Cardano Rumor Rundown JUN 02 2021

Hey Everyone!

Let's go...

Newly covered today:

1. Reuters reports on an EU digital identity wallet project. https://www.reuters.com/business/finance/eu-step-up-digital-push-with-digital-identity-wallet-2021-06-01/?taid=60b6e171efd84f0001b64ae1&utm_campaign=trueAnthem:+Trending+Content&utm_medium=trueAnthem&utm_source=twitter
2. The U.S. Currently has Issued Sanctions on Ethiopia, but they are not all-encompassing economic sanctions as with rogue nations, they have just barred entry into the U.S. for certain government personnel. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/24/world/africa/ethiopia-us-sanctions-tigray.html

Previously Covered but still interesting:

1. The Essential Cardano List is published by IOHK. (credit to /u/cascading_disruption for pointing this out) https://twitter.com/InputOutputHK/status/1390728385945550848
2. Cryptodoggies.org NFTs are now available. The website says 50% will go to a community voted animal charity. https://www.cryptodoggies.org/
3. For those learning Haskell, Check out this new video on Type Theory. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y7blCeETJo8
4. Also, Lars puts out a new Plutus Pioneers video on Native tokens. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6VbhY162GQA
5. ADA is the most crypto of all cryptos. George of CryptosRUs pointed out in a recent video that he couldn’t find any trace of a VC firm owning Cardano in its portfolio in his search of the categories section on CMC. This makes sense if you know Cardano. Would freedom and decentralization loving Satoshi not throw up a little in his mouth to find out that VC ownership of cryptos was a metric people would care about in 2021? The lack of VC stake in the very decentralized and freedom loving Cardano only adds to our already iron-clad claim on the mantle of the most crypto of all crypto projects. Our ecosystem never sought to attract VC money that would only centralize ownership in a smaller number of hands. This doesn’t even address the current extreme centralization of block validation in BTC and ETH. https://coinmarketcap.com/cryptocurrency-category/ https://etherscan.io/stat/miner?range=7&blocktype=blocks https://www.blockchain.com/charts/pools
6. IOHK has dropped a new article on the status of KEVM and IELE. Grigori Rosu of Runtime Verification says a proof-of-concept of IELE should be ready in six months. This is a key component in how we get to the ocean of all developers as we grow beyond the pond. https://iohk.io/en/blog/posts/2021/05/10/runtime-verification-iele-from-interoperability-to-universality/
7. Cardano saw a new challenger enter the scene with Internet Computer (ICP) debuting very high on the CoinMarketCap charts. However, a look into ICP makes one question whether they are really in the Gen. 3 Blockchain race at all given that available information indicates the blockchain runs via datacenters hosting standardized hardware and that those datacenters can only join the network with the permission of the “Network Nervous System”. You could say that the winner of the Gen. 3 Blockchain race needs to solve the blockchain trilemma of decentralization, security, and scalability. If that’s true, then it’s arguable that ICP is not even competing in the decentralization leg of the race. https://youtu.be/zHl-oVPoX88?t=97
8. The new venture of Sebastien, Nico, and Robert Kornacki is announced: https://twitter.com/dcspark_io. That’s a hell of a team!!!!
