Saturday Night Live

Opens at 2am Sunday testing a new computer's webcam and mic, noting node 1.18 is cut and GraphQL is ready, with the Shelley launch on track.

Db-sync and the REST APIs are ready and the QA and core node teams are running stress tests, with nothing stopping the launch and the last bail-out on Monday.

The teams push the button Monday with a hard fork on the 29th, then a Daedalus red-screen update carrying the Shelley software, while Yoroi, Ledger, and Trezor users wait or restore in Daedalus.

Previews the July 30th product update on Voltaire ballots, the DC Fund, and voting registration, with an October hard fork adding multi-sig, native assets, and token locking for Voltaire.

The October Daedalus upgrade adds a desktop voting center and a native asset center, and that August is a cleanup month for technical debt.

Plans to scale teams with more Daedalus and core developers, the Rust team, a cross-chain communication team, and a rebuilt Hydra team, plus the SCATS paper and a Praos rewrite.

Shows off his new build with 256GB of RAM, an AMD Ryzen Threadripper 3970X, 4TB of M.2 storage, and an RTX 2080 Ti.

Over 100 people work on Cardano's engineering side, with many more across the ecosystem.

On ADA rewards after the 14 billion is distributed, says like Bitcoin transaction fees cover the system at global scale, plus fees paid in hundreds of native tokens.

Treasury money can fund external projects like a wind farm via ballots, and that the Tezos higher-ups will never apologize since they feel no accountability.

Recounts the Tezos party line that Cardano was a casino coin that copied the Tezos whitepaper and is a scam, backed only by unrelated Japanese websites.

He asked the Tezos Foundation to state Cardano is legitimate and they refused, despite material differences in accounting, consensus, smart contracts, and network stacks proven by formal specs.

Confirms a chat with Sergey Nazarov about Chainlink, a great product that could be part of a broader oracle solution, since giving users choice matters.

On African tenders, says the ATA primary bid was undercut by a 35000 dollar bid on a contract that should cost 500000 to 2 million, so the winner will overrun and renegotiate.

Cardano could subcontract into the voucher business, and is also bidding on Ethiopian telecom and transportation contracts with a pan-African view.

Announces a Tanzania partnership with World Mobile building mesh-network 4G micro-ISPs, and calls Rwanda the most professional African country for foreign tendering.

He would work five more years on infrastructure and start building products, recalling his 2014 TED talk mission of economic identity for billions that needed a scalable governed platform Ethereum and Bitcoin lacked.

Frames 2020 as turning everything on and 2021 as the clash of the titans proving Cardano the best platform for thousands of dapps.

On Litecoin integration, says they must write a Litecoin Improvement Proposal and that Charlie Lee is reviewing the NIPoPoWs documentation sent over.

He created nipopows.com and is pushing Bitcoin Cash for wrapped BCH and governance as a service, since his CTO worked in that space.

Confirms he will run his own stake pool on an Intel NUC in the office, not yet named, spending the rewards on office upgrades.

The Mongolia Haskell and Plutus class is hard by design, with Lars and Polina pushing students as a filter.

Says he never cared about money and is as happy poor as rich, and explains the Kanye West token idea as an election tracker with Trump, Biden, and Kanye coins to test the native asset and oracle standards with no economic value.

Chainlink can integrate with Cardano as he discussed with Sergey, and recommends Max Tegmark's book Life 3.0 for thinking about AI.

Breaks down oracle solutions into sources, aggregation, access and distribution, curation, and use, with things that can go wrong at each stage.

Discussions are underway with Wolfram Alpha as a raw data and computation source, though it still needs aggregation, curation, and distribution layers.

Chainlink has the whole oracle stack, so wrapped LINK plus a DEX could bridge ADA and LINK, while ADA-native oracles via oracle pools suit distribution and curation, which Emurgo is exploring.

Calls the Zeus Capital report on Chainlink a manufactured hit piece designed to damage the price.

He studied mathematics, which computer science came from, taking algorithms, data structures, network, and logic and set theory classes that port over.

The office runs three shifts around the clock through the weekend, which is why he takes umbrage at claims that they do nothing.

The company works more with PwC than Deloitte and occasionally rubs shoulders with Ernst and Young's Nightfall project, and he sleeps in the office during crunch time.

His Longmont personal office is quiet with just his secretary and Rob Cohen since coronavirus stopped travel, with Nathan Kaiser visiting from Boston.

Clarifies IOHK USA LLC is the US-hiring operating subsidiary of the IOG holding company, keeping the old name for convenience.

Voices frustration that Cardano is not on Japanese exchanges despite filing invasive applications, promising a big Japan ag-tech surge in 2021 as one of his life goals.

Recounts Japan's exchange history: a 2017 law required a listing process after unregulated days, the Coincheck hack froze listings for two years, then only security tokens were allowed before relaxing by 2020.

All the Daedalus staking software turns on July 29th but the staking center stays grayed out until staking begins on August 18th.

Calls Trump not a bright man lacking intellectual curiosity and discipline, arguing wisdom comes from the humility of a beginner's mind.

Cites the Japanese Shuhari philosophy of the empty cup, recalling his surgeon grandfather tying fishing flies with operating-room mastery, a discipline he says Trump lacks.

Calls Trump a made-up person and all show, valuable only as a wall against the other party's Marxism, a terrible choice produced by a broken two-party system.

Defends his right to political opinions, saying disliking someone over different views makes you part of the problem, and the inability to listen and empathize is the root of society's ills.

Clarifies Mantis is a complete Scala client not on a Rust testnet, and insists three times that TPS is a vanity metric, pointing to their Hydra article and Duncan's presentation.

Confirms everything is on track for the 29th, that IOHK is profitable and officially IO Global after leaving Hong Kong, and that DeFi is coming to Cardano.

Assesses Max Keiser, whose old media model faded, who did MaxCoin and StartCoin and now runs a hardcore Bitcoin-maximalist schtick he suspects a sponsor pays for, like Peter Schiff's Dr. Doom act.

Max Keiser called him a pedophile and compared him to Jeffrey Epstein for taking PPP money, an unrepairable bridge he will now walk past like a ghost.

Reveals plans for a game development studio in Laramie, Wyoming called Frontier Studios, and a desire to buy Arcanum from Troika Games for the Legends of Valor Haskell effort.

He will not work with Bitcoin SV because Craig Wright is a bad man, though he is happy to collaborate with Bitcoin Cash and many other projects.

Calls Caitlin Long one of the best entrepreneurs in the space and closes the surprise Saturday Night Live AMA after an hour with a thousand viewers.