hi this is Charles Hoskinson broadcasting live from warm sunny Colorado today's January 27th to 28th from Davos I had a lovely time there lots of cool things to do lots of interesting people to meet and it was truly worth the investment of time and effort to get on out there and played with everybody but back in the saddle back here in the office still have the pillows on the couch in the blanket I sleep in the office more often than not it's it's full musk with the model three and things are moving pretty quickly so in two days we're gonna go ahead and release the next update milestone 3 for the ITN this is the first week where we're actually gonna start getting some aggregated statistics from a bunch of different sources they existed but they were siloed and fragmented and not quite where they needed to be so we're gonna start getting those statistics and we'll discuss with Tim Goodell and others about how to publish them and what format would be nice to publish them from the community itself has been actually publishing statistics on a weekly basis usually every year booked every few epochs they published them so a lot of good coming ton of ADA has been delegated there's a ton of stake pools that have been set up people are still having lots of issues with the network and that's to be expected and we're working real hard to fix those things so every milestone that comes out our Corrections and solutions to that it's quite unfortunate that we'll have a totally different network model with the the haskell shelly test that and but that one has been validated through formal methods so we feel a lot better about its stability then what was released with the itn it's important to keep a sense of what the goalposts are and it's important to keep a sense of why we did the ITN the purpose of the ITN was to talk about the business user experience of staking we really had a model for how we thought staking should be done we had kind of a user experience that we planned for that and by pulling all the pieces together we were for the first time ever to go from the lab to reality and build up a bunch of people who wanted to come along that with us it's important understand that when you release software that way coming along the ride with us means that you need a lot of patience and this is not a consumer product but it was never intended to be a consumer product the instead of ice test that it was intended to be a product for just that population sophisticated state pool operators and people who were interested in delegating their stake and just so that we could get a really good sense of what that experience is and how that experience should work and then from that perspective mission accomplished we've learned an enormous amount we've got now a whole tsunami wave of business and technical requirements which are working their way into the Pascal product and we've managed to put together a great community of people that are willing to go the distance with us so did help Patel who is the product manager responsible for the staking user experience and user interface as well as the staking concepts he will begin in February coming up with a plan for how we're going to transition the rust instead of ice tests at Staples to operate on the Haskell test net which will come out shortly thereafter so basically we can take these near 900 people entities that have registered stake polls and we can find a way to make sure that they can get their infrastructure working on the Haskell side and anticipation for the launch of the main net we've also gotten a lot of testing of the wallet back-end which is a shared piece of infrastructure between the rest side and the Haskell side and there's been a litany of improvements and modifications and new api's and other such things that we've gained from this experiment so that's the reality of scoped tests and that's the reality of alpha software it can be tremendously frustrating for certain people but it's always important to remember what the goal posts are and we're very happy about what we've been able to to do now we are now on a two-week Sprint's structure with the Haskell side and every week every two weeks we see those Sprint's coming through and we're starting to do post mortems on them and we're collecting lots of data our velocity things are looking pretty good and things are basically where they need to be for this year January and the end of December are always frustrating months when you're talking about a product or project spective because in december you practically lose two weeks of time at a January you lose about one to two weeks of time just because of the nature of holidays everybody goes on vacation everybody has something to do and even when they're there they're not really there because they're dealing with family and friends and travel and all kinds of things and you know relatives are staying with them so productivity just tends to go away down during that timeframe so we didn't really get a full month with January but the second half of January we've really seen things pick back up and velocity is looking very good with the second half so we're quite happy with that in terms of the commercial side of the project things are very much picking up Gerry our commercial director is doing amazing work and he's creating kind of a consolidated unified commercial strategy the Cardinal foundation is working on a unification play or to align the commercial and product strategy between Mirko io HK and the Cardinal foundation together and we're using PwC as the moderator for that so starting in February PwC is gonna start doing a lot of prep and amount of prep work take a lot of inputs from what McCann has done what we've done when a Mirko is done with the foundation it's done and then the capstone there will be a multi-day workshop and then they're gonna basically work with us to create a consolidated strategy for our go-to-market strategy for car Dom we've been operating on the aisle which case side with one but it's important that we bring hard on a foundation and a mer go into the fold and they they also have a chance to take what they've independently come up with and unify it with what we've come up with and the particular skunk works at PwC that specializes in this has a a team that's quite experienced with crypto currencies and they have a lot of Fortune 500 clients and they can help us give us a steer of what Western enterprises are looking for and we can make sure that everything is aligned from the way that we deploy software to the way we discuss it the way we market it and so forth we've also been really pushing product marketing up and there's a lot of us piece