Some Musings about the Roadmap

hi this is charles hoskinson broadcasting live from warm sunny colorado always warm always sunny sometimes colorado i got a new setup let's see if you guys it and today we're going to talk about the road map how about that huh yeah actually this is a nice little road caster i got and i have this beautiful mix board and it came with all these pre-installed sounds and i can entertain myself to my heart's content in fact i even have stuff for scary events [Music] and so forth how about that actually i want to make quick video and go ahead and show you guys with my screencasting software a little bit about what i'm thinking about where we're going so as you're aware we're starting to finish out cardano 2020 and we're building some things and we're getting it done so for example the alonzo hard fork is coming the hfc event will be announced exactly around end of april at the cardinal 360 episode if we can maintain the roadmap that we laid out for you guys but it's eminent pluto's pioneers is underway lots of firms are working you met some of those firms in the last card on a 360 episode and there's an enormous amount of activity on cardinal right now tons of nfts are being issued all you guys are running lots of merry stuff is still going on i think cardano assets let's actually take a look and see how many have been issued so if you go to our model assets right now we have [Music] quantity 18 460 so far created and remember it's not exactly the easiest experience yet and people are just getting started so it's really amazing to see the uptake of that and how fast network's growing so this quarter peer-to-peer is coming and we're obviously doing all the test net stuff and then next quarter we'll finish off the last of that 2020 stuff including we're looking at probably a genesis event for orborus genesis so we'll do an hsc to get there and if not september a little later but this year and then obviously there's a lot of work to do on voltaire but then after voltaire we have to figure out where to go what to do and what's 2025 going to look and the purpose of this video is to give you a sense of not only are we thinking about it there's already an enormous amount of work that's been done to kind of pre-chew and i wanted to make a video to talk to you guys about some of the things that i'm thinking about but obviously our chief scientist has his own agenda as does the cto that says the community as does others and right now we're working with a firm i can't quite announce them yet but they're a major consulting firm to help kind of pull that whole thing together and do all that stuff so without further ado let's share my screen let's see here share screen and we should see that whole crazy thing there we go and we'll bring this up okay and we'll go ahead and pull that over here put that right there and there we go okay so i can see you guys you guys can see me all right so no i don't still get for windows right now stop that okay so we should be able to draw some cool stuff all right let's draw a little circle here there we go okay so the core of cardano is aura boris and one of the things that we are exploring is this concept of auroboris omega so what happened with the oraboris research agenda was that we spent a few years thinking about whether proof of stake was going to work or not and showing that it was provably secure and we achieved that in 2016 with the oroboros classic paper now that paper was not designed for production cryptocurrency it was rather a theoretical artifact that we could basically construct on top of it i'll just maximize the screen for your guys's benefit because you guys can see me anyway okay but now i can't see you in your lovely chat then we followed that up in 2017 with our boris prouse so here's prouse and that's actually what's running right now and then we followed that up with our boris genesis and that's where we're going before the end of the year and that was in 2018. okay so beyond that there were many things we looked at like ledger redux is a paper and then there was also aura boris kronos and then there was also ledger combiners and then there's other research that's been done by the industry for example nakamoto proof of stake and so forth so all of this stuff plus all of the state-of-the-art stuff is going to be dragged into one gigantic paper or aborts omega and this is kind of the capstone so all the goodness here is enough for a permanent cryptocurrency with lots of great theoretical properties it kind of matches and exceeds proof of work in terms of theoretical guarantees and so you're semi-synchronous 51 security bootstrap from genesis it has a relatively the same consensus model the only difference is it's 1.6 million times more energy efficient and also you get a much higher transaction throughput and actually just off of this we think that our theoretical throughput maximum is about a thousand tps on the base ledger so that's no sharding no off chain none of that stuff that's our window of how far we can push it but you want things like fast finality you want things the abilities ego side chains you want no reliance on external clocks you you want the ability to gracefully recover from 51 attacks all kinds of stuff like that and a lot of additional theory plus a little bit faster tps and that's really what omega is about and so part of the 2025 agenda is making sure that not only we get to omega but then omega plus plus there's constant evolution iteration on the theory of consensus now we believe that the omega paper with a prototype is going to be available this year and this will likely be prior to the announcement about cardano 2025 but basically the idea is that we're going to roll up everything that we've done with redux chronos and ledger combiners as well as some things we've learned from the industry because there's so much fertile research with al grant and other things and we should be able to to easily match it and exceed what's on market and omega is kind of that nice roll up okay so that's definitely part of the road map another thing is this concept of light clients okay and like clients have always been an essential part of the cryptocurrency space and generally speaking they're easy to do uroy is an example of that but they're easy to do with trust assumptions so what ends up happening is that somebody runs a server and that server is going to basically be your window into the system into the protocol okay so they're the ones that show you how everything works and