Hi, this is Charles Hoskinson broadcasting live from warm, sunny Colorado. Always warm, always sunny, sometimes Colorado. Today is January 28th, 2025. It's been one hell of a month, hasn't it?
I'm making a video real quick; I've never done a video quite like this. From time to time, I look at our products and go through the basic onboarding experience. Essentially, I enter the product with absolutely no infrastructure and try to build the entire thing from scratch. Then I see what I can do and how fast it can come together.
Lace just released version 1.19. You may have noticed a great velocity increase in the Lace releases, and we're starting to finally get a lot of those things that were jammed up for a few years. This is due to Brandon Wolf's great leadership and some changes we made in how we structured that team. They’re very focused and really excited about the future. For example, I think in the next two to four weeks, we should have Firefox support for those of you living in that world, and Bitcoin support is coming very soon as well. They’re really getting into this mindset of "ship fast, ship often."
One of the things that got jammed up for a long time was actually the DApp store. We decided to stage it and have it as a DApp Explorer first, and then over time, build out a whole house of capabilities for it. I want to share the results of my onboarding to Lace as a new user.
This right here is the wallet that I installed a little earlier today. The very first thing I did was buy some ADA from a bank. I bought about $100 worth of ADA, and that whole turnaround was pretty quick. I had to go through KYC and upload my driver's license and these types of things. Once I purchased that ADA, I then decided to use the DApp Explorer. These are some of the Cardano DApps, but not all of them, because the Explorer only parses a subset that’s registered. You can see all the various different things on Cardano, and I chose MinSwap and later SundaySwap. I connected the wallet to it and purchased a few things.
So let's go ahead and redo that experience. We’ll go to MinSwap because the wallet's already connected. You see the address is right there, and let’s buy a little something, shall we? Okay, let’s buy $5 worth of something. Let’s see what’s on the list. We already got some Nike. Alright, how about you guys in the SNET community? There we go!
So we have filler, kill liquidity, and all these different options we can trade now. Waiting for confirmation, and we’ll go ahead and confirm that order. It’s asking for a password, so I’ll stop sharing here for a second and type that in.
Okay, we have a confirmation screen now. Here we go, close, and I just bought some. Now we should be able to go and take a look and see what that means. We have a little order up here that’s active, and you saw my purchase of the Jed token. We’ll have pending right here; we can click here. Hopefully, that’ll be in the wallet soon, so we’ll let that sit in the tab.
While we’re doing that, let’s go and take a look at my tokens. We have a DApp Explorer, and let’s go ahead and open up SundaySwap. So, DII helps me find things a little bit better. We’ll open up SundaySwap, and the wallet should stay connected. This helps me think about where our user experience is at.
We still have an connected wallet, and then we’ll click on Exchange. Let’s buy some more. Let’s see here, what are we going to do? There we go. Where do I click? Hang on a second here. Limit, market, select ADA. Okay, and then we’re going to select a token. Let’s see what token we have here. Something new and different. How about TS? There we go.
Okay, and the swap mechanism here. We’ll get $5 worth of that. We’ll review the order, build the transaction, submit the market order, and again, we’ll stop sharing for a second to confirm that and enter the password for this wallet.
That transaction is done, and we’ll go ahead and share again. Reshare the screen. Okay, so we should be able to view this order. That was the Nike purchase that we did, and the Talos order is already executed. If that’s the case, it should be in my wallet. So let’s go to my wallet here.
We have SNCK inside the wallet, but we don’t have TS yet. And now we do! Look at that! I remember when we first launched DeFi on Cardano back in September; it would take hours for these types of things to post, and now they’re all here. This is not an endorsement of various tokens; it’s more of a demonstration of mechanics.
You can see that it’s pretty seamless to take a look at the DApp Explorer, pick something off, connect a wallet, and execute a trade. There are many different things, so I highly recommend you take a look at the DApp list. More to come, and the on-chain registration standard is also coming. But this is an example of a fast feature release.