within the card on the ecosystem that do you require more tender loving care for example I'm deeply disappointed that the proof of stake article on Wikipedia as an example doesn't reference our bars when we actually are the first venture in the entire world to actually fully solve proof of stake as a a problem with computer science so it's very important that we bridge that gap and we get very good content out to market to explain what we've done the 55 academic papers we've written weren't just for fun or for experience or just you know to get people through grad school or to get people academic appointments these are practical industrial papers and the fact that they're getting into industrial conferences is a good indication of their usefulness so to me it's extremely important that we go from the science world where we've clearly won and make sure that the regular world especially institutional investors fully appreciate what we have been able to produce and the types of problems we've been able to solve so there's gonna be a big effort on product marketing all throughout the month of February to make sure that we take those things that are locked up in academia right now and explain them in an understandable way for people so that people can actually get what we've done the problems we've solved or why Cardno is a very special product our community has done a really good job trying to do this and there's been some piecemeal efforts from Sebastian the Cardinal effect and other channels and we really do appreciate that that's great but it is important that it comes from straight from the horse's mouth and this type of product marketing isn't scope for IO H K so we're gonna make sure that we take the time necessary to explain these things and make sure that proper articles are written and that we can get into Wikipedia in the event that their commercial censorship stops great progress there but much much much more to do we're trying to also create a consolidated way for exchanges to list Cardinal and we've had a lot of commercial conversations with our exchange partners ones who have listed us and ones who are considering listing us and we're trying to make sure that we have the lowest cost highest quality infrastructure to maintain for everything from the Explorer infrastructure to how the wallet backend works the types of things you can do with the command line and deployability either into a wasum environment a JavaScript environment just things like using docker and and so forth so we're learning a lot from those conversations and we're getting a lot of business requirements and we're working those into our weekly Sprint's or bi-weekly spreads to ensure that those things get done next we'll be the first month where our product managers begin communicating with you as I do meaning that they'll be making external facing videos and hopefully a mas part of you is the senior product manager behind Cardno and she has a whole group of product managers under her and so she and her product team will begin on a monthly basis doing a kind of a data dump of what if we learned that month and what have we done what have we accomplished and where we ad and where are we going we historically as a project had difficulty with estimation there's a lot of reasons for that mostly stemming from that processes and systems as well as some personnel changes that needed to be made and also changes in development philosophy so that said nickname FAQ has been for over a month meticulously working with a skunkworks within the company to help us get much better product projections of what goes going into a sprint and also how many Sprint's are required to satisfy a particular backlog of features so estimation has been a huge priority of ours especially the month of January so that when we say a date we can have a firm commitment to that day so the fruits of those labors will really start coming to play probably towards the end of February and we can give significantly more accurate dates on launch than what we've done historically that said there's still much to do but we have over 80 pages of documentation of trace abilities kind of test matrix every single issue required to resolve and feature required to resolve for Shelley has been brought out into the open and light and we've had a lot of exhaustive meetings making sure that they're properly documented and we've discovered a few extra features and issues that we were aware of but they weren't properly recorded so they weren't put into project estimation and we're finding ways to satisfy that in a reasonable period of time so we can properly scope things but nick has done a phenomenal job and a lot of sleepless nights and weekends just getting basic things done that we're long overdue and it's typically what happens when you go from a science-based approach to more of a practical engineering based approach the people are oftentimes very good at doing the science or formal methods work are not as experienced as they really need to be on the agile methodology or the product delivery side so you need certain people to bridge those gaps train people and bring people into that mindset the good news is it's a lot harder to do science and formal methods than it is to do agile work so upgrading people to have these skill sets and making sure that we follow a common source of truth is not an Herculean task it's just more of a task of patience and methodology so we're certainly working in that direction but my hope is to be able to give firm dates sometime in February for when we feel the Shelly main net is going to watch we of course will continue working on the incentivize test that in the interim and our focus primarily right now is network stability we had a four to six week program starting in early January when the team came back online to basically make that Network far more stable and we're about halfway through that agenda so starting Wednesday there's going to be another update Jormungandr 0.88 and of course every wednesday thereafter we will continue doing an update until we get that network where it needs to be but progress is definitely being made and that team is definitely working hard some of that team is based in Asia and this week they had Chinese New Year happy new year everyone so unfortunately that team wasn't completely at full strength and again this is the frustration of January and December as months to do product development they're the absolute worth months to launch things but moving beyond January into February there really aren't that many disruptions or holidays we have to worry about so things are things are moving along and and I do apologize for those of