that's how uri works you have a chrome extension or you have a mobile app and they give you some state of the system and then you make your transactions based upon that view of the system that's given to you and you have limited ability to check if that state is correct now there are other protocols on market that people are proposing like for example mina is one of the most promising of protocols right now and uses very sophisticated heavy crypto called recursive snarks and the longer the short is that you have this proof super cool little proof that one your coins that you're seeing exist and two haven't been double spent so you don't have the blockchain in fact the meanest case they're trying to get it down to 22 kilobytes for that proof you just see a proof but if somebody sends you a transaction that that transaction's right okay so we've been following stuff like that we've been following what's been going on with bulletproofs which is a type of snark we've been taking a look at what we can do with the stake pool operators and we have something called the mithril protocol the first time i've ever talked about it but we've been working on it for quite a long time and that's also coming out this year the paper and my hope is to also have a prototype as well this year and what we want to do is have a similar truss model where you have a light client by default so whether you're using uroi or you're using an other wallet like daedalus you start that with that light mode okay so you no longer have to have the entire blockchain you basically just get a proof that coins exist they have been double spent and that the state you're looking at is right so there's lots of optimizations that have to be done to make this happen and there's a lot of prototyping and careful thought and there's going to be some new data structures that are put into let me zoom in a little bit here it's a little easier to do this on a touch screen there's a lot of of new proof structure and data structures that need to kind of be put in so new ads authenticated data structures new crypto but we've been working on this since 2018 actually with the proof of stake side chains paper and we've also watched what the industry has been doing and there's a lot of really cool really interesting ideas and we think we're going to be able to bring something very novel to the table okay so omega is definitely the paper and a prototype our goal is to have that this year for like clients our goal is definitely have that paper and some form of a prototype and what we want to do is move the operating model of all wallets in our industry the standard operating model to default to light and then if you download something like data list it'll in the background upgrade over time into a full wallet but you get instant use and it has a lighter resource footprint okay so those are two core things that we're really keen really interested in so the other thing is side chains and for a side chains model one of the research things that we've been doing for a while is saying okay if you have your main chain we call that and if you read the y cardinal paper csl and then we say these side chains are ccls and csl stands for settlement so that's what we're currently all working on and then the side chains are stand for computation and we always had this idea that there would be lots of computation chains inside the system so like evm like yellow and then there would be this idea that over time we could add other computation layers that are domain specific or for new programming models for example we'd love to see catalyst become a side chain we'd also like to see maybe you have webassembly as a side chain or something like that who knows okay so you need rules to add you need rules to remove or retire and you also need an economic model so how will we pay for the maintenance of these side chains so how pay okay and that's a really interesting really cool fun question to kind of cogitate over and prevaricate over and so forth and what's also really cool is that these can have different resource models so in ethereum you have this concept of gas okay and you say okay that's great this gas idea this fuel idea but what if by holding ada that there was some way that you could refine eta through maybe a locking or staking mechanism to get fuel on one of these networks for example the maybe you'll get fuel in the evm network or you'll get fuel in the yellow network or maybe all of them or something like that and this is actually something that we're modeling and exploring right now looking at the game theory behind it but what's really cool is then what you can do is because you now have different tokens that are associated with these things that ada will generate you can have different resource models for these different computational domains and we can even make the field perhaps expire so perhaps it has a demirage or a decay mechanism or you can actually fix it to a guaranteed operating cost so these computation layers can actually have different operating costs what's really cool is that cardano could be a side chain of itself so you could actually have a plutus side chain so you can have plutus on the main chain and pollutus on the side chain but a different resource model for this and ada can be used to kind of generate those resources for all these different systems and we can have sensible rules about adding or removing and so forth so this year we're going to propose a cip and actually i think this is going to be one of the first cips that the community is going to vote on for an hfc event to basically update the monetary policy to include incentives to run an evm yela and catalyst side chain and also include some really cool feel and resource models that'll come so there's been some really cool things the industry done with cosmos and para chains with parity and the polka dot guys and a lot of people have some cool ideas and what we're trying to do is is kind of look at what the industry has done and look at the different arguments and this is a really nice mechanism design in game theory model and there's a lot of mathematical finance to do here but we think that we can converge to a design we're quite happy with and through the cip process we think the community is going to have a lot of fun exploring that and this is how we'll add ethereum compatibility and yellow compatibility and bring catalyst into the system and so forth but then there's going to be very clear rules about how to add retire and also pay for these