Roadmap and Governance
Charles Hoskinson on the Cardano Roadmap and Governance. 30th June 2022
This is a summary with inserted explanations, timestamps and references. The English is simplified in places to ease translation. Transcriptions are funded by QA-DAO Transcription Service.
Beginning
Lots of stuff going on in the markets reflecting the macro [macro economic conditions]. Bear markets are good for building. Time for getting things done
Vasil
Vasil [Hard Fork] is under way we forked the test net. As of July 3rd the test net will be running Version 1.35 which will run until the end of July 2022. Input Endorsers [The core idea of input endorsers is to separate transaction selection from block production]
What next ?
There are four tracks running concurrently.
The Shelley Clean-up
01:47
Partial delegation, Proxy keys, Peer to peer and Genesis.
Goguen
Vasil is the first Goguen clean-up hard fork. Better PAB [Plutus Application Backend] documentation. Optimizations of the language.
Basho
Sidechains. A paper is coming out in August 2022 explaining how we upgrade OPST to do quorum sampling.
Mithril [protocol acts as a stake-based threshold signature scheme allowing for transparent, secure, and lightweight stake leveraging] is under construction with a two week release cadence.
Input Endorsers ["The core idea of input endorsers is to separate transaction selection from block production."]. Work in summer on Input Endorsers official specification will rely heavily on Mithril and it's UTXO [Unspent Transaction Output].
Scalability and interoperability
These three things together, along with the work we are doing on Hydra. Is a starting point for true scalability and interoperability. The sidechain idea of Mithril is really the foundation of interoperability. Hydra is really a dApp accelerator. And backfills in the micro transactions use case. Input Endorsers gets rid of any consensus bottlenecks in the system. Everything is network constrained - so super high TPS [Transactions per second].
Voltaire
Voltaire is interesting. We have a lot of programs like Catalyst where there is just about to be a massive surge in voting. There is going to be the voting center, dReps and how to link Catalyst to mainnet (so it overlaps with some of the Basho agenda). Right now its running as a permissioned sidechain.
Protocol governance
The question of protocol governance and the bureaucracy behind updates. Things like - initiation of the hard fork combinator , changes to parameters, the CIP (Cardano Improvement Proposals) process, Treasury Management.
Tripartite Governance Structure
When Cardano was started the original intent was three entities -
Cardano Foundation (CF) - would take care of governance
Emurgo - would take care of ecosystem growth
IOHK - would take care of technical
There has been lots of back and forth. The CF (Cardano Foundation) of the Michael Parsons era was challenging (Michael Parsons era). We can litigate the past and talk about these things, but the long and short of it [idiom - to sum up] is that [governance] structure has not been perfect.
Members based organization
The particular thing I wanted to see built over the past few years was a members-based organization. That would run the bureaucracy of protocol governance. This was my hope for the CF (Cardano Foundation) but the system & structure in Switzerland is not good for that.
Earlier this year we had a long conversation with CF (Cardano Foundation) in a series of workshops. This asked the question - "How do we move the bureaucracy [of protocol governance] from the Tripartite Governance Structure, which was always ephemeral [temporary] to a members based organisation ?".
Members are defined by merit.
Dirk Hohndel, Chief Open Source Officer
The CF (Cardano Foundation) hired Dirk Hohndel who is a legend in the open source software community. He is co-founder of the Linux Foundation
Steering committees
There are about 50 people from the CF (Cardano Foundation) & IO (Input Output Global) who have been working since February 2022 on the construction of this members based organization.
There will be an announcement about the specific structure of the members based organization in September 2022.
This organization will have -
A governance steering committee (GSC).
A technical steering committee (TSC).
Other committees - related to growth and adoption.
A CIP (Cardano Improvement Process) committee.
These committees will make decisions about the Roadmap, suggestions for CIPs (Cardano Improvement Process), strategy and other things.
Bicameral Model
To allow for people to consent to this we want to move to a Bicameral Model [Bicameralism]. The Bicameral Model says that the bureaucracy proposes and the ADA holder votes.
After the Vasil hard fork, the next hard fork combinator will be a special type of update proposal (written to the CIP standard) that will go to ADA holders to vote on. And then it gets signed by the CIP committee.
The update keys [update keys] were connected to the three entities of the Tripartite Governance Structure (Cardano Foundation, emurgo and IOHK).
The intent was always to create a decentralized update system. We wrote a paper [Source ?] with a European Union Horizon 2020 grant to explore how to do that. And there is a lot of technical complexity in it.
A nice halfway house [compromise] is to have a CIP committee that controls an M of N set of keys that they cannot sign without approval from ADA holders. They write an update proposal and take it to the ADA holders. The ADA holder approve it and then the CIP committee can sign the proposals.
You pay or you work
What do we mean by a merit based members organization ? Merit and Members organization.
Well either you pay or you work. Either you do something or you contribute some funding.
Pretty simple and easy to understand.
You have to allow a set of people in the ecosystem to grow and evolve to a point where they are capable of participating.
That is effectively what the dReps (Delegated Representatives), SPOs (Stakepool operators) and the dApp developers are. Alongside people who take a community role. So we have the Ambassador program, 1000 plus dApps projects, 3000 Stake Pool Operators and a large corps of dReps are forming.
