Okonomiyaki

Introduces an okonomiyaki video, named after the a-little-of-everything grilled dish from his years living in Osaka, as a rollup conversation about many topics rather than one.

The AMAs are only temporarily on hold while he restructures them into one monthly AMA plus a fast-paced weekly Hosk Said Q&A to build question volume.

Lays out a social media strategy of livestreaming the AMA to Twitter and YouTube, biweekly Twitter spaces, and broadcasting to other platforms like Gab, Mastodon, and Truth Social without picking winners.

IO has become a venture studio incubating six or seven companies being spun out, most Cardano-related, the most prominent being the Midnight project worked on internally for years.

Runs through the workload: CIP 1694, the Rare Evo and nft XLV summits, an upcoming Cardano Foundation Summit in Dubai, 50-plus community events, and an Ouroboros Peras workshop in Scotland.

Monthly meetings with the Wyoming stablecoin commission, plus engagement with foreign regulators and DC actors on how to regulate cryptocurrencies.

Updates the open-source work: Mithril 2 almost published, Ouroboros Leios wrapping up as the backbone for input endorsers, Peras as Cardano's finality gadget, and BLS support landing in Plutus V3 for cross-chain bridging.

Opens a candid post-mortem of two projects that did not work out, the Plutus Application Backend and Yella, saying PAB was a wrong guess about dev tooling that the community replaced with TxPipe, Aiken, and Marlowe.

It is normal for a new language to have an unstable standard library for two to three years, citing Clojure, Scala, Kotlin, Python, Ruby, D, Java, and Rust, which was unusable in 2015 but is now the most common language in crypto.

Yella aimed to combine the accounts model and extended UTXO in one system via the Chimeric Ledgers paper by Bruno Woltzenlogel Paleo, but the formal-methods engineers resisted putting both paradigms in one system.

Yella and K as a next-generation EVM built on LLVM, register-based rather than stack-based, borrowing 20 years of compiler design after working with Grigore Rosu at the University of Illinois.

The hope of semantics-based compilation: write a language's formal semantics in the K framework once, register it on-chain, and let an SBC compiler translate any program to run on Yella, a universal translator for programming languages.

Admits that after 19 people and millions of dollars they never achieved semantics-based compilation, calling it the nature of prototypes, like HD-DVD losing to Blu-ray or XML losing favor to JSON.

Concludes that an accounts, K, and Yella system belongs on a side chain rather than the stable six-year-old main chain, where adding a new paradigm would be too much of a gamble.

Argues a layer one should stay concise and simple so multiple client implementations are feasible, since complexity makes a complete specification and competing clients far harder to write.

He now agrees with the architects who opposed integrating Yella into the layer one, and that it could have worked only if started before the Byron reboot, though it would have introduced problems.

Turns to what did work out: active Conway specifications, a fast reliable node run by thousands of stake pool operators, a vibrant extended-UTXO smart contract ecosystem, and minimum viable governance through CIP 1694.

Highlights the members-based organization for a decentralized product backlog, multiple Plutus iterations, Ouroboros as the best consensus algorithm, and liquid non-custodial staking with no slashing or bonding.

Defends the conference-based peer-review process, noting crypto and eurocrypt reject over 90 percent of papers with a formal referee process, and that computer science moves too fast for journals.

A hiring committee at Cornell would prize crypto and eurocrypt papers, and challenges critics who dismiss the 200 papers to name a more credible venue than those top conferences.

Argues Cardano never stumbled on what matters, since the network never had to be manually reset, and its extended UTXO is future-proofed for the rollups and offchain activity the whole industry is moving toward.

Lists the side threads coming true, Mithril, Hydra, and Marlowe, plus community projects like TxPipe and Blockfrost and 14 to 15 wallets, and teases a side-chain model to leapfrog the industry.

Cardano has always been in the leading set, first to market with liquid non-custodial staking by roughly two and a half years over Ethereum, while Bitcoin still struggles with expressiveness through Simplicity and Blockstream, and it led the industry on upgrades via the hard-fork combinator.

A fan at nft XLV lifted his pant leg to show a tattoo not of the Cardano logo but of the policy IDs from smart contracts he wrote, showing the shift from an aspirational logo to real work.

The movement is now collective rather than about one person, and the 2024 decentralized budget will flow tens of millions to a diverse set of people, with Catalyst repositioned as an innovation agency bootstrapping the next thousand dapps.

Closes saying the budget process holds people accountable through reporting, and that he wants to do more whiteboard videos and an educational series with Lars, maybe redoing his Bitcoin class.