Happy Birthday Ada!

Opens December 10th 2020 on Ada Lovelace's 205th birthday, noting ADA is named after the 19th-century first female programmer of note, a good friend of Charles Babbage who inspired generations of women in science.

Calls Grace Hopper, creator of COBOL and namesake of the computer bug, Ada's 20th-century spiritual successor, and explains he named each part of Cardano after historical figures like the scoundrel polymath Gerolamo Cardano.

The last five years were a scientific battle for the next generation of proof of stake, an uncertain problem in 2015 mocked by Bitcoin maximalists as perpetual motion, drawing dozens of teams worldwide.

The research team took a first-principles approach requiring a security model, an adversary, and a definition of a blockchain, unlike engineering-first teams like Cosmos Tendermint or Vitalik's original Casper.

Five years later a family of validated papers yielded Polkadot, Tezos, Cosmos in production, Cardano on Ouroboros Praos, and ETH2 Casper, each with different security and finality assumptions.

Declares proof of stake has won as the most scalable and energy-efficient class for financial operating systems, with Cardano the largest contributor by citation and paper count spawning many derivative works.

The biggest achievement is the success of the Ouroboros research agenda, giving Cardano an engine to grow from hundreds of thousands to a billion users with an incentive model for all environments.

The research team understood the economics as much as the security, working with Oxford's Elias Koutsoupias on rigorous, upgradeable game-theoretic models of stake pool operation and delegation.

The team built a wholly new network stack based on 30 years of systems theory and the RINA recursive internetwork architecture, different from Ethereum, and modelable as it scales globally.

Beyond delivering on Bitcoin's promise, programmability was the next hard problem, since there are thousands of languages and near holy wars between imperative, procedural, and functional paradigms.

Raises the open questions of what a smart contract is, how much runs on-chain versus off-chain, and whether contracts are immutable or economic agents paying rent to persist and be pruned like Ouroboros.

The team retained Philip Wadler, a Haskell creator with over 25000 citations, and Manuel Chakravarty and dozens of others to investigate from first principles the ideal accounting and execution model for smart contracts.

Competing ideas from BitML, the Simplicity project, Ethereum, Algorand, and WebAssembly, and that delivering a language also needs a resource model and a way to specify constructs.

The team adopted a polyglot approach blending Turing-complete and incomplete DSLs, partnering with Grigore Rosu's Runtime Verification, Mutual Knowledge Systems for Glow, and the University of Kent alongside home base Edinburgh.

The team invented the extended UTXO accounting model with big advantages over Ethereum's accounts model, and Marlowe for financial contracts that non-programmers can build like Lego bricks.

The devnets are dawning, with the EVM devnet and Yella devnet likely launching in mid-December 2020 and Plutus via the playground in Q1 2021, so dapps are coming through partnerships, the DC Fund, and the in-house C Fund.

The commercial team has 110 organically arriving deals in the pipeline, many unviable, all aided by the ERC20 converter without actively selling.

An Africa announcement needs more time, so Tim and the team will run a special episode on the 2021 Africa strategy after three hard years across 52 jurisdictions, headquartered in Addis Ababa with John O'Connor living there.

Despite a pandemic, civil wars, and unrest they crossed from potential to bidding, soon announcing large Ethiopia deals plus seeded projects from Tanzania and organic communities in South Africa and Nigeria.

Answers why Africa: a CEO plans for where value will be in 10 years, and Africa will be one of the most promising economies by 2030 with 70 percent under 30 and internet-enabled, as China invested over a trillion dollars via Huawei and telecoms.

5.6 trillion dollars of illiquid African wealth could become liquid on the Cardano blockchain, since the consumers of DeFi and identity will be nimble Africa and Southeast Asia, not the ossified invitation-only Western markets.

The most exciting part is governance, a gamble that the community would build it, with over 4000 people on IdeaScale in Catalyst unlocking 80 million dollars a year democratically without moving to London or Silicon Valley.

The same tools under Dor will let the community vote on parameters like k and fees and on hard forks in 2021, making Cardano the most decentralized cryptocurrency in every dimension.

Dedicated people will articulate a Cardano 2025 vision, broadening from three bootstrapping entities to dozens for resilience, toward a billion-person global financial operating system.

People intimate with Fortune 500 needs like chief commercial officer Jerry Fragiscatos are joining, and peer review and formal methods aid the procurement cycle where the Fortune 500 resisted open systems, which is why they joined Hyperledger.

Clients even larger than the Fortune 500, governments like Georgia, Mongolia, and Ethiopia, open gov-tech discussions on identity, KYC, e-voting, and property, especially as 74 million Americans doubting the election show appetite for a blockchain election system.

Closes on Ada Lovelace's birthday thanking the community for five years of mostly volunteer work, saying 2021 positions them to change the world and that increasingly the community will be the ones announcing and turning things on.