Cardano Rumor Rundown 03.27.2021

Hey Everyone!

I've been obsessively consuming all the Cardano news and media on a daily basis for years now. I figured it wouldn’t hurt to share a list of what I'm seeing for anyone else who's interested. Feel free to make additions as you see fit. Many of your additions from yesterday are in the “Newly Covered” list for today. Also let me know if you think any of the “Previously Covered but Still Interesting” items are no longer interesting and should leave the list.

Check out the youtube companion to today’s post: https://youtu.be/o-5hVFoqF6E

Let's go....

Newly covered today:

1. Someone paid $23k for the notorious “Your telling the CEO of IOHK…” tweet. https://v.cent.co/tweet/1374769078519300097?s=u_a
2. IOHK is rolling out a new team that will fight the scammers in crypto. In my mind this involves guys in polo shirts with popped collars carrying these and hunting the bad guys while ‘90s action movie music plays. Probably Dwayne Johnson is their commander. Maybe that’s not what Charles has in mind. https://twitter.com/IOHK_Charles/status/1375473873651568640
3. Cardano is the Tesla of crypto. We’re just in that early stage right before the Model 3 launch where the Ford and GM guys are at peak fear/peak shit talking but we haven’t made that big move yet. “It’s an illusion, they’ll never release a sub $40k car.” We’ll see shortly, gentlemen...we’ll see.

Previously Covered but still interesting:

1. Charles posts a pic of a taxidermy African bird called a Turacos. He follows up that post by saying "Guys sometimes a stuffed Ethiopian exotic bird next to an old identity book is just a stuffed Ethiopian exotic bird next to an old identity book. Stop reading into things". Everyone enjoys speculating what exactly this could mean with the obvious implication being that the African bird announcement involves digital identity in Ethiopia. https://twitter.com/IOHK_Charles/status/1369397063583227911 https://twitter.com/IOHK_Charles/status/1369402020067766275
2. Famed crypto enthusiast and billionaire Mike Novogratz asks the Cardano world "Can anyone make a real bull case for $ADA? Does anyone build on it? Use it? Why is market cap so high? Should it be a funding asset? It’s one of the few cryptos I haven’t traded in my life." https://twitter.com/novogratz/status/1369255782462746624
3. It's announced that 591 different assets have been minted on Cardano in the last eight days. https://twitter.com/IOHK_Charles/status/1369347294324162561
4. Catalyst Fund 3 Voting is ongoing, it looks like the Yoroi team has worked out the voting problem in the Yoroi wallet. https://twitter.com/YoroiWallet/status/1369050858546200585
5. Charles was on Real Vision earlier this week. https://twitter.com/RaoulGMI/status/1367804256783372288
6. Cardano SPO Schweta Chauhan was profiled by Forbes. https://www.forbes.com/sites/tommywilliams1/2021/03/08/meet-30-inspirational-women-this-womens-history-month/?sh=383b28405208
7. UAE Fund FD7 Ventures says ADA could 20x in next 2-3 years https://twitter.com/CardanoPoolXYZ/status/1367927864658690054/photo/1
8. Charles will be speaking at the Blockchain Africa Conference this week which may or may not give us more clues as to the African Bird announcement. https://blockchainafrica.co/
9. SingularityNet collaboration with Cardano going down. How else is Skynet gonna pay the Terminators? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MWdp33bYJpQ https://www.youtube.com/c/SingularityNET/videos
10. Wolfram Alpha collaboration with Cardano. What will it look like? Mentioned in several recent AMAs. Sounds like Charles and Stephen Wolfram want to be best brohs. That feels good broh.
11. What did Charles actually do (if anything) on the day of the recent Thanos Infinity Gauntlet snap pic? Just general or was something specific happening behind the scenes? https://twitter.com/IOHK_Charles/status/1367874091722694656/photo/1 RETIRED!
12. Alonzo hard fork (non)event to complete Goguen and add smart contracts in Q2. You’ll barely feel it broh. Not even an event. Lots of combinator broh.
