UPD 05/14/2019

Broadcasting from New York after Mongolia, following Consensus and the Polymath event and the confusion about how Polymath relates to Cardano.

Running two companies: IOHK as the full time job, plus Hoskinson Consulting Group, a small Colorado LLC that is the consulting arm.

Consulting is mostly for teams building blockchains or needing strategic technology advice on things like zero knowledge proofs and multi party computation, always with approval from the other IOHK principals.

Cardano is approached constantly about security token offerings and needs a standard for them, and multi model thinking means no single standard should rule everything.

Polymath leads the industry with 126 companies issuing security tokens on its framework and strong ties to regulators and investment banks, so any market standard worth interoperating with will likely come from there.

The very notion of a security will change over the next 10 to 20 years, and emerging economies such as Mongolia, Ethiopia, Rwanda and Uganda have more freedom to trade securities at the public protocol level.

Rigid markets like the United States and Europe will need special purpose hybrid blockchains that can reverse transactions, freeze accounts and deanonymize a ledger.

Handing China or any regulator the power to unwind the Cardano ledger, deanonymize accounts or reverse transactions would be a terrible idea, which is the uneasy tension between Bitcoin's original intent and the regulated world.

Cardano is meant to be a financial operating system for people who lack one, and the standards for lending, insurance, remittance and securities are still unset, so a more ethical philosophy can be brought to places like Ethiopia and Mongolia.

Working with a team holding over three years of security token experience beats spending years piecing it together alone and ending up four years behind the market standard.

The same standards question applies to decentralized identifiers, metadata and interoperability, where self sovereign identity is the ideal: an identity the government cannot revoke or strip from you.

China's Social Credit system points to a dystopian digital Scarlet Letter, and Cardano will never support an identity system that promotes that, even if it means being blacklisted in some markets.

Interoperability standards like Lightning, Interledger and NIPoPoWs raise no philosophical objection so Cardano will likely support several, while security token holders simply need to be informed when an asset breaches Bitcoin's social contract on immutability and reversibility.

On the recurring criticism of the Atala and Cardano relationship: the first questions are who needs to be in control and whether one size fits all beats custom systems for custom problems.

A planned IOT air quality pilot in Mongolia targets Ulaanbaatar's winter air, among the worst in the world as hundreds of thousands in the ger districts burn coal, wood and tires at negative 50, needing tens of thousands of sensors for targeted enforcement.

The layered design uses Atala to link sensor gateways through a distributed hash table with data kept in ordinary databases, then hashes that audit trail as a checkpoint on Cardano so one system audits the other.

Instead of a top down model of buying every sensor, a loyalty or payment token issued on Cardano could pay people through a smart contract for running their own air sensors, interoperating with the Atala ledger.

Millions of tiny sensor readings belong off chain rather than bloating Cardano, while a currency the government cannot steal belongs on Cardano, and exchanges could similarly run permissioned ledgers with side chain transactions to limit hacks.

Conversations run across the industry, from the Stephen Wolfram and Wolfram Alpha team on oracles to the Chainlink team, covering identity, metadata, token and formal method standards, and joining Ethereum or EOS as a core developer is the only thing that should worry anyone.