Hello, dear community! Paradigm is with you again and we are going to share the recent news of Cardano.
On June 5th, Charles Hoskinson gave an AMA where he discusses the recent work and updates IOHK has been doing on Cardano.
IOHK announced that they started off the public Shelley testnet, a very important milestone in the journey to Shelley mainnet. From right now, any operator who wants to run a Cardano pool can start getting ready for mainnet staking & delegation later this summer.
Cardano Foundation shapes legislation to future-proof blockchain industry The legislation is one key to adoption through use cases of blockchain — be it in emerging markets or developed nations. Robust regulatory environments and innovation-friendly political landscapes that foster technological advancements are vital to shaping technology-driven growth.
The team released the new Daedalus for the ITN. Daedalus 2.4.0-ITN1 contains a wallet recovery phrase verification feature, to support ITN users redeeming their rewards later on this summer as the team heads to Shelley on Cardano mainnet. It also provides background blockchain synchronization, new wallet import & various other enhancement. If you have been staking on the ITN, download it today from the staking site attached below.
Stay tuned!
Development
Github metrics:
Developer activity (from Coinlib.io):
Shelley Haskell rollout — weekly update w/e 29 May
According to the latest WEEKLY DEVELOPMENT REPORT Cardano team has been doing the following operations:
DAEDALUS
Wallet
This week the Daedalus team continued work on the integration of both the hardware wallet and the Shelley Cardano node, as well as preparing for the upcoming Daedalus 2.4.0-ITN1 release.
CARDANO EXPLORER
There is no update from the team this week.
ADRESTIA
This week the team added a migration endpoint to the Shelley component of the API, to make it easy to migrate a Shelley wallet to another wallet.
The version and integration with cardano-node was bumped following the pioneer releases. Nix script improvements were also made to improve access to various cardano-node deployment information.
Revisions were made to the getNetworkParameters endpoint to remove the extraneous “epochId” path parameter and to add a “decentralizationLevel” indicator to the set of returned parameters.
Work continued on support for cardano-node. The wallet can now send and receive basic UTxO transactions, despite some challenges regarding fee calculations. The majority of integration tests are now passing, and they are continuing to fix the remaining tests one-by-one. In the interim, they are adding support for delegation certificates and stake pool listing. Support was also added for cardano-node in Shelley mode, when connected to cardano-wallet-shelley.
Some minor API documentation improvements and fixes were made, using feedback gathered from exchanges as well as from users who raised questions on Slack. In addition, the package delivery workflow was automated to reduce the number of steps post-release.
A user friendly command-line interface was delivered for performing HD derivation in the console for all types of Cardano wallets. The associated commands are simple and well integrated, and also include multiple output encoding as well as good error handling. For example, a user can create a recovery phrase and easily obtain the public key of the associated reward account.
Issue #1670 was also fixed, where input resolution was not carried out over the entire database, but only on the fetched data. Additionally, a bug regarding transaction ordering was fixed.
NETWORKING
This week, the networking team merged and reviewed multiplexer changes which allow on-demand start of protocols. They also continued working on a set of comprehensive tests which will cover scenarios needed by the p2p-governor.
The team also implemented a server that is based on the new connection-manager, but this has not yet been merged to the master branch.
Investigations took place on how MonadDelay is using unbounded delays in a safe way (this is especially useful in 32-bit architectures, where previously maximal delay was about 30 minutes). In addition, the team updated cardano-db-sync to use the cardano-client library, and worked on updating other clients as well.
Discussions were held about the warm-peer protocol, which is needed to send keep-alive messages and query blockchain tip information. Last but not least, the team has been busy preparing their design document for a public release.
DEVOPS
The team tested ITN rewards transfer CLI tooling and update proposals. They also made Daedalus improvements to support the Shelley public testnet as well as faucet improvements to support different levels of API keys. Finally, they worked on Rust cross-compilation tooling and release builds for musl/mac.
CARDANO DECENTRALIZATION
The team successfully tested the hard fork combinator by simulating a hard fork between two mock ledgers. They also added the change discussed at the CSM regarding how to give delegators time to react when stake pools change their parameters. Stake pool re-registration certificates now always delay updating the stake pool parameters until the beginning of the next epoch, and crucially, after the stake distribution snapshot.
Genesis delegation certificates now register their VRF keys (as a hash). The team also ensured that the VRF key in the block header is checked against the registered hash for PBFT blocks, and the two VRF values (nonce and leader), are checked for PBFT blocks.
Some tests were moved from consensus to cardano-ledger-specs and the spec was also updated with all the recent activity on the exec model.
Finally, some investigation work took place on the Byron addresses to figure out how best to handle the authorization of Byron addresses in Shelley.
GOGUEN
This week the Plutus team made some organizational changes by merging plutus-emulator into plutus-contract and plutus-contract-tasty back into plutus-contract. They also split out the demo for the plutus-scb (smart contract backend), to provide two contract choices. Finally, they updated the sequence of handleBlockchainEvents and improved some ambiguous syntax for the builtin application.
The Marlowe team spent time testing the changes made in the previous week to the Marlowe Playground. They also made further changes to the Isabelle build task for NIX/Hydra and also worked on the Isabelle build task for NIX/Hercules.
