On DApps

Opens December 2nd 2021 with a video on dapps, starting with smart-contract certification as one of their big passions.

Certification ranges from an auditor's report to formal-specification verification, aggregating to four levels of uncertified, level one, two, and three via a micro-summit.

Internal discussions with Runtime Verification via the Alpha Frontier program and Quviq's tooling for level one, plus writing formal Plutus semantics in the K framework and porting Certora-style Ethereum tooling.

Wants app metadata on-chain showing what curation and quality control it passed, an open transparent process not controlled by a company or app store, so users choose their route of trust.

IO's light wallet dapp store, due in 2022, has no approval process but a standard for registering an app as a transaction, listing certified and uncertified apps differently.

Plans a members-based standards institute for smart-contract development on both EVM and Plutus, implementation-agnostic and handling certification and accreditation, likely embedded at the University of Wyoming with a permanent endowment like his CMU Center for Formal Mathematics, noting SundaeSwap's testnet December 5th and the Mamba project bringing one-to-one Solidity interoperability.

The institute starts through the CIP process with a workshop writing candidate CIPs, then an iterative agile cycle to reach good certification standards by the end of 2022.

Wants a frank conversation with the Catalyst community to make funded applications commit to certification at level one, two, or three, so Cardano avoids the 10.5 billion dollars lost elsewhere hiding behind decentralization.

He is asked when dapps launch, but CardanoCube.io shows 100-plus applications building independently that IO has no commercial relationship with, so no one tells IO the dates.

Says where IO helps it is to ensure code quality or a small C Fund equity position, having helped SundaeSwap with concurrency and memory so the first wave has pedagogical value teaching the extended UTXO model.

Smart contracts and dapps run on Cardano today including a small DEX already trading, and that the PAB is not a light switch but a tool for building apps, like JDK8 not turning on every Java app, with SundaeSwap and Meld using the testnet PAB while Plutus Pioneers review.

Predicts a lot of points of light turning on through Q1, with at least one DEX online for Christmas since one already exists, each DEX deciding its own timing.

Requested PAB functionality and CIPs like CIP 30, with Nami, Yoroi, and Daedalus in different states, and thousands of commits per week across parallel teams inside and outside the IO family.

Dishonest crypto media and bot-driven social media turn every incident like eToro limiting US participation or a concurrency issue into a narrative people fall victim to.

Cardano is a big ecosystem with successes and failures like Ethereum's DAO or Bitcoin's Mt. Gox that do not reflect the platform's overall quality, hence community-curated certification standards.

Warns even a level-three certified app could have a lurking protocol design flaw since this is living technology, illustrated by co-designing a new network protocol alongside the proof-of-stake consensus protocol.

Cites a Stanford and MIT paper by David Tse and Lei Yang, Securing Proof-of-Stake Nakamoto Consensus under Bandwidth Constraint, on DDOS and eclipse attacks, proposing download-towards-the-freshest-block and mentioning Cardano.

Getting dapps makes changing Plutus harder since it may break old dapps, but the hard fork combinator eases versioning through three upgrades a year, balancing speed with stability.

Cardano's governance lets it do three major upgrades a year and separate from Bitcoin and Ethereum, whose network effects make change slow, like Bitcoin only recently activating Taproot and Ethereum struggling toward proof of stake.

Extended UTXO is the most concurrent accounting system since state is local not global, rebutting the Solidity-developer lie that Cardano does one transaction per block, which SundaeSwap's testnet disproves, and that quality dapps will be easier to ensure over five to ten years, so the community must correct people with facts, papers, and evidence.

Proof of stake is hard despite over 100 scientists across 15 institutions working six years, and Cardano is furthest along as the most cited and analyzed, with Ouroboros implemented in multiple protocols.

Dapps will face the same misinformation and FUD, so do your own research and hold dapp developers to evidence-based standards, showing the paper trail and code rather than trusting security claims.

He would rather have an ecosystem that grows from a million to three million users keeping its gains than one spiking to 300 million then crashing to 10 million, citing MySpace, FarmVille, and Skype dying under poor custodianship.

Move-fast-and-break-things people caused 10.5 billion dollars lost in 2021 and some will happen on Cardano, but the community must fight back with facts and USPs rather than be demoralized.

IO is hiring seven full-time marketers for the community and dapp ecosystem reporting to Tim Harrison, working with Ben O'Hanlon and CMO Adam, and wants the Cardano Foundation to do the same.

Wants better short-form content on Instagram and TikTok versus their strong long-form AMAs, citing the eToro decision people wrongly implied made Cardano the next Ripple, though neither IO nor the Foundation was ever contacted by a US regulator and ADA was never delisted, still trading in 100-plus markets with Bitstamp listing it.

Many have made up their minds about Cardano and will not hear evidence, which is their loss, since the priority is winning over tens of millions of normal people who prefer slow-and-steady over move-fast-and-break-things.

IO's marketers will aggressively present evidence-based narratives, and encourages the Foundation, Emurgo, and all projects to budget for product and campaign marketing, leveraging the Africa channels.

Predicts high-TVL DeFi apps will not need to migrate since organic growth makes many unnecessary, and regulatory scrutiny with Wells notices and the Reves test will capture yield-producing DeFi in the US.

DeFi will need three things Cardano leads on: consumer protections via certification as a must-have, compliance via Prism DIDs embedded privately in transactions, and governance.

Every DeFi provider wants to DAOify to remove custodial organizations, and Cardano's Catalyst tools will eventually work for all two-million-plus native assets, rebutting the ghost-chain claim.

Certification, identity, and governance leads make a compelling migration argument, plus real customers needing microfinance, insurance, and peer-to-peer banking rather than yield-chasers with no loyalty.

Microfinance in Kenya alone is a 19-billion-dollar industry with 50 to 80 percent rates, and partners like Possession lower rates to 36 percent and defaults from 40 to 2 percent, perfect for the RealFi revolution.

Warns that facts do not always matter and perception does, which produces certain presidents and power structures, and that he does not want the project to fail because people lied and a less-honest standard won, closing that 2022 will be their biggest year after enormous growth in every metric in 2021.