Cardano Update

Opens May 25th 2023 with a Cardano update to separate the forest from the trees, noting an aggressive internal CIP 1694 development effort on node 8.0, which is out.

Node 8.1 is under construction for pre-prod, and that the Colorado-workshop candidate spec is being used for testing while 43 community workshops run across six continents.

All workshop feedback funnels into a closing July workshop in Edinburgh to finalize the CIP, followed by a testnet for people to build community tooling against.

An RFP and grant program for community tooling like dashboards and DRep voting accountability, akin to the Sunlight Foundation, with announcements coming in June and July.

Like the incentivized testnet and SPO pioneers, people will register as DReps and submit fork and change proposals across the seven governance actions.

A new Edinburgh Decentralization Index paper on tau decentralization using the HHI, Gini, and Nakamoto coefficients, metrics drawn from antitrust regulation.

The University of Edinburgh lab will present at the July workshop and eventually measure Cardano's decentralization against Bitcoin and Ethereum, where he believes Cardano will be the most decentralized.

Turns to the other work streams UTXO-HD, Genesis, and peer-to-peer, saying peer-to-peer is done except for eclipse detection, a summer project, and needs Genesis for a complete end-to-end network.

Ouroboros Genesis, published in 2018, has had a year of design to become a practical chain-selection protocol handing off to implementation, and that UTXO-HD adds persistent hard-disk storage, both critical-path for decentralization.

Plutus V3 scoping weighs semantic hard-fork changes against tooling improvements, with BLS signature support opening up a lot of capabilities.

Stresses Hydra is already running on mainnet as middleware used by Obsidian and MLabs, a spectrum rather than a light switch, reducing on-chain cost and improving speed and finality.

Calls Hydra the best open-source program in Cardano with flavors like the tail and head-to-head protocols, over 40 people per meeting, and the Cardano Foundation co-developing it.

Mithril as the in-house lightweight proof certificate, with Leonid Reyzin from Boston University spending the summer at Edinburgh on version two while version one nears mainnet readiness.

Mithril will be exposed for wallets first, with Lace integrating, improving light-wallet security and enabling parallel epoch validation for much faster full-node sync scaling with cores.

He is interested in combining Mithril with input endorsers and parallel validation, writing papers blending parallel chains, extended UTXO, and Mithril certificates for decentralization with high throughput.

Combining Mithril with recursive SNARKs for the side-chain model, a joint Midnight and Cardano project evaluating curves like Pasta and Plutus Aris, with a seven-figure commitment.

Heavy crypto primitives are hard to integrate given Plutus's per-block time budget, since BLS is straightforward but Pasta needs an expensive field-arithmetic conversion.

Side chains are progressing, forced by Midnight and a World Mobile partnership, shifting from a polyglot approach across Cosmos, Substrate, Scorex, and Milkomeda to an opinionated batteries-included turnkey framework.

DeFi and TVL are growing fast, with the Djed algorithmic stablecoin from COTI as the opening move, and that Cardano DApps are novel because they cannot copy-paste Ethereum and must redesign for extended UTXO and Plutus.

Lace is hitting 1.2 with Brave support and full open-sourcing under Apache 2 by month's end, delayed only by audit and license work, and laments critics who assume open-sourcing will never happen.

Widens the aperture to say Cardano invented all its protocols from scratch, wrote millions of lines of code, and is becoming self-governing and recursive, with relentlessness the thing he is proudest of.

The core is starting to ossify around good decisions like determinism and local resource computation, while the periphery stays vibrant with Aiken versus Plutus, TypeScript, side chains, and Prism v2 identity apps.

Predicts decentralization metrics will enter regulatory standards like MiCA and US law, so more-decentralized protocols get treated like commodities and TCP/IP while centralized ones are treated unfavorably.

Uses the Ledger case, where a subpoenaed employee would have to turn over keys, to argue that if they can do that you do not truly own your keys, which is the philosophical core of the industry.

The brain of Cardano is in academia controlled by no single university, with 180 papers across dozens of institutions, and that as the MBO forms the repos move over with open contribution guidelines like Hydra, with roadmaps and CIPs voted on via 1694.

The SLCL model lets side chains adopt radically different philosophies, like losing determinism or adding a VM, safely without contaminating the main chain, and that Cardano is self-funding through its treasury.

He signed up to build a system that transcends its builders and treats poor and rich alike with no backdoor red-carpet access.

Warns CBDCs combined with social credit will scale to billions, started at the WEF and now in central banks with China leading via partners like Tencent.

You can win moon-boy money short-term but would be exchanging something honest for something dishonest, and he would rather live with sound money, liberty, and power pushed to the edges.

Is proud that a call for governance workshops drew 200 applications and 43 good ones across six continents in just 30 days, showing the world's appetite.

Closes that the decisions transcend Westphalian nation-states, not the US, EU, or China, since it is your money, identity, and property, with the tagline it is about time to restore integrity.