Brief Update

hi this is charles hoskinson broadcasting live from warm sunny colorado today is august 10th 2021 and i just wanted to make a very quick video telling you guys a few things so we had our big meeting today and we kind of went through where we're at and progress with smart contracts everything seems to be on track looking really good and we were haggling over when are we going to cut the final release of the mainnet candidate and how much qa time so we had a lot of discussions with partners and other people and it looks we are on track for friday to announce the date but we have the date internally we're going to survive the entire week and make sure nothing changes and we'll feel very comfortable with it it is i think a very achievable date and i think the community is going to be quite happy about it but i just had the meeting and we went back forth over everything and i thought you guys would be really happy to hear that on our side internally we have certainty and a lovely little chart that you guys can share and so i'll make sure that nigel cleans it up and makes it pretty for friday so friday we'll have the mid-august update hopefully we'll get a link to share tomorrow or the day after and i'd love to see you guys there and we'll be able to announce when the alonzo hard fork is going to happen and at that point you can run smart contracts on cardano congratulations how about that it will be before the i o global excuse me before the cardano summit just to give you some boundings there and i think you guys will be very happy with the date and time and we feel real comfortable and confident with it i and i wish i could tell you right now filled with joy about it but i can't because we're saving that for friday however i can announce the announcement and pull a justin's son in that respect so there you go it's been a long journey and we're just filled with jubilance and a little bit of bittersweet exhaustion as well here at i o global it took six years to conceive the project to get to this point two programming languages tons of design paper after paper an enormous amount of work and it's just the privilege of a lifetime seeing all these different components come together and there's a lot of them it's such a challenging upgrade because it's not a node and then other vendors build infrastructure on top of it there's this enormous stack there's the node the wallet back end daedalus graphql rosetta dbsync and dozens of other components and over 100 different users of the software at that level including the thousand excluding the thousands of stateful operators who've been working on it but al lonzo purple launched and the note has been remarkably stable and things have looked fairly good really it's come down to a situation where feature completeness i think will be achieved by monday next week and then it's a question of how much testing and burn-in time and integration time do you want to give partners so we had to kind of get a sense of all of that and we think the dates we're proposing are reasonable and we're going to see how quickly the exchanges get onboarded this week and that's the final go no go on the date that we have but there is a date at least on the global side and that will be solicited and consolidated amongst all the partners and by friday it will be converged and confirmed or an alternative will be chosen but regardless it is within what we expected what the community expects it's before the conference which is good it's always nice to have something to talk about at the conference and i think everybody's going to be pretty happy with it there's a lot more to do after the hfc event it's just the beginning not an end because people are going to be building things and when they build things they're going to want more features and functionality and better libraries and these things but that's part of an iterative development cycle and we've talked a lot about what happens after alonso well there's genesis and peer-to-peer we've been rolling out peer-to-peer systematically with the help of the spos because it's just it's something that you kind of have to get right or else you break the network and it's very hard to put the network back together so we've been extremely conservative on that rollout but the peer-to-peer governor is in place and that's something that's on schedule and then there's also genesis which is an enhancement to the chain selection rule of war bors prowse and then there are some enhancements to the way that the utxo is stored and optimizations the smart contract model all those components together are a very good 1.0 product and it's exactly what we expected to deliver in the cardo 2020 roadmap hydra can be built as a layer two protocol like prism that sits on top of cardano and we have a full time team working on that we keep adding resources to that team and they their velocity is getting good and there's some great papers that have been written there and now they've been turned into great prototypes and we'll have a lot to show for you guys and the utility track of the io at the cardano summit and mithril we've gotten several great proposals to implement it from great vendors to work with us to accelerate its implementation and we're right now just in negotiations over particulars about time horizons and expectations and so forth but that's a high priority implementation as well and then of course there's a huge amount of work on the voltaire track most notably in the catalyst side and those funds continue to roll out and we have a whole team with a partner called obsidian who's working on the update system the on-chain update system on the main chain so really we've seen great progress with voltaire we've seen great progress with the boss show agenda and all this work is going to conclude gogan and then a lot more to add but partners are already talking about all kinds of cool things and rv will have a big update for you guys and yela is coming along k is coming along alpha frontier is coming along and a lot of use and utilities coming what's really exciting is what you guys community are doing and come soon we're gonna see a lot of stuff deployed on cardano and we're gonna learn a lot from it and you the community are gonna provide a lot so there's some surprises i'd say at the cardano summit we tried to save a few things for that and i think you guys would be happy about it but overall i'm just happy to see this finally come to fruition it for a long time has felt i'm in an incomplete person it's an incomplete protocol and it's damn good to actually see that coming so i i tune in on friday and guys it'll be a good day good event and then we just got to get it done we know what to do it's quantified everybody has their work packages they're not going to be a lot of sleep during crunch time because there's so much stuff and everybody's on edge because there's only so much testing you can do and so much validation you could do and we at some point have to say okay it is what it is and flip the switch and hope for the best we did with buyer and the shelley and so forth and we feel confident in the process the use of formal methods the use of property-based testing the engineering that we followed and ultimately the knowledge and competencies of the team and this is a code