13. Actual target date of Alonzo hardfork combinator event (smart contracts) will be revealed at Cardano 360 show at end of March. https://twitter.com/IOHK_Charles/status/1366519588519731203
14. Charles claimed Elon was trolling Cardano with “meta for k” on twitter. Can anyone argue one way or another on this? https://twitter.com/IOHK_Charles/status/1364350825271685122
15. Ourobouros omega is slated to bring significant innovation to the Cardano consensus protocol. https://twitter.com/IOHK_Charles/status/1357364560504709120
16. Possible Soulja Boy Cardano collab on NFT. Maybe Soulja Boy could be best brohs with Charles and Stephen Wolfram broh? https://twitter.com/souljaboy/status/1355770383396347907
17. Coinbase Listing of ADA. Will the DCG Mafia ever allow ADA to compete on an even playing field with “their precious” (read in Gollum voice) ETH? Maybe we don’t even need them? RETIRED!
18. Twitter revamp via Cardano? Charles did a whole vid on fixing social media curation. Other hand: they won’t even give Charles a blue check mark. (Retired: he finally got it) Other other hand: Jack has a mutual love of Africa. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JilEb42q-CI&t=2325s
19. In the Protocol Parameters vid, Charles suggested they will introduce a CIP (Cardano Improvement Proposal) to change the inflation model to accommodate pay for stakepools for processing transactions/data from the ETH, IELE, and Catalyst sidechains. We’ll get to vote on CIPs like this. Kablam! Democracy! Kablam! Voltaire! Kablam! More duckets for staking! Don’t worry broh. They’re gonna stay serious here broh. Charles squinting real hard/blinking/talking slower/using hands a lot here broh. Not planning to violate the things learned from the long Oxford research arc and the input of the Prism Group (Harvard dudes) broh. Snake still eats tail broh. Kablam! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JJorRPk767s
20. Charles mentioned a seven person anti-corruption committee reviewing the Ethiopia project. Hopefully no shenanigans there broh.
21. Charles is scheduled to appear on Lex Fridman’s Podcast in June. Lex seems like a nice guy broh. He’ll probably end up best brohs with Charles, Stephen Wolfram, & Soulja Boy. Ben Goertzel is also in broh. Lex needs a girlfriend but no paying ADA to romance the androids. Just take lion’s mane, maybe some ‘83 Gordon & McPhail, and solve global issues together broh.
22. Will a Joe Rogan appearance follow this? It was always ”Goguen before Rogan.” They both love meat and you can barely tell they’re both filthy rich. Match made in heaven?
23. 100% Decentralization of block validation incoming this month!!!!
24. Liquidity bird to land sometime soon? What is it? RETIRED!
25. What about the whispers of a telecom deal? Part of the Ethiopia project?
26. What about paying for utilities and transportation? Part of the Ethiopia deal?
27. Academic credentialing project in the nation state of Georgia. Lots of mentions of this over the years.
28. Mongolia project. Also lots of mentions of this over the years.
29. Uganda, Rwanda, Kenya, Ghana, & South Africa. It seems like there have been a decent number of indicators over the years that these governments are also already in play or targeted for the pan-Africa strategy of 100 MM users in 5-10 years.
30. In the recent Cardano 360 show there was talk of Emurgo possibly being in the process of building something that sounded kind of like a Metamask for Cardano. Sebastian building stuff works good broh. If not, what will fill the Metamask role in the Cardano ecosystem as a sort of universal(ish) bridge for users of smart contracts? Daedalus? Or something new that would be standalone?
31. Justin Roiland knows about Cardano. What if they ever mention it on the show broh? https://twitter.com/JustinRoiland/status/1363000121248473088
32. There is also the looming possibility of a Bitstamp listing. https://www.bitstamp.net/article/bitstamp-continues-exploring-support-additional-di/
33. Yoroi reaches 100k installs! https://twitter.com/YoroiWallet/status/1369952496307736578
34. Cardano tattoos are starting to get elaborate. https://twitter.com/BloomPool_io/status/1370148734177325056
35. There will be a “Mastering Cardano” book. No author signed on yet. Hopefully he or she will have a hairline that is even more dracula than Andreas Antonopoulos. I kid. Love Andreas.
36. Cardano reached 550k wallets in half the time it took BTC https://twitter.com/nierop_pieter/status/1369933366368362496
37. Cardano now has it’s own thirst trap twitter accounts. I won’t list them. But, you probably already know which ones those are if you follow #cardano. It’s probably bullish that we are now big enough for them to target us.
