Update 01/12/2020

hi everybody this is Charles Hoskinson broadcasting live from warm sunny Colorado today is January 12th 2020 it's a new year and brief update on what's going on with Cardinal okay so as you guys are aware we launched the incentivized test that middle part of December and it was a bit rocky and unfortunately Christmas comes in and New Year's comes in and the team that was responsible for delivery for the incentivized test that had been working for about four months straight without break many cases also working the weekends so after they delivered as stable a possible of a test then as they could the majority of that team went on vacation some for three weeks most for two this put us in an unfortunate situation where certain bugs and issues that were known were not able to be addressed until the team returned so that team is back there at full strength now and they mostly came back last week I and now they're working again and we should be able to issue a patch for network stability sometime next week and thereafter we'll continue to release regular patches at the cadence that you've come to expect with the rest team we've been able to collect an enormous of data about the use and misuse of the protocol things such as what is the saturation metric do we need it should it be adjusted things like state pools operating on multiple chains at the same time and this is exactly what we anticipated for and really frankly one of the purposes of the incentivize test net if you look at the goals the KPI is the reasons why we launched the incentivize test net the first reason was to get to the business of the user experience of being a state pole operator and the experience of delegation so the point was to enable you guys to be able to create your pools build a relationship with people and demonstrate that there's a group within the community and capable of running infrastructure obviously the software needs to continue to evolve for this to be a perfect user experience but the user experience is a moving target because this is the first time where we've released it to the general public and we're now getting a lot of feedback about the good the bad and the ugly second we were very curious to see if the parameters we had chosen and the way that we had designed the protocol would allow us to achieve the centralization and performance and a stable Network so we're working our way through that and it's incredibly important to understand that it's very easy for us to install proactively and retro actively as we evolve all kinds of measures to network conditions or activities or behaviors that are discovered to be counterproductive for example we have a pledging mechanism it would be very simple for us to install punitive measures with that pledging mechanism in the event that a fraud proof was developed that someone is behaving maliciously to the network example making multiple blocks at the same time for different chains and what we're doing right now is collecting data and trying to get an understanding of why people are doing what they do how they're doing things and making some final decisions about how the protocol will evolve prior to the launch of the main net this is the 2nd primary point of the incentivized test net outside of these are experienced and the business of delegation was taking it's also to look at the incentive scheme and the design of the protocol to allow us to tune things live with you the users to fix things and get things where they need to go it's important to understand that this is a test net and the entire point of a test net is for things to break and for things to change and for things to be tested that aren't necessarily going to go into mainstream and the point of an incentivize test net is that we all have an incentive my company you guys staking to work together to try to find a way for this network to be stable and try to find far away for this incentivize test net to be successful this said the code that will be deployed in production almost certainly will be the Haskell code I unless something comes up but more likely than not will be the Haskell code and that is a very different temper and that has a very different design and it has a very different quality level it's more complete and holistic and add because it was built from formal specifications the reason why we did not launch the incentivize test that with the Haskell code is that the Haskell code does take longer to bring to market because we've had to redesign rewrite everything from scratch and this is the culmination over a year's worth of engineering so the incentivize test that gives us an opportunity to test the experiences the parameterizations and the business that will be required for the protocol to get where it needs to go and then when we launched the Haskell code that is what gives you the assurances that everything has been designed correctly it's important understand that these are different and they're gonna have different quality levels and different experiences so many of the bugs you're seeing right now many of the connection issues you're seeing many of the kind of edginess that the incentivize Testament has due to the fast production of that software will not be the case with the Haskell code because it was constructed from formal methods thoroughly tested and built with different standards and rigor however the Haskell code intimately benefits from the fact that we will have a large population of stateful operators it infinitely benefits as well from all the lessons we've learned about how to parameterize things and if we need to put punitive measures in or not this is how good engineering is done you divide and conquer you break things down into simpler problems and you systematically work through with your customers the community these issues and you come up with good mitigations I understand the frustration of people running to issues with the incentivized tests not at the moment had we been in a normal development cadence a lot of the issues that those who are experiencing issues would have already been corrected