9. The Cardano Subreddit hit 400k users! https://www.reddit.com/r/cardano/
10. Alonzo Testnet Updates. https://cardanoupdates.com/ https://twitter.com/InputOutputHK/status/1392457888636022789
11. IOHK drops a blog entry on the strategic partners in the Plutus rollout! https://iohk.io/en/blog/posts/2021/05/12/developers-add-muscle-to-plutus-smart-contracts-on-cardano-for-defi/
12. Does Elon’s move away from BTC (ostensibly for environmental reasons) hold promise for ADA? https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1392602041025843203
13. The case for Cardano to replace BTC with Tesla and beyond is building. https://twitter.com/CardanoStiftung/status/1392806669810339851 https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1392950720979030019
14. Charles makes the case for collaboration with Starlink in Africa. https://twitter.com/IOHK_Charles/status/1392916783854616577
15. People are starting to realize what the real value of NFTs will be. It’s not in collectibles. https://twitter.com/RaoulGMI/status/1392939118355783682
16. The Cardano Development Update for this week is out. https://roadmap.cardano.org/en/status-updates/update/2021-05-14/
17. The Cardano 360 team also dropped a video with specific mid-month Alonzo testnet updates. At the timestamp in the link below the vid lays out the various test groups and when they will participate. https://twitter.com/InputOutputHK/status/1393258090703826944 https://youtu.be/5mPC4uLMdEw?t=532
18. We are seeing some small pools retiring. We’ll obviously see more and more of this as time marches on. But, here’s a salute to the small pools that gave it a go! This SPO also brought us poolpeek.com which we have covered here before. https://twitter.com/CardanoBudz/status/1393252321845465088 www.poolpeek.com
19. John O’Connor on CNBCAfrica! He gave a really good explanation of how Africa with it’s already very high adoption of mobile payment wallets can leapfrog the legacy payment systems currently in use in more developed countries. He also reiterated that Cardano will expand to five countries this year and 20 next year! https://youtu.be/RET8hIQQLUA
20. This tweet by u/TheADAApe pretty much sums it all up. When people ask me how I knew, I’m going to point them to this post. https://twitter.com/ArmySpies/status/1393606491110662146
21. To hear about something truly good happening in the Cardano ecosystem check out this interview with Mickey Watkins, CEO of World Mobile, on the Hotel Cardano podcast. Really good details on World Mobile's connecting the unconnected in sub-Saharan Africa! https://youtu.be/L15bn_b2moA
22. What if these two got to talking about what Atala Prism could bring to the table for students in the city of Miami? https://twitter.com/IOHK_Charles/status/1393574632305868805
23. The saga of BTC maximalists being angry at Elon continues with Elon implying that Tesla could sell its BTC while Cardano continues just doing its thing like normal. https://twitter.com/elonmusk/with_replies
24. Likewise, Marc Cuban tried to FUD real world use of Cardano only to be confronted with a giant infographic of use cases and partnerships along with an explanatory video just for him. https://twitter.com/mcuban/status/1393646131708665858 https://twitter.com/IOHK_Charles/status/1393689887648272384
25. Initial Stakepool Offerings (“ISOs”) are here. Crypto is no stranger to novel means of capital formation and now the Cardano ecosystem is getting in on the action. Here is SundaeSwap’s explanation of how ISOs will work. https://sundaeswap-finance.medium.com/iso-sundae-with-the-works-c5c335101ef5
26. ICYMI, Manuel Chakravarty reminds us all that his Cardano Summit 2020 talk is publicly available for questions on native assets. Really interesting discussion of the asset identifier just being a hash of the policy script and how that helps create a super lightweight easy to use system. https://twitter.com/TacticalGrace/status/1394263629088923649
27. Elon confirms that Tesla has not sold any BTC. https://twitter.com/BTC_Archive/status/1394051036462071808
28. Charles makes a whole video about how to fix Doge. https://youtu.be/iQd9XjEm8EE
29. The Ecosystem is getting even bigger every day we inch closer to Alonzo! https://twitter.com/TyIsDigital/status/1394345977952284676
30. The Cardano Foundation is out to do something incredible with supply chains as described in the fireside chat! In his previous Cardano Live appearance, Frederik Gregaard, CF CEO, also expressed a very healthy and sustainable perspective on what DeFi should become. He compared the current state of DeFi to just moving funds from your left pocket to your right pocket and taking profit. https://youtu.be/d8uPMZplfeM https://youtu.be/xbMSQUA1lss
31. The ISO model entering the capital formation toolbox in Cardano is going to make the stake pool game extremely interesting with SPOs scrambling to find the right balance between rewarding ADA and giving their delegators other things like tokens. Some stake pools could even become like portfolio funds with relationships with many different projects the tokens of which are given to delegators. Babel Fees could also play a role here for smart SPOs as they may allow access to a wide variety of tokens in the ecosystem that could be used to reward delegators with a sort of index fund exposure to a wide variety of Cardano projects.