you who are having a lot of frustrations with the ITN but you know that's the nature of an alpha product and that's a nature of a product that is not intended for consumers I have seen some things on Reddit and I have some seen some things on Twitter and other channels where people are attempting to conflate the user experience of rust with what will be the user experience of the haskell product that we launched it's incredibly important to understand that the haskell product is based on completely different code and it's been built for the purpose of being a consumer product that works on your everyday computer so there there's a lot more stuff in that to make sure that you have connecting to network or other such things that just simply was not put into the Russ product because of the nature of the customers who are using that rest product so you will have a very different much better user experience especially on the consumer side with the Haskell code then you will have with the rusco and this is by design and it's one of the reasons why it takes a lot more time to get that Haskell product out versus the Russ proc the Russ product has always been a update as quickly as we can fly by the seat of your pants Alfa style product which was all about testing hypotheses and building a relationship with the community the Haskell product is the product that exchanges use and it's the product that you use and it's the product that's safe to use your money with and it's the product that is also security audited and so forth so it's very important that people understand that differentiation and it's very important that people understand that these are just simply different experiences and one does not imply the other and we're very excited to be able to actually launch the first major milestone of that product in February there are two updates that are coming in February one is a hard fork that's the OPF T hard fork and we will announce a formal date very soon about that exactly one in February that's kind of strike and then the other is the launch of the byron reboot so all of the new Haskell code with the Haskell wallet back-end and we will announce that date as well we're right now talking to Tatyana aparna and others who are involved in the release management cycle exactly when is that going to hit and when do we feel good about that well this is the foundation upon which all code for the entire Cardinal roadmap will be launched so this code base has been rewritten three times by different teams and with different understandings the final time was the PI musing rigorous methodology using formal methods using quick check these types of things so we're very comfortable in this foundation and we understand it at a very very deep level and all of the shellye features are being built on top of that sprint nice brand and being brought to market very quickly the nice part is because this code is so well written and so well understood it has high velocity when we add new features to it so once this barbary boot code is in mark that is the code base upon which will evolve to the Shelley main net now in parallel there's a test net stream and when that Shelley test net hits that's where we're going to verify that all the code we've built on top of the Byron know that's being deployed next month is working the way we thought and that's the code which these stateful operators will build their state pools on top of and verify their infrastructure is working and once that's been done the QA is given us the green light we can just simply do a hard fork and upgrade the byron node to the showing note that said it's just a joy working with that code and working with those teams and you know the transition from science to delivery is almost done and we're really happy with the output and what's very nice is the Delta from Byron the shell is significant and almost done but the Delta from Shelley to go gonna see much less significant so we should be able to take care of those two major milestones this year easily there's still a lot of questions about what constitutes the basho release and the voltaire release and this is one of those how long is a piece of string type of deal so with basha we could be very aggressive and embrace a litany of things like ledger based sharding and so forth but it looks like we're gonna choose a more conservative plant which will still accommodate the needs for being a having fast finality being able to do micro payments being able to get high TPS throughput and so forth because the base ledger itself is so performant the base ledger is at least five times faster than what aetherium is currently brought to market with its proof-of-work model and this is unoptimized and further optimizations through over time given that we have a superior network stack I could easily see that number improving more so and that's in a single shard environment so using an overlay protocol to accelerate and get fast finality and the ability to process payments at a low slow feed rate it means that we can achieve pretty much everything that most people would want to do from Cardno is a payment system or Carano is a smart contract platform without embracing a ledger sharding agenda that that other competitors are choosing to do it would add unnecessary complication to the product the good news there then is that a parallel team can begin implementation of Hydra prior to finishing Shelly and Gogan with an anticipation of how these things are going to be built on top as for Voltaire the primary collection of business and technical requirements for Voltaire will come as an output of the CIP process and really there's a coordination on our side of three separate teams to just basically get all of infrastructure and ideas ready for those final business and technical requirements in particular we've been doing exhaustive voting research for over three years out of University of Lancaster under benching sangs leadership and he's produced several papers which are groundbreaking and have been sent to major conferences such as NDS s so we have a high degree of confidence and understanding in how to do voting second we have a team of people working out of our Cypriot entity IOH Kay research working within a consortium with guard time IBM Research University of Edinburgh and other organizations specifically about decentralized software updates and we've written a near 40 page paper exhaustively explaining how one can do that in a cryptocurrency s setting so finally we have a team of people looking at it from a different perspective that has just started thanks to a subsidy from the Cardinal foundation at the Berkman Kline Center at Harvard