Cardano AMA with Charles Hoskinson

Surprise AMA 10/30/2021 (From Ethiopia)
u/LongTermDigital

General State of the Union

• Alonzo Hard Fork September launch was a great success, and October was about adding in a lot of features.

• Final stages of a Plutus application back-end (PAB). Transitioning from low-level Assembly language of Plutus to high-level applications like Sundae Swap and Meld are going to start deploying soon. Estimates PAB to go live, best estimate around November, but stuff happens.

• Babbage hard fork between November 2021 and February 2022 – going to be a boatload of changes and optimizations. Basically the first wave was about correctness, and now they are going to focus on optimizations for scalability and real-world deployment. There is a layered execution strategy with Cardano.

• John Woods (lead technical architect of Cardano, https://ie.linkedin.com/in/johnalanwoods) is focused for the next 6 months on optimization of performance, more throughput and scaling up systems parameters. Specifics are things like “k”, the blocksize, reducing the memory footprint (perhaps by 50%), how the data structures work in the system, UTXO-HD (hybrid storage of memory and hard drive), script compression.

• Other parties are going to come in and optimize the Haskell code. Everything was first written for correctness, now they are focusing on optimization and scalability.

• Another layer of workstream is Mithril (https://iohk.io/en/research/library/papers/mithrilstake-based-threshold-multisignatures/). Light client solution with full node security.

• Another layer is improving the performance of Daedalus and also adding in light client support on the IOHK end. As well as improving the light client ecosystem.

• One of the most anticipated is the Hydra workstream. Goal is to have something by Q1 (first quarter of 2022?) that is a good beta, that can be attached to commercial partners like DEXes to see how one can offload traffic onto the Hydra Network for payments and for smart contracts.

• Mamba – hoping for something developers can experiment with as early as January. Mamba adds in EVM (Ethereum Virtual Machine) support.

• Yet another thread is standards for verifying smart contracts and their correctness.

• Digital Identity – full prism integration into Cardano stack. This has been underway due to the Ministry of Education deal, the Boost mobile deal, etc.

• The dApp store is another thread that is going on, so on and so forth.

• 300-400 people are working on all of these things.

• IOHK foundation announced a $25 million budget for 2022.

• EMURGO (https://emurgo.io/) is trying to launch at least a $100 million fund that is Africa focused to start building out an ecosystem there.

• Catalyst – 150 proposals were funded in the 6th round, largest one yet. $8 million Fund 7 starting in November.

• A lot of social media criticism regarding the price. There’s usually a big buildup and a big drawoff. Charles says he doesn’t care and isn’t focused on that. Charles doesn’t understand market swings, and stays focused on technical development.

• “Every single metric of Cardano is looking real strong.”

• Africa tour – overwhelming demand in e-governance and identity.

• Met up with a lot of startup accelerators that want to build up on Cardano.

• Anticipates dozens of deals coming from this Africa tour. The bottleneck is not having enough bandwidth to handle everything.

• Zanzibar is launching a nation scale ISP with Cardano at the bedrock of it that will cover 1.8 million people. Expects a 12-to-24 month timeline in terms of rollout. Believes that what they do in Zanzibar will transfer over to many other nations.

• People are already writing Solidity code that can be fueled and powered by Ada (mentions dsSpark – https://dcspark.io/).

• Over last 2 months – tens of thousands of NFTs been issued.

ERC-20 Cardano Converter

• SingularityNet is in the process of migration

• Two targets for ERC-20: one is the main chain, the other is Mamba

• More resources will be invested in the ERC-20 team

• ERC-20 to native asset standard, first example of this is going to be Singularity Net. This will be a case-study and they will work backwards to a more generic framework for it.

• Long-term goal is automation and bridging, moving and wrapping assets.

• Commercial tool that allows people to migrate to Cardano ecosystem, and there is a collection of competencies there.

Hydra

• Huge amount of work is going into Hydra

• High commercial priority. Important that they can offload the traffic onto Hydra.

• You need to segregate the traffic for micro-transactions.

• But still a bit of research going on, but converging to a good idea of a “1.0”

DJED

• A project by COTI, not technically from IOHK.

• IOHK philosophy is to develop something, open-source it, and let other people develop their own competing implementations of it.

New light wallet from IOG

• Very high priority

• Mithril will launch with light wallet, so you get full node security with it

FUD about increasing block size doesn’t really increase amount of Plutus smart contract per block

• Charles says this is a lie. If you increase the amount of storage a block has, you can of course increase the amount of scripts in that block. There are some limitations about amount of computation per block, but it’s a very complex situation. For what it is worth, IOHK wrote a blog post about this: https://iohk.io/en/blog/posts/2021/09/10/concurrency-and-all-that-cardano-smart-contracts-and-the-eutxo-model/.

• Seems like Charles big vision here is that the eUTXO model is massively parallelizable because there will be a massive amount of outsourcable computation: “3-5 years into the future 99% of computing will be done off-chain, and checked with proofs on chain.”

• The scaling model: “As long as you have a proof that the computation was done correctly, that’s all that matters and that’s what checked on chain. You have a scarce resource on-chain, and unlimited, distributed resources off-chain. That’s the model that makes sense.”

• “You’re boiling the ocean if you are chasing global state.”

How many transactions per second

• Average transaction (subjective what this means) of 50-100 per second for an average crypto you are doing okay for daily volume. Nice to get core chain to 500-1000 TPS.

• Getting beyond 500-1000 for any sharded architecture is not going to happen. 50K TPS is centralizing or batching/rolling-up, effectively doing Layer Two (which is the spirit of Hydra).

• Charles doesn’t think there is a TPS problem. Or rather it’s the wrong question, Charles thinks in terms of “what is the off-chain, what is the on-chain?” and how do you check correctness.

• Charles thinks TPS is a useless in practice and is just a marketing metric. A dump-truck has 1000 horsepower, but it’s completely different than a coating stick (not sure about this transcription).

Paper wallet with staking capability

• This is a core goal and a priority.

IOHK is not the ecosystem

• IOHK is independent from projects like Sundae Swap. Charles does not know the deadlines of all of these various projects.

Coin burning

• Charles reiterates there will only ever be 45 billion ADA. Does not believe in modifying the monetary policy. No one can change it.

Plutus Dev Accreditation System

• Thinking about developing some sort of accreditation system

• Hired 8 companies to just write code. They also viewed these companies as training the trainers.

• Continue to grow Plutus Pioneers program

Can hydra heads/channels talk with each other?

• Does it make sense to have everything go through the main chain or to have a synchronized Layer 2 setup? Charles believes in synchronized Layer 2 with Hydra.