2020-12-03
The Island, The Ocean and the Pond (Soon)
- Cardano's developer strategy covers three worlds: the ocean of mainstream programming languages, the pond of Ethereum tooling, and the island of Cardano's own Plutus stack.
- An IELE devnet, built with Runtime Verification's K framework, lets developers start writing Cardano applications this December, with Solidity as the first supported language and more mainstream languages to follow.
- A separate, permanent EVM devnet lets Ethereum developers run Solidity and EVM bytecode unchanged on Cardano, targeted for around December 10.
- The island itself gets the extended UTXO model, native multi-asset support, and Plutus through a series of hard fork combinator events running from this month into early Q2 2021.
- Project Catalyst's Fund3 dedicates 500,000 dollars to dApp and DeFi development, with permanent developer funding built into every future fund.
- Glow, a cross chain application framework from Mutual Knowledge Systems, will let developers deploy the same app on Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Cardano.
6 chapters · 32 markers
Intro: devnets are coming soon 2
A collection of announcements is coming in the next 60 to 90 days, starting with the devnets developers have been asking for.
Developers need a devnet to write and test code before launch, the same way game studios write Xbox titles six months to two years before the console ships, only Cardano's window is much shorter.
The island, the ocean, and the pond: framing the strategy 7
The video's title, The Island, The Ocean and the Pond, names Cardano's three part developer strategy; early smart contract theory was a patchwork of Nick Szabo's 1990s definition, Vitalik Buterin's Ethereum definition, design by contract in the Eiffel language, service oriented architecture, and Resource Aware ML.
A smart contract design starts from a real problem, like DRM for a video game or a portable electronic medical record, then decides what code runs on chain versus off chain.
The pond is Ethereum: a small, contained space for on-chain experimentation, with virtual machines like the Ethereum Virtual Machine and languages like Solidity, Vyper, Serpent, and Kadena's Pact.
Firms like ConsenSys claim Ethereum has won all the developers, but its actual developer base and deployed applications are tiny next to the mainstream ocean.
The ocean is the mainstream developer world: the Java Virtual Machine, .NET with 5 million developers, Java with more than 10 million, plus JavaScript, Swift, Objective-C, PHP, and C or C++.
Ocean tooling barely interoperates with pond tooling, and mainstream developer adoption will not happen until Cardano has a strategy covering all these ecosystems, not just experiments.
The island is Hoskinson's metaphor for Cardano's own chain: a place where everything works right the first time, like one of the world's blue zones where people live to a hundred.
The ocean: Runtime Verification, K, and IELE 7
All of this runs on Ouroboros and Cardano's network stack, and since 2017 Cardano has partnered with Runtime Verification, founded by Grigore Rosu, a University of Illinois professor who worked at NASA and DARPA and created the K framework.
Runtime Verification built IELE for Cardano, a virtual machine based on decades old, highly optimized ideas from LLVM, whose creators at the University of Illinois helped design it.
Runtime Verification's job is the ocean: use the K framework's semantics based compilation so any mainstream language can eventually compile down to IELE within a three to five year horizon.
The IELE devnet is targeted for the first half of December 2020 as a Cardano side chain, decoupled at first and linked to mainnet in the first half of 2021.
Developers can start writing IELE applications in IELE assembly this December, with Solidity as the first surface language and JavaScript and other mainstream languages to follow.
Algorand already uses Runtime Verification's services, and the K framework lets anyone add their own programming language to Cardano just by writing its semantics.
Runtime Verification will also build a lightweight formal verification and specification language for Cardano; the firm was the first in the world to write a formally verified ERC20 specification.
The pond and island on mainnet: EVM sidechain, eUTXO, and Plutus 3
A separate, permanent EVM devnet lets Ethereum developers run Solidity code and EVM bytecode unchanged and port ERC20 tokens over one to one, targeted for around December 10, running faster and cheaper over time than on Ethereum's own mainnet thanks to Ouroboros.
On the main chain, the island brings the extended UTXO model, native multi-asset support, and Plutus through a series of hard fork combinator events: the first this month, the next in mid Q1 2021, and the last in early Q2 2021.
Writing for the island is like writing a native iOS app: many languages can target Cardano, but Plutus is engineered to be the best possible experience, the way Swift is for iPhone development.
Catalyst funding, Glow, and the developer community 9
Project Catalyst's Fund3 focuses on dApps, DeFi, and Goguen era developers, with 500,000 dollars available and permanent developer funding built into every fund from here on.
Over 4,000 people are already on IdeaScale discussing ideas, with a goal of 10,000 by the end of Fund3 and 100,000 by mid-2021, and the Plutus Playground development environment is coming in Q1.
Educational partnerships in Q1 2021 will produce free, Creative Commons content for IELE, Plutus, and Marlowe, alongside a Stack Exchange style Q&A and knowledge wiki for developers.
Cardano now has the island, the pond, and the ocean, positioned to do everything competitors can do just better, faster, and cheaper, with the foundational technology validated by dozens of peer reviewed PL papers.
At current ADA prices Catalyst funds should carry over 80 million dollars a year, rising toward almost a billion dollars if ADA reaches one dollar.
IOHK is also building its own DeFi portfolio and wants full coverage of the DeFi spectrum alongside its partners, with announcements coming this month and next.
Glow, created by Francois-Rene Rideau of Mutual Knowledge Systems, aims to be the Cordova of Cardano: a cross-platform framework to deploy the same application on Bitcoin, Ethereum, Cardano, and other chains.
Glow already compiles to the Ethereum Virtual Machine and will launch alongside the Ethereum devnet this month or next; Hoskinson is negotiating a strategic investment in Mutual Knowledge Systems.
Once Hydra is turned on, Ouroboros will give Cardano higher throughput than Visa, Mastercard, and every other payment network combined.
Under the hood: Mantis, Jormungandr, and Haskell 4
Cardano side chains run on three code platforms: Mantis in Scala, originally built for Ethereum Classic and battle tested since 2017; the Rust based Jormungandr, developed since the Incentivized Testnet; and the Haskell based Cardano node, with the EVM devnet launching on Mantis first.
Because Catalyst also runs on the Rust code base, the Cardano Haskell team can keep shipping releases every week or two undisturbed while side chain and devnet work happens in parallel.
Runtime Verification works across chains and industries, counting Boeing among its dozens of major clients, which makes enterprise conversations with Fortune 500 companies much easier.
Promises a fast moving next 90 days of partnerships and announcements, signing off until Ada Lovelace's birthday.