Cardano Update

August was dominated by shipping Shelley, a completely new codebase, and the node 1.19 release that resolved most of the performance issues people were seeing, with Daedalus mainnet targeted for release 2.2.

Daedalus and cryptocurrency exchanges run on the same wallet backend, so the performance work done for exchange scale wallets carries straight over to everyday Daedalus users.

A wave of technical debt reduction and a short breather set up the move of Goguen from its own team into the general Cardano team to begin implementation.

Goguen breaks into three components, the first being native assets, which turns Cardano from a single asset ledger into a multi asset ledger.

The second component, Plutus Foundations, brings the extended UTXO model and Plutus into Cardano so smart contracts can run, and the third, the Plutus Application Framework, layers ecosystem tooling on top by drawing on 35 years of Haskell best practices and everything learned building Cardano itself.

There is ongoing debate over whether the three Goguen components ship bundled or as separate hard fork combinator events, but once they land, native assets, Plutus Foundations, and the application framework together make Cardano extremely competitive for DeFi, and the commercial team is already identifying stablecoins, oracles, and DEXes to build as case studies, though the partners are not ready to be named yet.

The Shelley codebase handed to the community was built for correctness first, and once that was proven the team delivered a 50 to 100x performance improvement in about two weeks.

Daedalus's near term roadmap is packed: multisig support, a hardware wallet center, one to many delegation also known as partial delegation, delegation portfolios for delegating to curated stake pool operator lists, U2F support with YubiKeys, a QR code center, and shielded paper wallets.

Daedalus has long been unfairly blamed for slowness that actually comes from the node, wallet backend, and network stack it talks to, not the application itself; IOG has now launched an internal user experience benchmark suite feeding into the acceptance criteria, so after historically focusing on correctness first, performance improvements will land on a steady two to four week cadence, with most people happy in two to three months and no repeat of Shelley's slow validation launch.

Bittrex's massive wallet exposed a persistent coin selection slowdown tied to how new addresses are created, fixed for everyone once solved, while other bugs traced back to the oldest code in the stack, the original Cardano SL codebase launched in September 2017.

Vacuum Labs is finalizing the stake pool operator update, a deal to upgrade Trezor and Ledger firmware, alongside plans for multi sig pledging and multi delegation.

The team and outside researchers are deeply reworking protocol parameters like k and a0, expecting a shake up that especially helps smaller stake pool operators once one to many delegation and delegation portfolios ship.

Daedalus was historically the project's neglected stepchild, so IOG hired a dedicated user experience expert to work closely with the team fixing rough edges.

A Voltaire voting center is coming, first as a phone app that uses the QR code center to securely transfer credentials, with a richer Daedalus desktop voting center to follow.

Project Catalyst Fund1 is wrapping up as a closed focus group, with Fund2 submissions opening September 7th to the entire Cardano community.

Even while Shelley settles in, partners are pushing hard for smart contracts and multi asset support, and the team is investing in developer experience under the DevX banner: developer acquisition, collaboration, incentive, and application deployment.

The wallet backend team, Adrestia, carries the heaviest load since it sits in the middle of everything and ships something new almost every week, with security work continuing through things like the Quantstamp audit alongside new automated benchmarking suites replacing manual QA.

Cost is not a constraint right now; wherever money can buy speed, hiring people or retaining external firms, that is exactly what is happening, without sacrificing correctness or security.

The Cardano Foundation hired McCann to rebrand cardano.org and a new marketing director joins IOG in early September, with plans for dedicated content explaining questions people keep asking, like why Ouroboros beats Casper or notarized proof of stake, released under a Creative Commons license for the community to reuse.

Deliberately held off on things like a Joe Rogan appearance until Goguen actually ships, since an audience that big would not stick around waiting for unfinished software.

Marketing is also about enabling creativity: wants to bring the beautiful animation work already on the IOHK website into more places, citing a fan made animated QR code Pac Man gif as inspiration for encrypted, animated paper wallet backups.

The big story is smart contracts and native assets, but the small polish and hidden details are what actually make people fall in love with a product, which is why marketing at IOG is now both educational and creativity focused.

The team ran at half capacity right after Shelley while keeping Goguen and application side work going in parallel, and Daedalus is being readied for a big update.

Voltaire keeps evolving fast: Fund1's closed focus group of 50 plus people is nearly done, Fund2 opens as the first fully public Catalyst vote cast entirely by phone, and voter registration will change again with the next hard fork combinator event, adding a Daedalus voting center alongside the phone app, with hopes that Yoroi comes on board too.

Expects 2021 to be a clash of titans against competitors like Polkadot, Tezos, EOS, Algorand, and possibly Ethereum 2.0, backed by Cardano's edge of 35 years of legacy from top computer scientists and a three year research lead since Ouroboros predates comparable proof of stake protocols that only launched in 2017.

Cardano's layer two and smart contract scaling design benefits from having no global accounts unlike account based chains, though that extended UTXO advantage is still poorly explained, a gap product marketing needs to close over the next three to six months.

Closes with a promise that 2021 will be far more exciting than 2020 as all of this lands.