hi everybody this is Charles Hoskinson broadcasting live from Zurich Switzerland I just got off a plane and this is my first attempt at doing a video like this but I decided I'd give it a shot and experiment that's what we always do with Cardno and the I which key ecosystem as we like to try out new things so the purpose of this video is to discuss briefly a few things about Cardno where we're currently at where we're going and just provided the community and update on some things that we're thinking about okay so the most pressing collection of questions stems currently around the certain technical issues like for example slow recovery speed connecting to the network issues when things are coming for example when are we gonna get a Linux client when are we going to get a paper wallet generator when will multi-sig come and so forth and so most of these come under the I'd like to use the product and I'd like to use the product as safely as possible that includes ledger integration okay so what's the story there so when we released a client biron back in late September of 2017 there were a few goals that we had number one do the nature of how ADA was sold the buyers had to redeem vouchers to get their ADA so it was a high priority that the buyers came into the system this is more than 80% of the ADA on circulation so to us it was very important that that group understand how to install Dedalus use Dedalus redeem their vouchers and learn how to safely use exchanges so they can have liquidity if they so choose and that ADA could also get more broadly distributed from the initial distribution so we did a helpdesk tour I in October and we invested a lot of time and effort into education and particularly in Asia to get people on board and into the ecosystem - we had never deployed a product before to an exchange customer so we had quite a bit of experience dreaming of what a peer-to-peer protocol needs to look like and other such things but exchanges have different needs they use wallets in a very fundamentally different way and unfortunately we weren't able to collect a huge amount of business requirements prior to the launch of the system so we launched with fewer exchanges instead of lots of exchanges so that we could consider this to be a multi month beta test where we could learn how exchanges use wallets and begin creating some special optimizations specifically for them in particular finance and bid tricks as many people have noticed both Pitt ryx and finance have had some issues where the wallets have gone down and that's a direct consequence of our software not being where it needs to be with respect to exchange users now we set up a 24/7 support line with them and every time issues occur we work very carefully with these exchanges to resolve those issues and so far we've done a pretty good job unfortunately something broke and Finance also requested some changes right around the turn of the year so during Christmas time in New Year's Eve when most of our personnel were on vacation the wallet needed some maintenance so a skeleton crew decided to forego their vacation and actually work very hard at creating a patch to repair what was needed to be repaired now this was a process because you can't just write code you have to run code through QA and that even after you've created a patch it takes two to tango so the patch had to be shipped to both metrics and to finance my understanding is that bit ryx is fully operational again and that QAM patches have been approved and are working properly with respect to finance they've requested a new API namely batch processing of transactions and our engineers are currently working on this amongst other things and our hope is very shortly to be able to get everything there back online but overall the lesson has been great we've collected enormous amounts of data from the use of these nodes including network traffic and how they do withdraws how they do deposits every exchange is a snowflake but it's greatly informed our engineering efforts and we've decided to create a dedicated work stream and assigned dedicated personnel specifically to improving that experience for exchanges ok so what's next where are we going there's January and February in many months coming and then there's the Shelly release so the immediate priority is that there is some technical debt in our architecture in our code from the Byrant release and we've been working towards reducing that debt in parallel to finishing the specifications for Shelly and starting new code work for Shelly so what we've decided to do is enhance our resources and work very carefully at accelerating the technical debt reduction so our goal is to get most of that technical debt in the architecture completely removed by the end of February with the hope of shipping a patch that will dramatically improve things for some users by early February and a follow up patch sometime in early March that will continue those improvements and we're going to leave a dedicated team to do technical debt reduction for the Biran codebase this will not interfere with the shipping of Shelly we hope and we're going to bring a new company on board specifically to accelerate things so that we can leave he at core personnel in in the Shelly work streams and continue our march towards launching Shelly so as a user in the coming weeks expect to see a patch issue to the edge nodes probably early february is our hope in addition we are beginning preparations for the first shelley test that now our hope is the launch that shelley tests then sometime in early february to mid february this could be done sooner or later it just depends on a variety of factors on the DevOps side and we're working real hard at getting that out as quickly as possible now once we do some API rewrites once we do a technical debt reduction it's going to become very easy for us to then deploy new features in a rather systematic way in the future pipeline that I prioritized i prioritize the safe storage of ada as the highest priority of features for the moment and that includes cold storage options such as cold wallets so like paper wallets and hardware wallets as well and that also includes multi six support for Dedalus the only caveat to this is that for ledger the hardware wallet partner we have we're working with a third-party firm named metal air so while we have control over some of the development process and progress ultimately there's code that has to be done on the ledger side and through metal air and so we can't make a firm guarantee that that's going to ship at a certain date because we can't promise for third-party contractors when they're gonna finish things and how they're going to prioritize things but we've told them that this is a very high priority it's something that the community desires and we're going to work real real hard at trying to get that out as soon as we can because we understand there's a very strong community demand in addition once we've reduced the technical debt we've redone some of the remedial work and cleaned up the API Safed