Caravan Moving On: MicroSummits

Opens November 23rd 2021 wanting to talk about positive things, batting around an idea for the 2022 dapp ecosystem.

Meld, SundaeSwap, Cody with Chad and Charli3, the CNFT marketplace, and fan tokens, and proposes logical groupings bringing domain experts together for focused conversations.

Micro-summits scoped to a domain where dapp developers interact with IO, Emurgo, and Foundation staff, starting with a DexCon, having done internal workshops for the light wallet and Prism.

Developers view automated market making, order books, concurrency, and on-chain versus off-chain differently, and as the PAB moves from testnet to mainnet around December or January, SundaeSwap and others will wake up.

Wants a Thicket DexCon in February to March around the Babbage hard fork combinator event, giving the PAB and certification program time to mature, since Cardano was built with dapp certification in mind after 10.5 billion dollars of DeFi waste.

Wants certification levels based on formal methods verifying proofs, built with partners Quviq, Tweag, Well-Typed, Runtime Verification, and CertiK plus security auditors like Kudelski, Trail of Bits, and Quantstamp, with the K semantics for Plutus finishing around February to March.

Design patterns are materializing via their concurrency blog post, so it makes sense to bring DEXes, certification people, infrastructure hosts, and the Plutus core team together per category.

Wants scoped micro-summits for DEXes, algorithmic stablecoins, oracles, and NFT marketplaces, not a giant 100,000-person summit but a fun few days for 30 to 50 people exchanging ideas and grievances.

The micro-summit format gives community influence over the June and October HFC events, since February is saturated with Plutus script compression and UTXO-HD but June has room for an agile cycle adding features.

Wants a regulatory bend to future-proof next-generation DEXes and to bring Voltaire people, since Catalyst provides DAO capabilities and the native asset standard lets any asset reuse ADA's governance mechanics to run a DAO.

His preference is to host at Alfred's Cardano hotel in Spain, calling it Cardano Mecca, bringing DEXes, regulatory ideas, certification, governance, and core team together to share ideas and do presentations.

Expects many DEXes to turn on in 60 days with NFT trading and a long tail of iteration like Uniswap and SushiSwap reaching version three, so now is the time to establish patterns, best practices, and certification standards.

A web-oriented TypeScript PAB alongside the Haskell PAB, whose build-once-compile-everywhere strategy used Tweag's Asterius for Haskell-to-WebAssembly and the GHCJS project, wanting a lightweight JavaScript-native version with a beta by the first DexCon.

Suggests the Foundation could subsidize these quarterly community developer events alongside the Cardano Summit, since DEXes are imminent, being tested, audited, and performance-tested on testnet.

Early dapp days risk replicating effort and repeating mistakes without a welcoming FLOSS culture of sharing ideas, since everyone must solve the same Plutus, tooling, and UX problems together.

Announces a new developer, Splendid, a UI and UX firm specializing in interface design, since 2022 is about experiences that work fast and beautiful in the browser and cell phone after achieving correctness.

Splendid will work on the dapp store, developed through the Double Diamond design process with customer interviews and market research presented at the September Cardano Summit, noting UI design is deceptively simple with a demo in weeks but dozens of iterations to refine.

The wallet needs a multi-currency interface, hardware wallet center, third-party plugins, and an identity center carrying Prism, with the voting center interfacing with Catalyst plus a dapp connector, enabled by nine months of architecture work with Daedalus and partial delegation.

2022 builds multi-layered open-source scaffolding from scientific papers to formal specifications to consensus, node, ledger, and transaction logic, each level needing a different governance system.

The vertically-integrated 12-company stack must open up since dapp developers become protocol contributors, so 2022 is less about when and more about how, why, and who to keep the momentum organized.

Plans to hire a full-time science writer to increase the velocity of communicating scientific innovations, with blog posts scaling up.

It will get harder for users to know where to focus, like the Enlightenment where polymaths like Da Vinci and Leibniz mastered every field when knowledge was wide but shallow.

Ouroboros is a family of protocols built by over 20 scientists from 10 universities over six years, now adding a decoupled clock, quantum resistance, private stake pool operation, pipelining, input endorsers, fast finality, and side-chain connection.