but the holidays did slow us down a little bit however everybody's back and so we're back into a normal development cadence as you saw prior last year how quickly were able to go from the network test net to the incentivized test then and how quickly we were able to stabilize things with mitigations I'm very optimistic that this month will resolve most if not all of the major issues people are having with instead of ice test that and give us them a nice platform to finalize some experimentation prior to the launch of the main net so things are moving along I was just at real-world crypto and I had a great opportunity to meet with our chief scientist at las casas and we spent about six hours covering the entire 2020 research agenda things ranging from finishing the Ouroboros research agenda that we started in 2015 to things such as our collaboration with Peter Schwab a and producing a post quantum signature scheme for Cardinals so we can Hartman Cardinal against quantum computers to things such as improving our network stack design to things such as usage of recursive starts and other state-of-the-art future technology it was a very comprehensive conversation and we're right now finalizing our 2020 research budget including a donation to the University of Wyoming so great things are coming and it's really amazing to see that we've accomplished so much so quickly on the research side another thing to point out is that our development velocity continues to increase through every product in our portfolio from Daedalus the wallet back-end Cardno node which is the Haskell known Jormungandr we are looking at weekly to bi-weekly releases for most of the software and we are systematically working our way through not only bugs and issues but new feature requests and requirements we are far more commercially oriented than we've ever been and we're far more disciplined than we've ever been as a company so I'm very optimistic that we should easily be able to satisfy the requirements of Shelly Goggan and we should easily be able to get full terror implemented and part if not all of basho implemented this year pending upon how ambitious we decide to be with scalability the Hydra protocol should be ready for its first paper sometime in February as we are targeting a using submission this protocol is quite good there's a lot more room for improvement but we feel can dramatically accelerate or borås from where we're currently sitting which is already on even a conservative estimate at least five times faster than atheria minutes at its peak efficiency and this is without aggressive optimization furthermore we have really figured out comprehensively the theory of proof of state to a point where we should have good mitigations for things for example like spikes of dishonest majority which or Boris Genesis currently does not cover so we have a lot of great protocols a lot of great ideas and designs and we feel very good and very confident with the science and we feel very good very confident with the engineering and what we've been able to accomplish in short order in terms of the commercialization of the technology especially with Gogan I firmly believe for Cardno to be a successful platform for smart contracts at the very least we must have four fundamental properties that we have good stories about and good development experiences about first we must have a good multi-asset standard that covers the grid meaning fungible not fungible regulated and non-regulated for example with etherium they have standards such as ERC 20 gr c 721 security token standards and so forth we must have competitive offerings within the Cardinal ecosystem for those who wish to issue assets at a compelling reason why our ledger is a better ledger to issue these meta tokens to bring these communities yet we've had numerous discussions with those who have ERC 20 tokens and we feel that we have some very good ideas that we can bring to the table to make card on a uniquely competitive second we must have some way of bringing external information into the network these are commonly called Oracle's or data feeds as we've seen with the success of chain link and as we've seen the success of many of the Oracle solutions floating around in the D Phi space there's a lot of promise and potential here but it is a necessary requirement for applications on and off chains to function correctly card on o like aetherium and other smart Ledger's must be aware somehow through some mechanism of the outside world and thus we are now working with Umberto and the Cardinal foundation to pursue a good Oracle standard for Cardinal third we very much believe that identity is a first-class citizen Bitcoin started with the asset and only one asset and no comprehension of identity since the launch of Bitcoin over eleven years ago we've now seen things the did standard to self sovereign identity movement projects like sovereign and hyper ledger Indy and so forth emerged their way through and as a consequence we are now in the best position as an industry to make identity a first-class citizen within a ledger for the purposes of being able to have an aliasing system as being able to reuse this for pub/sub use it for multi SiC use it for things to be embedded within contracts and so forth and we have a project called prism working within the Attalla team building a ledger agnostic identity solution based upon principles from the did standard and hyper ledger in d this will be ported to Cardinal and I've made it a highest priority of the team to do so within this year so that we have a very strong identity solution that we can begin integrating into Carlotto infrastructure and anticipation for DAP use and consumption and also to allow us to improve the user experience everything from human readable addresses to being able to have direct communications with people being able to have subscription channels for state pools so that they can directly communicate through the message center to those who have delegated to them there are numerous use cases for identity as a first-class citizen and then finally after identity