Happy Birthday Ada!

hi everyone this is charles hoskinson broadcasting live from warm sunny colorado today is december 10th 2020 and it's a very special day because this is ada lovelace's birthday she was born december 10th 1815 which makes her 205 years old today and despite that legendary age she seems young and vibrant as ever it's a very very special day for us in the cardano community as you all know aydah was named after aydah lovelace and she was a pioneering figure in the 19th century with the first female programmer of note good friends with charles babbage and left a great legacy and inspired generations of women that came after her to enter into the sciences and become developers i'd like to say the 20th century spiritual successor to ada lovelace is grace hopper creator of cobalt and also the gal responsible for the computer bug there's a great legacy there as well when we were naming the cardano ecosystem and thinking carefully about what the name the protocol what to name the currency i i really wanted to connect each and every part of cardano to historical figures that did something unique and special in their lives not necessarily the best of people like for example cardano himself was a polymath and a brilliant mathematician but he was also a little bit of a scoundrel from time to time in fact if you read his biography it's a surprise to me that hollywood hasn't made a book yet or a movie yet about about cardano because he's a pretty incredible guy but aydah is one of the good ones and she lived an incredible life and left an incredible legacy so when we look and ask ourselves as we enter to the 2021 the next decade and we say well where is cardano positioned i think we're in an incredible position right now there was a huge scientific battle that took place over the last five years it was the race for the next generation of proof of stake and we asked ourselves well can we do it is proof of stake real is it possible or is it just all big scam the bitcoin maximalists say and often referred to as perpetual motion 2015 this was actually a very uncertain theoretical problem and it was worthy of study and that's exactly what occurred we actually saw dozens of teams all around the world from china to europe to america start working full time on the science of proof of stake now there was a lot of foundational work that had to be done so when we say is it secure or not well you have to have a model a security model you have to have an adversary you have to have a clear definition of what is a blockchain so we took a very first principles approach other teams took a more engineering oriented approach like teams such as the cosmos tendermint team or what vitalik started doing with the original designs casper and there are a lot of hybrid efforts along the way but what's so incredible is five years later we have seen this fertile area of inquiry materialize into a large family of academic papers which have now been valued validated either by simulation or fully functioning networks so we now have protocols like polka dot we have protocols like what's going on with tasos cosmos is in production cardano is in production with orovor's prowse casper's starting to wake up and turn on with the f2 efforts and each and every one of these carries different economic assumptions different security assumptions different thresholds of security different throughput and operational concerns as well as different finality thresholds and so forth but the long and short is that proof of stake is here to stay and it has one there's just simply no class of algorithms that is more scalable energy efficient and better built for the needs of the future especially when one is talking about cryptocurrencies as financial operating systems with things like smart contracts than a peer proof of stake or hybrid proof of stake system and over the last five years we have been the largest contributor to that body of science by citation and paper count and there are many derivative works by independent teams from the things we've done so there's a mission accomplished in that respect true to our names and our academic heritage in the way we named our protocol cardano and ada with the probably the biggest scientific achievement of our project over the last five years has been the success of the orb worst research agenda now what does that actually mean in practice for cardano when we talk about cardano going from hundreds of thousands of users where we currently set to millions and eventually a billion plus users we do need an engine that has the capability to grow with the network and we need an economic model that incentivizes that engine to operate properly in all of these different environments and what was very unique to the research that we did is that we took great pains to understand the economic side as much as we understood the security side and we worked with great people like elias kasupas from oxford and others and wrote a whole set of things on the game theoretic side to understand the economics of state poll operation the economics of delegation and to build great rigorous mathematical models that are extensible and most importantly upgradeable to meet the needs of a real life system as it grows from those users so we really do deeply understand at this point what it's going to take for cardano to grow orders of magnitude as the network grows and we have high confidence and belief that the engine we have chosen will actually get us where we want to go and that's a great miracle of science and it's a great miracle of wonderful engineering in addition to that we built the network stack of the cardinal protocol in a completely new way based upon principles and systems theory for the last 30 years we started from the arena community recursive internet work architecture and inspired by ideas from that we built a completely new way of doing networking for cryptocurrencies very different from what ethereum uses with secure academia many of the other cryptocurrencies in the space and because of this not only do we believe that the way we approach networking is viable and great for orophorus and cardano as it is today but we understand what it's going to look and are able to model and simulate what it's looking like as we grow from hundreds of thousands to millions of users and so forth and there's a beautiful body of theory that we can continue to optimize and continue to improve and iterate upon to get to a point where we have a sustainable and stable system that retains its performance and utility despite the fact that it will become global scale now this alone would be worthwhile of a five-year research agenda basically building something that could deliver upon what bitcoin sought to do but as we've all learned over the last five years and actually seven years since the smart contract revolution began we learned that you have to have programmability and this is another one of the most difficult topics because it's not a clear and easy answer there are thousands of commonly used programming languages and there are near holy wars between different paradigms of