base we've been working on as a company for over three years all handwritten 100 new code and we understand a lot about it and we've been navigating it for a long time so that team is quite exhausted but quite excited at the same time to to finally see this turn on and get done and ultimately i think it fulfills the promise and dream that haskell had in the 1980s about being a mainstream programming language the reality is that haskell had to find its killer application kind of like ruby did with rails or any of these other projects and i'm extremely glad to see haskell enter into the smart contract space through plutus just today there was a 600 million dollar hack and every week there seems to be one and this is because of a lack of ability to formally specify things and produce good rigorous engineering and there are some companies like certa k and others that are definitely adding to the ethereum stack and attempting as best they can but this is a case of where the tools and languages work against you and your intent to write correct software whereas what we've created i think works with you the developer and helps you along to get to an assurance level that you feel comfortable with relative to the value at risk and the consequences of failure of the application so that story has yet to be told and now it's going to be told through you the developers now plutus and haskell are not magic you can write bad code in it in fact we learned that with the early days of byron so it doesn't prevent you from not knowing what you're doing and going crazy routes and poorly designing architecture and so forth but what it does do is if you have the skills and knowledge and will it helps you get to where you want to go in a very concise way in a very provable way and part of the deal is in addition building plutus is talking a lot about the different assurance levels of smart contracts and how one can approach building a high assurance smart contract and creating a community expectation of that it is my belief that if someone in the future not today but in the future months from now wants to receive catalyst funds to build a dap the community should push back and say if you're going to do this what assurance level should we expect it's our duty to make sure that those assurance levels are mapped out and give rigorous definitions of what you should expect and then it's the community's job to decide what is reasonable for their funds after all catalyst belongs to you those that's community funds and if the system works well there should be many ways to do that and those will best fit the needs of the engineer and then what will happen is amongst the certified verified groupings of software on our platform those will work for the most part as intended and they just work and you don't have to worry too much about that just you don't worry too much about your airplane that you sit on because we understand that the people who built it and the people who regulate it and the airlines that operated all of them are held to very rigorous and high standards so it's very rare for accidents to happen they certainly do but relative to car accidents and train accidents and any other mode of transportation it is the safest because of that reason and similarly we should treat our financial applications the same way this is not to say that hacks won't happen with cardano applications it will and i predict that when it happens the media is going to go and say see cardano's not secure they lie to you this entire time the nuance will be that the hacks and problems will occur in uncertified software and applications that people build that aren't rigorously debugged or checked and as with any open system you can't prevent that the reality is that if it's open anybody can build on it you can't control who builds on it and so you can't control people maliciously or incompetently writing software that can create problems for people but the existence of certified software against known standards and auditing means that the consumer can have a visual representation and proof objects that demonstrate the difference between something that is known to be reliable and something that is unknown and then you can make consumer choices accordingly just you do in all your day-to-day consumer choices from the medicine you buy to the car you drive to the home you live in to the location of where your house is etc etc and hopefully we can communicate that as developers and we can communicate that at the conference upcoming in september so it's going to be a long journey from here on out because it's a beginning when smart contracts start there's a whole ecosystem to build but i am i take great solace in the fact that thousands of you are ready to go and the thousands of you ready to go are going to build the killer apps which really changed the brand reputation of the chain and it will gradually go from a spooky ghost chain to a juggernaut that really dominates the industry and from there the next wave of people will come and the next wave of people will come and thousands will turn to tens of thousands and that'll turn to hundreds of thousands we will continue the plutus pioneers program and we'll continue upgrading and scaling and augmenting it especially after plutus hardens to 1.0 we will continue updating and creating things the prism pioneers program and dedicated education for marlow and our goal is to continue having class sizes in the thousands to inclusively get more and more developers there's been also 154 projects funded by catalyst and as catalyst grows it's entirely possible for the end of the year over 300 will be funded and next year over a thousand at this rate of growth so that's a great growth engine for projects and applications in our ecosystem and again completely community curated what we can do is add support just the certification levels for software the support will come from incubation acceleration audit and oversight and other services that we can bring in and the community can eventually finance and maintain for the benefit of the community and helping them make better decisions and holding people accountable once they have received the community's money because that's a public trust and it needs to be have proper oversight to it so thank you all for being part of this family and this effort and thank you for being here through this very long long drawn out process it was a very necessary one in my view and we've done something incredibly novel honestly there aren't many cryptocurrencies in the ecosystem that have accomplished what cardano has the reality is that we are in the top five and we will stay there for the foreseeable future as we continue to grow and make progress and we're starting to see the same kinds of integrations that ethereum has and bitcoin has and we're starting to be that third choice in this ecosystem of ideas in the next three to five years everyone is upgrading bitcoin is getting lightning and that's growing at a nice pace and there's a very good reality that simplicity and jet will one day work its way into bitcoin giving bitcoin some level of smart contract capabilities at the layer one with taproot at the layer two these two things together probably create a decent smart contract ecosystem combining with ethereum going