UPD 01/27/2020

Back in Colorado after a worthwhile trip to Davos, with plenty of interesting people met.

Milestone 3 for the Incentivized Testnet ships in two days and brings the first aggregated network statistics from previously siloed sources.

People still hit network issues on the Incentivized Testnet, but the Haskell Shelley testnet uses a totally different network model that has been validated through formal methods.

The point of the Incentivized Testnet was to take the staking user experience from the lab to reality for sophisticated stake pool operators and delegators, never to be a consumer product.

February brings a plan to transition the roughly 900 registered Rust stake pools onto the Haskell testnet, and the shared wallet backend has gained a litany of improvements and new APIs.

The Haskell side now runs on a two week sprint structure with post mortems and velocity data, after December and January lost weeks to holidays.

Commercial director Gerry is building a consolidated strategy, and PwC will moderate a unification of the go to market plans of IOHK, the Cardano Foundation and Emurgo.

Deeply disappointed that the Wikipedia proof of stake article does not reference Ouroboros when IOHK was the first to fully solve proof of stake.

The 55 academic papers are practical industrial work, and February is about explaining them to institutional investors and regular people rather than leaving them locked in academia.

Building a consolidated, low cost way for exchanges to list Cardano, covering Explorer infrastructure, the wallet backend, the command line and deployment into WebAssembly, JavaScript and Docker environments.

Product managers will start communicating externally themselves, with Aparna and her product team doing a monthly data dump of what shipped and what is next.

Estimation has been the big January priority: Nick and an internal skunkworks have rebuilt sprint projections, backed by over 80 pages of Shelley traceability and test matrix documentation.

Moving from a science and formal methods culture to practical agile delivery is a matter of patience and training, not a Herculean task.

Hoping to give firm dates for the Shelley mainnet sometime in February, while the Incentivized Testnet focus stays on a four to six week network stability program.

Jormungandr 0.8.8 lands Wednesday with further updates every Wednesday, though the Asia based team was short handed for Chinese New Year.

People on Reddit and Twitter are wrongly conflating the Rust testnet experience with the coming Haskell product, which is different code built as a consumer grade, security audited product that exchanges will use.

Two updates land in February, the OBFT hard fork and the Byron reboot with the new Haskell wallet backend, with dates being set with Tatyana, Aparna and the release management team.

The Byron codebase has been rewritten three times, the final pass with formal methods and QuickCheck, so it is a well understood foundation with high velocity for the Shelley features built on top.

A parallel Shelley testnet stream lets stake pool operators verify their infrastructure, then the Byron node hard forks into the Shelley node, and the remaining delta from Shelley to Goguen is much smaller.

Basho will take a conservative path without ledger sharding, since the base ledger is already at least five times faster than Ethereum's proof of work chain and an overlay protocol delivers fast finality and micropayments.

A parallel team can start implementing Hydra before Shelley and Goguen are finished, while Voltaire's requirements will come out of the CIP process.

Three years of voting research at the University of Lancaster under Bingsheng Zhang has produced groundbreaking papers sent to conferences like NDSS.

A Cyprus based research team wrote a 40 page paper on decentralized software updates with Guardtime, IBM Research and the University of Edinburgh, and a new group at Harvard's Berkman Klein Center will consolidate that with the European Union work.

The intent is to launch a voting and treasury system with incentivized participation in 2020, because IOHK wants to run the next five years of Cardano research and development through it.

Governance is among the hardest problems in crypto and open source: rational ignorance, low participation and what consent a system needs, much like US presidents elected by a minority of eligible voters.

Wrapping up: IOHK will publish weekly Incentivized Testnet statistics soon, estimation is nearly where it needs to be, the PwC contract is being finalized and the first marketing wave is in beta review.

Davos brought meetings with Guns N' Roses drummer Matt Sorum, several current and former heads of state, fund managers and Fortune 500 companies, and that interest now has to be matched with real support.

Upcoming appearances include the Satoshi Roundtable and Suits and Spooks, where he will meet General McChrystal, plus new hires to help manage a decentralized environment.

Funding for The Cardano Effect has moved from IOHK to the Cardano Foundation, and they will likely be among the first entities funded directly by the treasury.

An aggressive meetup and Africa community building strategy is coming, with greetings to the Nigeria meetup and an Africa tour through Addis Ababa, Lagos, Kigali and South Africa.