and that group of people is going to basically consolidate with what we've already done with the European Union and what we're doing at Lancaster and these three things together will constitute a pretty good collection of ideas then when the business and technical requirements come in from the CIP committee we can basically scope something that we feel is reasonable for a voting system and a Treasury system with incentivize participation with an intent to launch that in 2020 this is a high priority item for us because we intend on using that system for the next five years of research and development for Cardno and being able to take Cardinal to the next level but obviously we need that system in place before we can utilize that system so we have the infrastructure in place we have the teams in place and now we're going to work with the found to make sure that the CIP process concludes in a reasonable time frame so that we can get the proper business and technical requirements so that as Gogan is finishing the team working on Gogan can roll over immediately to the Voltaire side and within a reasonable time horizon pull these things into the ledger rules and into the system so so we're moving in the right direction for that and we've done a lot of the foundational research and we've built up a corpus of knowledge and capability so it's less about theory at this point and it's more about just making strategic bets on what we think will be the easiest to maintain this is among the hardest of all problems in not only the cryptocurrency space but an open source software in general how do you have intentful communication how do you ensure high participation behind your voting system and also how do you ask you rational ignorance as people are asking to do things and then what level of consent is required for the system to evolve into a new state especially if amongst those who are voting you have less than a majority present which is generally the case with a lot of these types of systems and for example in the u.s. election system less than half of the people eligible to vote voted so the current US president and the prior US president were actually in a position where they were elected by a minority of the eligible voters instead of a majority so then do they truly have a democratic mandate so similarly to avoid hard Forks it's important that key stakeholders are involved or else when a fork happens that fork does not have a Democratic consent and as a consequence you could see something like a cardinal cash or card all classic so we've done as much as we can on our end on the research side to basically say well here is the state of the art and here are the sets of tools that are available but then then we now have to reach consensus on what will those social system B and the Cardinal foundation is now in a position where it is capable of leading for that so lots to do but not much science to do it's just more practical stuff than good old-fashioned code being written so things are looking good I look forward to the product update next month and you guys hang in there and as we a start now consolidating statistics on the ITN IOH Kate will probably publish some sort of weekly summary of those statistics maybe next week or the week after but certainly not too long down the road you're having issues with the incentivize test that you're not the only one a lot of people have and historically are currently and that's to be expected given the nature of the software and product estimation is finally starting to get where it needs to go so we'll be able to give you guys some very solid nice dates pretty soon on the commercial side we're trying to align all the strategies of the organization's together PwC is the entity that we've negotiated with the work with us on that there's still some final things to do on the contract and the kickoff date but that'll be resolved very soon and then based on the output of that process we should all be directly aligned the first wave of marketing is also kind of in a beta state ready for me and my chief of staff and my marketing directors and so forth to review and then of course we'll run it through another iteration this week I'm getting a full presentation on that and you know a lot of other little things to do we obviously at Davos met with lots of interesting people from Matt Sorum the Guns N'Roses drummer to several heads of state or former heads of state we met with a lot of fund managers we met with a lot of people in the finance world we've met with a lot of fortune 500 companies and so well now things are things are certainly evolving on that commercial side and there's a high degree of interest for Cardno as a platform and it's very very important that we make sure that that interest can be met with matched with real life support so that those interest points can turn into products of market so we're we're certainly kind of chipping away at that I will be at Satoshi roundtable this year I will also be at suits and spooks where I'm meeting with general McChrystal and several other key figures we're certainly bringing some people on board I which K who can help us make sure that we can better manage a decentralized environment and make sure that we can offload some of our responsibilities to the community we've already seen some of that offloading happening we I which K gave a grant to the Cardinal effect and now that fun ending has switched from IO HK to the Cardinal foundation and once the Treasury systems in play I think they're probably going to be one of the first entities to be funded by the Cardinal blockchain directly they do great work for the community similarly we'd like to get an aggressive meetup group strategy and we'd like for that funding structure to come from the Cardinal foundation we've already had some discussions about an aggressive Africa community building strategy speaking of Africa my director of African operations asked me to record a quick message for our fans in Nigeria who attended a recent meetup group so hello Nigeria we do love you guys and thank you so much for being great Cardinal supporters I and of course I will be in Lagos at some point this year when I do the Africa tour because I'm going to Addis Ababa Lagos and I'll be in Kigali and go down to South Africa and many other places so I'll see all of you soon so lots to do alright well that's our update I try to keep them short and sweet and I'll see you guys next week and we'll just keep working at it thank you all for your love and support and thank you all for your criticism it helps both the support and the criticism and thank you for keeping the faith and until next time take care guys
