2021-01-28 · timestamps by ADAtainment
UPD 01/28/2021
- January 2021 Cardano360 recap: the Plutus Playground relaunches, native tokens head toward the Mary hard fork, and a big Daedalus community survey shapes the wallet roadmap.
- Kevin Hammond breaks down multi-asset tokens, custom minting policies, and the path from the pre-production launchpad to mainnet.
- Emurgo reviews a year of Yoroi growth including Ergo support, mainnet staking, and a new Rust-based Cardano Serialization Library adopted by other wallets and exchanges.
- Project Catalyst's Fund3 doubles its budget and hands the community more say in future funding rounds, with a rapid-fire showcase of Fund2-backed projects.
- Atala Prism demos verifiable credentials for Georgia's education system and lays out a plan to bring digital identity and credit history to the unbanked.
- IOHK's commercial team, Colin's market analysis, and the Cardano Foundation's Eva Oberhauser cover enterprise adoption, crypto market dynamics, and the 2021 org roadmap.
117 entries
Open the first Cardano360 show of 2021 with a preview of the topics ahead: Atala Prism, the Plutus Playground, and the Mary hard fork.
Introduces the refreshed Plutus Playground, a browser sandbox with pre-written Plutus smart contracts developers can edit and simulate transactions against before mainnet.
Details Playground extras like IDE key bindings and saving sessions to GitHub, plus plans for production-focused features that ease the path to mainnet.
Argues now is the best time to start learning Plutus, since audits and third-party review take time before contracts can go live.
Reports Playground traction: over 600 nightly users in the first 48 hours and a dedicated developer support channel.
Recaps the native token pre-production environment: over 300 tokens minted by the community over the holidays.
Walks through the token builder abstracting away CLI complexity, starting with a predefined monetary policy before user-built policies arrive.
Previews Daedalus UI mockups for native tokens and the ERC20 converter bridging Ethereum-based tokens onto Cardano.
Demo the ERC20 converter: connect MetaMask, convert DAI to Cardano, and view the redesigned dashboard branding.
Demo minting a custom token in the token builder, noting the monetary policy is IOG-controlled for now with user-defined policies planned.
Lays out the rollout timeline: pre-production through February, a new staging net for stake pool operators, then a public testnet fork with node 1.25 ahead of the hard fork.
Explains why Cardano native tokens differ from typical approaches: treated much like ADA rather than a separate token standard.
Kevin Hammond previews the Mary hard fork, drawing confidence from the uneventful Allegra fork and months of Mary-capable launchpad nodes.
Multi-asset tokens: ADA stays the administrative token while users mint, distribute, and trade their own token types, illustrated with a joking Tim token that only minted five.
Confirms the staging test net for stake pool operators has just been signed off ahead of exposing release versions for trials.
Covers the added administrative complexity of sending native tokens alongside ADA, and the performance gains expected from node 1.25.
Hardware wallets, exchanges, and other third parties are being prepped so their tooling keeps working once native tokens launch, with ADA remaining primus inter pares for fees and storage.
Custom minting policies, such as requiring any one of ten authorized signers to mint new tokens.
Predicts new classes of Cardano users emerging: token producers, brokers, and traders operating alongside ADA holders and stake pool operators.
Distinguishes fungible from non-fungible tokens, with NFTs suited to deeds, share certificates, and other unique on-chain records.
Points developers and stake pool operators toward the testnet to experiment with NFTs or their own loyalty and rewards tokens.
Minting your own tokens only needs a relay node, not full stake pool operator expertise, via Docker or a pre-built Linux image.
Daedalus will eventually support constructing and burning native tokens, pointing viewers to the devnet's program signup.
Recaps the devnet program: the KEVM devnet already has around 120 developers, with a Glow language integration targeting EVM and later Plutus.
Shares devnet community numbers: 250 registered emails, 130 Slack members, staged invitations, and self-organized meetups like Blockchain Developers United.
Connects the devnet program to Project Catalyst funding, giving developers a route from ideation to a funded project.
Outlines devnet support: roadmap guidance, tooling help, and a funding path to help projects reach market.
Introduces the big pre-Christmas Daedalus survey covering three personas: stake pool operators, delegators, and the internal IOG team.
The voice-of-community process: Ben leads outreach, Mike handles analytics, and Haley and Darko turn findings into wireframes.
Reports survey response rates: over 500 wallet users, roughly 10 percent of the base, and about 40 percent of stake pool operators.
Reveals survey ratings: wallet users scored Daedalus 4.2 while stake pool operators scored 3.2, with low trust in the ranking system.