38. We can now claim that Catalyst is the world’s biggest DAO! Luckily, I think it is safe to suspect that ours is less susceptible to recursive call attacks than ETH’s first big DAO. https://twitter.com/InputOutputHK/status/1369961368946946053
39. IOHK releases a good article contrasting the various blockchain accounting methods: EUTXO (Cardano) vs. UTXO (Bitcoin) vs. Account Balance (Ethereum). This is one of those nice articles where the British guy pleasantly reads it to you if you want. Use this one to convince all your friends you are the ultimate blockchain expert: “listen Kyle...the shortcoming of UTXO accounting is....” https://iohk.io/en/blog/posts/2021/03/11/cardanos-extended-utxo-accounting-model/
40. Cardano devs at IOHK are the most productive in the industry! Already 3,170 commits and climbing this week! I sleep better at night knowing they are not allowed to sleep. Kidding….kidding. https://twitter.com/InputOutputHK/status/1369589307720269825
41. Actual spycam footage of Brian Armstrong watching Coinbase customers discover ADA. https://twitter.com/ArmySpies/status/1370516335298420736 RETIRED!
42. Novogratz follows up that he’s bearish for now but will jump on a call with Charles next week. https://twitter.com/novogratz/status/1370482108553105408
43. Apparently the first $1200 stimulus check if invested in ADA would be $44,800 now. https://twitter.com/CryptoIRELAND1/status/1369426234883645443/photo/1
44. Charles gives us that real talk about why a young billionaire would devote his life to this Cardano thing. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T7Da6sFAxuI
45. Cardano uses a tiny fraction of the energy some other top-ten blockchains use. This factoid alone should allow you to hook up with eco-obsessed nature people. https://twitter.com/RichardMcCrackn/status/1370571904969551875
46. Now you can drive your drinking buddies crazy with your ADA obsession without even saying a word! https://twitter.com/KenzieByrne6/status/1370566690073935872
47. Will Babel Fees in Cardano lead to delegators receiving an almost index fund like assortment of native tokens? Will SPOs be willing to accept a wide assortment as payment for transaction fees? Will the economics of the delegation/staking landscape require SPOs to share those Babel Fee tokens with their delegators?
48. Will NFTs be a glaring exclusion from Babel Fees? Will I have to pay for the transaction fees on my NFT in ADA because I don’t want to give an SPO a small piece of the ownership interest in the digital art or other asset represented by the NFT?
49. There’s a new Crypto Time Traveler and this one loves Cardano. https://twitter.com/CryptoTimeTrav2
50. Business Insider covers Cardano among four other coins. https://markets.businessinsider.com/currencies/news/5-altcoins-under-the-radar-avalanche-cardano-polkadot-cosmos-graph-2021-3-1030187382
51. The “Cardano Pizza” event becomes an NFT. https://twitter.com/RichardMcCrackn/status/1370924728534376449
52. Bloomberg covers Cardano, Cites Charles as saying 100 Companies Coming Over https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-03-14/crypto-s-next-big-thing-raises-questions-while-the-price-surges
53. Cardano definition added to search function in Bloomberg Terminal https://twitter.com/CryptoJeromeFR/status/1371195771798884352
54. Commenter Report: Africa Special has finished recording
55. Cryptoviser apparently is not romantically in love with us. https://twitter.com/IOHK_Charles/status/1371097989968666626
56. There is a Part 2 to the IOHK EUTXO discussion we reported under item 39. Good read for verbally upstaging your ETH & BTC supporting co-workers. Be the king of the post-zoom call crypto banter! https://iohk.io/en/blog/posts/2021/03/12/cardanos-extended-utxo-accounting-model-part-2/
57. Commenter Report: the “metamask of Cardano” speculated about previously in item 30 is the “Yoroi dApp connector”. It’ll be rolled out “with Ergo first and Cardano once Plutus is released.” https://github.com/Emurgo/yoroi-ergo-connector
58. It looks like this Yoroi dApp Connector info has even been detailed by Sebastien and Rob on yt. Not sure if we can link directly to this video. But, here is the link to the link. Looks like the dApp Connector talk starts at 1:23:10. https://twitter.com/NicoArqueros/status/1353203943195734017
59. The visionaries among us are already thinking about advanced NFT derivative instruments (some even created by AI) in our ecosystem. https://twitter.com/NicoArqueros/status/1370150347113648132
