broadcasting live from warm sunny Attis Ababa uh where the weather is quite nice uh the sun is out and shiny temperatures not too hot no rain right now uh traffic's not so bad which is pretty amazing for Attis Ababa uh anyway it's been a very eventful last few days it's actually been a very eventful trip uh for those who don't realize I've been on the road for a while uh started in Hong Kong went to Australia went back to Hong Kong went to Greece for an internal Summit uh involving uh a lot of uh stuff were're planning and then uh went down here to Ethiopia so why am I in Ethiopia well it's kind of a composition of uh many different things but the most important uh is that we just finished the hasal development course uh for those who weren't aware of this uh last year we started working with the ministry of Science and Technology and we signed anou to train uh a large class of hascal developers to use for some form of an Enterprise blockchain play involving cardano uh so we uh spent quite a bit of time the ministry requested that all the candidates be female we said that sounds great as long as you can get us access to good rumes were're happy to accommodate uh we had over 300 candidates who applied and we winnowed that set down to about 23 19 from Ethiopia and four from Uganda and uh we uh put them through probably the most intensive of all the High School courses we've ever done because this one also included a plutus uh section and it was the first time we actually uh gave broadscale plutus training to people outside of the organization and we learned a lot from that uh anyway the the girls worked really hard uh a lot of them made tremendous personal sacrifices to attend the course uh some of them had to travel over two hours on public transport both ways to get to the class uh some are single mothers it was uh it was really um tough and uh we're just so incredibly proud of them because they they went from knowing nothing about functional programming and has schol as a language to become actually fairly accomplished and they implemented a kind of a toy peer-to-peer system and they built some interesting applications uh so we think that they're going to have just great careers uh our HR Director Tamara Hassen flew down here with me from Greece and she's actually been interviewing all 23 of them to see uh which ones we can bring on board iohk and where they can provide some value uh but it was just a great humbling experience and I I'm really proud of Pina and Lars uh for actually living here in Ethiopia for several months uh to teach the course it wasn't done remotely uh we came here and drank the water ate the food and uh dealt with the daily traffic and The Daily Grind and uh that's not so easy in Attis Ababa it's a tough City uh so uh mission accomplished tonight we have the graduation ceremony uh the great Phil wadler is uh is here uh he gave the last lecture propositions as types uh I attended that lecture I I've watched it on YouTube once before but uh I never had a chance to actually see it in person so that was really amazing to be in Ethiopia and learn about gon's natural deduction and uh so forth uh so tonight I'll be signing the graduation certificates with this the ministry uh for all the girls and um we wish him really well and we hope that we can work with them uh depending upon work life balance and need and other factors but it was a real humbling experience uh while here we also met with world food program we met with uh the uh Deputy political economic sections Chief uh we met with uh US Department of Commerce uh we met with gz German Development Bank uh We've uh had a chance to tour a coffee factory and that was real interesting we talked to some domain experts that have been investing in the jurisdiction for the last 15 years and we're entering phase two of our plan uh in Ethiopia uh so to talk about how we enter jurisdictions we really do this in a 3 to seven-year time Horizon and we kind of have three distinct steps so step one is that we established substance political Goodwill and uh basically a labor force within the jurisdiction so that's what we did with the Ethiopian developer class and we'll continue to do with future courses phase two is that we work with local partners and we look for interesting Pilots that are are naturally suited for blockchain technology case of Ethiopia 85% of the economy is Agricultural and basis uh and uh there's a huge International demand to massively upgrade the agricultural systems there's been some really wonderful work that's been done uh in the recent uh past they've already done complete satellite mapping of the entire country and they've discovered all kinds of aquifers and they also discovered that only two types of fertilizer being used and just by making some minor changes there they've been able to increase yields of crops by more than 100% but there's still a lot of problems for example in the honey industry uh here uh beekers tend to have about a 50% loss rate so they lose about 50% of their yield due to spoilage and other factors and they don't really have good access to certain markets so they tend to waste things for example the Beeswax is in many cases just as valuable as the honey but some Farmers don't even sell it they just throw it right on the ground uh so and the machines that they used to refine these things were built by the Italians in the 1950s so huge demand to start upgrading the honey industry uh huge demand to upgrade uh the coffee industry and uh tracking traceability certainly on everybody's mind and it's also a great discussion about national identity Ethiopia is in the market to create a national ID system for all 106 million people and we hope to be part of that conversation uh so uh we'll uh we'll keep hammered away and at some point we'll sign some M for specific Pilots as phase two these Pilots can last months to years generally we hope on the month side but the goal is to basically derve to a commercial product and then phase three is to set up a public pivate partnership and take that product to an entire Market vertical and uh we generally give that solution away on the front end for free and then monetize it on the back end through transactions so it's it's uh it's a life's work it's slow and methodical uh but you meet a lot of wonderful people along the way and uh if you get it right you change people's lives uh for example uh some uh recent uh Evolution here in Ethiopia was that if simple things like paying utility bills uh would often take hours in some cases days and may even involve a bribe so if you wanted to pay your power bill you might be on the phone or talking to people for four or five hours every month and some cases your power still get shut off and you have to pay a few hundred bird to get it ship back on turned back on well a company came in and