UPD 02/04/2020

Broadcasting from snowy Colorado after a two hour meeting on the functional and non-functional requirements for the Shelley testnet, plus the first independent security report on the new code.

The industry started with Bitcoin, a short white paper with no security proofs and some questionable C++ code, but real people, governments and corporations are now making multibillion dollar bets and need a scale neither Bitcoin nor Ethereum can accommodate.

When Cardano started IOHK chose to begin with the peer-reviewed scientific process and hired a large group of scientists to ask hard questions about security proofs, adversaries and security models.

Hiring real scientists is no longer a distinguishing feature now that David Chaum, Silvio Micali and even Ethereum are writing real papers.

Formal methods, aspired to since 2015, mean writing down rigorously and mathematically what the system intends to do so an engineer can build it with no ambiguity, then checking the specification with model checking and SAT solving.

Writing software this way adds years to the roadmap and required hiring formal methods experts, since almost nobody had done it at project scale: only scattered efforts like Meredith Patterson's work, some Scala projects, dependently typed languages, Tezos, Russell O'Connor's Simplicity at Blockstream and Grigore Rosu's KEVM.

IOHK was first to combine peer review, formal methods and property-based tested code into one pipeline it calls evidence-based software, explained in detail by Duncan Coutts and Philipp Kant on the IOHK YouTube channel, and it only works alongside third-party validation from independent security auditors and reviewers with no financial interest.

For the first time IOHK consolidated three years of project charters and GitHub issues into a single scope and requirements document, already almost a hundred pages just for the scoping up to the Shelley testnet.

The whole point of the incentivized testnet was a broad community discussion about the staking experience, the business model of staking and how Ouroboros actually works, using rapid prototyping so things can change weekly.

Admits IOHK has not been open enough about how any of this works, having been myopic, ivory tower and insular, though anyone watching the GitHub repos can see the progress: in 2019 Cardano was the most actively developed cryptocurrency by meaningful commits, ahead of Ethereum, and it is coding faster now.

The OBFT hard fork is tentatively scheduled for February 20th and the Byron reboot code should also land in February 2020, the proudest work in the company's history, with its design published in the cardano-ledger-specs repo under input-output-hk on GitHub.

The Shelley Haskell testnet comes in two phases, first moving stake pool operators off the incentivized testnet over roughly two to four weeks, then a consumer release for the balance check so everyone can verify their ITN rewards and balances.

After that it is strategic planning for the ideal Shelley mainnet launch date, with a major Cardano Docs update, multi-sig, a Ledger update and other supporting infrastructure, and the organization is under the most delivery stress it has ever been.

Then it is Goguen's show, a pursuit of six things: multi-asset, the identity effort IOHK is calling Prism, oracles, metadata flowing through transactions, developer experience for writing Plutus and Marlowe applications, and Ethereum interoperability.

Expects a major update or release every one to two months, with incentivized testnet work transitioning to Basho around March to April in parallel with the Goguen and Shelley streams, and Voltaire work underway with the Cardano Foundation.

IOHK has funded original contributions to Haskell for over a year, the GHCJS project and the Asterius project with Tweag, compiling Haskell to JavaScript and WebAssembly so it becomes as portable as Rust, C and C++, which matters enormously for Plutus.

Adrestia is a collection of explorer libraries and the wallet backend that lets people build Cardano wallets, exchanges list Ada and users do cold staking or staking as a service, and IOHK is rebuilding the listing experience with more than 30 exchange entities for one unified, secure experience.

A Voltaire task the Cardano Foundation is leading is evolving the Cardano protocol beyond where IOHK took it, keeping the quality methodology intact: science must be peer reviewed, code must be documented, tested, built with formal methods and audited by third parties like Root9B and Kudelski Security.

Protocol changes split into two dimensions, improvement proposals that update a formal specification such as the delegation design spec or the Byron chain spec, which is how soft and hard forks and ledger, consensus and network rule changes get made, and eventually those specs can be self hosted on Cardano instead of GitHub with the democratic mechanisms on ledger.

The other dimension is enhancement proposals that need community judgment rather than mathematical formalism, like an ATM network throughout Addis Ababa for adoption in Ethiopia or a grant for the government of Mauritius to put voting infrastructure on Cardano, and the Cardano Foundation's CIP committee explores both mandates plus a code independent reference system so a C, Java or Haskell client can verify one source of truth.

The goal is to put both proposal types under a single democratic voting mechanic attached to the treasury, which is the point of Voltaire, backed by a Horizon 2020 grant of over half a million dollars won with IBM Research and Guardtime to study decentralized software updates, executed by IOHK's Cyprus entity Input Output Research.

Combined with three years of research at Lancaster University with Bingsheng Zhang, including a paper at NDSS, IOHK has the mechanics, but none of it substitutes for community participation and incentives to participate.

Because governance is so complicated he authorized hiring a dedicated product manager for these work streams at IOHK, joining product managers at Emurgo and the Cardano Foundation, to land a reasonable system for improvement and enhancement proposals before the end of the year.

Moving into 2021, once the bulk of Shelley and Goguen is done the entire team becomes available to implement the treasury and voting system, and a base version needs no substantial protocol changes because much of it can be layer 2 or more centralized at first.

IOHK is reaching the end of the first generation of research, having solved most of what was outlined in 2015, starting with the GKL model that now has nearly 800 citations and working systematically through Ouroboros Classic, Praos, Genesis, Chronos and soon Hydra.

The science is done and IOHK is moving into the explanation phase, telling people what it built and why it matters, with Shelley launching on Praos and the protocol updated systematically from there.

The point of the improvement and enhancement processes is to leave it to the community to decide what comes next, though nothing would make him happier than another five year stint taking Cardano to the stars with a satellite network if funding permits.

IOHK hoped for a hundred reasonable stake pools on the incentivized testnet and expected maybe 50, but there are almost a thousand registered pools with no end in sight, evidence of an engine that tends towards decentralization without giving up performance or coordination.

The roadmap will be completed sooner than you think and IOHK has already begun brainstorming the next book, post quantum VRFs, the satellite relay network and more.

There is a real shot at replacing the world's global payment settlement systems, redefining what regulated and unregulated transactions look like, contributing to computer science, and building larger coalitions to use the software, including work with Emurgo and PwC on commercialization.

At dinner with the former prime minister of Georgia the conversation was not about payment or credential systems but about rebuilding an entire country on a blockchain, and the Iowa Democratic caucus disaster shows even the richest nations cannot get basic voting right.

The technology enables societies where power is pushed to the edges, identity becomes self sovereign, you own your own data and the fruits of your labor, and you decide how you participate in the economy.

The last ten years with Bitcoin have been exciting but frustrating because the technology never lived up to the promise of decentralization, and Cardano is the first system with the capacity to keep decentralizing, self governing and scaling regardless of how many users it has; the next months will be the busiest and most exciting in the company's history, with a Kyoto announcement coming.