Vasil is Coming September 22nd, 2022

hi everyone this is charles hoskinson broadcasting live from warm sunny colorado always warm always sunny sometimes colorado today is september 2nd 2022 and we have a pope the white smoke is coming out of the sistine chapel all the teams got together today with the cf talked to a lot of different people i looked at the rate of progress with the spos the dap developers and the exchanges and we now have an official date for the vassal hard four combinator event september 22nd what's so amazing about that date is it randomly and just so happenly falls on the independence day of bulgaria as the vassal hard fork is named after vassell he is a bulgarian was a bulgarian mathematician who was a good friend of our ecosystem he spent his life planting over ten thousand trees and he recently perished and we decided to honor him by naming the hard fork after him and it's just random luck that it fell on the independence day of bulgaria how about that pretty special i'd like to thank everybody who made this happen it's a long list but the spos really stood up and did a lot of extensive testing the qa teams in particular were overloaded on this one the engineers put a lot of effort into getting all of the the code where it needed to be there were a lot of features and fossil ton of them and just so much that had to be done so many things that had to be built and improved and it really demonstrated that we need to build better processes and better foundations to launch things at this scale and magnitude with that we kind of pushed the limit a bit on on fossil like to thank all the dap developers who worked with us tirelessly throughout the last few months in particular to verify that new features and functionality are looking pretty good i'd also like to thank the community management team ben o'hannon and all the people that work with them and the cardano ambassadors they carried a heavy load on this particular one like to thank tim harrison as well he he spent a lot of time communicating with people collaborating with people trying to make sure that the messaging looked good kevin hammond as well for his leadership on the technical side and rallying people the delivery team nigel and chair and the rest of the gang there they pushed hard as well this was one of the long ones probably the hardest update we've ever had to do as an ecosystem and it it's one that if we've all done our job right we're gonna wake up on september 22nd and it'll be just another day that's the magic and power of the cardano ecosystem as we do our homework early and we do the work up front so that we don't end up enduring the consequences of not doing it on the back end and i'd finally like thank the community for your patience persistence and dogged loyalty you fight hard you push hard and it's good to get it all done vossel is going to really help a lot of dap developers out as i said back when we launched alonzo there's really two ways you can look at smart contracts and programmability in the ecosystem one way is to start with maximum expressiveness and there dial it back as you discover there's problems and this is kind of what ethereum has done and they released something they said oh well maybe we need to put some more controls and checks and balances and the problem with that is two-fold one as you dial back expressiveness you break old contracts and two anything that is hacked results loss of money i've seen reports as high as 25 billion dollars worth of stuff has been stolen or lost as a result of hacks and bad smart contracts in that ecosystem when you look at the other direction you start with minimal expressiveness and then you gradually add new capabilities over time that broaden the universe of things that can be implemented on the system and ideally every time you do that you'd like to improve safety reliability and specification so that's what we did with the extended utxo model we started and knew that over time we could get to what ethereum has done but we understood a roadmap to get there so the first major upgrade to pollutus is happening with fossil and it's going to massively scale up the universe of discourse for contracts the level of expressiveness has really improved but we've maintained actually that level of security and quality that people have come to know and love in the cardano ecosystem there's more work to do more sips to the right there's a lot of things on the horizon especially in 2023 but i think people are going to be very happy with what they have and there's a lot that they can build with what they have from big upgrades to dexes to stable coins to many other things there's over a thousand projects currently under construction in cardona land so i look forward to seeing what you the community are going to deliver and the utilities you're going to bring to bear and i look forward to seeing this ecosystem continue to grow it really has been a product of love and a lot of effort and i think that overall it's been worth the investment of time for me i'm actually almost eight years into this from the early days before launch to today and you can see the beard is getting longer the hair is starting to recede the waistline is growing the white hair is coming in it didn't used to be that way i used to be a little different but that's the nature of these types of things and it's been a wild ride to get this far i've been to over 72 countries and i've watched the community grow from a very small community to have more than 3 million people when we look at where we're at today we have regularly events all around the world for cardano for example the event in brazil that was held not too long ago we have the rare bloom event that's coming up in october which i'll be attending and i believe we're going to be launching lace there one of our wallets that we've been working on and have a great vision for and there's a ton of community support and it completely self-assembled we were not involved the foundation was not involved the mergo was not involved this was just the community scratching its own edge coming together to take care of what they felt was a good need and there's many other things that are on the horizon so vassal is a major turning point i'd say the parameters totally removed more than half of the updates went through the sip process and it really has been a collaborative product of the community working with us and external members and really it all came together now moving forward there's going to be a big retrospective on how do we do things better there's also going to be a deep conversation about the overall architecture of cardano as it is and now we take it to the next level to make it more useful and portable scalable and better for everybody a lot of sips are coming some sips related to voltaire and governance some sips related to basho and scalability and there's a lot of cleanup that needs to be done as we hand it over from one steward role to a members based organization and then participate with you guys in that capacity so that's what 2023 is really about so a lot of people are stepping up taking more advanced roles more in-depth roles and we're seeing tons of new people entering the ecosystem and discovering the magic of what we've put together for the very first time which is truly exciting i wish i could feel that way too it's been eight years for me but actually every time i see you guys play with new things and get inspired it reinspires me just recently we open-sourced the mithril repo and i saw spos playing with it talking about quality of the documentation they felt it was great and how they were up and running in 40 minutes that was really fun and exciting and the fact that we can bring full node security to light clients is just showing how much raw innovation is occurring literally everywhere you look in this project from how we vote to how wallets work to how we handle consensus to how smart contracts are developed cardano stands alone in that it has innovated and that's an objective reality it can be ignored it can be diminished plenty of people who don't understand how this technology works or why it works the way it does could not value that but the reality is that our bright light is shining through and as we as we look to the future it's becoming more clear that the distance between us and everyone else is is growing we built cardano to be the financial operating system of the world we built it to bank the un bank we built it as a community to give economic identity to those who don't have it so that we can have one global fair marketplace it's a crazy mission and it feels vast in scope but with vassal cummings in september 22nd it feels that much more achievable because we're not here alone we're here together a lot more to do but this is a good month it's about time that we get some good news this year it's been a tough year for everybody in our ecosystem and industry we're kind of in the hangover of the excesses of last year and everybody has to grow up a little bit and come down to earth and realize that hard things are still hard value still has to be earned it's never given freely and ultimately you have to know who's in charge which is you the community and you have to respect that always some people tend to forget that in our community and in our ecosystem and every time they do no matter who they are they're reminded of the facts of life so thank you all for being here thank you all for being part of this and i look forward to a successful hard four combinator event on the 22nd there will continue to be integration and testing there's more than 20 days left to get all that stuff swept up but it's long overdue we're about ready and it means we can enter october real strong and i'm looking forward to the cardano summit in november and the rare bloom event in october i'll see you guys soon cheers