Key Highlights
- Open-sourced platforms have faced bottlenecks in evolution of better technology
- In a truly decentralized community where there is no direction or leading voice, it can be difficult to gain consensus and make progress; establishing governance for a more disciplined and coordinated team can quicken decision-making and maintain quality
- Creating a bridge between centralized and open-source blockchain is a critical next step
Listen to the full podcast version of this interview
Transcript of Part I
Founder of IOHK which gave us Cardano: He is a Colorado-based entrepreneur, he is a mathematician, and IOHK gave us Cardano, which is a platform that aims to be better, smarter, and faster than everybody else. How?
So, when I look at Cardano, I look at it kind of like a DARPA project. So, back in 2015, we said where would we like the space to go over the next five years and what’s required for us to reach scale, so let’s get to millions, to billions of users. What’s required for us to be interoperable with both legacy financial systems like credit cards and debit cards and banks and regulation, but as well as the new cryptocurrency space where we have thousands of blockchains and how do we become sustainable, meaning that we actually have a model to pay for things, not just at the ICO or you’re one or you’re two, but you’re five, you’re ten, you’re fifteen.
And we also have a governance model where we can actually decide where to take these protocols, because with their decentralized infrastructure, you don’t have a foundation or a committee, or some leader to say ‘well let’s update it this way or adopt this thing.’ If it’s truly decentralized, you need to have a completely different way of having people coordinate or work together.
So, that was very aspirational, a high level goal, so what we did was we put together one of the largest teams of scientists and engineers in the space, worked with many different universities, from people at Cambridge to Oxford to people at the University of Edinburgh, Tokyo Institute of Technology, University of Athens, we wrote more than forty papers, academic papers, twenty of which had gone through peer review at major venues like CCS and Crypto, and then we took those papers and extracted from them formal specifications, which then allowed us to actually implement the protocol with high assurance that it’s built correctly, so it’s a very unique project, it was kind of a high-risk high-return project, very aspirational, and for three and a half years we did lots of science, and last year and this year, we’ve been now rolling out a lot of those innovations, and all throughout 2019 we will be achieving great decentralization and smart contracts and 2020 we will achieve the scale that we think can get us to millions to billions of users.
Alright, well that is no small feat. What is the first real case that you can point to that says “ah, this is the first step, this is the genesis of how we get there?”
So I think what needs to happen is you need to create first a bridge between the permission blockchain space and the permission-less space. So, right now, we kind of have this bifurcation, so you look at projects like IBM Hyperledger Fabric, or like the Cadina, or RThree’s quarter project, and we saw, that’s for enterprises, that’s for governments, and those are for things like supply chains, voting systems, and property registration, and they’re federated or centralized, and while they use some of the DNA of blockchain technology, they’re definitely different because of the people who control those ledgers are kind of pre-decided and they don’t change too much, but then when you look at open systems like Bitcoin, and Ethereum, and Cardano, those systems, they have dynamic quorums, so they have people come and go, they have people who are running this thing a month ago can be completely different from the people today, and they’re meant to be as open as possible and no one is really in control of the destiny of that system.
Keep Watching
Part I: Charles Hoskinson, Co-Founder of Ethereum / IOHK, on Why Cardano is a Better Platform
Part II: Launching a Blockchain-Powered Coffee Supply Chain Project in Africa with Cardano
Part III: Of All the Programming Languages in the World, Why Haskell?
Part IV: Revolution or Evolution? The Philosophy of Blockchain with Charles Hoskinson, Co-Founder of Ethereum and IOHK
Part V: From Africa to Asia, What does Global Growth Look Like for Cardano?
Full Interview: In Conversation with Charles Hoskinson