32. May Cardano 360 coming one week from today (always the last Thursday of the month). https://twitter.com/InputOutputHK/status/1395117067960045569
33. New delegations from IOHK are out. Congrats to the selected SPOs. https://twitter.com/InputOutputHK/status/1395087751746310156
34. The Cardano Foundation has released the full video of the Fireside Chat with Eva and Fred. Lots of questions answered on a variety of fronts. Very interesting remarks including that in discussions with financial institutions, Fred has found they are interested in exposure to the alpha provided by the asset class in general, tokenization of assets, and the yield provided by staking rewards. Fred counters that they SHOULD be far more interested in the Cardano standard including the concepts of reference accounts, programmability of money, and transaction metadata. https://youtu.be/JW6s9Jkyazg
35. In a video press release yesterday, the Fed finally admitted that it’s moving toward a central bank digital currency (just like every other central bank). This will eventually be impactful on Cardano and every other crypto ecosystem. https://youtu.be/WOAQxpG79Ag
36. The Treasury is trying to figure out how to get cryptocurrency regulation in a headlock. This will probably go hand-in-hand with the Fed’s March toward a CBDC. Afterall, what good is all the tracking and monitoring afforded by a CBDC if it’s easier for everyone to just use a non-central bank digital currency? Tax evasion in crypto is also obviously a target problem since we know only about 800 people a year paid taxes on crypto in 2013-2015. https://www.cnbc.com/2021/05/20/us-treasury-calls-for-stricter-cryptocurrency-compliance-with-irs.html https://home.treasury.gov/system/files/136/The-American-Families-Plan-Tax-Compliance-Agenda.pdf https://www.businessinsider.com/bitcoin-taxes-overview
37. The Cardano Foundation has released the full video of the Fireside Chat with Eva and Fred. Lots of questions answered on a variety of fronts. Very interesting remarks including that in discussions with financial institutions, Fred has found they are interested in exposure to the alpha provided by the asset class in general, tokenization of assets, and the yield provided by staking rewards. Fred counters that they SHOULD be far more interested in the Cardano standard including the concepts of reference accounts, programmability of money, and transaction metadata. https://youtu.be/JW6s9Jkyazg
38. In a video press release yesterday, the Fed finally admitted that it’s moving toward a central bank digital currency (just like every other central bank). This will eventually be impactful on Cardano and every other crypto ecosystem. https://youtu.be/WOAQxpG79Ag
39. The Treasury is trying to figure out how to get cryptocurrency regulation in a headlock. This will probably go hand-in-hand with the Fed’s March toward a CBDC. Afterall, what good is all the tracking and monitoring afforded by a CBDC if it’s easier for everyone to just use a non-central bank digital currency? Tax evasion in crypto is also obviously a target problem since we know only about 800 people a year paid taxes on crypto in 2013-2015. https://www.cnbc.com/2021/05/20/us-treasury-calls-for-stricter-cryptocurrency-compliance-with-irs.html https://home.treasury.gov/system/files/136/The-American-Families-Plan-Tax-Compliance-Agenda.pdf https://www.businessinsider.com/bitcoin-taxes-overview
40. Charles has now added the Jack Dorsey edition to his series of “Let’s Educate Crypto Adjacent Celebrities” videos. https://youtu.be/lMZ1xQzWtl4
41. ...and still...KINGS OF THE GITHUB! May our reign never end. https://twitter.com/ProofofGitHub/status/1395771379929255945
42. Some banks still won’t allow customers to buy crypto with their accounts. In 2021, this is still a thing. https://twitter.com/CryptoCardano_/status/1395933037192437763
43. Even the Pope is condemning Proof-of-Work? At least, that’s how the crypto community took a recent tweet. https://twitter.com/Pontifex/status/1394993742226939905
44. Apparently, you can now have your own Stakepool run for you for $122/month in a Stakepool-as-a-Service arrangement. https://twitter.com/ChrisGraff/status/1396169061487333380
45. If you want to see how the Cardano NFT space has been heating up, you can check out CNFT resale listings at Lovelace Marketplace. https://lovelacemarketplace.io/all-categories/
46. Ethiopia awards new Telecom license as promised. The winner, a consortium including Vodafone, Safaricom, and Sumitomo; will invest $8 billion in their network in Ethiopia in the next 10 years and will cover the country in 4G. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-05-22/ethiopia-awards-new-telecoms-license-to-vodafone-consortium https://twitter.com/AbiyAhmedAli/status/1396060475184533505
47. Check out this new infographic explaining how World Mobile Works! https://blog.worldmobile.io/post/how-world-mobile-is-connecting-the-unconnected-infographic/
48. Cardano hits 1MM wallets! https://twitter.com/Cardano/status/1396331888093061121
49. Set your calendars! The May Cardano 360 is this Thursday! https://twitter.com/Cardano/status/1396331908632653830
50. Charles releases a 90 Day Countdown to Alonzo video. https://youtu.be/u6negi1yAQQ
51. Institutional inflows into Cardano get some coverage by the crypto press. https://cointelegraph.com/news/cardano-sees-largest-weekly-inflows-from-institutional-managers-coinshares