60. Today is staking rewards day for Epoch 253! Let’s get those duckets!
61. Cardano is getting a disproportionate cut of the attention market compared to its CMC neighbors. https://twitter.com/CardanoRise/status/1371431289895665665
62. “Ask the Doctor” is switching from ERC-20 to Cardano. Note that Ask the Doctor is linked to FD7 Ventures in Item 7 below. https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20210315005744/en/Global-Healthcare-Platform-Ask-The-Doctor-to-Use-Cardano-for-World
63. We get another People of Input Output Global video. This one features Dan Friedman. He currently lives in Japan. But, the interview starts off with some very interesting stories about his youth in 1980s Kiev, Ukraine. His speaking and story-telling style is similar to the captain in a 1990s buddy cop movie (in a good way). Very interesting and compelling guy. https://twitter.com/IOHK_Charles/status/1371574441637937153
64. St. Patrick brings us the green today! The Liquidity Bird has landed!!!!!! We begin going live on Coinbase Pro tomorrow!!!! https://blog.coinbase.com/cardano-ada-is-launching-on-coinbase-pro-694b1cb8c778 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z2gcNkeJ4Rk
65. Native Token Minting Workshop released on the Slack Dev Community Channel. https://files.slack.com/files-pri/T01G2PY2E1M-F01RF61QVQS/download/minting_native_tokens.mp4
66. This Minting Workshop above is a follow up after a previous Native Token Workshop from 03.04.2021. https://iohkdevcommunity.slack.com/files/U01H7BUQAKS/F01Q3GT4GP7/native_tokens_workshop.mp4
67. The Coinbase News is allowing us to retire rumors 11, 17, and 41 above.
68. Today is Coinbase day! Finally! Rejoice. Trading on Coinbase Pro is supposed to open at or after 9am Pacific! https://pro.coinbase.com/ https://blog.coinbase.com/cardano-ada-is-launching-on-coinbase-pro-694b1cb8c778
69. Charles finally gets the blue check on twitter. https://twitter.com/IOHK_Charles/status/1372182831430955008
70. Perceptions are shifting on which platform will be #1 for smart contracts over the next decade. Here’s the biggest crypto youtuber asking his co-host if he’s losing faith in the traditional #1. If you’re in Cardano, you can guess which coin his answer is shifting away from. https://youtu.be/4jRCmdWva40?t=3270
71. Even septuagenarians are getting in on Cardano. https://twitter.com/Emini_Scalper/status/1371061383975030787
72. Coinbase Pro did actually happen yesterday morning. Congratulations everyone. It’s been a long road and it was beautiful watching those initial candles build on the chart after all these years. https://pro.coinbase.com/
73. The Crypto Time Traveler mentioned last week (Item 49) has apparently left us and now gone back to the future. It definitely adds a touch of realism when they actually leave. https://twitter.com/CryptoTimeTrav2/status/1371492636884865029
74. Charles delivered his pre-recorded keynote address at the Blockchain Africa Conference. His remarks support the rumor that the initial Ethiopia project will be around identity. He specifically mentioned Atala Prism. There was talk of the digital identity being able to be linked to wallets, payment systems, and property. He also reasserted that the deals on the table in Africa would bring “millions of users” into the Cardano ecosystem. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CGEs99I6qV8
75. If you haven’t seen it in the past, the Atala Prism website has a demo that works with the mobile app showing how the identity solution (along with academic credentialing, health insurance, and proof of employment) would run on Cardano. https://www.atalaprism.io/
76. ADA is now live on coinbase.com as well as Coinbase Pro! So, you don’t even need to understand orderbooks to buy ADA now. https://blog.coinbase.com/cardano-ada-is-now-available-on-coinbase-dd30c1e0d93a
77. Tim Harrison of IOG sums up this week perfectly: “Glass of nice red tonight, I think. Quite a week.” https://twitter.com/timbharrison/status/1372985361794760705
78. Never imagined there would be a holiday light display that flashed “Screw Doge Coin; ADA is Best” to the original Doge music. Friendly rivalry is probably good in crypto. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eM135pv72mY&t=31s
