Cardano (founder) Charles Hoskinson discussed the time and effort spent developing Cardano , saying that most of the work required to get it started has already been done, in an interview with Ryan Selkis of Messari. However, despite a constant comparison with Ethereum , he believes that there will be no winners in space for a long time, as the industry is now in the same state as the Internet in 1991.
Recap six months of hard work
After an extremely successful expedition of the Shelley testnet, Cardano has entered the last stage of the race for complete decentralization. Once Shelley, the era of the Cardano blockchain that will allow staking, launched, the blockchain will have gone from a static and federated system to a dynamic and decentralized system.
In an interview with Ryan Selkis of Messari, Charles Hoskinson, CEO of the IOHK, took stock of the efforts made so far. The frank designer of Cardano said it was incredibly rewarding to see the products of five years of painstaking work finally coming together in one go.
This year has gone very well, he said, as the company has met all the criteria and deadlines it had set. The same couldn't be applied to the past two years, said Hoskinson, as Cardano faced obstacles on every street corner. These obstacles, which were the consequence of the fact that two separate teams working simultaneously on Cardano , the have helped him become notorious for being "slow."
Nowadays, however, speed and efficiency seem to be the only epithets that could describe developments at Cardano . Hoskinson has stated that the main network candidate for Shelley will be dispatched on June 30 if all goes well with the test network. Shelley will be activated on July 29, while all registered staking pools will be able to start mining pools as of August 18.
To fill a small open window between major outings, IOHK organized the virtual summit of Cardano , which will take place on July 2 and 3. The event, Hoskinson revealed, will see everyone from heads of state and government officials to Wyoming research laboratory partners and IOHK business partners to meet to discuss Shelley. But with most of the main points of the imminent launch of the main network already covered, the speakers will also focus on Cardano after Shelley - his UTXO, Plutus, smart contracts, etc .
Cardano's virtual summit will also host one of the founders of the Internet, Vint Cerf.
A high hand built on formal methods
None of this happened overnight - Hoskinson explained that Cardano started its journey with a competitive advantage provided by the Haskell programming language. Although the use of Haskell requires a huge advance in terms of tooling and development costs, it pays later because it requires 5 to 10 timeless codes less than the programming languages ??C ++ or Java.
"Haskell developers are not JavaScript kittens," he said, but serious professionals with doctorates, some with more than 25 years of experience in the financial industry.
This type of research-based approach has allowed the IOHK to harness good ideas from the wider scientific community, rather than relying on a single small group of scientists. This can only lead to the creation of a closed system that cannot support inter-chain communication and this is a mistake from the 1990s that should not be repeated.
The diversity of thinking facilitated a rather unusual approach to the development of Cardano . The team working on Goguen, the Cardano era that will spawn smart contracts, has been around for three years, although smart contracts are still months away.
"They weren't waiting for Shelley to be done," said Hoskinson, adding that they were developing their code alongside Shelley. The University of Lancaster saw its first articles on Voltaire, the era of Cardano governance , published around the same time.
It took years to formally form Cardano of Bitcoin's proof of work , despite the protocol's many shortcomings, he told Selkis. Nevertheless, with all its flaws and limitations, the proof of work actually provided Cardano's own Ouroboros protocol both with solid foundations and the ability to introduce incredible innovations.
According to Selkis, this is what many believe gives Cardano an advantage over its competitors, the main one being Ethereum . But, despite its obvious "advantage", Selkis believes that Cardano still has a long way to go to reach the network effect of Ethereum . History, he said, seems to be littered with examples of superior technology losing the race for technology with better network effects.
Hoskinson encountered the remark with great annoyance and just a little bit of animosity, not towards Ethereum , but the rhetoric that puts the network effect above science.
"This is the biggest lie ever told in space."
There is no network effect on Ethereum , he explained, not because Ethereum is inherently bad, but because the crypto industry is still so small that it is practically useless to speculate on its effects. For each dApp created on Ethereum , a thousand more are created for mobile phones, a comparison that puts the size of the network in perspective. Being a big fish is, after all, relative:
“You are a big fish in a very small pod near the ocean.”
He went on to explain that not a single project in the crypto industry has succeeded in achieving a network effect so far and that it will take another decade before any of them come.
It's not a theory, however - Hoskinson went on to explain that the winning blockchain will be the one that will connect best on and off the chain and maximize flexibility. Only a flexible blockchain whose protocol facilitates integration and offloading will be able to host what the industry calls "killer applications". These killer apps, in his words, will not be payment services, but supply chains, medical records, identity solutions and voting solutions.
Coexistence, peer review and plans after Shelley
With that in mind, it's not at all surprising to hear Hoskinson say that we are heading into a world where an adult Cardano and an adult Ethereum can easily coexist. Any discussion that one succeeds the other is futile and leads to a toxic and unproductive environment in which no one can thrive.
"It's like the Internet in 1991 now - we don't even have a web browser, we don't even have JavaScript yet. We don't have incentives for people to adopt this particular technology right now. "
This is not to say that Cardano is heading into the battle without weapons.
Asked how IOHK supports some of his claims about Cardano , such as the protocol being "surely proven", Hoskinson defended the company's rigorous filtering process.
Calling Cardano “proven secure” does not mean that other proof-of-stake protocols are not - it means that peer-reviewed scientific research has found evidence that the protocol is capable of defending against an adversary. particular. The original document that modeled Cardano based on Bitcoin's proof of work has more than 800 citations, providing the company with a solid foundation in both academic and cryptographic circles.
All articles submitted by IOHK or one of its partner or scientific organizations have been peer reviewed, said Hoskinson, taking a hit against the self-proclaimed creator of Bitcoin :
"When we write these articles, we don't just write them and we say, 'Here is the paper, we solved the problem'. We are not Craig Wright . “
These tests, peer-reviewed and modeled officially used Cardano have certainly been ambitious. But, Hoskinson and the rest of the small army of people working on Cardano seem to be incredibly confident that they will be able to reap success.
He has presented big plans for the next two years, with the first important thing that they want to focus on is issuing assets on Cardano . The existing ecosystem already supports many of the features that Hoskison would like to see, namely automatic Daedalus support for tokens and an easy way to deploy tokens on exchanges that already list ADA .
The second thing will be to play a major role for the Haskell community as a whole and bring them into the Cardano ecosystem . An influx of experienced and ambitious Haskell developers would allow a rich DeFi system to thrive on Cardano , since the blockchain works from a native Haskell base. More information on this will be discussed at the next virtual summit, said Hoskinson, hinting that there will be discussions on upcoming hackathons.
Finally, the integration of new operators of participation pools in Cardano will be a major objective for the company in the coming months. Hoskinson said he would like to see people running sustainable businesses on Cardano's servers , an adoption effort that will most likely start in developing regions such as Africa.
The interview ended on a positive note, Hoskinson announcing a "pleasant surprise" for everyone regarding the first vote on governance to be held at the virtual summit.
