Cardano CEO Announces 1.3 and 1.4 Updates

Charles Hoskinson, the CEO of Cardano, released a video yesterday outlining the next steps for the project. Cardano is an Ethereum competitor that supports the development of dApps and smart contracts, but aims to improve on current blockchain security measures. It aims to provide more oversight by relying on researchers and scientists to peer-review code.

 

Today’s update from Hoskinson announced the next two updates to the platform, as well as a new social media policy and a promise to continue a debate with Vitalik Buterin.

 

 

Hoskinson announced that Cardano 1.3 is coming soon. A proposal for the update will be issued between August 8th and 9th. Version 1.3 will improve efficiency, reduce memory requirements, and speed up block downloading times. It will also fix a number of network connection issues that people are experiencing.

 

The next update, Cardano 1.4, will reach its dev cutoff on September 4th and then move into the QA process before shipping in October. Hoskinson called it Cardano’s largest update and said that it will include “a lot of really good things underneath the hood.” Those features include a network reduced from 1.3 million files to 44,000 files, a wallet backend specification for developers, and core refactoring that will make Cardano’s code easier to test.

 

Finally, Hoskinson discussed Cardano’s upcoming alternative code base, Prometheus, which is a library for developers targeting mobile and light clients. Hoskinson said that an internal demo of Prometheus’ CLI interface will take place in September and hinted that a related Google Chrome extension will be announced on August 15th.

 

Hoskinson also chastised the conduct of Vitalik Buterin and the Reddit community toward the end of the video. The conflict was spawned by a Reddit thread in which Buterin criticized Ouroboros, Cardano’s proof-of-stake algorithm, for its lack of finality, its limited messages per slot, and its inefficient safety guarantees:

 

“Vitalik Buterin saw fit to have a discussion about Ouroboros on our forums…we felt that Reddit is not the proper place to have a debate, so we have decided to write a formal rebuttal…sometime this week we probably will turn that rebuttal [into a blog post].”

 

Hoskinson also made clear his dissatisfaction with social media, announcing that he is leaving Twitter apart from posting Periscope video updates. Hoskinson claimed he will no longer share his personal life due to hostility from the crypto community. He said that Twitter is “a broadcast medium, and that’s what we’re going to use it for,” and that he will maintain his duty to inform the community about Cardano’s progress.