AMA 06/18/2019

Broadcasts live from the country of Georgia, touring a 1,400 year old mountaintop church with siege tunnels and a cathedral said to hold a piece of the crucifix.

Praises Georgia's decade of reform: a huge jump in ease of doing business rankings, a rebuilt police force, rising GDP, a new education spending mandate, and a simple four tax flat tax system.

Highlights Georgia as an early blockchain adopter, crediting Bitfury for pushing land titling, health records, and self sovereign identity work.

Details a Georgian academic credentialing pilot that hashes and signs diplomas onto a blockchain, backed by MOUs with the Free University, BTU, and the Ministry of Education, plus a meeting with the prime minister.

A pilot combining Atala and Cardano into a hybrid ledger with a token for identity verification payments, with a feasibility report and scale out cost estimate to follow a July site visit.

Wraps up the Georgia trip battling a gout attack in the birthplace of wine, unable to drink any of it.

Previews the next stop, Israel, for a hackathon and meetings with partners like Endor in its cryptocurrency hub, plus a private tour of Jerusalem and the Dead Sea.

Shifts to a Cardano progress update, calling Shelley a major inflection point as the rigorous Haskell rewrite nears a viable test net.

Confirms the Rust client is ready for a self node test net, with packages coming for Snapcraft, Chocolatey, and Homebrew, and a full rolling release planned for Friday.

Announces David will host a Friday AMA covering the release and taking community questions around 3pm Eastern.

Reports a rapid release cadence, four client releases in three weeks, with the Haskell wallet backend integration due by month end.

The self node test net as a blockchain in a box, letting anyone run their own network in god mode to control token distribution and delegation.

Previews the open test network as a shared state network stress test, followed by a final incentive test net built on the formal specifications and reviewed by a third party auditor.

Expects a Haskell siren test net around July and full Shelley functionality by late July to August as the Rust and Haskell clients converge on a final design.

Running competing Rust and Haskell teams in parallel, one formal methods driven and one agile, and credits small resilient teams with weekly releases for the organizational turnaround.

Announces Cardano SL 1.5.2 as the last maintenance patch before enabling OBFT, paving a clean upgrade path to the new nodes.

Plutus is passing hackathon stress tests and being decoupled into a pluggable service, with papers landing at conferences and the second half of the year focused on making Plutus and Marlowe ship ready.

Outlines the keys to smart contract adoption: training developers through Udemy courses, refining the DSL model, and courting the huge untapped Lisp, Clojure, Haskell, and OCaml programming community.

Plans to compile the Haskell side of Plutus to WebAssembly and JavaScript so developers can use it in browsers and as a node package.

Reflects on three years and twenty redesigns behind Plutus, comparing it to JavaScript's early mistakes and crediting Philip Wadler's decades of Haskell experience.

Points to the refreshed roadmap website and growing weekly reports as the best way to track Shelley's steady progress.

Praises Yoroi's fast release cycle from Emurgo, a new Crypto.com integration for merchant ADA payments, and exploration of hardware wallet and debit card support.

Plans to return to Colorado and finalize scalability with the growing Ouroboros Hydra team, alongside side chain work for interoperability using Interledger and Lightning with Rob Cohen.

A Voltaire product team is starting to take shape, needed soon to hit a 2020 target on the now rewritten, low technical debt codebase.

Introduces IFTF inspired ideas on embedding compliance metadata into transactions, splitting a transaction into asset, entities, story, and regulatory branches, plus code for smart contracts.

Contrasts Bitcoin's rigid push system with Ethereum's flexible but unstandardized metadata, floating a subscription style pull payment model.

Weighs the fungibility and privacy tradeoffs of embedding identity data, favoring a hash pre image compromise that keeps transaction details private.

Building an end to end compliance model with account level metadata, a pub or sub architecture, and contingent settlement beyond simple multisig.

Plans a dedicated compliance team spun out of Shelley, pairing added metadata with more transaction privacy and citing the Ouroboros Crypsinous paper.

Opens the floor for questions, apologizing for the hotel wifi in Georgia and joking about an overly short military style haircut.

Answers whether IOHK will keep working on Ethereum Classic, saying a funding proposal will go to the community after a million dollar, year and a half commitment.

Declines to comment on Facebook's coin project but calls Saturn cool before wrapping up.

Signs off thanking viewers, promising to see everyone in Israel and reconnect for Friday's AMA.