our hope is then to onboard a larger set of exchanges it would be problematic to do so now because of the unique support nature of where we're at but our hope is towards the end of the month that this work will be concluded for the exchange works in which case we have several exchanges waiting in queue that would like to list data and we can work with them directly to get that done as quickly as possible so that's one of our goals okay now there's a few other things in in the housecleaning section that we'd like to resolve for example easy submission of logs is something that slipped the Biran release it was something I really wanted to get in but unfortunately software is software and occasionally you have to cut it somewhere so what we decided to do was to cut some sort of easy submission to log and put it for a later release so my hope is to get that feature out sometime in February what it basically entails is something in the GUI of Daedalus that will allow you to submit logs directly to us without having to go through the Daedalus wallet Oh /faq process that we're currently using the purpose of this is we would really like to get a better understanding of how and where our users clients are failing at the moment we are requesting everybody who has an issue send us their logs and we try to work with people unfortunately the vast majority of users who are experiencing issues for whatever reason either competency or time have not decided to send us logs in particular with the connecting to network issue that has cropped up for majority of our users this is becoming somewhat problematic we have some ideas of what could be causing these issues and we have some ideas on how to resolve these issues but these are hypotheses until we actually get logs and we can hunt down these things so we're left with a guessing game where we can clean up some code and make some changes issue a patch and see if that resolves the problem but we don't actually know a hundred percent if it's going to resolve the problem until we see the user logs so our hope is to make as soon as we can it as easy as possible to submit logs to us in the meantime if you are experiencing an issue please please please submit logs to us because it'll allow us to resolve those issues more quickly and also have a higher degree of certainty that they actually have been fixed there are a few things I'm not happy about I'm not happy about how long it takes to recover the wallet the reason being is that it does an entire traversal of the blockchain to recover all the history of the wallet from the very beginning there are many ways to optimize this and improve the user experience and we've made this a priority because some of the users who have been using the Dedalus wallet when they enter recovery mode with the seed think that the wallet has frozen and it actually hasn't frozen it's just taking quite a bit of time to recover because it's doing a full blockchain traversal and then they shut the wallet down it stays in recovery mode and it causes all kinds of havoc so we'd like to speed that up a bit so that the user experience is much better so that's in the housecleaning department so there's a few other things that we're working on under the hood to try to make the Daedalus experience better if you other things were working on to make the code much more concise and clean in certain areas that just didn't get where they needed to be during the Biran release and our hope is that in the coming weeks we're going to be able to chip away and hammer this until it's finely polished and finally made most of the i/o hke team will actually be meeting up in Portugal Lisbon this month and so we will have a giant in-person hackathon and this will definitely accelerate some things for us and we can definitely get some things done ok so that's a brief update on some of the technical issues and some of the exchange issues I am sorry that this has caused some pain and some sadness and I am sorry that there's been a lot of bugs that have caused some usability issues and not made 8 as optimal as it can be we are aware of them and we are working really hard the team has over 25 people working full-time there are project managers we have meetings every single day and in many cases people have forgone their holiday vacations and time with family to be here for the ecosystem and work hard as for other things like the Linux wallet that's one of those things that we just have to make a lower priority until other things like technical debt for example have been reduced but it is something that I really would like to get out we have a great Linux community we actually use Linux as our development platform we love Nick so as these things so it's a shame not to have that where it needs to be and so for me it's very important that we get back to that okay so that's byron and that's byron for the next two months expect things to gradually get faster expect the connecting to network issues to start receding expect patches coming in February and in March which will dramatically improve things expect more exchanges coming and we're certainly going to work real hard now once the great cleanup is done then the next step is to gradually roll out shellie features so there are many work streams for Shelly from delegation and state pools to enhancements to the network the highest priority is to begin the process of getting people who want to run stake pools into some sort of slack channel or forum that we can have a direct communication with them so we can get a better understanding of what their technical competency is what operational costs are going to be in required hardware is going to be for staking these types of things our hope is to get between twenty five two hundred state pools by the launch of Shelly so come February probably early February right right around the time we shift that patch we're going to open up a forum on our reddit and in the Cardno forums for people who want to register as a state pool to give us all their details and then on the back of that will open up something in our slack channel at i/o HK slack and start a direct line of communication with these people so that we can begin that process the final output of it will be things like the production of example docker images and things that can be deployed to Amazon ec2 and Rackspace and other servers for people who are running state pools and eventually for people to deploy their state pools in the shellye test net for the next iteration of tests that unlikely the one coming in February but probably the one that's coming in March there are a lot of little fine details that still have to be worked out for example we are considering creating a special type of address called exchange addresses which are removed from consensus so exchanges will not have any influence over the staking of the system but this does require some careful thought in consideration and a little extra work and it was something that we didn't fully anticipate when we respect the protocol out but we have sufficient resources to