think they're still running their stake pools internally I don't think they've shut them down or at least that's not going to happen for a while so that is an event and it's no indication of anything the project I mean bitstamp as I mentioned is 10 times larger by volume and also in Europe and they're entering the ecosystem and a lot of people are talking about staking products and so forth so this is an industry-wide concern about proof of stake and the nature of staking and delegation in pools that the industry is going to have to work its way through 40 of all cryptocurrency value lives in that paradigm so when you look at that that almost half of all your value is in this proof-of-stake world then or intends to be in a proof of stake world this is a universal problem that tens of millions of people and entrepreneurs companies are going to be discussing for years with Regulators cardano has no special provenance in that particular problem so it's deeply unfair to extrapolate from an event like that a particular about a particular project but you don't you don't let it bother you you just realize that every single day the Caravan has to make some distance progress has to be made and every single day each person is responsible for their part what makes cryptocurrencies great is not the leader up on the hill who says this is the promised land this is where we're going this is what we're going to do what makes cryptocurrency great is that a swarm across the entire world comes together like locusts and they bathe the land and they make some progress they take it over they transform it they are one Unity made of many no one member of that swarm is somehow indispensable or more special than others some locusts are bigger some are Queens some are different species but you don't look at a swarm as one look you look at it as a collection that makes a universal a whole that's what a cryptocurrency is all about and the Swarm moves slowly sometimes it moves quickly other times it runs into bad weather from time to time but we're okay and the growth is okay and it's truly a decentralized giant ecosystem every contingency you could imagine has been considered from my death to the united states banning all proof of stake and proof-of-work cryptocurrencies and only allowing permission ledgers run by the Federal Reserve with a gov coin to catastrophic protocol failure events to cosmic rays coming and destroying a lot of infrastructure Leica for example those solar flares that hit 100 years ago and knocked out the entire Telegraph Network for a week we've thought about these things in the disaster recovery plan and there are contingencies put in and there are people whose day job is to just do this which is why there's so many damn people at i o and there's so many different companies working on cardano and there's so many different people thinking about cardano taking it seriously now we're not unique in this respect I'm absolutely certain at Gavin's shop with polka dot and at Al Green Silvio's shop and the shop over at Avalanche and all these they think about this stuff too and they plan for these things too and their ideas and their methodologies make us stronger and our ideas and our methodologies make them stronger we learn from each other that's what gives me hope about this industry in this field not the minutia of the day-to-days or how brutally unfair people can be especially when they have biases that they don't admit but they certainly do broadcast in the way that they talk about things it's the fact that we are a swarm together we're all in this together the technology we're all in this together with this desire to create real use and utility and we can see massive progress when we zoom out a little bit it wasn't too long ago that cardano was just an idea on a Blackboard in Japan and now there's millions of people there's great technology there's a beautiful vision and road map and progress that's collectively happening with that swarm that's inspiring other ecosystems onto itself it wasn't too long ago that Bitcoin was just a digital white paper that had been uploaded to the peer-to-peer foundation in 2008.