programming whether it's imperative or procedural or functional or some other exotic pick your favorite type of style and how exactly you go about modeling and building applications this is among one of the most difficult things to get universal consensus on the right things to do and naturally there's a huge collection of opinions about what is a smart contract where should a smart contract run and execute how much data and interaction should be on chain versus off chain and what security guarantees do you care about there and should it be run in a distributed model or a replicated model and should smart contracts enjoy the same level of immutability and persistence as do transactions on bitcoin or should they rather be economic agents who pay rent to persist and when they can no longer afford that be pruned out like aura boris and like what we decided to do in 2015 with our consensus agenda in parallel we went to domain experts some of the best people in the world for the design of programming languages for example philip wadler got more than 25 000 citations and is one of the creators of haskell a mainstream programming language that many people use ourselves included who's also done consulting on everything from go to java and other things and written papers all around we retained him and while chakravarti and dozens of others throughout the years to start a first principles investigation and what is the ideal accounting model and execution model for smart contracts and also where should smart contracts run and execute off chain and on chain and how is all of this going to work together again at the time in 2015 there was not clear theory and there was also still a huge amount of ideas floating about and different approaches and teams like bit ml and the simplicity project we saw obviously the contributions of ethereum we saw what al grant is doing and we see what people are doing with web assembly there there's a lot of innovation here and it's also complicated by the fact that in addition to delivering a language you need a resource model and you also need a way of specifying the things that you construct so we decided to adopt a polygon approach and we decided to borrow something from the past have a vision for the future and also blend in both turing complete and incomplete approaches through the use of dsls this was a very ambitious agenda equal in scale if not greater than the scale that we chose to adopt for or boris and it required us to partner with many institutions such as academics out of university of illinois urbana-champaign and the company based there by gregory roshu runtime verification companies like mutual knowledge systems for languages like glow and professors out of university of kent in addition to our home base at university of edinburgh and that team over the last four years has learned enormous amounts about everything from a new accounting model for smart contracts called extended utxo which has enormous advantages over the accounts based model that ethereum has to better ways of designing dsls for special purpose applications like for example the marlow programming language specifically for financial contracts so you can get a much to greater degree of certainty and testability that your contracts behave as intended but yet your development experience can be as simple as connecting bricks together almost like putting legos together so that domain experts and non-programmers can actually work and design the logic of the system without the assistance of a dedicated computer scientist or engineer to do so this year we have witnessed the dawn of these systems with the devnets this month it looks very likely that the evm devnet will be launching next week and a pretty good chance that the yellow devnet will launch next week and so what that functionally means is that for the first time ever people can begin designing and deploying applications on cardano through yellow and through the evm later in quarter one of next year plutus and will be represented through the blues playground and you can already start writing marlow applications and playing around with that logic and we've seen a lot of people do that since october so what this means is that gaps are coming both through partnerships and commercial deals through the alignment of the dc fund through what we're planning on doing with our in-house vc the c fund and it's really exciting to see all the partners and other people that have come along and the great tools we've been able to build to facilitate the commercialization of the technology in particular the erc20 converter and what's nice is that there's simply no shortage of asks we get approached literally every single day with project pitches and potentials in fact my commercial team at the moment has 110 commercial deals that are somewhere in the sales management pipeline many of which will not close because they're just simply not viable and we can't come to terms on economics that makes sense but given the fact that we haven't actively tried to sell rather these are just organically coming to us for many of these cases that gets me incredibly excited now i would love to announce some things in africa and i was actually hoping we'd have an announcement for today for it but it's gonna take just a little bit more time and actually because there's so much going on in africa what i've proposed tim and the family do is that they have a special episode specifically about what our 2021 africa strategy is we've been as a company in africa for over three years and it's been very difficult we had to learn how to do business in that jurisdiction there are many many jurisdictions over 52 jurisdictions to deal with varying degrees of stability rule of law and ease of living and we chose to base our headquarters in africa in addis ababa in ethiopia our director of african operations john o'connor has lived there for over three years of his life and we have done some remarkable things we've met every ministry we've met the prime ministers of many of these countries we've trained classes of people and hired the people who graduated from those classes and built a very strong local presence many places in africa require personal relationships in order to be able to do business effectively and thus you have to be willing to spend the time and effort necessary to build reputation and relationships to close deals what has been truly remarkable this year despite a pandemic this year despite civil wars despite political unrest and a litany of other problems that have occurred we have crossed the threshold from potential to actually being able to bid and very soon we should be able to announce the closing of deals in ethiopia that are quite large and quite exciting and we're going to have a dedicated episode not just about that jurisdiction but about all jurisdictions in africa and many of the projects that we've seeded from tanzania to other places and what's most exciting was organically growing from cardinal communities that are self-assembling in africa from south africa to nigeria it's extremely compelling now many of you ask