systems as they're needed also this will allow a concept of moving between a permissioned and permissionless system as many of we've joined the hyperledger foundation and we could definitely propose a permissioned version of cardano as a hyperledger project and it's very easy for us to add that to the system okay so that's another event that we're looking at this year so mithril and we're definitely looking at orabore's omega and then of course off chain there's this concept of layer two infrastructure and there's really two prominent pieces this year of off-chain infrastructure that we're conducting a lot of work on one is prism and there's a lot of deal flow with prism which will be announced and this is basically did embedding and this is worthwhile to have its own video and i'm probably going to do that talk about all the different things but that's basically for things like authenticated wallets authenticated transactions kyc aml scenarios idea of a regulated d5 space so you could create a defy application but yet that defy application will be somehow connected to a did which has been kyc and aml'd so there's no central authority controlling it but it's permission for access to a contingent on you having a certain credential and things like that and there's hundreds of other use cases that exist with prism for example i remember on the roadmap years ago we said human readable addresses well this is how actually you accomplish that because what happens is you'll have a friends list with with daedalus and eventually they'll become a standard a crc and basically when you add alice or bob to your friends list what you're doing is you're actually adding their did and the ability to generate addresses on their behalf so you can have a point to point perfect forward secrecy communication with them but then you can also just send money to bob or send money to alice and you get a guarantee that it's the right address because they can have signed addresses and all kinds of cool things the other piece of off-chain infrastructure is hydra and we have a great prototype team on this and that team is going to present in april what they've accomplished so far they've really started working heavily in march and they should have some cool stuff to discuss and there was always kind of a four paper agenda for this and we are right now deep in the guts of the second paper and we should be able to finish the other two this year so paper three paper four this year and alongside a prototype and we designed hydra to be a graft on layer 2 solution that the spos can run alongside other people and each channel will enable micro transactions in high throughput for the entire system so when you write a cardano dap you can use prism for free that all that infrastructure is there it's built in and your users can have dids and you can use hydra when hydra is available and we think with substantive progress will be made this year and we'll finish it out in 2022. so just hydra prism mithril and omega alone i i think that really makes us not only the best in class but it really just pisses all over what f2 is trying to accomplish because we'll have a better resource model with the side chains and always have that we'll have a beautiful light client experience that enables payments and e-commerce and all these other things and very fast finality with omega and high throughput and so forth and you also will have future proofing for the whole regulated side but actually there's so much more to discuss for example quantum resistance is one thing and i would love to have that property as soon as possible but that's in scope for 2025. we got to get that done and that's a huge research agenda you need a quantum resistant vrf you need all of the zero knowledge crypto to also be quantum resistant you also need quantum resistance with the signature scheme and then you also have to model what's called a quantum adversary and there's been some preliminary work done there but it's an enormous effort and then also potentially how do we use quantum computers to enhance cardano for example some of the community members are using quantum computation for random number generations that's really cool they're injecting that randomness into the cardinal network so it's going to be a big quantum agenda for 2025 happy little quantum agenda and we're gonna have some fun with that we're really going to enjoy that okay the other thing is on the governance side there's an enormous amount of work to do linking catalyst which is right now primarily concerned about treasury with voltaire which is really concerned about protocol updates okay so these have to be unified together some of that unification will happen in 2021 and then as we go into 2022 that that unification will be complete and so the entire hfc system will be further formalized and put under the control of voltaire and there'll be a probably a bicameral voting model and there's a whole bunch of things like liquid feedback things like expert ballots and also getting all the economics right and continuing growing the social dynamics but actually catalyst is one of our most successful products in that all the kpis are being hit fund after fund after fun but this is a big thing that's going to be growing throughout this year and next year are getting all those components there but one of the big things that i would like to do is when you create a dap on cardano or d5 or sofi or whatever the hell else this stuff is that if you need voting if you need a dow basically this can become a dao as a service so the basic concept is that hfc that your monetary policy the update system for your code all those things if you issue a token that's connected to it you can basically assign voting rights and you can reuse all of the voting system that catalyst has and voltaire has to handle all of that for you so what this means is that we're going to overbuild the governance stuff in catalyst and voltaire as we think about these things so that means we'll add other voting systems like preference voting and quadratic voting and so forth because even if we don't use it for cardano that's a library that's available for your dap if you have different governance preferences and so forth we're also going to launch a research agenda to move from a plutocratic model which is right now where we're at with ada to a hybrid model where we actually have ada plus proof of merit and that's a very ill-defined things when we talk about 2025 research agenda this is closer to 25 then closer to 21.