UPD 07/14/2019

A brief Cardano product update from warm sunny Colorado, with both the Haskell and the Rust code evolving at a rapid pace.

Friday's demo covered the new logging and reporting framework, the network and consensus protocols and many nodes running together, and the Haskell wallet backend is already coupled to the Rust node.

Daedalus 1.6 brings 50 or 60 major new things plus technical debt reduction and ships late July or early August depending on QA, with the OBFT hard fork work turning on around early August.

The Rust self node testnet has been an amazing feedback experience with a release cut every week, 0.3 landed on Friday, an SDK is being considered, and a Haskell self node testnet will follow so people can compare the two clients.

A professional economist is coming on board for an independent academic and community review of the staking incentive scheme, a process that usually takes three to six weeks.

A stable Byron node for testnet is a few weeks out, then the Haskell wallet backend and Daedalus integrate into it to replace 100 percent of the legacy code, while Shelley rules move from formal specification to production code in a friendly race between the Rust and Haskell teams.

Yoroi 1.8 recently came out and over 2,000 people in the stake pool task force channel are running the self node testnet and getting ready to stake, with network, incentives and mainnet release as the remaining phases.

All of the progress is visible in the GitHub repos, Reddit and Twitter feeds, and David will start regular community roll-ups every four to six weeks with an AMA, ideally taking questions live.

The scientists are preparing Ouroboros Hydra, Crypsinous and Chronos for conference submission, with a preliminary Hydra design in September; Hydra is the sharding capstone inheriting everything from the GKL paper through Classic, BFT, Praos and Genesis.

The Ouroboros Classic rewrite published on July 5th is the product of over two years of careful thought and the Praos paper gets the same treatment before journal submission, alongside multiparty computation work, the Sonic zero knowledge proof paper, private computation and more scalable proof of stake sidechains.

Cardano has over 40 papers but no canonical white paper, so later in 2019 the philosophical Why Cardano paper and the other threads get aggregated into a traditional white paper supervised by Dr. Jamie Gabbay, son of logician Dov Gabbay.

The Cardano Foundation's new executive director Heinrich comes from UBS with a law and mergers background and is aligned on transparency, a diverse board and operations, so the community finally has a person to talk to about the foundation being more proactive.

Negotiations are going well with an unnamed company in the anti-counterfeiting space that wants to build on Cardano, and work continues in Mongolia, Georgia and Ethiopia.

Despite the markets and the sentiment, 200 people at IOHK and its partners do hard work every day, and it now shows in installable releases through Chocolatey on Windows, Homebrew and Snapcraft.

Shelley should be a great release and Plutus has major upgrades coming, with off chain code decoupled so you can write it in JavaScript, good progress on GHCJS and Asterius for WebAssembly, and Marlowe and Goguen on schedule.

A hackathon at the University of Wyoming in Laramie with 500 plus people and the governor will feature Plutus and Marlowe workshops, and a Plutus book is already published on Amazon with another to follow, bringing functional programmers in to issue currencies and build dApps.