52. Charles and Kim Dotcom have a conversation about PoW miners possibly fleeing China with all of their hardware. https://twitter.com/KimDotcom/status/1396964996693708801
53. Cardano gets a little coverage on NBC for it’s energy efficiency. https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/cryptocurrency-goes-green-proof-stake-offer-solution-energy-concerns-rcna1030
54. Plutus Pioneers Lecture #7 is out. https://youtu.be/_EDJt55vOB0
55. Yesterday was ADA Payday with the end of Epoch 267. I hope everyone made lots of sweet delicious staking rewards! https://adapools.org/epochs
56. Paypal moving away from the “walled garden” model. This is decentralization teaching the legacy institutions a lesson. https://www.coindesk.com/paypal-will-let-customers-withdraw-crypto-exec-says
57. Charles is interviewed on Yahoo Finance where he explained: 1) how the lack of an obvious decentralized governance system in ETH and BTC will cripple their efforts as they attempt to scale and the founders/core developers start losing prominence, 2) the ADA EUTXO system is vastly more scaleable with it’s local state being so much more amenable to sharding than ETH’s global state system, 3) Cardano has a high willingness to bring on users in hypergrowth areas like Africa where ETH seems to have little interest, and 4) ETH does not seem to be as highly concerned with interoperability which might become highly valuable in the future. https://twitter.com/YahooFinance/status/1397593275826151424
58. Cardano 360 is tomorrow. Don’t miss it if you want to hear about all the awesome things happening with Alonzo (smart contracts), Hydra (scalability), and everything else! https://twitter.com/InputOutputHK/status/1397549347592675338
59. The May Cardano 360 was yesterday and we had lots of updates including the Color Coding for the different stages of the testnet! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SS33gRj9JYE
60. Alonzo “Blue” Era Testnet (through mid June; <50 user cohort) will include the basic functionality of the system for testing basic contracts . Initially the SPOs will be included, then some of the Plutus Pioneers will be allowed in, then a few of the outside development firms (Plutus Partners). The Plutus Partners will be working on specific areas including oracles, DEXs, stablecoins, NFTs, and DeFi. This will produce code and documentation that will be publicly available.
61. Alonzo “White” Era Testnet (mid June to mid July; <500 user cohort) will add more Plutus Pioneers and more functionality. They will develop various dApps and there will be interaction on the user side of these dApps. They will do some benchmarking at this stage.
62. The Alonzo Hard Fork Combinator Event requires a lot of different pieces come together at the same time. But, this is not their first rodeo and they have a lot of experience with this from the ITN, Shelley, and etc.
63. Alonzo “Purple” Era Tesnet (mid July to mid August; fully public) will involve a full public network with all of the Plutus pioneers, the Rosetta Api to the exchanges, Daedalus, hardware wallets, graphQL, and full functionality. The purpose of this phase will be optimization.
64. Alonzo “Red” Era Tesnet (August; a very short phase) will involve a new network where they can test scalability and stability.
65. Alonzo “Black” Era Tesnet (August; a very short phase) will be the final public testnet where they will ensure they have their candidate mainnet releases ready to launch on the mainnet.
66. They are committed to making sure there is a very large group of people who are familiar with using the Alonzo testnet by the time the mainnet launches.
67. Alonzo Mainnet (August-September). It’s looking like Alonzo mainnet launch was positioned in very late August through September in the infographics. That makes me assume there is a chance of August, much better chance of September, and also some chance of October or later. This is blockchain development after all. Also, we’ve waited years. Why care about a few weeks?
68. There will be another Plutus Pioneers Cohort later this summer.
69. Marlowe Run will be a browser product that can run on mobile or desktop. It can be linked to your wallet and be used to run Cardano smart contracts simultaneously on a distributed basis across multiple user browsers. The user interface is light years ahead of anything we saw in Marlowe Meadow or the Marlowe Playground simulations. It will include a library of off-the-shelf contracts.
70. There will be a Marlowe Webinar on June 3. Register here: https://webinar.marlowe-finance.io/
71. The ERC-20 converter was looking very intuitive and seamless in the new demo. It should be on the testnet in June.
72. Manuel Chakravarty gave a big update on Hydra (layer 2 scaling). Hydra will not require that the base layer be modified since it will be implemented via Plutus smart contracts. Hydra is actually a collection of protocols including Hydra Head and Hydra Tail. Hydra Head is a symmetric protocol where multiple participants will be online simultaneously for the whole period of the head exchanging messages. Hydra Tail is an asymmetric protocol involving a high performance server and many clients that may be mobile and could be offline for large portions of the tail’s existence. There will also be “inter head & tail networking” which will allow for a network of heads and tails. They have a published research paper on Hydra Head. They are currently writing the Hydra Tail paper.
