UPD 04/12/2020

Open with a fresh shave that takes twenty years off, joking that quarantine leaves nowhere to go anyway.

The Byron reboot is rolling out well, with new flight candidates and Windows syncing times improved by 30 to 50 percent.

Cardano node 1.10 with the Windows fixes will fold into the next Daedalus flight release, delayed slightly by the Easter holiday.

Two of the seven core consensus nodes now run the reboot code, so Shelley network infrastructure is already live on mainnet.

The wallet backend shipping with the reboot is the same one Shelley will use, already de risked with the incentivized testnet.

The reboot pulled eighteen months of siloed work together, de risking the components still needed to assemble a working Shelley node.

The most loyal ITN stake pool operators become the first adopters of the Haskell internal node, with a node and a CLI.

Next comes a general testnet across Cardano, with support from IOHK and the ambassadors, to move operators off the ITN.

A later testnet connects the wallet backend to the node for a balance check, restoring and consolidating mainnet and testnet earnings.

Running the balance check as a testnet allows investigation of any reward mismatch before it is locked in on mainnet.

The Root9B audit is under remediation, due around April 17, with the report to be published once permission and wording are settled.

The Cardano Foundation has started negotiating a deeper, dynamic next generation audit, a six figure once a generation investment worth it for Shelley.

An internal audit team from BCryptic has worked with the design for almost two years, catching numerous issues in weekly recorded reviews.

The reboot has been remarkably bug free on the first try, validating the design and process model the team has followed.

The monthly town hall with Farah continues, and the next one should carry Shelley news, possible dates, and a reboot post mortem.

Governance meetings are productive, covering improvement and enhancement proposals and how to practically implement the Voltaire protocols.

Prism identity is coming along, and a first generation explorer covering stake pools should be ready with the Shelley launch.

Smart contract development is nearing the point of opening Plutus to third party developers to acid test the model.

Progress feels like whiplash, with developers so eager they are committing code on Easter Sunday.

Critics who dismiss Cardano as just a wallet or a testnet will lose all credibility once Shelley ships.

Community editors are drafting a Wikipedia page to Wikipedia standards, fixing what seems a blatantly unfair omission.

With Ouroboros exiting the lab, the time has come to stop chasing the next paper and clearly explain the ones already written.

Content will explain proof of stake attacks that Cardano's design avoids: long range, nothing at stake, grinding, and stake bleeding.

In proof of stake the token value is directly tied to security, unlike proof of work where the two are decoupled.

Marketing meetings keep returning to a clear answer for why Cardano does research, since people stumble over it.

Every protocol has a trade off profile, you get X but give up Y, like a cancer drug that cures but risks blindness.

The point of research is to mitigate the trade offs while keeping the benefits, moving a twenty percent risk toward zero.

For consensus the goal was a system that is fast, secure, and participatory without the downsides of centralization or high energy use.

Clarifies that saying Cardano's contributions outweigh Bitcoin's was misread by the media as a price or superiority claim.

The real point: Cardano built an open source, peer reviewed, patent free scientific foundation that Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Ripple never did.

Over sixty papers exist, and the wallet specification is a reusable model any UTXO system can build from to avoid common Bitcoin wallet problems.

Reasonable people can disagree on assumptions or monetary policy, so the aim is to separate opinion from settled science.

Claims the best path of any cryptocurrency to scalability, sustainable network design, and fair high participation voting.

A decentralized model lets universities do science in months, giving a sustainable and predictable flow of innovation without depending on one founder.

Predictability, no cult of personality or founder effect, is essential for Fortune 500, gov tech, and high finance to build on granite not quicksand.

Every step is telegraphed far in advance, which makes the vitriol from critics puzzling since the plans are then followed exactly.

Marketing must work on two dimensions: articulate what has already been accomplished, and make it accessible to as many people as possible.

Communication cadence increases with monthly product updates, possibly weekly ones for Plutus and Daedalus, so others can explain it too.

Independent media is encouraged, like a Cardano Effect in a twit.tv style, with enterprise and developer oriented shows eventually funded by the chain.

New address libraries arriving mid month make it substantially easier for exchanges to list ADA and later handle staking.

Building as openly and decentralized as possible avoids custodians having dominion, letting the community answer and fix its own problems.

The first Shelley features arrive as a closed testnet with invited stake pool operators, an alpha before an open beta.

The closed Shelley testnet will not be another incentivized testnet: it runs a short time and exists for configuration and a migration path from the ITN.

The Ouroboros BFT design lets Shelley launch safely, handing more slots to stake pools epoch by epoch under a network quality control.

The Daedalus flight program can add features like Ledger support and multisig in weeks rather than long development pipelines.

A massive documentation update is slated for June, replacing the deprecated old docs with full API and library documentation.

The virtual summit will be timed to the Shelley hard fork, ideally launching the network at the event.

Signs off wishing a Happy Easter and urging people to call family and reconnect during covid, since those days cannot be gotten back.