Vasil Upgrade - The State of Play

hi everyone this is charles hoskinson broadcasting live from warm sunny colorado always warm always sunny sometimes colorado today is june 20th 2022 i was a little under the weather for a while i was supposed to be up at collision in toronto but didn't feel well enough for it and i had my congressional testimony here in just a few days and so i figured i'd stay here out of an abundance of caution just to make sure i'm well rested enough for that because it's a pretty important event as many of because the blog post came out titled vassal upgrade the state of play that june 29th is out so i want to make a quick video and show you the blog post and talk a little bit about it and let me share my screen here okay so here's the blog post and it says on friday the core input output global team working towards the vossel upgrade held its regular end of the week evaluation call today monday june 20th was the latest date that we could facilitate a carnano tested upgrade before the next epic boundary so we agreed to reevaluate the latest status this afternoon taking into account the work of our engineers did over the weekend the iog engineering team is extremely close to finalizing the core work with just seven bugs still outstanding to complete the hard fork work with none ranked as severe after some consideration we agreed not to send the hard fork update proposal to testnet today to allow more time for testing today we've managed to get through the majority 95 of our plus v2 test scripts actually there's a little link there to the test script repository you can see all the scripts here being done real time all that stuff however we still have a few outstanding items that need to run and confirm everything is working as expected we have determined we'll need a few more days for this this puts us behind schedule on our previously communicated target date of june 29th since the start of june we've successfully running an early build of the new node which includes diffusion pipelining and the new plutus v2 cips among other enhancements as the semi public vessel development devnet we now have some 35 developers across 27 projects testing their depths and helping identify any issues along with 16 stake pool operators supporting we've also been working closely with some of the leading tool providers including block frost cardano serialization library the cardano multi-platform library we want to call out the work of m-labs and d-quadrant in particular for providing great support throughout the process this developer testnet stage puts us in a good position when it comes to pluto's code compatibility and functionality this valuable work will continue on this development test now over the next few weeks work on vassal has been the most complex program of development integration to date from several angles it's a challenging process that requires not only significant work from core teams but also close coordination across the ecosystem the final decision to fork hard fork the cardano test that will be made in consultation with members of the spo and dap community against three criteria no critical issues outstanding on the node or our internal audit function benchmarking performance cost analysis is acceptable and community including exchange staff projects have been properly informed and has had sufficient time to prepare the hartford combinator event project continues to track well against these criteria once we can comfortably and confidently tick all boxes we can move forward and the hard fork of the cardano test neck marking the final countdown to the main net hard fork cardano foundation integration team leads this process and typically aims to give exchanges four weeks to finish their own integrations and updates the pareto principle tends to be following here achieving eighty percent exchange compliance by liquidity before maintenance thus minimizing inconvenience for users while recognizing different exchanges can work on different timelines not to name names today iog and the cardano foundation have created a new target date to hard fork the test net at the end of june once completed we will allow four weeks for exchanges and spos to carry out any required integration and testing work this is only reasonable and should not be rushed the work assumption should therefore now be a cardinal mainnet hard fork occurring during the last week of july we recognize that this news will be disappointing to some however we are taking an abundance of caution to ensure that we do this deployment correctly as we have consistently communicated the most important and most in the community recognizes no timelines can be absolute software development quality and security must remain paramount if more time is needed to get core code right sure all ecosystem players are fully comfortable so be it giving the process longer is the only responsible thing to do the iog and cardano foundation teams will continue to work closely with the developer community and exchanges as we draw closer to the fossil hard fork on mainnet and to keep the updates to the community coming thank you all for your support okay so that's the statement that just came out and i figured i'd add a video to add some of my own comments to it as well we're pretty close to the target we're cut complete and what code complete effectively means is you probably could flip the switch and get away with it and certain projects would do that but what happened after the collapse of tara luna is that i gave a directive to a lot of the engineers to say we should probably measure three times and cut once given the nature of things and so additional tests were added in the pluto suite and additional work was done for qa above and beyond what we normally do for hard forks so that was one dimension of the puzzle that made it more complicated the other dimension of the puzzle was that after consensus we did have an enormous amount of contact with dap developers and other people and there was a desire to be a bit more inclusive in the qa process and the testing process so a lot of them said hey we need several weeks on test that to be able to play around with these things and at the end of the day this is not a hard fork for the average cardano user the vocal hard fork has always been a hard fork specifically for dap developers it speeds up the transaction rate with pipelining and then all the sips are basically there to make pluto smart contracts easier to write if you're a developer whether you're doing it on the main net or the test net you should have the same development environment in that respect so what's more meaningful to the community frankly is making sure that the test net runs fossil so that people who are building daps on cardinal can deploy those dabs and you'll notice something that that's still on schedule for it appears to be a june hard fork so we don't anticipate that this july date is going to in any way impact the actual roll out of all the daps that have been waiting for fossil because now they have a testing environment to do that the foundation always requests at least three to four weeks of time for exchanges and other infrastructure and one of the things that happened when we were looking at the infrastructure audit the amount of community programs the community projects that are plugging into cardano are very significant in fact much much more so than when alonso came out in september which we did hit the date of so it's a little