Update and Few Thoughts

Opens September 16th 2020 from Colorado trying a new streaming service, adding a caption stating he will never give away ADA to deter giveaway scams, and thanking community member Daryl for a carved log of his Falcon Twitter avatar.

Thanks the community after the Catalyst presentation, noting Shelley is out and evolving, Voltaire is starting, and Goguen is close with dates coming at the end-of-month product update.

Goguen is a much smaller task than Byron to Shelley, which required building a whole new cryptocurrency with new ledger rules and a new network stack, and Shelley was designed with extended UTXO and the smart contract model in mind.

Bespoke engineering makes Goguen integration easier and faster, and Emurgo is thinking deeply about DeFi and invited collaboration on stablecoins, oracles, and DEXes, so Cardano gets first access to next-generation DeFi without the prior generation's problems.

Voltaire will have systemic influence not just on community funding but on the platform's whole direction, first the Cardano Foundation roadmap and later every aspect, like a giant community brain.

Shares a demo from Pramod and his University of Illinois team of Prism, a proof-of-work protocol 10000 times faster than Nakamoto consensus, with benchmarks holding even in bad network conditions using HPC concepts.

Replaying the Ethereum chain on Prism takes a big performance hit to only 100 times faster since the accounts model is hard to optimize, whereas Cardano's extended UTXO makes much higher performance easier.

He approved scaling up the Basho project to build a Hydra prototype team, since the science can now make a competitive push to de-risk approaches for when the community needs that infrastructure.

Recalls his September 2017 Byron whiteboard defining scalability as staying fast or getting faster with more users like BitTorrent, so Hydra is a real approach to true scalability, easier than sharding.

A Stanford paper found security concerns in the Casper protocol proposed for ETH2 that Vitalik and the Ethereum developers must address, making Hydra's simplicity more appealing than embracing complexity.

Hydra's elegance: stake pool operators are natural parties to host channels, and as value rises the k factor grows, adding operators and channels, so growth brings appreciation, decentralization, and more performance.

Hydra's design removes the urgency of sophisticated techniques and gives the luxury to pick the best science, since Cardano will never face a high-fee crisis, a beauty he finds missing from many blockchains.

Reflects on progress since 2015: over 75 research papers, partners tied to NASA, Boeing, and Pfizer, universities like Wyoming, Edinburgh, and Tokyo Tech, and engineering firms like Vacuum Labs, Atix, Tweag, Well-Typed, Runtime Verification, and Quviq.

Partial delegation is coming with a Vacuum Labs contract to bring it to Ledger, showing the roadmap's parallelism where Shelley, Voltaire, and Goguen are beginnings, not endpoints.

Staking and smart contracts are endless rivers, and they will bring in firms like Runtime Verification, whose Firefly project replaces Truffle for EVM testing, to build similar Plutus testing frameworks.

Lays out four dimensions of a competitive cryptocurrency, the first being security and correctness, since junior developers' bad mistakes have lost innocent people billions of dollars with no consequences to the developers.

A third-generation platform must invest in security tools, as Quantstamp, ConsenSys, and Runtime Verification have, and Cardano's 35-year Haskell foundation was designed right the first time for high-assurance systems.

The second dimension is ease of maintenance and upgrades, where the hard-fork combinator and reusable Voltaire governance let dapps upgrade and add governance cheaply without reinventing the wheel.

The third dimension, performance, was corrupted by ICO marketers claiming 500000 transactions per second on a basement server, whereas Cardano has 10 years of Bitcoin lessons and congratulates Bitcoin on Schnorr signatures and Taproot entering smart contracts.

Extended UTXO is the fastest accounting model on and off chain and Hydra flexes seamlessly between the two, with Marlowe DSLs for financial experts and Plutus as glue, so no one will be faster when Hydra comes.

The fourth dimension is operating cost, which must be both low and predictable so a penny transaction does not become five dollars after you build and deploy, which their architecture achieves.

The company will invest in comparison and product marketing, admitting a product failing in not explaining in plain everyday language why its proof of stake is different, so it hired a marketing director named Liza.

Commits not to leave as a company until smart contracts, multi-asset, Voltaire, and staking are solid even if it costs him tens of millions, then to propose a Cardano 2025 consortium via the Voltaire and IdeaScale tools starting with 250 people and nearly 100 papers.

He is tired of conference debates about Libra and crypto unicorns with little real progress, since the developing world needs economic identity, the mission of IO Global.

The economic-identity roadmap from open data to self-sovereign identity, financial inclusion, and decentralized lending, insurance, and banking, calling it his life's work to build with principles.

Success is not being king of the crypto hill or beating Bitcoin's market cap but millions living where a Jeff Bezos and a person born in Rwanda have equal footing, noting tens of millions of Americans also lack economic identity, worsened by the covid depression.

Bitcoin's 2008 mandate was to do something different, not become a settlement layer for banks, and Cardano's decentralized brain and globally distributed stake pool operators mean everybody matters, lifting the world up with much more to do into 2021.