Rollup

Opens back from Dubai, Poland, the Ukraine border, and Switzerland, plus Wyoming where he had dinner with the governor about the woolly mammoths, making a roll-up video to clear a question backlog.

In Switzerland he met the Cardano Foundation deep in the weeds on governance with a joint open-source announcement coming, and that Consensus in Austin June 9th to 12th will have a large Cardano pavilion.

The Vasil hard fork in June brings pipelining, a massive performance improvement, plus the first big wave of Plutus enhancements since launch, driven by feedback from the Plutus Pioneers and Cardano DeFi Alliance.

CIPs 31, 32, 33, and 40 were implemented for Plutus, and John Woods, Cardano's lead technical architect, made a video detailing the upgrades that with pipelining will massively improve the DeFi experience.

The Cardano DeFi ecosystem is growing past a thousand projects but he is not regularly briefed, so he wants a mechanism to interview interesting builders and broadcast them through IO channels.

IO stands things up where the ecosystem has a deficiency, like the C Fund where IO is a limited partner and Wave Financial the general partner, investing in ventures like WingRiders they have worked with for years.

Vetting organizations is hard, citing the SundaeSwap versus CardStarter dispute where IO had only tangential involvement, since IO needs close channels with stablecoins, oracles, and DEXes to evolve Plutus but gets egg on its face when things go wrong.

Friendship is easy with no money on the table, but competition among 10 DEXes or 10 stablecoins creates animosity, noting the C Fund holds positions in both Cody and WingRiders which compete on stablecoins.

WingRiders uses Milkomeda wrapped stablecoins while Cody does the algorithmic Djed, serving the same purpose differently, one of dozens of such portfolio conflicts that make governance so important.

Wallets are another example: with Daedalus, Yoroi, Nami, CCVault, and AdaLite there are over a dozen, so he recommends self-certification via a quality checklist so any wallet meeting it becomes a certified, equally-marketed wallet.

Smart contract certification is enormous work, with devs and third parties meeting in Barcelona May 17th to 18th to define certification levels one, two, and three, a group that could also accredit wallets and infrastructure like Cardano Rosetta.

Calls this the terrible teens and growing pains every ecosystem faces moving from a founding set to a diverse and conflicting one, saying as founder he tries to provide generic solutions that fix root causes not surface problems.

Crypto-media critics claim Cardano does not exist and is an elaborate scam, but over four million assets have been issued with tons of dapps and weekly new capabilities, each adding value but also new attack surface.

Points to significant CIP contributions like CIP 50 on decentralizing the system, and DReps turning on for delegated representatives.

Praises MinSwap, a young fast-moving team whose code had flaws found not by a hacker but by a competing Cardano project that worked with them despite being rivals after a Tweag third-party audit, calling that cooperative attitude worth preserving.

As IO CEO he has finite time and would love to study every project, but doing so would cost pipelining, input endorsers, Plutus enhancements, governance, and side chains, which are on insanely aggressive timelines.

Critics imagine one guy copy-pasting oracle code, but there are hundreds of engineers across a dozen organizations working multiple shifts to hit the Vasil and October hard fork timelines needed for commercial competitiveness.

Admits the friction era means some projects will not get the attention they feel they deserve and will complain on Twitter, which he understands from his own early Bitcoin days feeling core developers ignored outside opinions.

Recalls going to the altcoin space to innovate on stablecoins, DEXes, and smart contracts because Bitcoin ignored NIPoPoWs and Blockstream's promised side chains from 2014 never delivered a good layer-two.

The second half of the year brings an aggressive Plutus Pioneers program refresh by Lars, since post-Vasil the canonical way to build a Cardano app changes and the pedagogy must stay in sync.

Discusses a Mastering Cardano book after sampling Jimmy Song and Andreas Antonopoulos titles, but says Cardano changes so fast that a 2020 version would miss peer-to-peer gossip, Genesis, extended UTXO, and native assets.

The October hard fork is the stability inflection point where concepts like extended UTXO and the Plutus dev experience settle enough to write about, though the multi-year Omega agenda will justify a second edition.

His weekly CEO technical-updates Slack channel is a torrent of demos from Mithril to Hydra to the light wallet, dapp store, DReps voting center, and partial delegation with proxy keys and multisig.

The second half brings RealFi topics he cares about, including a Bermuda trip in October to showcase microfinance he described in his TED talk eight years ago, now becoming real.

World Mobile, met in Zanzibar then Dubai, already has internet balloons and towers up, and they are discussing syndicating the tech to Burundi where 98 percent is unconnected and to conflict zones for reporting human rights abuses.

Previews new formats: a podcast with President and chief of staff Tamara Hassan, a more produced AMA format, and celebrity events like the recent Snoop Dogg space that draws 100,000 listeners.

Jokes about going to Davos and telling Klaus Schwab he likes to own stuff, then previews a downstairs studio build, the lobster, and Crypto Bison.

Closes noting dcSpark's Milkomeda and Flint work, Tim Harrison leading ecosystem development, the Cardano Foundation running its first Cardano Summit, and several flavors of Djed for algorithmic stablecoins coming post-Vasil to boost TVL and microfinance.