Cardano 360 May write up

Having not had a proper 360 last month, this months 360 was eagerly anticipated and it did not disappoint. Below is a summary of some of the key points coming out of it.

Road to Alonzo

We’d already been given a heads up by Charles in the Next 90 days video which I covered here. Today we got some more color (figuratively and literally speaking) around this.

• Alonzo Blue (June):
  • Working with select SPOs and Pioneers, plus 7 external European companies and 1 US company, to build test smart contracts
• Alonzo White (July):
  • Allows off-chain integration such as with the wallet backend APIs
  • Additional Plutus pioneers involved in testing
  • Demo dApps by external companies deployed
  • Optimizing Plutus
  • Benchmark data collected
• Alonzo Purple (August):
  • This is the key stage. Getting here means the testing is completed and being prepared for mainnet launch
• Alonzo Mainnet (Sept)
  • Cardano Summit event to celebrate!

Plutus Pioneers

• Going great – a lot of enthusiasm from devs
• Material will have to be updated and then another class of pioneers enrolled

Marlowe

I will have to cover this in more detail in a separate post as there was a lot of interesting things that requires further explanation (such as ACTUS) but in a nutshell:

• Online library of smart contract templates produced
• Impressive demo of how these could work in reality by non-developers

Project Catalyst

• 314 developers
• 132 entrepreneurs
• 6 dApps being built based on funds 2 & 3
• 160 individuals submitted proposals in fund 5
• 25,000 participants involved in IdeaScale
• Ledger support coming for voting

Wolfram partnership

• Wolfram is working on a exploring “cellular automota and NFTs” – I admit I didn’t follow what exactly was being explained here. But generally it sounded like having an automated system for generating NFTs

ERC-20 Converter

• Singularity is the test case
• Ethereum to Cardano bridge to be released in June
• Cardano to Ethereum bridge to come later (~August)
• Great demo using metamask
  • Connect your Ethereum and your Cardano wallet to Metmask
  • Then use the ERC-20 converter to convert

SingularityNET

• New token AGIx created
• Migration of Dapp coming next
• Gas fees, speed, reliability, the Cardano community, and the verifiability and scalability of Plutus are the reasons given for the move to Cardano
• An AGI Domain Specific Language is being developed which will be built on top of Plutus
• Ethereum tokens are locked, and then minted on Cardano, so 1-1 peg
• Can migrate in both directions
• Singularity will cover cost transaction cost from Cardano to Ethereum
• Total cap of 1 bn Eth AGI tokens and 1bn on Cardano will stay the same but the ability to mint new tokens from within this cap is going to be important

Peer-to-Peer Testnet

• Moving to a model where IOG is no longer needed to maintain a central topology of the Cardano network and instead that knowledge is shared between stake pool operator relay nodes
• Concept of ‘gossip’ to propagate the topology across the network in a self-perpetuating way

Research:

• Hydra – Cardano’s scaling solution. A layer 2 solution (similar to Matic on Ethereum or lightning on Bitcoin) implemented using Plutus
• Would reduce fees even further
• First research paper on the Hydra head protocol published in March. Second paper to be submitted in June.
• Each head can run the exact same smart contract as the main layer, and each head could theoretically have its own heads
• Rewards & Pledging: Prof. Aggelos presented a short whiteboard video of the importance of the alpha parameter that impacts pledge factor. Admittedly I wasn’t quite sure if there was any new knowledge here or just a recap of how things work.

My thoughts:

The most eagerly anticipated news around the timeline had been pre-empted by Charles already but it was re-assuring to see it laid out on the timeline to avoid ambiguity. In short – we are aiming for an early Sept launch of Alonzo if everything goes well.

Marlowe deserves a lot more attention – the team did a good job presenting it, but the true audience to reach will be likely be people that are currently not involved in the crypto-sphere. I’m interested in understanding it better so that I can produce content explaining it to my former colleagues in the mundane world of corporate finance!

Plutus Pioneers – the enthusiasm and support from within the Pioneers is really encouraging and was great to hear from them. I would have liked it if there was more than a vague promise to launch another round as I’d heard that a month ago and I’m trying to follow along with just the videos and bashing my head trying to get Exercise 1 to work on the latest Plutus core :-). Also no mention of the Plutus book that’s being written? Overall though – the first wave of Pioneers are rising to the challenge in helping to test out Plutus and develop out knowledge material.

ERC-20 converter and Singularity – Great to hear the progress. But what other projects are likely to follow and when? My sense is AGI is the test case and once that goes well, other projects will look to jump on board so may not hear of a flood of migration stories just yet.

But two-way conversion — that’s pretty cool and re-assuring for existing projects!

All in all – the next 90 days are going to be super busy, fingers crossed it all goes well!

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