79. Charles doubles down on the declaration that Cardano’s defining moment will be when it can provide the rails for micro finance from the developed world to the developing world not as a form of charity but as a profitable financial activity for both lender and loan recipient. He thinks it will be the biggest transfer of wealth in the history of the world. He says the base infrastructure for this is being rolled out over the next 24-36 months. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oMRGUCLQPYo
80. The ADA adoption numbers are looking really good lately! https://twitter.com/nierop_pieter/status/1372686310901747712
81. Max Keiser is also not romantically in love with us. Charles lays down the stick pretty hard on this one. I’m saying good. If you can’t take the heat...stay out of the Cardano kitchen, my man. https://twitter.com/IOHK_Charles/status/1373027224509542403
82. Cardano releases an infographic that sums up all the partnerships, deployments, startups, and functionality in the entire ecosystem. We got a lot going on! https://twitter.com/IOHK_Charles/status/1373313974616215557
83. Here’s a really good article discussing decentralization in the context of Cardano core code maintenance. Really good job on this by cardanians.io. https://cardanojournal.com/who-will-maintain-cardano-129
84. The Cardano tattoo phenomenon continues to proliferate. https://twitter.com/IOHK_Charles/status/1373354182124531713
85. BlockFi to add ADA “as soon as we can.” https://twitter.com/SugarZeusCrypto/status/1372958662805708800
86. ADA Heart Pool made an awesome infographic guide to staking: https://twitter.com/InputOutputHK/status/1373310895544229892
87. Awesome comparative chart showing how much more decentralized Cardano is already compared to BTC. https://twitter.com/PoolGrow/status/1373492994645450752
88. Transactions are way up over the last several epochs! https://www.adatainment.com/index.php?lang=en&page=charts_onchain_metrics
89. Cardano 360 going down on Thursday March 25th. This is the big monthly streaming event where they tell us what’s going on. Save your spot here: https://www.crowdcast.io/e/cardano360-march/register
90. Critics think that lack of burned fees is a valid complaint against Cardano. But, good outcomes at scale only come with good incentives and free competition. So, if the fees aren’t paying the costs of transactions in these other protocols, the question goes begging: who is? In the end, the answer always turns out to be that the transaction costs have just been obfuscated under the guise of inflation via coin emission or some other hidden tax on someone in the ecosystem (usually the coin holders). https://twitter.com/avaxholder/status/1373336728010956801
91. We are starting to see cracks in the psychological armor of the Ethereum crowd. This anti-Cardano post was at 0 upvotes (at time of writing) while the fairly pro-Cardano response received triple figure upvotes. https://www.reddit.com/r/ethereum/comments/maktuy/ist_charles_hoskinson_the_new_justin_sun/
92. When smart contracts go live with Alonzo (the final HFC event in Goguen), and we eventually have Babel Fees, it’s going to make almost zero sense for any developer to choose ETH over Cardano. This will apply especially to any project that sends tokens to its customers (e.g. NFT projects) and any project that involves significant computation or transaction loads on the network (e.g. DeFi projects).
93. Emurgo is thinking about supply chain solutions for the seafood industry. https://emurgo.io/blog/how-can-blockchain-deliver-benefits-to-the-seafood-industrys-supply-chain
94. Check out this very cool relay node global tracker form monadpool! Thanks for building this! https://monadpool.com/cardano.html
95. We now have a Backstreet Boy. Might not seem that important, until you notice he has 600k followers. Network effects...network effects. Thanks, Nick! https://twitter.com/nickcarter/status/1374347860834062340 https://twitter.com/nickcarter/status/1374466486018842624
96. A guy tried to use Charles’s reaction to the King Soopers tragedy in Boulder to criticize Cardano. Charles told him to go f*** himself and then auctioned off the tweet with proceeds going to the families of the victims. The auction price quickly hit four figures and closed at $7k. https://v.cent.co/tweet/1374207862646304773?s=u_a
97. Thursday is Cardano 360 and Friday will be “Get ADA Day” as staking rewards for Epoch 255 close. Gonna be an action packed close to the week. Enjoy!