These are not pairwise disjoint sets [mathematical analogy - see pairwise disjoint sets] , there is an overlap, and that is a good thing.
If you look at that set [of people in the ecosystem] that is a very large group of people. Okay, take the next step, join a members based organization, there is going to be governance committees, technical steering committees, growth and adoption committees. And actually get involved in the governance process.
How will you run effective committees?
[Our model will be] the work Dirk Hohndel did at the Linux Foundation which runs over 140 plus projects from Kubernetes, to Node to cryptocurrency projects like Fabric, the entire Hyperledger group, even an Ethereum node called Besu. So there is a lot of decentralization there. And there is a lot of organizational wisdom in these types of models. And that is basically what we're pursuing.
In September 2022 we will have the first setup. Between now and September in July and August 2022 we are going to set up a website for signups.
And then either you pay the membership fee to the [member] organization, or you contribute some sort of work or both.
More people working for Cardano
Another side is we need to get more people working for Cardano.
You may have noticed that Sebastien Guillemot from dcSpark is now a CIP editor, and his role is covered completely by the Cardano blockchain itself. [See Fund 8 Catalyst proposal - CIP Editor time Sebastien for 1year]
I told Harris Warren at Project Catalyst that I would like to see three to five more community members become CIP editors paid for completely by the Cardano Blockchain [Catalyst Treasury].
I'd also like to see 10 to 15 full time engineers working directly for Cardano, paid for by Cardano. This will be a big part of Catalyst Fund 10.
It is time to get a complete group of people that work for Cardano. That is the entire point of the system. With this members based organization it is pretty easy to do that because the members can be directly funded from Project Catalysts after [the new Challenge] has started.
It is good to have individuals in addition to companies working for Cardano. It creates checks and balances. So if you have the technical abilities to write code or the ability to read scripts then you can be part of that process. Jobs are opening up. Coming very soon before the end of the year.
I guess what I'm trying to convey is that it is a lot of cleanup.
Major inflection point
It has gotten to the juncture [to the point] where we are about to have a major inflection point [change] where this structure [the Tripartite Governance Structure] is gone.
There has been an enormous amount of learning along the way. I would have done things very differently if I got to do the project again. But, to be fair, we had to live through seven years of history. And, we had to go through a lot of events to get to this point.
The fact that we are now about to see the existence of a massive members based organization, that is going to provide proper representation of the community for roadmap, strategy etc. and has a consent component from voting is pretty exciting to me.
A lot of good people are working on this, and I can't wait to make the announcement September 2022. I will be at some event for that. I cannot say anything about it right now. I have signed a mutual NDA (non disclosure agreement) with the Cardano Foundation.
House cleaning
Some house cleaning is needed in terms of the update committee and that has always been the case. And the proxy keys (see update keys) and partial delegation and so forth.
We still are number one for GitHub commits as an ecosystem. The push out [rollout] of the Vasil Hard Fork even though it is complicated has been pretty seamless.
The reality is that Cardano is not controlled by a person, an entity or a collection of entities. It truly is one of the most decentralized of all cryptocurrencies because it has this gigantic super smart community that is working towards an end.
Some legacy has to be removed and cleaned up, some training wheels have to be clipped off. Sometimes it takes a little longer than you think. But there is an intent to do it.
The Edinburgh decentralization index
We need a North Star. So what is our North Star, our guiding light, behind these types of things? Well, the North Star is this concept of decentralization. That is one of them. There are many North stars. But decentralization is the big one that I think we can tackle this year.
So we are setting up something called the Edinburgh decentralization index (EDI), it's going to be based at University of Edinburgh (Blockchain Technology Laboratory network & IOHK Research Library). And obviously, it's going to measure decentralization of cryptocurrencies.
In this GitBook see also How to Measure Decentralisation?
Throughout the summer, papers are going to be written, a lab is going to be set up governed by the University of Edinburgh. And the team at the lab is going to start with Bitcoin, then Ethereum and then move on to Cardano.
They will keep going and create a decentralization index and we do not know where we are going to fall on this index.
Some of [the decentralization score] might be great, some of it may not be so great. It will be aggregated together and we will get a score.
Then the governance steering committee of the open source program [members based organisation] can make an agenda and strategy of how do we improve [the decentralization score].
You have to have a collection of North Stars, a constellation of stars, that allow you to steer the project in a particular direction. Some of that is decentralization, some of that is resilience, some of that is effectiveness and cost, some of that is use and utility.
Roadmap and Smart Contracts
We did our best with the initial Cardano roadmap to try to balance all of these different types of concerns.
It did not make everybody happy all the time. For example, being slow to market with smart contracts meant that Cardano missed a lot of the defi stuff that is happening today.
And in 2021, people thought we were horrible and idiots. Now [being slow to market] seems to actually be a benefit as the defi markets come collapsing down and exponential losses are occurring.
We did not play in those waters. And so we did not get bitten by those sharks. But that was out of an abundance of caution and we could have had smart contracts in the ecosystem a little earlier.