You may have noticed that the prototype of multisig is now out, multi-stake pool delegation is now out, the DApp Explorer is now out, and Nami mode is now fully enabled inside the wallet. In fact, let’s see here. We have send, receive, go back to tokens, and I believe that there is a Nami mode somewhere here. I forget where they put it inside the user experience.
This is the Explorer. I’ll have to look around; I haven’t tried it out because people go from one side to the other. But Nami mode is now inside the wallet, so if you’re a Nami user, you can preserve your Nami user interface just now with Lace code in the Lace backend.
We also have the paper wallet generator, and that’s pretty cool and exciting. In fact, I have a copy of the paper wallet that I used to construct this, and I preserved that paper wallet so I can show you guys. This is the coolest thing in the world for Lace.
Here we go. This right here is my paper wallet. Scan the QR code, and it’s encrypted with my PGP key. So you guys can scan that, follow that wallet, and see what we do with it. But nobody can recover it. Why? Because the wallet is connected to my PGP key. It’s super easy to restore.
As we continue to build up the stack, what’s going to occur is we’ll also have a mobile wallet. We’re actually already putting that team together right now, and we’re going to work really hard. The good news is all the things that are in the browser are pretty easy to repackage for a mobile application, so there shouldn’t be too much latency in that.
But you know, it just takes a little bit of time. I’m not worried about it. The mobile wallet will then have a great synced interface with Lace. So if you have a browser, you have a mobile, and over time, it becomes more aware of its ambient environment.
Then an identity center is also coming into Lace, and that identity center will allow for tethering for commerce. For example, when I had to go through that KYC step to onboard into Lace and buy that $100, instead of having to go through a naked KYC process, I could just have a Lace ID. Through partners, they can accept that, and I don’t have to go through KYC.
So there’s a seamless experience that basically goes there for both on and off ramps for people. It’s pretty cool. It took me under 20-30 minutes to get everything set up: to install and create a wallet, encrypt that wallet, and have a paper wallet backup that’s in PDF form that I can also print out. That’s more secure than any other backup mechanism we ever had.
So much so that I could share it with all of you over this channel, and you can’t steal my money. Then I was able to connect that to two different Cardano DApps and purchase one, two, three, four assets just like that with relatively low fees and low latency. Real-time, we bought it, it’s in the wallet, it’s there, I have custody of it, and it’s all in the browser.
Later on, we’ll actually allow you to connect your Lace wallet to multiple backends. So it won’t just be default connected to the Blockfrost backend; you’ll be able to connect your Lace wallet also to a full node that you run yourself. You can be completely trustless on the stack, and that full node will be Mithral enabled, so it’ll have fast sync.
That’s an example of real progress. If a person can come in from nothing and have a debit card and be a member of the ecosystem in 20 minutes, that’s great. That’s what we have here, and the goal is to just keep making it better and better over time. It’ll take a little bit of effort to get there, but we will get there.
Since you guys are listening, what other things should I buy in the comments? I got a little bit of ADA. Okay, let’s see here. Pretty exciting. XTN, what else we got? Come on, send you a gift. Oh, Hosy sent me—oh no, he contaminated my wallet with Hosy token. Ah, now the value is now zero. You know what we’re going to do? We’ll probably put a little disclaimer on that.
Yeah, see right here, the Husky token. Just set it right there. Get some chips. Alright, I can do that. Sunday seems to be a little faster, so let’s do Sunday. Alright, open up SundaySwap. MinSwap is very good too.
Let’s see here. We’re going to go to Exchange up here, and we’ll see if that’s on that exchange. Select token. Where’s chips? Where’s my chips? Chips to Giraffe? No asset found? What’s your handle? Chips? Is that not on Sunday?
Strike Danzo? Yeah, get some stuff. I love chips. Well, we’ll do Stuff token. I love to stuff people. Stuff is there. Oh yeah, there! Alright, I’m going to buy $5 of Stuff token. Oh wow, 352. I think that’s probably a pretty good price. There we go, submit market order.