98. Here was my favorite moonboi tweet of the last few days. Old photo, but excellent captioning work here. https://twitter.com/MaximilianXCIX/status/1373471841449304066
99. Great new interview with Sebastien! In this one he explains a lot about the dApp Connector being built by Emurgo. As reported by a commenter in one of our earlier threads, it will work with Ergo first and then Cardano. A very interesting tidbit was Sebastien’s explanation of how the Emurgo dApp Connector will actually be safer than Metamask (which fills a similar role in the ETH ecosystem). Very good info. Thanks to Sebastien and the Cardano Podcast! https://youtu.be/Dkw7hvFP6dY
100. Today is Cardano 360 day!!!! Watch it here at 10:30AM Pacific, 17:30 GMT, 18:30 CET. This is the live monthly streaming show from IOHK. Watch this one. Hopefully we’ll get a target date for Alonzo. That’ll tell us when we get smart contracts. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uQt7AjimaAg
101. Looks like the Cardano 360 show may highlight how Cardano will not experience some of the shortcomings that leading blockchains have in the past (like the time that bitcoin accidentally issued 184 billion BTC in one block). https://twitter.com/IOHK_Charles/status/1374783084881608706
102. Catalyst Fund 5 will have a $2MM total budget! Included will be a very interesting $50k Metadata challenge in Fund 5. Metadata can be used to prove the existence of a certain document or event to third parties without necessarily revealing the data contained therein. This means you can do cool things on the blockchain without using smart contracts as in the prior New Balance anti-counterfeiting and Beefchain traceability Cardano projects.The winners of this challenge are actually going to be incubated and supported by the IOHK Metadata team! People waiting for Goguen and smart contracts are definitely sleeping on what can be done with metadata on Cardano today. https://www.crowdcast.io/e/fund4-6 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pjg_u7Oeel0
103. There is a Catalyst Dashboard available that gives you all the stats on the current projects in Cardano’s multi-million dollar decentralized innovation fund (the world’s biggest). https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/15R-Vbajy4t4fGs1TipNMfL1pEO9cwdn6WV13lKviX4Q/edit#gid=40774150
104. Charles says they are going to end up spending $15-30MM this year on research and they will hire 100-200 people. That’s an investment in the future of the ecosystem! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bLwyFADws8w
105. Cardano 360 was yesterday! The big news first: it sounds like the Alonzo (smart contracts) testnet will launch around end of April or early May. It’s looking like Alonzo HFC event will happen on main net late July or August. The stream was over three hours long. They covered so much! Now, let’s get to the other details revealed. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ULBLgPgxtN8
106. Grigory Rosu from Runtime Verification gave a big rundown on the universality in programming languages that will be provided by K framework in Cardano. He said he should have some kind of proof of concept around six months from now.
107. Michael Peyton Jones and Manual Chakravarty (the architects of Plutus) talked about 1) the benefits of Cardano’s modern approach to designing Plutus TX and Plutus Core and how Plutus Core basically being lambda calculus allows for mathematical verification of software written in Plutus, 2) how UTXO (and EUTXO in Cardano) are much more battle proven than other ledger accounting systems like account balance system (e.g. ETH) which have had problems, 3) how non-fungible role tokens will be a thing, and 4) how they are now laying out a real development platform for builders instead of just throwing Plutus out into the world.
108. Lars Brünjes (Head of Education) laid out how they are going to train a group of developers through the Plutus Pioneers program. That group will help test the Alonzo test net after it launches.
109. Lars has also cloned Uniswap in Plutus with a graphical user interface and completely automated price discovery in the liquidity pools. He did this as a proof of concept to show the capabilities of Plutus. That was demoed right on the stream.
110. They then brought on people from three different Haskell development firms who will be building things on the testnet as a sort of “red team” test of Alonzo. They all seemed to be very capable in terms of Haskell development (note here that Plutus is basically Haskell).
111. Tom Lindeman (Chief Security Officer at Runtime Verification) then laid out how disastrous the last few years in Ethereum have been for smart contract security. But, Cardano has a solution. IOHK and Runtime Verification will partner to certify smart contracts as to security. Runtime Verification will do the security audits. This program will be called “Alpha Frontier”.
112. Charles then laid out the details of the timeline for Alonzo as described above. It sounds like they are targeting to be totally done and hit a code/feature freeze at the end of June. But, it will take Coinbase, Kraken, Binance et al. at least four weeks to update their systems before they can actually launch smart contracts on mainnet.
113. Collin Edwards and Duncan Couts then gave us an update on the stake pool world as we approach “D DAy” or d=0 which is full decentralization of block production. A stake pool operator Shawn McMurdo has made some Cardano Improvement proposals as to 1) a non-linear curved basis for a0 (pronounced a-naught, represents stake pool operator pledge) to affect rewards more greatly, 2) non-centralized rankings in Daedalus, and 3) an adjustment to minimum fees from fixed to variable. Collin and Duncan clarified there will be no changes to a0 (pledge) or k (max pool size) at the d=0 (full decentralization) event coming up. Duncan also laid out how they are going to launch P2P node testnet in early Q2. This will allow for information to flow directly between nodes and will accomplish automation of things like peer discovery that are currently manual on the network.
114. Dor Garbash then gave an update on Catalyst. As covered previously here, Catalyst has become a monster. There are 17k people in Ideascale and the treasury is worth more than $400MM. You heard that right, almost a half billion dollars in the Catalyst Treasury. We also heard from a bunch of the previous catalyst winners.

~Army of Spies