Delegators split between chasing ROI and valuing network decentralization when picking a stake pool.
Shares channel insights: stake pool operators follow Twitter for news while wallet users rely on YouTube.
Lists qualitative requests from the survey: password help, tax support, inline guidance, multi-currency wallets, and better news feeds.
Frames the findings with a must-have versus nice-to-have prioritization model for what keeps users coming back to Daedalus.
Redesigning the delegation experience to balance a simple one-click option against full data for power users.
Commits to more transparency in the stake pool ranking system after stake pool operator criticism.
Flags multi-delegation as a high priority so users can split portfolios as the k parameter grows and choices multiply.
Announces plans for a stake pool operator digest, a developer digest, and a Net Promoter Score to track ecosystem health.
Proposes sharing survey personas and intelligence with stake pool operators to keep them aligned with product direction.
Introduces Emurgo's one-year look back on the Yoroi wallet with Nicolas Arqueros and Sebastien Guillemot.
Covers Yoroi's platforms and traction: desktop, iOS, and Android, past 100,000 active users since its 2018 launch.
Details 2020 extension work: support for multiple wallets and recovery phrases within a single install.
Yoroi's deliberate strategy of deep support for only a few currencies, adding Ergo alongside ADA.
Yoroi now supports the Cardano testnet for developers, with multi-asset support coming once the Mary hard fork ships.
Showcase mainnet staking dashboards and support for choosing between multiple blockchain explorers.
Lists new wallet restoration options, including recovery phrases that are cross-compatible with Daedalus.
Yoroi Mobile's rewrite onto a new Rust-based Cardano Serialization Library, now also adopted by other exchanges and wallets.
Yoroi Mobile now supports delegation on the go plus Ledger hardware wallets, both Nano S and Nano X.
The Cardano Serialization Library also underpins Coinbase's Rosetta standard for exchange integrations.
Covers Emurgo's UTXO research into building smart contracts and complex protocols on Cardano's model, versus account-based chains.
An Oracle initiative already deployed on Ergo research that is coming to Yoroi.
Points to a separate Ergo Summit talk on the Emurgo and Ergo stablecoin research collaboration.
Reveals Project Catalyst Fund3 doubles the pot to half a million dollars worth of ADA, up from Fund2's quarter million.
Outlines Fund3's three challenges: building dApps, growing the developer ecosystem, and letting the community define future Fund5 challenges.
Frames community-defined challenges as a first step toward self-determination and on-chain governance emancipation.
Shares Fund3 growth stats: 5,500 IdeaScale members, 188 proposals on the ballot, and about 600 community advisors reviewing them.
The finalization stage, where proposers revise their pitches based on community feedback before formal advisor review.
Frames Catalyst as a series of experiments open to any ADA holder or anyone with a good idea for the ecosystem.
To get involved: register on IdeaScale to browse and support Catalyst proposals.
Showcase the Liquid Protocol pitch: a decentralized money market for lending, borrowing, and collateral on Cardano.
Showcase the Lovelace Academy pitch: attracting and educating builders, with a focus on India and Brazil.
Showcase the Ouroboros over Arena pitch: a Japan-based stake pool and relay project funded through Catalyst Fund2.
Showcase a Haskell, Plutus, and Marlowe education pitch aimed at onboarding newcomer smart contract developers.
Showcase the Gimbal Labs pitch: open-source Cardano starter kits and APIs for builders.
Showcase the Cardano for Mobile Developers pitch from Tesseract: an inCardano Swift SDK for native iOS apps and wallets.
Praises Catalyst as a self-governing innovation engine and ties it into Goguen's developer acquisition strategy.
Welcomes back Danielle and Mark for an Atala Prism update, recapping its self-sovereign identity design built on Decentralized Identity Foundation specs.
Breaks down Atala's two-part architecture: a decentralized identity platform plus a product suite for digital identity and verifiable credentials.
Declares Atala Prism technically ready after a working end-to-end solution was demoed to Georgian government stakeholders.
Previews the demo apps: a management console and browser wallet for organizations, and a mobile app for holding credentials.
Demo the management console and Atala Prism browser wallet registering decentralized identifiers on the Cardano blockchain.
Demo issuing university degree credentials for Georgia's Ministry of Education deployment via a bulk CSV import.
Demo a credential arriving instantly in the Atala Prism mobile app, rendering identically to the management console.
Articulate the vision for password-less, one-click identity access across the web, likened to Amazon's one-click checkout.
The two systemic problems locking out the unbanked: no verified legal identity and no portable informal credit history.
Proposes Atala's fix: government-issued digital identity linked to informal credit history so users can access formal lenders, echoing Kiva's project in Sierra Leone.
