UPD 01/12/2020

The incentivized testnet launched in mid December was rocky, and the delivery team went on vacation right after four months of straight work, so known bugs sat unfixed over the holidays.

The team is back at full strength, a network stability patch should ship in mid January 2020 and regular patches resume, and an enormous amount of data has been collected on use and misuse of the protocol, including whether the saturation metric needs adjusting and stake pools operating on multiple chains at once.

The first goal of the incentivized testnet was the user experience of being a stake pool operator and of delegation, proving the community can run infrastructure.

The second goal was to see whether the chosen parameters and protocol design actually deliver decentralization, performance and a stable network.

Measures can be installed proactively or retroactively against counterproductive behavior, for example punitive measures on the pledging mechanism if a fraud proof shows someone minting blocks on multiple chains at once.

The entire point of a testnet is for things to break and change, and an incentivized testnet means the company and the stakers share an incentive to make it work.

Production will almost certainly run the Haskell code, rewritten from scratch from formal specifications over a year of engineering, so the bugs, connection issues and edginess of the fast built incentivized testnet will not carry over, while the Haskell code benefits from a large population of stake pool operators and the parameterization lessons learned.

The frustration with the incentivized testnet is understandable, the holidays slowed a normal development cadence, and January 2020 should resolve most if not all of the major issues before mainnet.

Six hours at Real World Crypto with chief scientist Aggelos Kiayias covered the whole 2020 research agenda: finishing Ouroboros, a post quantum signature scheme with Peter Schwabe, network stack design and recursive SNARKs, plus a research budget including a University of Wyoming donation.

Development velocity keeps increasing across Daedalus, the wallet backend, cardano-node and Jormungandr, with weekly to bi-weekly releases and a far more commercial and disciplined company, so Shelley and Goguen, all of Goguen and part of Basho should land in 2020.

The Hydra protocol should have its first paper in February targeting a Eurocrypt submission, already at least five times faster than Ethereum at peak efficiency, and the theory of proof of stake now covers gaps like spikes of dishonest majority that Ouroboros Genesis does not.

Goguen needs four properties, and the first is a good multi-asset standard covering fungible, non-fungible, regulated and unregulated assets, competitive with Ethereum standards like ERC-20, ERC-721 and security tokens.

Second, external information has to reach the chain through oracles or data feeds, as the success of Chainlink and DeFi oracle solutions shows, so work with Emurgo and the Cardano Foundation is underway on an oracle standard for Cardano.

Third, identity should be a first-class citizen in the ledger, and the Atala team's ledger agnostic PRISM project, based on the DID standard, Sovrin and Hyperledger Indy, will be ported to Cardano in 2020 for aliasing, multisig, human readable addresses and stake pool message channels.

Fourth, there has to be a good story for metadata embedded in transactions, covering things like the FATF travel rule and contingent settlement, so users and applications can stay compliant with law.

Beyond those four there has to be development tooling, interoperability with Ethereum and baseline DeFi infrastructure, ideally a DEX and a stablecoin in the Cardano ecosystem for liquidity, remittances and microfinance, and commercial director Jerry is discussing the minimum viable investment with the Cardano Foundation, while Plutus and Marlowe leave the laboratory and turn from academic into commercial projects, bringing hackathons, tooling investment and pedagogical applications.

Emurgo should publish a formal investment thesis on the record, with a firm financial commitment and priority geographies, so the market knows what the ecosystem is looking for and how much money is behind the portfolio.

Africa is the first geographic priority: John O'Connor and IceAddis built a proposal for presence in almost every African country with hundreds of meetup groups, and the Cardano Foundation is formally asked to approve or negotiate it.

Japan is the second priority, with a dedicated Foundation strategy requested for the second half of 2020, meetups in every major Japanese city and pilots such as agricultural supply chain that works for the Ethiopian coffee farmer and the Japanese rice farmer alike.

Many software releases are coming: the Byron reboot with the Haskell wallet backend integrated lands in January or February 2020, followed by the OBFT hard fork, the last upgrades required before the Shelley testnet and mainnet upgrade.

A security audit with partner Root9B is deep underway, and the report will be published after remediations so a third party verifies the code quality, because software claims need auditing the way scientific claims need peer review.

It will be a long month, but the software, the engineers and the vision are there, this is Cardano's year, so everybody grab a shovel and let's go build a future.