accommodate these types of things in addition to that we also would like to support cold staking so if you have a ledger wallet or a paper wallet you'll be able to assign a proxy key that you can control within Dedalus which is hot and live but can't spend the cash that's sitting on the cold wallet device so you can stake or delegate your state without needing to have your stake be live this is a very requested feature from our users and it's something that we're pretty excited about being able to bring into the ecosystem so in the coming months these are the kinds of things that are very high priority for us network improvements will come iteratively and gradually we have a dedicated team working on that both IOH Kay and a firm called well-typed as well as the firm called P and Sol and we're doing everything from saying how do we increase the level of the centralization the network how do we resolve some of the issues we've noticed with firewalls so that users can install Daedalus and it just works they don't have to do any special configurations these types of things and also proof download time and these things and that will come iteratively and in a series of patches in a series of tests it's a well understood problem it's just one that takes time and it's one that takes testing so those are some of the things that are in the immediate horizon on the longer-term horizon we are working on the formal verification and specification of Aurora's Prowse which is the next generation of the or Bors protocol we're trying to make provisions to accelerate that workstream but it is among the most technical and complex of all of our work streams involving the production of an oocyte calculus eye as well as a lot of coding in languages like Isabel so the preliminary work has already been done it's public you know we have a repo I believe it's AI ohk or Boris spec on github so people can follow along but there's quite bit more to do the end result of this output will be the first formally verified and specified consensus algorithm in the cryptocurrency space actually used in a cryptocurrency so that's pretty exciting and we probably will end up writing a paper concurrently with releasing the protocol because it's a novel from an academic viewpoint but that's that's coming along quite nicely and we're gonna try to accelerate it so we can get it out in the first half of this year potentially but it might bleed into the second half of the year although it's not required for Shelley in addition to that work stream also we've got a lot of questions about smart contracts and when and how are we going to launch that what is our strategy going to be for that so as it stands right now what we believe the best option is is to take the mantas client that we've constructed for a theorem classic and to make the virtual machine component of the mantis client pluggable so at the moment it's using the etherium virtual machine but we can install yella which is a card on O's virtual machine into this framework and then deploy a test that so that we can begin testing Plutus and solidity smart contracts on the yellow virtual machine so that we can do things like fine to the gas model and also clean up a lot of the engineering rough edges since December we're coordinating very closely with a firm named run time verification on this and we are expanding our commercial relationship with run time verification which will include a considerable expansion of their team currently they have eight people and our hope is to more than double the size of that team over an arc of a few months and they have a very rigorous beautiful work agenda for evolving yella to make it the finest virtual machine the world's ever seen for smart contracts so we're really excited really proud of that we'll make a dedicated announcement at sometime soon about what our plans are but because we're looking at pluggable consensus with an existing very mature Scala based codebase this means that we probably can accelerate our test net plans for Kogan our smart contract layer so we'll make it an announcement in early February about what that means but our hope is good things sooner rather than later because a lot of people really do want to start writing some smart contracts and testing software and they're fairly excited about it there's still a lot of work that would need to be done to link Cardinal CL and SLE together for example we have to finish some of our specification work for our proof of proof of stake protocol so the side-chains connection point as well as some things about how we wish to handle where it's taking and so forth and that's actually one of the reasons I'm here in Switzerland I'm attending a conference called real world crypto but it's also a great opportunity to meet up with all of our scientists and have a discussion about some of the final things that need to be done in that respect so very exciting a lot of research work streams are moving along our smart contract layers moving along quite well and we're pretty happy with the status of things and we're pretty happy with how things are working and the team is growing considerably we've been hiring like crazy we've on board for new Haskell developers just the last three weeks alone we intend on bringing onboard about five new Scala developers within the next six weeks you hired another DevOps person and we'll be hiring more DevOps people and we are partnering with some new companies that will be making those announcements at some point specifically to help us accelerate cardano's progress so that we can continue the momentum that we've already achieved so that's my update thank you so much for listening I do appreciate it and my final thing is that I'd like to thank all the members of the community for their incredible patience I I understand how difficult this is we live in a space that tends to measure things in terms of days and weeks and most of our competitors tend to deal with forked code so they don't start from scratch they start from Bitcoin or they start from aetherium or from NXT or from bitshares and they work their way from there which means a lot of things have already been solved for example people can connect to the network fairly reliably and the wallets tend to work so when you start from scratch you have to accept that you have to resolve some of the rougher edges but we believe in the vision we believe in the roadmap in these are ephemeral concerns and they will be resolved then the team is quite good and the technology is good and the long term output is that we have total control over the code bases long term quality and the capabilities of that code so when we begin to do things like formal verification it's going to work very well for us and ensure that we don't have bugs and that the code is incredibly solid so we're paying a pretty hefty price on the front end and that price is jointly paid by you guys and by me and so I am sorry that it is taking time to get through it so please be patient I really appreciate your support and thank you so much for your time