Outlines the near-term roadmap: reaching a feature-complete MVP while scaling security and performance for aggressive user acquisition targets.
Reveals three anchor angel clients in the pipeline, each able to onboard millions of users, alongside developer SDK workshops.
Jerry Colin frames IOHK's 2021 commercial strategy around three pillars: code, community, and commercialization.
Lists commercial services offered today, solutions and data services, with migration, consulting, and infrastructure services expanding next.
Cites institutional buyers like MicroStrategy and Michael Saylor as a sign that new capital is playing the long game rather than speculating.
Colin opens a market dynamics deep dive with the stock-to-flow model of scarcity-driven pricing.
Stock-to-flow works for assets like gold with no close substitutes, but ADA behaves more like a substitute for Bitcoin.
Crypto as an industry still toddling toward adulthood, with altcoins trading on future potential rather than proven fundamentals.
Invoke the classic market for lemons problem, arguing weak regulation makes it hard to tell strong crypto projects from junk.
Credits Cardano's experienced team, peer-reviewed research, and treasury and Catalyst governance as differentiators rewarded by markets.
Coins move together through shared catalysts, like Shelley's staking proof lifting other staking coins, and through shared liquidity pools.
Asks whether the 2021 rally is sustainable, pointing to rising institutional trust and falling illicit-activity metrics as maturity signals.
Concludes the rally looks sustainable long term for patient investors, though short-term volatility and pullbacks should be expected.
Map today's exchange-of-value and yield-generation phase against tomorrow's more aspirational use cases like social networks and voting.
Highlights government traction in Ethiopia, Georgia, and Mongolia, framed as leapfrogging Western financial infrastructure, alongside growing interest in the education sector as digital natives come online.
Calls interoperability a no-brainer that is already happening through stablecoins and exchanges bridging into the legacy financial system, drawing a parallel to the multi-cloud world instead of one winner-take-all platform.
Observes coins beginning to specialize into niches, which raises new questions about trust and finding counterparties in a decentralized world.
The industry's tenor shifting from get-rich-quick speculation toward creating real, mutually beneficial value.
Highlights inbound partnerships being sought by others, including a SingularityNET deal pairing blockchain and decentralized AI services and a Wolfram partnership for Oracle and data services.
Frames partnerships as win-win rather than zero-sum, invoking Metcalfe's law as the ecosystem's network effect compounds.
Closes the segment noting the Catalyst treasury opening up funding to the community as a mutual learning process between IOG and builders.
Introduces Eva Oberhauser, the Cardano Foundation's chief growth officer, on its renewed mission as smart contracts open Cardano to business.
Her first three months clarifying the Cardano Foundation's mission and value proposition amid the transformation.
Lays out three Cardano Foundation missions: drive adoption, enable community decentralization, and provide resilience and compliance.
The foundation evolving from autonomous builder to community co-creator, and eventually to a supervisory role as decentralization deepens.
Covers operational work underway: hiring and building the skills and resources needed for the foundation's new focus, plus new co-creation initiatives with the community.
Points to the ambassador program and the CRP process as swarm-intelligence growth accelerators drawing on community skills.
Showcase the Cardano Connector built with ScanTrust, a proof of concept for supply chain tracking using metadata.
Signal a shift toward channeling more of this collaboration through Project Catalyst, including direct foundation involvement in Fund4.
Outlines a strategy to bring more developers and technology capability into the ecosystem by helping the community build additional tools.
Reports the metadata workshop with ScanTrust drew about 500 live attendees, a model to repeat for native tokens, Plutus, and Marlowe rollouts.
Welcomes David Likes Crypto onto the official channel, moving from his own YouTube show to producing content for IOHK.
Recounts discovering Cardano in 2020 after falling down a Bitcoin and altcoin rabbit hole, and noting the community feels slower from outside than it does working inside IOHK.
Previews upcoming explainer content aimed at newcomers to both crypto and Cardano.
Aparna sets 2021 priorities around people, product, and process after a fast-moving 2020 that delivered Shelley and the start of Goguen.
Details product priorities: right-sizing teams and pushing decentralization, programmability, and governance themes.
Ties the developer ecosystem and utility pillar to proof of concepts plus launch and commercial partnerships.
Lists innovation tracks in flight: Marlowe, Project Atlas, and a Hydra scalability prototype.
Covers launch planning basics: documentation, websites, support models, and incentive models for partners.
Closes the show pointing to a separate bonus video: Charles Hoskinson and Ben Goertzel in conversation on decentralized social media and the digital commons.