Specialized depth means neighbors do not know each other, so the open-source project must broadcast the innovations effectively so everyone understands how amazing Cardano is.

The community collectively knows everything but each node has a small view, so the Cardano Stack Exchange with its 83 to 84 percent answer rate, which he wants over 95 as a KPI, lets people learn and interact, with Discords for Plutus development.

DCF product manager Johnny will turn his slides into a single architectural map of the Cardano open-source stack layers, then a class showing career paths for lawyers, doctors, and developers to work in the ecosystem.

Predicts hundreds of people by end of 2022 working for Cardano paid by Catalyst, submitting grants to be ambassadors, marketers, developers, or entrepreneurs in residence.

Wants a bespoke incubation and acceleration pipeline with entrepreneurial training like MIT, CMU, or Stanford programs, graduating people ready to submit a Catalyst proposal to build on Cardano.

Micro-summits can become community-driven for the metaverse, NFTs, or gaming, with an inclusion test that you must have a working dapp or mature project to attend.

The era of giant releases like Goguen and Shelley is over, since Byron to Shelley rewrote all the code with a painful migration and introduced the hard fork combinator decentralizing from static and federated to dynamic.

Now is the era of rapid iteration where Goguen and Shelley keep optimizing, OBFT permission side chains iterate in parallel, and Voltaire experiments toward a good open-source government avoiding the sins of the past.

Protocols like Mithril bring massive innovations plus a long tail of weekly optimizations, and the closer they are to the community the more it drives innovation, the great challenge of organizing total decentralization with consistent delivery.

Revisits the eToro story he found unfair, where a company de-risking for an IPO ring-fenced US staking without delisting ADA, which still trades in 100-plus countries with stake pools running.

40 percent of all cryptocurrency value lives in proof of stake, a universal problem millions will discuss with regulators for years, so extrapolating from one event about one project is deeply unfair.

Says what makes crypto great is not a leader on the hill but a global swarm like locusts making daily progress, one unity made of many where no member is indispensable.

Every contingency has been considered in the disaster recovery plan, from his death to the US banning proof of stake for a Federal Reserve gov-coin to cosmic rays like the solar flares that knocked out the telegraph network a century ago.

Competitors at Gavin's Polkadot, Silvio's Algorand, and Avalanche plan for these things too, and their methodologies make each other stronger, which gives him hope.

Marvels that Cardano went from an idea on a blackboard in Japan to millions of people, and that Bitcoin was just a 2008 white paper on the peer-to-peer foundation with no logo until Marty Malmi.

Daily vigilance and work over five to ten years produces Bitcoin, Linux, the internet, and the moon landing, since it is the people in the trenches not the great speeches that matter, like the over a million people across thousands of companies who worked on Apollo.

Master craftsmen welded Saturn V engines 12 hours a day in the Texas heat and others sewed the spacesuit and built life support so Neil Armstrong could reach the moon.

Factionalism and maximalism are toxic zero-sum thinking, since Apollo had people from 115 countries speaking 200 languages, yet crypto dwarfs it with 10 times the companies and 100 times the people.

Addresses Reddit snark about the Voltaire name, explaining Voltaire criticized democracy, and that Candide ends with tending your own garden after the protagonist shifts from idealistic Leibniz determinism to pragmatism, like Basho's dangerous journey through Japan.

Voltaire favored the enlightened monarch over parasitic aristocracy or mob-rule direct democracy, so Cardano builds a social laws of physics, an open-source decentralized monarch with Catalyst participants as the advising philosophers.

There are still immutables like the monetary policy, and that Voltaire wrote over 2000 books and 30,000 letters, so Cardano's 125-plus papers and literature may rival his collective life's work, the name a message to himself to tend his own garden as one locust in the swarm.

Cardano is building a collective enlightened king protecting economic freedom, self-sovereign identity, and economic identity, where each person is a philosopher and the currency is merit, respect, and trust.

Closes that the caravan is always moving on no matter how loud the dogs bark, a worthwhile life's pursuit where they cannot lose as an ecosystem as long as they keep the delight and keep pushing, wishing everyone a happy Thanksgiving.