Morning Update

good morning everyone this is charles hoskinson broadcasting live from warm sunny colorado always warm always sunny sometimes colorado although i might actually one of these days move to wyoming or at least live there part time i'm starting to really fall in love with that state and we'll have to change the intro to rough and rugged wyoming it's a little different than car than colorado just a brief update on a few things housekeeping items and i figured i have a few minutes so why not so the interview series people of iog is a resounding hit we've received an overwhelming amount of feedback and positive vibes from it and i have many of my employees and contractors and others who have reached out to me saying hey that's so cool i'd like to tell my story too so i'm going to make that a regular series and this week i will be interviewing daniel friedman so dan is actually one of our oldest employees he's based in japan but he has a very eclectic life starting a ukraine being a filmmaker in california and then working his way throughout the rest of the world and somehow ending up in osaka japan of all places and i think he speaks more languages than most people so look for that also given that we have 300 people in the organization as well as many contractors that we work with there's simply too many for me to service and talk to so tamara hassan is also going to be interviewing people and she's going to start with glenda shore who is our director of hr and she glenda has an amazing life story and she's just a great gal and it's going to be great to tag team with tam and every week we should be able to get some interviews out and hopefully in a few years you guys can actually know all the people that work with us and for us in addition to that we're going to extend our interview series so recently we had leslie lamport come and speak and we've had other great guests come and speak at the company for our internal seminars we're right now working to record those and make those seminars publicly available so a lot of interviews are coming either through great guest speakers or through people that happen to work with us now another topic is collaboration i love all the emails you guys send me i really do and usually i get about five to ten business pitches every single week and that's great but unfortunately i don't have the ability to service them myself because i'm incredibly involved with the nuts and bolts of bringing cardano to market amongst many other affairs in the company so what i'm going to make sure is that there's a easy to use contact form that gets anybody who's interested in anything whether it's they want to volunteer or they want to make card out of their profession whatever it is you want to start a business in the cardano ecosystem i want to make sure that that's an easy friction-free process so i'm having some discussions with adam bates about how to build the right type of funnel and then instead of emailing me please use that funnel and go through the entire thing and it'll get you where you need to go because if you email me usually what ends up happening is i forward it to either michael my ea or lulz or jerry or someone else and you then have to wait another two or three days to get a response sometimes longer and lately we've been undated with responses now there will be times that certain projects i'm incredibly interested in and i do a direct call for that and that's another thing adam and i are discussing is how to build a proper funnel so that for those particular things there's a dedicated site for them where and when it makes sense right now nfts are a thing that we're looking very heavily into but we're also looking at stable coins and dexes and oracles and these types of d5 infrastructure so if you happen to be in that space and you want to do something with us all right go ahead and email me for the time being but in the next probably two weeks to three weeks we should have something specifically for a generic funnel and then we should have something for those specific projects catalyst has had an overwhelming level of participation and success i don't have the exact statistics but i think it's well over 16 000 or something like that i'll have to check at the end of the month but it's amazing to see the level of participation and that's just today right now and it's still not the easiest experience in the world so as we get deeper into the fun structures i think that we'll see a tremendous uptick in potentially over a hundred thousand people now we have to start building infrastructure around catalyst at this point so we've been bringing in several consultants and it looks we're gonna bring in the sociocracy guys so john buck and his partner we've just been haggling over the nature of the contract and we've gone through four or five iterations of the exact engagement specifically for what we're looking for for catalyst but we're also in discussions to attach an accelerator program into catalyst from a well run one like maybe the mit accelerator or 500 startups or something like that because there's a definitely a place to capture raw talent and passion upgrade people and get them to a place where they can do great things the plutus pioneers program will be announced at the end of the month specifically how to sign up and participate and lars will go over the course offering and what we're going to do and we also should be able to lock down the mastering cardano textbook sometime this month as well we've been in discussions with several people who would be great authors and what we may end up doing is turn it into an actual university of wyoming project at the blockchain lab that we have there so we've been talking to jim caldwell specifically about that and i think it'd be really cool to make it a very collaborative effort we would write it in a similar way to what andreas antonopoulos did for mastering bitcoin and release chapter by chapter on github and make it very collaborative and i would make sure to assign a red team to read it whenever you do documentation or books like this you have block team and a red team block team writes it the red team criticizes and critiques it and so you always get a good feedback loop and you get a lot of quality improvement that way my goal is to have mastering cardano done before the end of the year so we're gonna have to spend a little bit of time and money to get that get that where it needs to go but it'll basically be the bible of cardano it'll cover everything in a technical sense from the ledger rules and how that works the update system the hard four combinator how our consensus protocol works how extended gtxo works how plutus works how marlowe works how our side chains protocols are going to work metadata works the monetary policy the incentive schemes how to be a stake pool what is a stake pool all the different stuff and so it'll probably be a very large book about 600 to 800 pages all things considered but it's about time that we have a single reference source for everybody this information does exist but it tends to exist in formal specifications or in documentation or in repos and it needs to be all pulled together in which the same way that andreas pulled it together for bitcoin so look for that so in addition to this we're getting some professional firms to come in and acid test and develop and build some cool stuff on cardano just to verify that the things we think are true about plutus are true and also give us an independent assessment of the quality of tooling so we'll