there has to be a good story about metadata and data to be embedded within transactions we see things the fa TF requirements for the travel rule we see things such as consent and approval contingent settlement I as simple as hashing a contract that has been signed by both parties and embedding that a transaction is becoming increasingly a requirement for our systems to maintain regulatory legitimacy within the developed world so obviously there has to be capabilities within the ledger and within transactions so you the users can make decisions about what to do for the transactions you broadcast and for the applications you write in order to stay in compliance with law so these are the four things that we must do in my view for Kokan the very least to have for a competitive solution now obviously there has to be a litany of other things from successful development tooling interoperability with aetherium some baseline defy infrastructure I would love to see a Dex and a stable point within the Cardinal ecosystem because this is required for better liquidity of a ton of markets that don't have it as well as things like remittances and microfinance and we've begun a very aggressive through our commercial director Jerry conversation with the Cardinal foundation about what is the minimum viable investment required to enable a bootstrap as quickly as possible for this type of infrastructure to get built out Plutus is leaving the laboratory Marlow is leaving a laboratory and it's going from an academic project to now a commercial project and this means that we're now open instead of talking about how do we optimize things and how do we get the theory right and formal semantics we're now having aggressive conversations about how do we build things and how do we build great things that are going to change the world so in the coming months as we close out Shelley and we start moving into the golden era you'll see a dramatic acceleration and hackathons a dramatic acceleration investment in tooling investment and people building pedagogical applications and our hope is that a Mirko will publish on the record a formal investment thesis for those who wish to invest and build apps within the Cardinal ecosystem alongside a firm financial commitment of how much money they intend on investing in those portfolio companies I think it's important that we give the market clarity and we give the market a good idea of what we're looking for as an ecosystem and how much money mirco is prepared to commit towards that portfolio which geographies are a priority I've also had discussions with the Foundation Council about two particular geographic areas one Africa and the other Japan last year John O'Connor my director of African operations worked with ice Addis and created a great proposal so that we could have presence in almost every African country with hundreds if not thousands of minute meetup groups and exposing millions of people throughout Africa to Cardinal as a platform and inspiring them to do things with Cardinal as a platform I formally requested that the Cardinal Foundation approve the proposal that I status and John Kotter have presented or at the very least negotiate that proposal to something that could be of mutual benefit furthermore I've asked for the Cardinal foundation to begin a executing a dedicated Japan strategy for the second half of 2020 so that we can further invest and build up our presence in Japan the Japanese community is extremely important to us and we believe in them they believed in us since the very beginning and we feel that it's incredibly important that they don't get left behind as we build up the Cardinal ecosystem globally I and I would love to see meetup groups in every single major Japanese city and I'd like to see a lot of pilots and projects and gaps coming out of ruled Japan in areas that need this technology the most supply chain for agriculture could work just as well for the coffee farmer and Ethiopia as it can work for the rice farmer in Japan so it's very important that we have a strategy for that and I've asked for the foundation to begin drafting one and to make a financial commitment and to work with their partners namely a Mirko and IO HK towards this end and so a lot is happening we're moving very quickly there's many things that will occur this month next month and March many software releases are to come on the horizon we have the byron reboot shipping with the haskell wallet background integrated that is in final development and if it doesn't hit this month it will hit next month we also have the Obie ft heart Fork these are the last upgrades required prior to the Shelley main net upgrade for the hospital code so it just remains to be seen when the haskell shelly me net excuse me test net is launched and what economic modifications we wish to make prior to the launch of the main net the better job we do with the instead of ice test net the faster this process will be we are also deep in a security audit at the moment with our partner route 9b as soon as we have the audit report we can begin remediations and then as soon as those remediations are finalized we will publicly publish that report giving some assurance to the community that a third party has reviewed our code or security audit and that the code is and good or we firmly believe in the quality of our software but it is important to verify claims that are made and while scientific claims can be verified through the peer-review process software claims do need to be verified through security auditing so thank you all for listening then it's gonna be a long month for me and for the it--which gay team and for all of our partners but our best days are ahead of us I firmly believe that cardano's year is this year I see things imminently happening and it's really been amazing to see things come together it still is going to require a lot of work to get us over the finish line but the software is there the engineers are there the vision is there and so let's get this done so everybody grab a shovel let's go build a future thank you so much for listening