A bit of detail on the rest of the year for Cardano

The Shelley hard fork combinator date is set for July 29, assuming exchange partners and security auditors do not surface a last minute problem, with node 1.16 already running well among stake pool operators while Daedalus catches up.

Stake pool operators from the incentivized testnet begin migrating their Haskell code and turning on infrastructure during August, taking over block production on August 18 while the d parameter counts down and the k parameter rises toward full decentralization.

The network team runs peer to peer experiments, turning relays off and the peer to peer governor on so the system becomes deterministically and inevitably more decentralized.

The Voltaire governance thread begins at the end of July, when community ballots start flowing into the DC fund, the Decentralised Cardano treasury fund.

Through August the DC fund dominates community channels and Twitter as ballots decide who gets funded and for what, with a new fund launching every six to eight weeks and growing larger each time, likely starting on a cellphone voting app before those capabilities get backported into Daedalus.

Ledger and Trezor hardware wallet support slipped from its original June target because IOG had to modify device firmware to get a unique hardware ID, work that will also let a Daedalus install manage multiple hardware wallets.

IOG wants to bring Yubikey support into the stack for access control, wallet restoration, and spending passwords, adding security and letting a wallet be maintained in a shared space.

August itself will be calmer as the exhausted, overworked core engineering team rests and catches up on technical debt and documentation, even while parallel teams keep shipping Daedalus upgrades, exchange integrations, and the peer to peer experiments.

A second security audit from Quantstamp is being remediated alongside the earlier Root9B audit, with the team sorting which issues must be fixed before July 29 and which can wait for a later release.

After August, Voltaire keeps shipping on its own six to eight week cadence while native assets and Plutus foundations become the next two big threads of work.

Polina Vinogradova and Jared Corduan work out the ledger rules for native assets while the Daedalus team designs a rich native asset experience around a candidate token standard, which a separate review team led by Bruno benchmarks against security tokens and stablecoins.

IOG is contracting a firm on a fixed cost basis to build an ERC-20 converter that ports existing Ethereum tokens onto the Cardano testnet as a proof of concept for the native asset standard.

Native asset work touches down in August but the heavy lifting starts in September, and because Byron and Shelley are now solidified there is real velocity, putting native assets on a September to October timeline.

The ACID strategy, adoption, collaboration, incentives, and deployment, guides how IOG supports dApp builders, funded by IOG's own C fund, the Cardano Foundation's CCI fund, the community's DC fund, and Emurgo's investment portfolio, with an app interface likely coming to the Atlas explorer.

Shipping upgrades while the network keeps running is like changing the tires on a moving car, and Cardano has done that all the way from Byron to Shelley while hitting every self imposed deadline; critics, meanwhile, have built nothing.

The IOG contract only runs to December 2020, but Hoskinson will not leave until Goguen, Shelley, and Voltaire are truly done, and Rob is reforming the Hydra team around four protocols, head, tail, head-tail, and routing, with the head protocol already finished.

Hydra needs no hard or soft fork and layers cleanly on top of existing stake pools, while a separate cross-chain communication team explores extending the UTXO model with Ethereum-style accounts to bridge value and computation between Cardano, Ethereum, Litecoin, and Bitcoin.

Rob, who led the Shelley documentation surge, is now back leading cross-chain work as Goguen and Shelley near completion, with Q1 2021 bringing infrastructure and tooling from IOG and partners to expand what Plutus can do.

At least two or three more hard forks are coming, one with a dedicated video on the asset strategy, and the next Cardano Summit, a Goguen edition, will get an announced date soon.

The DC fund's existence means ambassadors, podcasters, and developers, like the Cardano Effect, start getting full time community funding, driving a dramatic rise in Cardano content even from this first fund.

Plutus foundations, years in the making, will finally let developers write and deploy real smart contracts, with the Cardano Foundation leading the ACID strategy for onboarding builders while IOG helps every step of the way.

Finding developers is not the hard part, it is properly incentivizing quality developers to ship genuinely useful applications, so IOG plans to build some demonstration apps itself to show what the platform can do.

A new multi-sig spec adds a reusable stake-locking mechanism for voter registration, a Bitcoin-style time lock, while the network team works on routing multi-party transactions without needing a trusted server.

Atala PRISM combined with the Atlas explorer will support DID registration for uses from friends lists to secure communication channels, brand identity, and unique namespaces, including for stake pool operators.

IOG has grown past 270 people, alongside Emurgo and the Cardano Foundation both scaling up rapidly, with everybody finally hitting a good stride ahead of a big release.

Cardano is getting easier to integrate through Rosetta support, WebAssembly and JavaScript bindings, and an Atlas explorer aiming to be the most beautiful on the market, as transaction volume and media coverage keep climbing.

Vacuumlabs has submitted the first of three pull requests for the Trezor integration and the Ledger work is nearly done, so hardware wallet support will likely land in August rather than at the July 29 hard fork but in time for staking.

Building proof of stake at scale is genuinely hard, as shown by Ethereum 2.0 slipping six or seven times this year, and Cardano's own schedule changes reflect that same difficulty.

IOG is bringing in a chief marketing officer and the Cardano Foundation has just hired its own CMO, with the Foundation's website refresh only the first step of a bigger marketing push.

Critics will probably keep attacking no matter what ships, but Hoskinson expects Cardano to keep winning, with over a hundred thousand people potentially building on the system every day within a year.

After five years building the platform he wanted to use to change the world, Hoskinson hopes for another five year contract to chase quantum resistant one-shot signatures, a proof of merit alternative to proof of stake, better voting, and decentralized storage.