announce something along those lines if not at this cardonal 360 than at the following one in april peer-to-peer we right now have an internal test net running it and we're going through a lot of scenarios it's a 35 billion dollar network and so we're a little careful with those types of features because peer-to-peer is a situation where we don't actually need it for cardano to run at the moment the stake pool operators and others are doing a phenomenal job with this the problem is that by launching it you don't notice a change in performance or a change in the network but if we screw it up you will certainly notice that it'll create catastrophic harm so it's one of those move very slow and methodically type of things and we've had a combinatorial explosion and acceptance criteria for everything that we're looking for to make sure the testing is great and actually it's gotten the point where we're going to bring in cubic specifically to do some outside testing to verify that everything we think is true is true how we're going to roll out peer-to-peer and we'll have more to say at the cardona 360 episode at the end of the month is that we'll take it to a beta and then we'll ask the stake pool operators to spend an exhaustive amount of time trying to break it examining it looking at it and there's almost 2000 of them now to verify that and then once we're happy and we think the data they look good then it'll just be rolled out naturally likely in the alonzo time frame so our goal was kind of to get it in q1 we got it to a point where the governor is active and we have the ability to test it we're a little behind on rolling it out across the entire network but it was one of those things that was not essential because it doesn't actually change the operation or use or utility of the system at the moment so it didn't make any sense to rush that for the sake of rushing it it made much more sense to focus on things like native multi-asset and plutus and things like hybrid wallets and partial delegation because obviously they have a huge impact on the commercialization of the platform and the use and utility of the platform as well as the level of decentralization of the system so that's coming and i'm looking forward to what the stake pool operators have to say we put a lot of work into this this system is completely new it's not based on any other peer-to-peer system that's ever been used in a cryptocurrency there's about three years of development history specifically just in this topic where we thought a lot about protection against many different attack factors and it turns out in the networking world this is an understudied area for just for peer-to-peer distributed systems like cryptocurrencies and there's a lot we learned and we actually tried many different approaches we looked at arena-esque approach we examined with polkadot and the itn an approach there we looked at secure academia we looked at probably more than half a dozen ways of doing it and we're quite happy with this mini protocol approach that we have and it seems to be working quite well with the existing network stack and peer-to-peers the next major milestone and then gradually moving into a pub sub system that's completely decentralized so we'll see if you guys it that's going to be fun d equals 0 is still on schedule march 31st it's going to hit that and at that point 100 of the blocks are made by stake pool operators it's the end of an era and kind of sad to see it go but on the other hand i'm super happy and excited to see how much progress we've made we've been looking at the statistics and the stake pool operators have performed equally well or better than the bft nodes so the experiment worked prowess is stable there's great history here we're also setting up a skunk works to do the last mile in the 2020 agenda which is genesis genesis is a change to change selection rules so that you can bootstrap from genesis it's really the last component that we really need to put into our boris before it's a beautiful standalone system and we'll get that done likely i think tentatively in the september time frame but it just depends on how long it takes for that team to spool up and get it done it also depends on the delivery train so if there's an issue with getting alonzo out that'll obviously push everything on the back end out a few months but i don't anticipate an issue at this moment looks like things are looking pretty good but we'll know more in a few weeks in the coming months hydra is also looking good for the first time we actually have a full-time hydra team forming it was always a paper and some prototype work but we never had dedicated people and now we do so every month we'll start making major progress on hydro we do with catalyst and probably in may is when we're going to start talking about hydra in the cardano 360 episodes and what's nice is that the state pool operators will be beating the hell out of peer-to-peer my hope is that as soon as that's done we'll have something for them to start playing around with on a test net for hydra because we anticipate that the majority of hybrid channels will be run by these stake pool operators but the way we're designing it anybody should be able to do that so there we go more to say more to do but i hope this gives you a sense of just how many moving pieces there are from babel transactions to the governance work to a lot of integration work that's happening with plutus the devnets are of course evolving and we're making a lot of great progress with yella and a lot of great progress with the kvm and learning a huge amount along the way we're still competing on code bases on the side chains whether we do a scala based system or a rust based system and we have parallel teams working and we'll see which one we like more and cip process is coming along quite well we're learning a lot from that update system is coming along quite well as well we're working with obsidian it's a firm and they do haskell development and they've been working on the on-chain update system and then catalyst is the off-chain as many as you're aware we're going to be going with a bicameral model for system updates and we're still in discussions about extending the ledger rules to include a voting key chain in addition to a staking keychain and a value keychain a lot of infrastructure work as well addressdia continues to evolve at a pretty rapid pace rosetta continues to evolve at a rapid pace as does graphql our integration there and the other integration apis documentation continues to improve i would like to get on ledger live it is a nice priority and treasurer has something as well and the foundation has been in progressive discussions with ledger about that it's really a matter of just getting to the right cost i think there is a cost to do that and my hope is that we can come and have a meeting of the minds there they're spearheading those negotiations not iohk so we're just kind of observers the rest we are working with others i believe we're doing something with prime trust and copper and others for custodial solutions because that's becoming increasingly important so the integration teams are overloaded there's just so many different factions and people that were trying to get cardinal support with and they're they're moving at a pretty rapid pace so expect more of that it's a busy month this month a lot of stuff a lot of people working a lot of code being written and still some birds in the sky too so hopefully those will come soon anyway thanks everybody i'll see you soon cheers