Alright, we’ll confirm that and stop sharing real quick to enter that password right there. Eventually, we’ll get to biometrics for this stuff, so you just tap it. Actually, having hardware authentication is really good too because you can just tap to confirm. There you go!
Alright, that order’s been placed. So we got some Stuff token on the way. I guess that’s on the V1 swap. There we go! You want some SNCK? I already bought some SNCK. What else we got here? You can do stuff with Danzo, like play casino games.
Alright, well, go do that. You guys are such degens. Alright, Exchange, select token. Let me go ahead and share that again. Let’s see if there’s any Danzo here. There we go! Dono, huzzah! Alright, we’ll get $5 of that. Review order, 107,000. There we go, we will receive at least 103 from the transaction or revert. Boom!
We’ll confirm that. It’s just truly amazing because remember, we couldn’t do any of this in 2021. It was just not possible. Not only is it here, but you can do this on pretty much any Cardano wallet. What’s nice is Lace has it.
So, got some Danzo there, 107,000. Got 590 SNCK, 1,233 Nike, got some Stuff right there, a little bit of Stuff token. We got some SNCK in there, we got some Jed, and we got this coin right here that’s like a black hole of value that will destroy all the value of the system. Isn’t that nifty?
Yeah, so that’s product onboarding, and that’s what we’re focused on this year. Every single product manager in GM, I said, “Look, you’ve got to go through your user flow relentlessly.” And you know what? If you don’t, I’m going to do it, and I’m going to do it publicly. I’m going to look around. It wasn’t obvious where the Nami mode is; they told me they put it in there, but I couldn’t find it in 15 seconds. That’s a problem.
So you know what? We need a toggle, Brandon. We’re holding you accountable. I’m going to do this pretty often. Every time you release new features, we’re going to start talking about it. Another thing is when Lace pushes out a new feature, I’m going to make sure that somebody from the team does a little video, and I’ll retweet those videos. Kind of a feature demo gets people more used to these types of things.
There’s a lot of really cool stuff coming. Remember when Rand, Mr. Ran, Crypto Banter bought something with Sunday, and it took a really long time for that to confirm—like 20 or 30 minutes? Some of you remember in the very beginning it took hours to confirm.
See how quickly those things are now inside my wallet, in my custody? That’s how far we’ve come in just a very small period of time, and it shows you how powerful Cardano DeFi is. This is the year where a lot of great things will come on board. Much better oracles will really crystallize on those stable coins. Midgard is a beast.
The Anastasia people were up at my ranch, and I had a chance to spend some deep conversations with Phil and G. Whole presentation on where Midgard is going to go. That’s going to take Cardano to the next level. Laos is making amazing progress on a monthly basis, and they’re really starting to build out the corpus of the fastest one minus Delta protocol you could implement.
On-chain governance—we have a hard fork tomorrow, and that’s going to basically fully turn on Vol. You guys get to vote on a constitution and an annual budget. So all the pieces are coming together, and those pieces are resulting in a very comprehensive ecosystem that’s becoming more and more consumer-friendly with each iteration.
Once you get real-life human identity, you get rid of addresses, and your security goes way up. Your wallet recovery becomes dramatically simpler. We already have the best paper wallet and wallet backup solution ever devised—super easy to use. Now multisig is getting more advanced, the DApp Explorer standards are getting more advanced, and the DApp connector got all that done.
So when people say it’s just a wallet, no progress has been made. The proof is in the pudding. You can see how good the things are and how powerful these things have become in such a short period of time. The next few years are going to be dramatically more transformational than the last three years, which built up this entire corpus of capabilities for Cardano.
I thought I’d make a quick video for you guys and share the lev around and show you all the cool stuff that’s been happening. Hopefully, this gets you inspired about the future. It’s only January, and I can’t wait to see how this year unfolds. Cheers!
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