disappointing at times that things sometimes take a little bit more time but now we've gotten to a point where the project complexity and the amount of integrations and third-party things that have to work well and not break is pretty significant and this is significant because we're doing network enhancements consensus enhancements with pipelining we're upgrading significant changes to the plutus language which is the first time we've ever done that with live dapps in circulation and adding new cryptographic primitives the sec p256 k1 pluto's versioning removing the d parameter there's a there's a lot of stuff here with with this hard fork it's the largest and most significant i think we've ever done and it's one where the stakes have never really been higher in that respect we have a security auditor named be cryptic they do a rolling audit and for three weeks they've found no issues and that's a good indicator that things are mature so the cardano 360 episode at the end of the month i requested a lot of people who are doing testing to come on including even talking about the bug bounty program which has found some interesting things so you guys can actually get a sneak peek behind the scenes of why cardano doesn't tend to have problems because it's a byproduct of all the hard work so july is not too far off and all things considered it's kind of an acceptable zone in my view it's a little frustrating because i really wanted to make sure that we got something in june but getting it on the test that i think is good enough for the developers because they're the primary constituent here and that's not going to slow down ecosystem growth moving forward things aren't going to change as many of cardano is becoming a true open source project i mean the code has always been open source but we need to move towards a members-based organization where many people can come in there's now reasonable and significant differences of opinion about road maps strategic approaches time horizons what is critical infrastructure and what's not it's got to a point where decentralization has merited leadership so we'll have a lot of announcements about how that's all going to work and how people can join come september but earlier than that there's going to be several people creating signups if anybody wants to join a members-based organization to contribute to the construction of cardano at every level from core infrastructure to libraries to side projects and so forth you'll have the opportunity to do so it's merit-based so either you contribute time and materials or money but anybody who contributes is welcome because you have to do something to be there and that's that it's it's a hard project building cryptocurrencies is tricky business there's a lot of moving parts and you try your best to estimate things and there's a lot of unexpected things that come up there were some attrition there's some coveted cases that came up that were particularly nasty and they delayed some things in certain areas consensus turned out to be a larger resource think than i would have liked to be but it didn't slow down too much of the core team and it was incredibly valuable from several perspectives but it did cost some time on certain parts and it gave us a newfound appreciation for a lot of the adapt developers we met tons of them there and they really wanted us sneak behind the scenes and we're happy to do that but nothing is free in life and all things considered what's really nice is to be code complete which we are and now we're just kind of working our way down the train of bugs and the fact that our tests are discovering so many bugs and we're correcting those as quickly as possible is a really good indicator that the process works so i want to thank the core team and everybody who's been working on this and the extended team all the people that have been helping us test this this is the most tested released in the history of cardano it's the most complex release in the history of cardano and the most interconnected release in the history of cardano and yet it seems it's going to continue like any other update when the switch is flipped and the hfc event occurs just works that's the magic of all of it behind the scenes and of course our detractors will criticize us and say stuff but what have they done lately outside of create catastrophic risk for the cryptocurrency industry it's not lost on me that when i go before the house agriculture committee we're probably going to receive more than one question about the state of affairs in crypto the collapse of celsius the collapse of terra luna the constant hacks that happen the anti-consumer behavior that occurs flawed d5 protocols it's open season right now and it's frustrating because many of our harshest critics were the biggest proponents for the very protocols that are now collapsed yet they don't seem to have any fallout for supporting such things meanwhile we as an ecosystem have consistently said and done the same thing we move forward we build things and you can see by the caution care and just the interconnectedness behind the things that we do how much passion and how much love goes into every line of code that we write cardano for us is not just a product it is a philosophy it's a way of life it's our personal liking guy in that respect and every day when we work on this we work on it with the belief that this is going to influence and change the lives of millions if not more so we take that very seriously and the people who work with us take that very seriously at times it means that you don't get the features that you'd want to have exactly when you'd want to have it and at times it means that sometimes it takes longer to get through the qa process than you would but instead of having a dogmatic blind adherence to an arbitrary deadline what you do is you do the right thing and you move things from time to time and that's okay it's not the end of the world because at the end of the day when you do get there that you've gotten to a place that's pretty special and pretty unique and in an industry that doesn't seem to value that and the consequences has been over the last year the destruction of a trillion dollars of wealth the bankrupting of hundreds of firms and catastrophic systemic risk that's now inviting potentially harsh regulation to come to our industry maybe it is a good idea from time to time to measure twice or sometimes three times and cut once because if you miscut it hurts real people it causes real damage but the people who criticize that maybe they should get another luna tattoo i don't know the 20 smart people will certainly tell them what the flavor of the week is it's it's just sad sometimes but it doesn't in any way diminish the passion enthusiasm and excitement we have and we know you the community have so we'll see you next month it's going to be a very good month and a very exciting month and if you are a developer when the test net rolls over please do begin immediately building and testing because we want to see the test net stressed we want to see you actually deploy your plus v2 scripts and use the new features and functionality these are your critical four weeks to be able to get that done and as always we'll be around answering questions pushing forward and you'll see the sign up sheets july august if you want to become part of a members-based organization to take cardano to the next level we're all going to do that together until next time folks see you soon cheers