But there would not have been as much careful thought put into the development model. And we would also be suffering from the many hacks, protocol design flaws and other problems that the cryptocurrency ecosystem is now working its way through. And [these problems] may actually several major cryptocurrencies. It has already destroyed Luna and it's destroyed Celsius and more to come as exponential risk continues to scale. So roadmaps are hard.
Rare Bloom
You have to kind of wait for the right people to materialize. And now there are dReps (Delegated Representatives), there is a huge amount of SPOs (Stakepool Operators).
In fact, communities going to have a big event in Colorado, the Rare Bloom event, I had nothing to do with putting it on, it might have more than 1000 or 2000 people.
Community events just materializing out of thin air happened in Brazil [Source ?].
Summing up
It would have been nice to have a members based organization five years ago. That was the intent. But Michael Parsons (former Cardano Foundation Chairman) decided to focus more on his own needs than the community needs.
A resilient ecosystem should have the ability to course correct and get rid of bad actors, which is what happened. It did, unfortunately, leave us with a legacy structure that was never going to be fit for purpose as a members based organization. So I knew one had to be constructed and embedded inside a structure that made sense.
If you want to be part of it, a website is coming, Signups are coming. And we would love to have you there. If not, vote, your ADA gives you a voice, gives you a vote.
We wll do our best to try to provide objective guiding stars, like decentralization, which is a foundational one.
The moon landing of the blockchain ecosystem
We are all on this journey together. From an idea in 2015, on a whiteboard to this technological Leviathan. Cardano has really been the moon landing of the blockchain ecosystem. We wrote more than 100 papers. So much code brought together a global movement. Some of the brightest people in the world have worked on this project or continue to work on this project. And we paid homage to great people along the way like Voltaire, and Basho.
We tried to stay true to some basic concepts and principles about a desire to increasingly decentralize and build up a group of people that are going to be here for a long time.
believe we have the strongest community of any cryptocurrency and we'll continue to have the strongest community because people really get the intention and where we're going.
It has been difficult at times. It was a hell of a job getting Shelley out. There was a lot of work there. And Goguen hasn't exactly been the easiest of things.
[ ...]
Real Fi (Real Finance)
And then I get to the business of Real Fi (real finance), which is what I've always wanted to do.
I built Cardano so that I could go and bank the unbanked and get 3 billion people to have a financial operating system that they do not have right now. That's my personal mission.
Doesn't have to be yours. Cardano is an open protocol. Anybody can use it any way that they want to use it. I built it for that purpose.
Bear markets
It's a great time to do it. bear markets are where everybody gets much more collaborative, more people are willing to join and work with you. And people will actually pick up the phone. Bull markets are crazy. Poaching is at an all time high, people are very hostile, extremely negative language is used and inhuman things happen.
Maximalism
I'll never quite get used to the arrogant, maximalism and brutal comments that people make, or the betrayals.
But I have gotten used to the fact that people behave differently when economic incentives are aligned that way, it is what it is, and you accept it.
Member based organization legal structures
So come July and August, websites coming out and if you want to be part of the members based organization. Go ahead and sign up and then we can enroll you in September and make an announcement of the name of the organization, how it is going to work and the legal structures behind it. A lot of little things need to be done, like legal wrappers.
So it is a lot of cleanup, as I mentioned, and post Vasil on the code side an enormous amount of cleanup, technical debt reduction, re-architecture. And then we are pushing for a lot of the backlog to of work its way through.
References
About hard forks
Blockchain Technology Laboratory network (Edinburgh University)
Bicameralism
Cardano Improvement Proposals
Dirk Hohndel, Chief Open Source Officer
Dirk Hohndel Joins Cardano Foundation as Chief Open Source Officer
Linux Foundation
Hydra – Cardano’s solution for ultimate Layer 2 scalability
Michael Parsons era
Cardano Leaders Split With Foundation, Demand Chairman Resigns
Oct. 12, 2018
Mithril: a stronger and lighter blockchain for better efficiency
Ouroboros: A Provably Secure Proof-of-Stake Blockchain Protocol
See - 8.1 Input Endorsers
Pairwise disjoint sets
Disjoint sets are those sets whose intersection with each other results in a null set.
A collection of sets is pairwise disjoint if any two sets in the collection are disjoint. It is also known as mutually disjoint sets.
Let P be the set of any collection of sets and A and B.
i.e. A, B ∈ P. Then, P is known as pairwise disjoint if and only if A ≠ B. Therefore, A ∩ B = ϕ
Examples:
P = { {1}, {2, 3}, {4, 5, 6} } is a pairwise disjoint set.
P = { {1, 2}, {2, 3} } is not pairwise disjoint, since we have 2 as the common element in two sets.
IOHK Research Library
Introducing the Concept of Delegate Representatives (dReps)
Sidechains explained: Cardano's answer to scalability and interoperability
The Cardano Roadmap
What is the PAB?
Plutus Application Backend
What are input endorsers and how do they make Cardano more scalable?
Update keys
Cardano Treasury with Kevin Hammond - A Catalyst Town Hall Presentation on the Cardano Treasury with an After Town Hall Q&A
Vasil upgrade - the state of play
June 20th 2022
Last updated