they created a universal solution so you get all of your Utilities in one system uh you can pay it very quickly and uh gave it away for free to the government they just monetized it on the back end with transaction fees and they're wildly profitable reduceed waste fraud and Corruption and it made it considerably easier for people to do something as simple as paying their water bill and electric bill so these are examples of monetization that are coming and uh this is one of the fastest growing economy out here in Africa uh so we're uh we're real excited to be here and we're going to be here for a long time and there's going to be a lot to do uh not to be undone uh there's a panafrican focus for cardono and we've uh started talking to ISA Addis and our hope is to create a program where we can do 190 meetups in 25 African countries uh by the end of this year so we're working real hard to see if we can come to terms on exactly how that's going to work and how we'll do the cardano ambassadors but uh to have presence in 25 African countries in less than a year and do 190 meetups that's going to be a big Challenge and uh there's some good people that are up for it and our hope is by the end of 2020 to be in all 52 African countries including Sierra Leon and Somalia and Sudan uh so that's going to be a big challenge but we're up for it as well uh so the wheels keep moving uh people uh people are moving fast uh and uh the world is is starting to to look nice uh now in terms of some updates on the project cardano 1.5 uh just shipped a few days ago it was on testnet for a few weeks and uh now we got it out and we had to do a slight hot fix for an old issue that we forgot to put in uh you know these things happen uh so far everybody's pretty happy with it pretty seamless upgrade uh and uh we're real excited to see that that was so smooth uh second Ledger support should be out probably before the end of the month uh I was told uh unofficially that the release dates March 27th uh but that's up to amergo and um Ledger but um codee's done and QA around uh and most of the hard work's been done I actually have a uh a cardano branded Ledger that works with cardano well it was somewhere with me I'll have to grab it I had in my suitcase well anyway uh I have a cool card Auto branded one that at merco Hong Kong gave me when I was uh visiting the Hong Kong office uh which was quite generous of them and um anyway uh that's uh that's coming pretty soon uh so if you're a ledger fan sorry for the long wait uh but your fish have finally come in and they're pretty tasty so you're going to like them uh anyway uh test Nets not too far out uh we're working super duper hard on that uh Vincent's a basically a code ninja right now and actually the wallet backend team is is now on an extreme programming model and they're getting weekly to bi-weekly releases uh and things are moving super fast they're they're moving super fast on the rest side not to be outdone uh the formal methods team has made huge progress updating a lot of the specifications and converging to some uh basically candidate specs for Shell uh which uh will eventually get the test net to fully comply with there's going to be some drift between the hasal implementation the rust implementation because they're implemented by independent teams but it's a nice exercise because it kind of forces the uh different implementations to in the specification to converge to an understanding and it prevents a mon culture around a particular code base the hasal code is um not too far behind the r code and Eric dcastro is right now working on integrating the cardono chain repo with the oror network uh repo which contains all of the network uh assets as well as the consensus assets so once that uh unification is done the next step is going to be connecting that code to the new wallet backend that we have that Mattias is connecting right now to the r client and then we'll actually have uh two independent implementations uh that we can now test against each other which is really nice for QA and it's uh really nice to verify our specifications are right so uh the ihk summit's coming very soon I think it's three weeks or something like that I've lost most track of time uh and uh we're real uh we're real excited to see these things converge and there's going to be a lot of wonderful presentations from tangem uh all the way down to uh test Nets and other things like that Sak poool task force is about to converge upon the uh test net I got to talk to J about the transition there uh running around the world so sometimes it's difficult to Sy on that but U they're doing a good job a lot of good questions have been answered uh we have some good uh content people that are going to start parsing those answers and producing some FAQs and uh other material as we get closer to the Shelly release uh but all things considered things are looking pretty good and we're getting into the uh meat and potatoes the nuts and bolts uh of getting Shelly out the door what what really most exciting is that development velocity is dramatically increased code quality is dramatically increased and it's getting very easy for us to actually add features quickly uh yoy is the biggest beneficiary of this at the moment and they've done many releases since yoy launched back in uh last year late last year and uh soon our velocity is going to start looking like that velocity the technical debts almost gone uh and this means that as we look to the Future so the second half of 2019 when we start talking about topics like interoperability ility and Rolling Out Concepts behind or Boris Hydra uh it's going to be a lot easier for us to bring that into cardano than it was for us to bring Ledger support and other such things in the cardono uh this is a consequence of Lessons Learned uh sometimes very painfully on both sides ours and yours uh but that's the reality of engineering and that's the consequence of when you start with a a very rigorous academic Viewpoint and you kind of have to backfill good processes to accelerate that without losing your principles uh so so uh All Things Considered I'm very proud of the team I'm very proud of the work done proud of the community things seem to really start uh rallying and things are going to grow a lot and the summit sounds like it's going to be a heck of a lot of fun too so if you don't see me on the road uh you'll see me here on an M Ama or something like that uh or you'll see me uh at the summit uh thanks you all for listening and thanks for the uh thanks for the patience the support and the faith and uh there's a lot of good people here in Ethiopia that believe in you too and believe in the project too and are really excited about what this can do for the world and it's uh an opportunity to really put things into perspective so thanks guys cheers
