Okonomiyaki

Opens April 12th 2023 with an okonomiyaki rollup, noting Lace launched that week in a graceful rollout to mainnet after Dev hell on wallet restoration and remediating an extensive security audit including the CIP-30 dapp connector.

Lace moves to a three-to-six-week release cadence adding Brave and Safari support, 24-keyword recovery, a dapp store, multi-delegation, and multisig, auto-updating as a Chrome extension.

A parallel team optimizing Cardano infrastructure by deprecating DB Sync via node-to-node protocols and the CLI, and building a multi-chain strategy for Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Solana.

Thanks the cardano-address and Lace teams, crediting a lead engineer named Florian who assembled an elite launch group for the last-mile items, saying Lace is simple now but a fast cadence grows it quickly.

Confirms the CIP 1694 Edinburgh workshop is still on for July with community workshops underway and the MBO progressing, while node 8.0 is in heavy work.

Node nomenclature switches from 1.35.x to the on-chain protocol version as node 8.0, moving to a two-week pre-prod cadence after an eight-month backlog and CI and version-control process changes.

Node 8.0 is where Voltaire features deploy, with early CIP 1694 ledger rules on pre-prod and a parallel testnet for private-testnet play, informing the July community-tooling tender.

Reports Mithril and Hydra progress, with a working group on Mithril wallet integration where Lace is first-mover bearing the cost so other wallets can adopt it, nearing hardening and integration-ready by summer.

Mithril's two modes, full-node security for a light wallet and fast sync for a full node via parallel epoch validation going multi-core with certificate checkpoints.

Turns to congestion control raised by the Meld issue, referencing a 2021 IO blog on tiered pricing, since block size is finite while pending transactions are not, so priority must be decided.

Lists mechanisms: off-chain stake-pool tiered pricing with no protocol change but inconsistent adoption, or on-chain fee markets, prioritization by transaction age, or a VDF puzzle to rate-limit spam.

Ties congestion to input endorsers' plumbing, since side chains and layer 2 create many checkpoints and inbound transactions, so you still need highways for priority even as capacity expands.

Introduces Ouroboros Peras, a finality gadget scoped for fast side-chain finality that could also give fast main-chain finality.

Input endorsers need a distributed mempool with a pub-sub protocol so stateful operators exchange intermediate Mithril certificates, a pattern reused in Hydra batching, citing Stanford Ousterhout's RAMCloud from 2015.

Plutus V3, Marlowe tested on mainnet, and Atala Prism v2 are all maturing with great Prism Pioneers, and that there has never been this volume and diversity of progress across the ecosystem.

The ecosystem is getting closer to unlocking community power via CIP 1694, a 1.5-billion-ADA treasury under community control, expecting exponential project growth over 24 to 36 months.

Moving GHC 8.10 to 9.2 boosted developer efficiency, with feature-pairing to acceptance criteria and documentation, plus fixed-cost-contract tenders for the node-to-node protocol, the CLI, and Genesis.

Parallelism will increase dev velocity after node 8.0's sequential bottleneck, and that transferring the repos to the MBO will change release management and contributions.

NFT NYC in April 2023 with good community representation, interesting CIPs like 68 and the CIP 38 account-abstraction idea, and transaction pipelining to commit a master-transaction proof on chain.

The macro environment is shaky with crypto battered by the US government, citing a DeFi report alleging crypto is racist by framing wealth transfer from white to non-white people as racist.

The reports are now fantasy leveraged for policy, but courts still side with crypto on rule of law, and a growing blockchain caucus sees the anti-competitive offshoring to Abu Dhabi, Switzerland, and Singapore.

Operation Choke Point 2.0 continues pressuring banks to debank crypto companies with a dishonesty-first policy, debanking 10-year customers without explanation, awaiting congressional investigations.

Argues treating legally operating people as criminals is abusive authority when the industry creates high-paying jobs for the cyber economy, and that the policy transfers wealth to giant banks and unaccountable bureaucracies.

Stays optimistic that the US dollar cannot keep taking hits given banks' unrealized capital losses, and that the solution is not printing money, consolidation, or a federal CBDC.

Warns FedCoin progresses under a dishonesty-first stance, aiming for money on your phone and banned cash so an unelected regime can shut off your money, with civil-forfeiture precedent and no accountability since Ripple cannot recover its 100 million in legal fees.

Some states are banning CBDCs but lack full authority, perhaps needing a constitutional amendment, and that the TikTok-restriction legislation could make using a VPN a federal crime, limiting economic and internet freedom.

Wishes the opposition party had done better to stop this, notes the bureaucracy is not accountable to the courts, and says IO will keep educating, engaging, and advocating sensible policy with consumer protections.

He signed up for transparency, immutability, decentralization, and equality, and will not work on protocols lacking those principles, with Cardano remaining a shining beacon especially in the developing world.

Industry tribalism makes collaboration hard, working well with Algorand but not with Bitcoin maximalism that thinks it is fine for the government to attack altcoins, not realizing the same tools will be used on Bitcoin.

Warns that if the world-reserve-currency country severely sanctions crypto it is ubiquitously bad for the whole industry including Bitcoin, since no one is an island and the industry must mature and work together.

Frames it as a fight for the 21st century between an autocratic monetary system controlled by unelected people cradle-to-grave and an enlightened world with guaranteed freedoms of Association, Commerce, and Expression.

It is increasingly crypto versus not-crypto, since crypto carries self-sovereign identity, self-custody, decentralized finance, and DAOs as ideas of liberty with accountability.

The alternatives of CBDCs, social credit, and de-platforming are unlimited power with no accountability or recourse, so everyone must vote with their wallets, feet, and time for a freer world.

Closes that the mission and vision never changed, with great progress in governance, technology, and even law, and other jurisdictions moving in the right direction.