NEWS
The team entered a new phase for Cardano:
In the first of a new technical blog series written by developers on the project, Edsko de Vries shares some of the thinking and choices that underlie the Cardano consensus layer:
Here’s Christopher with the next installment in the twice-monthly Shelley Testnets rollout updates. They’re now halfway into Week 4 and things are progressing nicely.
The team just released new Daedalus for the ITN.
Daedalus 2.4.0-ITN1 contains a wallet recovery phrase verification feature, to support ITN users redeeming their rewards later on this summer as they head to Shelley on Cardano mainnet. It also provides background blockchain synch, new wallet import & various other enhancement. If you have been staking on the ITN, download it today from the staking site.
Cardano Foundation appointed Mel McCann and John MacPherson to expand third-party integration capabilities and strengthen relationships with exchanges. Full announcement:
Awareness and social encounters
In the latest CityAM edition, the Cardano Foundation explained its involvement in shaping legislation for the blockchain industry and the importance of legal frameworks. Read and learn more from here:
Live AMA with Casey Monroe, Senior Community Engagement and Strategy Lead & Tiago Serôdio, Community Project Manager of Cardano Foundation:
AMA with Charles Hoskinson:
Upcoming events:
InputOutputHK will partner and sponsor this year's "Collision from Home Conference." Collision is one of the world's biggest tech conferences, spanning 3 days –– June 23-25. Learn more below.
On June 14, Cardano Ambassador, Robert Castelo will be holding an online Cardano Community Meetup. Join him to discuss and learn about a variety of Cardano topics! Check out the details here:
Roadmap
Work scope
PLUTUS
Plutus is a purpose-built development and execution platform using the functional programming language Haskell. Designed to enable the creation of smart contracts on Cardano, Plutus brings the inherent benefits of functional programming — such as reduced ambiguity and easier testing — to smart contracts.
All the work on Plutus is visible in the Plutus GitHub repository, and the Plutus Playground testbed is available for users to try creating their own smart contracts in Plutus.
PLUTUS CORE
While Plutus is a high-level language for developers, Plutus Core is a low-level scripting language that runs on both Cardano’s settlement layer and computation layer, controlling interactions between scripts and the blockchain itself. All on-chain functionality of smart contracts written in Plutus compiles to Plutus Core, which retains all the benefits of functional programming while remaining simple and concise. Where Plutus Core is implemented in the settlement layer, it is done so in the simplest way possible, improving security by minimizing potential attack vectors.
MARLOWE
Marlowe is a domain-specific language (DSL) for creating financial smart contracts, designed to be accessible to non-technical individuals such as business engineers, subject experts, and financial analysts. Using Marlowe, even someone without any programming experience can create executable smart contracts that interact with real-world data and deploy them on its built-in Cardano emulator, and eventually the Cardano network itself. Whilst Marlowe is necessarily a high-level language, it is built on Plutus and Haskell and continues to benefit from all the assurances that functional programming provides, without affecting ease of use.
All the work on Marlowe is visible in the Marlowe GitHub repository, and the Marlowe Playground emulator is available for users to try creating their own financial smart contracts using a simple web-based interface.
PLUTUSFEST
PlutusFest was held at the University of Edinburgh in December 2018 to announce and promote the Plutus and Marlowe programming languages. Interested members of the public and academia gathered for two days of talks and presentations by IOHK engineers, most of which were recorded and can be watched on the IOHK YouTube channel.
PLUTUS AND MARLOWE UDEMY COURSES
Two free Mooc courses have been released on Udemy covering the Plutus and Marlowe programming languages. Created and managed by IOHK’s in-house education team, the courses provide an introductory resource for anyone interested in learning how to experiment with smart contracts using Plutus and Marlowe.
MULTI-CURRENCY LEDGER
The introduction of a multi-currency ledger model into Cardano will allow the network to support additional cryptocurrencies in an ERC20-like way, but cheaply, more securely, and without the need for a complex scripting system thanks to native support in the settlement layer. Not only will users be able to create their own fungible tokens on the Cardano network, but a multi-currency ledger will also allow for tokenization with the creation of non-fungible tokens, plus easier integration with smart contracts involving multiple cryptocurrencies.
KEVM
KEVM is a high-quality, formally-verified smart contract virtual machine compatible with the Ethereum virtual machine (EVM). Formally specified in the K framework, the KEVM uses formal semantics for elements such as the configuration and transition rules of EVM, resulting in a more secure virtual machine for smart contracts. IOHK paused its collaboration in the K framework project in order to focus on other priorities, but is enthusiastic about the vision and may participate again in the future.
PLUTUS EBOOK
The IOHK education team have worked in conjunction with Plutus language architects to create an introductory Plutus ebook. The ebook is designed to educate beginner Haskell developers on the fundamentals of the new Plutus smart contract language and uses real-world examples to illustrate the potential applications of Plutus.
Finance
Shelley Incentivized Testnet: 10 June 2020
The Shelley Incentivized testnet is going strong! Here are the latest stats from the Shelley Incentivized testnet.
Partnerships and team members
No updates.
Other
Assets that have gone up a rank in FCAS this week:
Social media metrics
Social media activity:
The graph below shows the dynamics of changes in the number of Cardano Facebook likes, Reddit subscribers and Twitter followers.
