UPD 02/12/2020

Return from the Satoshi Roundtable in Cancun after visiting Suits and Spooks and the McChrystal Group on the road.

Talking to institutional investors, VCs, and DeFi vendors, the industry feels like it is leaving crypto winter for crypto spring or summer.

A blog post announces the most significant update since Byron: a new Cardano node, wallet, explorer backend, and web API.

The new Cardano node and wallet are the foundation for deploying Shelley, built by a large team over eighteen months, first for exchange operators.

Exchanges upgrade via this node for the Ouroboros BFT hard fork coming February 20, with the Daedalus retail update to follow.

Every Cardano user, from exchanges to Daedalus holders, will move to completely rewritten software.

On internal benchmarks the new software is two to three times faster, with half the memory footprint and sync times under an hour.

Special purpose libraries and reworked APIs, built with exchange partners, make it considerably easier to list and custody ADA.

The relationship will yield a major upgrade to the Cardano address framework, with a better explorer, wallet, and an SDK for builders.

The new node can run for weeks or months without a reboot and restart quickly, cutting wallet maintenance downtime.

Exchanges will be able to offer staking as a service to customers, similar to how Coinbase stakes Tezos.

Cold staking lets you keep ADA in a cold wallet and manage delegation from a hot interface, never exposing the value keys to the internet.

The incentivized testnet gets a bundled Jormungandr update, with a Friday release combining Daedalus, the new wallet backend, and Jormungandr.

Network stability on the ITN has jumped from the low forties to about ninety percent, though it has not fully reached end users yet.

Users still hitting Daedalus connection issues are encouraged to use Yoroi for a couple of weeks while fixes land.

A blog post covers ITN KPIs, with Daniel Patel upgrading the tracked metrics weekly, possibly surfaced in the explorer.

The ITN has been a success, getting past a thousand stake pools and building relationships with pool operators.

A black team and a red team will completely redo Cardano Docs, targeting a first major update in late March, localizable into Japanese.

The Shelley Haskell testnet splits into two phases, the first strictly for stake pool operators to redeploy their infrastructure, led by Daniel.

Internal testing shows the Haskell software is high quality and stable, so ITN instabilities should not carry over to the migration test.

The second phase is a balance check that verifies your Byron mainnet funds plus ITN rewards appear correctly in the wallet.

Stronger exchange and enterprise communication lets more testing happen in parallel, shortening the QA phase before mainnet.

Firm dates come in sequence: end of February for the stake pool testnet, then the balance check, then the Shelley mainnet launch.

The plan is to launch the Shelley mainnet in Kyoto with a large party amid the cherry blossoms, echoing the 2017 Tokyo launch.

The company is running more in parallel than ever, with zero knowledge proof and Goguen workshops in Edinburgh and Belgium.

Ledger cold staking and multisig support is being bid out to three companies to keep the hardware wallet ecosystem in step.

The Prism identity product, built by twelve full time people, will be formally announced with a demo tested in Georgia by the Kyoto launch.

Other products are spinning up, including an oracle solution, payments and layer two work, and an asset issuance framework.

The community is doing a great job keeping the company accountable and focused on target.

The team invented Sonic, one of the fastest snarks in the industry, to be presented at the Zcash ZK standardization summit in London.

Beyond post quantum work, a new paper on one time use signatures uses quantum cryptography and would help sign proof of stake blocks.

The Cardano Foundation is pushing hard on the CIP process and should soon publish its first principles for handling proposals.

A dedicated Voltaire product manager is in final interviews to coordinate the Lancaster, Berkman Klein, and European Union governance threads.

Goguen and Shelley are built in parallel, and after Goguen the whole team pivots to Voltaire while Basho advances alongside.

First Hydra simulation results look good, with a TPS rate in the thousands over a base ledger doing 50 to 100 transactions per second.

The Hydra paper drops after the USENIX submission, notable for involving scientists, formal methods, and an industry product manager together.

Late February brings dates for the first Shelley testnet, the ITN end of life, and the consumer Byron reboot upgrade.

Blog posts will cover compiling Haskell to JavaScript and WebAssembly via GHCJS and the Asterius project with Tweag, for portable code.

There are discussions with Emurgo about translating their backend from Rust primitives to Haskell where the compilation makes sense.

Science papers are being updated, from Ouroboros Chronos and Crypsinous to Genesis and Praos, likely rolled into a proof of stake monograph.

Monthly product updates begin, with each component's product manager, coordinated by Farah, giving more depth than these videos.

A ceremony at the University of Wyoming on the 14th announces a donation opening an authentication lab and a Plutus development lab.

Wyoming becomes the first university in the world to accept a unique asset, with Beef Chain among the partners and matching seven figure funds.

Wyoming joins Edinburgh, Athens, and Tokyo Institute of Technology in the research family, the first American university with the brand on the lab.

It is also a first move into hardware, designing a special purpose authentication device for anti counterfeiting applications.