Surprise AMA 07/06/2024

Hi, this is Charles Hoskinson broadcasting live from rough and rugged Wyoming. It's good to be at the ranch, and I wanted to make a video about all the amazing progress and roll it into an AMA because we haven't had an AMA in a long time. It's been a long road, and there's a ton of construction going on right now. As a result, I actually don't have a permanent house and am moving from one place to another. I have these beautiful podcast studios I'm constructing, equipped with high-end audio and other cool features, but unfortunately, they’re not quite ready yet.

So, as the months go by, you’ll see a slight change in backdrop. Right now, I'm a bit of a nomad, waiting for things to be built and finished. Overall, when we look at Cardano, it’s a really exciting year. The last few years have been long, and we got jammed up in a few things, but we've managed to unjam those issues as an ecosystem. Governance, in particular, has taken about two years to get all the pieces of SIP 1694 together, and it is really amazing to see that Node 9.

0 is nearly out. What’s exciting about Node 9.0 is that it’s the Chang hard fork. Basically, 8.2.

2 was the last version before 9.0, which is the fork-ready candidate. There’s been a lot of cleaning up, and it’s been tagged, so it will work its way out next week. Probably Monday or Tuesday, the signal for mass upgrades will come if nothing gets discovered. Overall, that’s really exciting because once we reach a density of about 70%, it will signal a hard fork, and then we’ll be in the final phase of a two-year journey.

It’s been so much work, and really, it’s the last part of the roadmap that I can do. If you think about it, BOS is a very multi-dimensional thing and requires a lot of discussion about which direction and trade-offs people want. Do they want more of their traffic off-chain or on-chain? What type of on-chain sharing do they want, if any? Do they like protocols like LEOs and the trade-offs involved?

Do they want to make adjustments to how staking works, how the reward function works, or how transactions are processed? These types of decisions cannot be made unilaterally for the thousands of people building on Cardano for their dApps and for their ecosystem. So, we really needed to have some notion of governance to finalize the last parts of BOS. From our part, we presented to the ecosystem a roadmap combining WUPs as given by Midnight and things like Plutus V3, Hydra, and input endorsers as given by L. Mithril.

We think that’s a very strong roadmap moving forward. The very first governance action will be to vote to ratify what BOS shows as its final state and how the resources will be allocated. This will be something we complete together, and thus concludes the eras of Cardano, which is pretty cool when you think about it. It’s been a long journey—almost 10 years. When you reflect on it, you see we’ve gone from a static and federated system to a dynamic and decentralized system with best-in-class staking to a really compelling smart contract paradigm.

We have the best strategy and plan overall, and at every step, the community grew. At every step, people built and added capabilities to the ecosystem, so much so that the roadmap is now completely in control of a very diverse and global community, which is really a nice thing. Unfortunately, it looks like this isn’t going to work because the internet here is not so good. I’ll shoot this at the office on Monday, so we’ll have to wait until next time. Sorry, guys.