Brief Comments on Goguen

Opens October 29th 2020 from Colorado after a two-and-a-half-hour product update, saying the single slide of interlocking Goguen dependencies shows the complexity of being a smart contract platform in 2020.

Contrasts co-founding Ethereum in 2013 with only papers by Nick Szabo, Ricardian contracts, Eiffel, and FpML as reference material, an open field, against 2020's commercial expectations of who will buy and use it.

Ethereum as designed today has massive deficits, which is why Tezos, Cardano, ETH2, Polkadot, and others exist, since back then there was no ERC20, no ICO revolution, and no DeFi.

Competing at the scale of millions or Fortune 500 contracts needs good answers, introducing Marlowe which leverages professor Simon Thompson's over 30 years of domain-specific language design plus financial domain experts.

Marlowe gives semantic clarity between the entrepreneur, developer, banker, insurer, and exchange for the first time in history, available now in the Marlowe Playground to build contracts.

Marlowe evolved over four years and its contracts can be written visually, in JavaScript, in the Marlowe language, or Haskell, and proven correct with 40-year-old theory like SAT solvers to avoid a Parity-style bug.

DSLs bring clarity, so a future medical-records DSL will broker movement between doctors, hospitals, patients, governments, and regulators with a common language.

Introduces Glow from MuKn, a cross-blockchain unification language, saying strategic investment ensures Cardano is not left behind when Bitcoin gets smart contracts or ETH2 arrives.

Frames Plutus as the unification language and conductor of the orchestra, designed for resource determinism and predictable costs, unlike Ethereum's 2013 just-see-what-happens experiment.

Plutus rests on a 35-year Haskell ecosystem IOHK invested millions to modernize with Windows support, WebAssembly via the partner Tweag, and JavaScript compilation, as a founding member of the Haskell Foundation with Simon Peyton Jones ensuring ARM compilation.

Teases the relationship with DAML and the Yella VM, an imperative object-oriented option sharing Cardano's principles, resurrected years after first reaching out to its creator Grigore Rosu of Runtime Verification.

Turns to the native asset standard, admitting Ethereum did not anticipate how pervasive token issuance would be, recalling the Miami 2014 t-shirt, Colored Coins, and Mastercoin.

The standard supports utility tokens, NFTs, security tokens, and instruments with fixed or flexible monetary policies from central or decentralized issuers, co-evolving with commercialization via the ERC20 converter.

Cardano's native assets are first-class citizens treated like ADA, unlike Ethereum where tokens are second-class to ether, giving better wallet, listing, and governance experiences.

Higher-value tokens could eventually pay their own transaction fees in the native asset itself, impossible under Ethereum's design, a huge advantage.

Goguen already launched via the metadata standard enabling identity applications, and the full rollout spans three hard-fork combinator events, the first in November to December 2020 laying foundations for a Q1 2021 second event.

HFC events must be spaced so developers, wallets, and exchanges are not overwhelmed, and infrastructure must be both deployed and populated, which the Marlowe Playground and coming ERC20 converter and mint testnet already do.

A safe sandbox lets builders get it right before mainnet given the huge adversarial surface, citing DeFi's existential failures, with native assets, extended UTXO, Plutus, and Marlowe rolling out through Q1 to Q2 2021.

Turns to the Shelley team and the Daedalus stake pool ranking concern, clarifying the ranking is not broken but the k parameter needs raising, with a goal of k equal to 1000 before d hits zero.

Beyond k they need partial delegation, delegation portfolios, pub-sub for operators, SMASH improvements, an identity center, and Daedalus upgrades, with over four companies working on it plus seven CIPs including a reward-function change.

The ecosystem more than doubled since Shelley launched at the end of July, celebrating enterprise-grade exchange integration work with Binance and Bittrex via the new address stack.

Highlights Voltaire Catalyst wins with over 3500 daily participants competing for 2.25 million dollars of ADA in Fund 2, scaling every six to eight weeks as a developer acquisition strategy.

The next Catalyst fund will build a voting center into Daedalus alongside the phone app, calling it one of the fastest-moving teams running parallel to Shelley and Goguen.

Turns to Basho, aiming to include a sidechain protocol at the third HFC event in Q1 for moving value between independent systems via a locking mechanism, addressing the interoperability pillar.

Rob Cohen and Matthias Fitzi are de-risking and evolving the Hydra scaling protocol, most of which can run in Plutus with stake pool operators as a natural constituency, needing no HFC event.

Cardano already has 10 times Ethereum's throughput with room for 100 times without Hydra, and unlike Bitcoin and Lightning, Cardano was designed for Hydra via extended UTXO, enabling diverse community implementations.

Cardano 2020 has matured from an ecosystem of potential to one of reality, with the commercial team inundated by daily requests to build on the platform.

Closes proud of building a community to rival Bitcoin's over five years with 90 papers and a million-plus lines of code, saying character and culture cannot be bought, toward Cardano as the financial operating system for those without one.

Thanks the team and encourages everyone to try the Marlowe Playground and the November mint and multi-token standard, teasing major announcements from the commercial division.