to ethereum 2 that's going to have a superior smart contract ecosystem to the incumbent experience and then obviously all the things we have planned as an ecosystem it's really going to be a clash of the titans in that respect and it's going to be fun to watch now we have a lot of future-proof plans like omega and mithril and where hydra can take us and we have thought a lot about how to create a balanced and holistic ecosystem the concepts of realfly which we're going to introduce at the conference and hopefully it's going to percolate its way through just like third generation cryptocurrency did in things like having governance as a service babel fees these types of things which we think are essential for layer ones to stay viable but ultimately what makes these platforms great is not the technology or the evangelists at the top rather it's you the community and the difference between ethereum and bitcoin and us is that you're in charge and it's explicitly made so by catalyst and the whole voltaire campaign every single day the community not only gets more control but the community also gets more knowledge and capability and in many cases actually compensates for things that they consider to be deficits either in marketing or technology for example like cardano updates.com or cardona wall or pool tool we saw this a lot in the early days of bitcoin as that ecosystem grew and evolved because there was no coordinating force to do that so people picked up a shovel and they did it themselves it's incredible to see that level of growth and progress and evangelism and that's what gives me hope that we're going to be around in five years 10 years 15 years 20 years and what's nice is our foundations are superior to bitcoin and ethereums we have much more rigorous foundations we have a much more sensible way about how to evolve the protocol and the tools necessary to evolve the protocol we're much more inclusive we have the capacity to pay for the bills the protocol encumbers and there's an incredible ecosystem of developers and a lot of this bespoke exotic technology that we invested heavily in over time will become more mainstream and over time i think become the dominant force in the space because it has built-in advantages which i think are required when people enter regulated insured in fortune 500 government adoption which is where the majority of users are going to be coming from a single deal with microsoft or apple could bring two billion users into a cryptocurrency and when you live in realities like that it really is a question of how do you build enough assurance where people at that scale would feel comfortable coming in and then what's nice is you have your cake and eat it too because the base level the everyday virality we have a lot of things to offer people from being a stakeful operator to delegation to participation in catalyst and that keeps growing every single day so all things considered i'm quite happy today about how things have panned out and shaped up there were a lot of rough times in the last six years they've been frankly the hardest of my life absolutely brutal and it's been brutal for everyone in the company because there was so much uncertainty and excess work and the scope always changed on us and there were some difficult decisions along the way like having to rewrite all the code the original plan was to have a high assurance code base that we would eventually get to towards the end of the deadline and in the meantime use a fast moving prototypical prototype code base and when it became clear that that code base was actually a hindrance to our ability to operate we had to completely throw it away and replace it with the byron reboot that set us back by over a year and a half and we didn't even know that that was the price we were going to pay up front we thought it was going to be about six months shows the naivety of planning and there were a lot of other things that took a little bit longer than we thought they were going to take for a variety of reasons but we overcame those challenges together as a community and we built a lot together as a community and we've gotten to a point where plans now have certainty in the days to weeks and that means that no longer if we miss something do we have to wait three months or six months or nine months rather it's next week instead of this week that's a pretty remarkable thing furthermore we've made enormous improvements to haskell itself from the underlying infrastructure to libraries to our ability to navigate and discuss with domain experts in the space to the extent that when we need something we know who to call they pick up the phone and it's a negotiation as we did for example with the mithril implementation and it's a very different time as a consequence we also see a lot of diversity for example the development of the rust serialization library and my hope is that's going to grow into a full rust client hopefully maintained by dc spark and we should be able to do that in the next roadmap these kinds of things create resiliency inside the ecosystem and they get us to a position where we're ultimately stronger in every respect and those roots are deep now and quite fertile and they just require a little tender love and care and watering in order for us to get to where we need to go so all those things are things we accomplished over the last six years and we have great philosophies about how to think about software now how to design software design apis design interfaces and communicate with vendors remember on a regular basis we communicate with hundreds of different vendors and infrastructure providers gap providers and there's a whole process in place for that that was not in place four years ago but it's now here and because of that you can amplify the project and the rate of progress will continue to grow and not slow down and as a consequence next year we can do far more than what we did this year and this year was our most successful year in terms of reliable delivery to market so that's a remarkable achievement if you think about that and we've also broadened our research base considerably and some of the investments that we're making will give us access to some of the brightest minds in the world and the ability to bring those minds into the cryptocurrency space to help us work on some of the hardest problems inside the space and we've gotten to a point where a lot of protocols are being refined now for their final form where we believe that those protocols will be in service for years or decades as opposed to six months or two or maybe two or three years five years 10 years 15 years these types of things we just didn't have that before and that's amazing to see we do benefit from collaborations with other blockchains and we've made some relationships and partnerships with them hopefully we will be able to announce those relationships at the conference the upcoming conference in september and i think we can i and we're going to continue the outreach program ergo for example was a phenomenal relationship and i'm very proud of what alex cherpinoy has done and we've used ergo a lot to explore dexes and stable coins and other things kind of like microsoft using apple computers back in the day when they were prototyping software on the xbox 360.