why africa why should we care why not focus on the fortune 500 in the enterprise markets and the answer is we actually do i am an american-based company based in wyoming and many of those 110 deals that are in our sales pipeline are based in europe and in north america but when you're a ceo especially in an emerging industry you don't look to where the value is today when you're making a five year or ten year plan you look at where the value will be in the next 10 years and much like enterprising entrepreneurs realizing political changes had opened up china in the 1980s making it eventually one of the most attractive markets in the world and who got in early and reap when fall profit the reality is africa as a whole will be one of the most promising economies in the entire world by twenty thirty seventy percent of the population of sub-saharan africa is at or under the age of 30. most are internet enabled demanding new systems and africa is experiencing a mass amount of globalization which is meaning that all the old systems are being replaced with new systems china recognizes this and as a whole over the last 10 years china has invested more than one trillion dollars into the african continent building everything from mass infrastructure to buying sovereign debt to making long-term trade deals because they understand this place is the place for their products to sell we commonly run into companies like huawei and we commonly run into chinese telecoms and stalling 5g or selling tablets creating brand recognition of chinese companies not to be outdone america also realizes this facebook opened up one of its largest outsource centers in lagos nigeria and actually some of the most open source commitments in the world are starting to come from african developers in african countries and mass education efforts over the last 20 years has meant that it has been a humongous improvement in human capital at moment there's 5.6 trillion dollars across the entire continent of africa in illiquid wealth that if better systems were present would become liquid and accessible on the global market and when we ask ourselves who will be the consumers of defy who will be in need of identity systems and payment systems and new ways of representing equities will it be the ossified highly regulated markets of the western world which are invitation only and when firms such as facebook try to innovate they get brutally attacked by the senate the congress and incumbent actors who are trying to protect their businesses or will it be the agile and nimble countries of africa southeast asia and western east who have no incumbencies and are desperately trying to compete and thus open and friendly to retailing and ideas given that the human capital physical capital and economics are all moving in the right direction it is my belief that africa will be the most promising economic environment within the next 10 years and we as a firm in our community is the best positioned to be able to execute in this realm we've built the networks and relationships necessary through three years of hard work day-to-day living there training people building a physical presence and very soon we'll be able to solidify that with a collection of flagship deals which we then can roll out to a much larger set of deals and we have a lot of strategic partners in relationships and political access in the right places so that as the continent starts retooling cardona will be a great recipient of that so as we see that 5.6 trillion dollars of wealth become liquid it is my hope that the representation of that wealth will live upon the cardano blockchain and i think we have the best shot out of any cryptocurrency to be able to do that and the proof is in the pudding so we'll have a dedicated episode to talk about our strategies what we've done already the things we've closed the things that will be closed and our vision over the next few years and what's most exciting is we're not doing this alone there are many partners we have and a lot of organic movements that exist perhaps the most exciting part of cardano's hall hole however isn't the fact that we're a technological marvel or we've written 91 white papers or that we've written millions of lines of code and we have all these things going on and we're always number one on github commits it's the governance component of our ecosystem and what's so inspiring about that is that it was something we could not build alone we took a big gamble that the community would show up and build it with us right now over 4 000 people are actively participating within the idea scale framework on the catalyst project and these are very early days and these are the beta tests of our governance system as we slowly turn it on and what's exciting is that that number is easily going to turn to tens of thousands as we travel throughout 2021 and it will unlock at least at the current market cap 80 million dollars per year of funding for cardano projects in our ecosystem and that very easily can turn into hundreds of millions of dollars as cardano ages that is democratically accessible to every single person in the world there is no linguistic or geographic biased in that respect you don't have to move to london or silicon valley or to new york you can start anything anywhere using this network and as we iterate with an innovation management partner we can continue to add infrastructure from accelerators to special purpose consultants to ways of merging projects together to create strategic partnerships to leveraging failures and turning them into successes this is a gigantic experiment in governance and you're doing this right alongside our people under the leadership of door and many others who have been working so hard over the last six months this very same set of tools and framework can also be utilized to vote on parameter changes for cardone and vote on upgrading the system so when we ask how will we do the soft and hard forks of the future and we ask when are we going to change parameters like k or fees or other such things this will become the dominion of the community as a whole as opposed to a federation or foundation in 2021 making us frankly the most decentralized cryptocurrency in every dimension from block production to network to validators to governments and that's really exciting to go from an idea on a chalkboard five years ago to something that simply outclasses each and every one of our competitors and has a beautiful vision about how we're going to build a financial operating system of the future and a way for every single person to be involved whether it be a developer it be a stake pool operator or people who want to participate in the governance of the system as a whole so in a way 2021 is going to be our best year as a project and it's something that is the privilege of a lifetime to have participated in and get us this far but people ask what is next where do we go from here as we finish what we intended on finishing in 2020 the last five years cardona 2015 to 2020 i am invigorated by the fact that there's so much more to do and so we looked at cardano 2025.