2021-02-12 · timestamps by Bitcoin & Cardano
UPD 02/12/2021
- Mid February 2021 update: the Mary hard fork lands native multi asset at the end of the month, plus a new protocol to pay transaction fees in native tokens.
- March is all about Goguen go to market, with the Plutus testnet, Alonzo in Q2, and Alpha Frontier work with Runtime Verification on Yella, the KEVM, and the K specification language.
- A major nation state deal in Africa involving five million people is close, and would be the largest user acquisition deal in the history of the industry.
- Governance and Catalyst are scaling: fund four holds one million dollars, a decentralized consortium funding whitepaper is coming, and the on chain update system gains staff.
- Hydra, Prism identity, hybrid hardware wallets, partial delegation, and a multi asset Daedalus all progress, with d equal to zero set for March 31.
44 entries
Open a mid February update to tease big announcements, the birds, coming for Cardano.
The hard fork combinator event at month end brings the Mary hard fork and native multi asset.
A newly discovered protocol will let users pay transaction fees in a native asset, presented by Aggelos at the Cardano360 update.
Silvio and Runtime Verification are deep in the Goguen go to market strategy, with more partners joining constantly.
A Goguen focused Cardano360 lands in March, and the Plutus testnet ships right after the Mary hard fork.
Alonzo, the Q2 hard fork that brings Plutus to the network, will be stress tested by experiments like reimplementing a Uniswap in Plutus.
Real token partners are lining up, with SingularityNET the publicly announced one and Alex Mashinsky hinting at more.
Coming announcements include off chain infrastructure partners, new wallet support, and a big liquidity deal.
Two dedicated development firms are being brought on to write Plutus code and beat up the Alonzo testnet.
Runtime Verification drives the Yella and KEVM strategy, rolled out in the Alpha Frontier program led by Tom Lemon.
The developer strategy is captured in the ACIDDIC acronym, where the ACID side covers how you acquire, collaborate with, incentivize, and deploy developers.
The DIC side is an app store concept: deployment platforms, consumer interaction, and curation, and an app store for dApps is in the works.
Certified software means a formal specification with a proof that the application follows it, a concept to introduce to end users.
Inspired by Carnegie Mellon's Software Engineering Institute, plan a donation to set up a university center for smart contract engineering.
The institute would have a steering committee and invite Algorand, Tezos, and the Ethereum Foundation to set shared smart contract standards.
A major commercial deal, a bird, with a nation state is in its final stage and would put five million people on Cardano.
John O'Connor and Proof of Africa hinted at it, the payoff of years spent pursuing Africa deals.
The plan is to franchise it pan African across the continent, likely the largest user acquisition deal in the industry's history.
A second bird is also expected in February 2021, and these deals are validators and starting points for the strategy.
March brings the Goguen go to market, getting into how Cardano competes with Ethereum on building applications.
Commercial demand is strong for projects to become multi chain or fully migrate to Cardano, including Celsius and others.
Growth is showing up across community population, Google search volume, Reddit, and Telegram subscriptions.
Native multi asset is arriving with over 100 tokens already minted on the testnet, and ICO and STO pitches arrive daily.
Catalyst fund four holds one million dollars, funds keep growing, and 20 to 30 entities should get funded this round.
A full time journalist will be hired to interview and tell the stories of Catalyst funded projects.
The Wolfram relationship is strong and is being turned into an oracle approach for the AgeUSD stablecoin, targeting the Alonzo testnet.
Goguen summit dates depend on travel and vaccine passports, and may run as a hybrid event like the Shelley summit.
A giant hackathon is planned where Catalyst recipients showcase progress, creating roughly 200 speakers.
No deadlines have been missed, engineering stays on track, and the Haskell firm Obsidian is the newest team to join.
On March 31 d equals zero, meaning one hundred percent of blocks will be produced by stake pool operators.
Full peer to peer networking should reach major progress or deployment around the same time, otherwise early Q2.
There is a huge amount to do in governance, with Obsidian helping expand the on chain update system first built with the European Union.
The Catalyst team gained more Rust developers and oversight to accelerate the governance work.
Leon will present Cardano 2025 and the decentralized consortium funding idea, a post launch treasury concept with a whitepaper coming.
Hydra gains more team members in March, targeting a prototype mid year to confirm the simulations in the papers.
Hydra will work for all native assets and lets issuers reuse Cardano governance and payment state channels.
Prism is advancing, with plans to embed decentralized identifiers into transaction metadata for KYC wallets.
Post Shelley optimization brings speed improvements and a light client strategy, with a Daedalus 2 team building mobile, browser, and desktop wallets.
Daedalus transforms from a single asset to a multi asset wallet, with the first UX arriving alongside Mary.
User issued assets get the same tooling as ada, including paper wallet generators and multisig with the same security standard.
Hybrid wallets pair a Ledger or Trezor holding value keys with Daedalus as a hot wallet for voting and staking.
Partial delegation, letting one wallet delegate to many pools, slipped from Q1 to Q2 to de risk multi asset and Rosetta work.
A cloud product managed by Alex Appledorne will roll up many browser run features, with demos coming soon.
Closes the brief 25 minute update promising more news in February 2021 and hinting the largest Cardano deal yet is about to close.