73. Hydra is distinguished from other layer 2 protocols by its isomorphic properties. This means you will be able to run any smart contract that works on the base layer in a Hydra Head! This is very special. We won’t need special purpose contracts built out just for layer 2. There are some big implications to this. Since a Hydra Head is essentially just a Plutus smart contract, this means you can run a Hydra Head inside another Hydra Head. It’s turtles all the way down, guys. It sounds like they can do this iteratively as much as they want.
74. Aggelos also gave a good presentation on the importance of “skin in the game” in resource based consensus protocols (both proof-of-work and proof-of-stake) and its effect on promotion or discouragement of centralization. He explained how Ouroboros has built-in safeguards to prevent centralization including the K parameter (currently at 500) which caps total rewards per pool and the alpha parameter (currently at 0.3) which splits rewards into a 77% piece and a 23% piece. A pool can take its share of the 77% piece based on the pool’s total stake and its share of the 23% piece based on the pledge of the SPO. A higher alpha parameter makes it less attractive for individual SPOs to proliferate multiple pools since they can’t be as leveraged on their available pledge and still get as big a share of the 23% piece. This also discourages Sybil Attacks. As Cardano on-chain governance progresses, these parameters will be controlled by the community.
75. There will be a Cardano Goguen Summit in September. It will be hybrid digital/in-person.
76. Charles is helping to bring the cryptographer who broke SHA-1 to the University of Wyoming. The Cardano funded blockchain lab there could be on the road to be a powerhouse. https://twitter.com/CaitlinLong_/status/1398290866419105802 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yiqun_Lisa_Yin
77. We don’t often get to hear from the engineers behind Yoroi over at Emurgo. But, here’s a podcast with Vicente Almonacid from Emurgo. Check out 12:50 where he mentions the dApp Connector (Cardano’s Metamask Equivalent). https://twitter.com/vacuumlabs/status/1397847633696280576
78. Check out this great article from Cardanians.io on the work being done at the University of Wyoming on a physical chip for transfer of private keys in day-to-day cashlike transactions. https://cardanians.io/en/cardano-can-give-crypto-a-cash-like-experience-58
79. Professor Aggelos Kiayias recently dropped a video explaining exactly how Mithril (apparently neckbeard dungeon master talk for elf armor) is going to allow for Perfect Cardano (ADA) wallets that combine the ease of use and convenience of light wallets with the trustlessness of full node wallets. We also learned exactly how Mithril is going to work. https://youtu.be/LhepJFCyWRk
80. In proof-of-work, bootstrapping can be done with blockheaders. This won’t do in proof-of-stake since we need information about stakeholder distribution to confirm block validity.
81. Mithril fixes this by being a cryptographic construction that enables a population of stakeholders to issue a signature consistent with certain constraints.
82. For Mithril to work in proof-of-stake, it needs three crucial properties: 1) it needs to enforce a threshold ratio of stakeholders before the signature is issued; 2) the pre-signature fragments must be independently verified and subject to public aggregation; and 3) it must be efficient in the sense that the final signature is of constant size and is logarithmically dependent on the # of stakeholders.
83. Stakeholders will issue special Mithril keys along with the normal cryptographic key material. Then at regular intervals, full nodes will test whether they can produce a pre-signature fragment. Only a random subset of stakeholders will be eligible to produce a pre-signature fragment. When a sufficient # of pre-signature fragments have been issued by eligible stakeholders then it will be possible to aggregate the fragments into a final signature.
84. This will be a checkpoint that will be verifiable with respect to previous check points all the way back to the genesis block. Such checkpoints will be cryptographic commitments of the relevant UTXOs.
    
85. Since the checkpoints will be trustless, a light client (i.e. wallet) will only need to verify the sequence of checkpoints up to the current time to trustlessly bootstrap.
86. The ecosystem is growing so fast, it’s hard to keep up with all the projects without these infographics at this point. https://twitter.com/Dr_shwetaPHD/status/1398783893638103040
87. The Cardano subreddit is at 487k users. Half a million isn’t far away. https://www.reddit.com/r/cardano/
88. Epoch 268 is a wrap as of yesterday with 22.83 billion ADA staked. https://adapools.org/epochs
89. Check out the telegram AMA tomorrow with the CEO of World Mobile! https://twitter.com/ZwijBerg/status/1399377659105320962
90. A very interesting stat on Cardano user growth. https://twitter.com/cex_io/status/1398959088684445699
91. Don’t forget, the Marlowe webinar is this Thursday! https://twitter.com/InputOutputHK/status/1399444331556225027
92. More and more people in the youtube sphere are jumping on the Cardano train. https://twitter.com/techleadhd/status/1399398373384351744

~Army of Spies