CO-WORKING SPACE, HONG KONG

• Emurgo is setting up a co-working spaсe in Hong Kong. The office will be available for developers from February 2018.

• The space will be a hub for developers to come together, share ideas, and organize teams for buliding applications for the Cardano blockchain.

MEETUP FOR DEVELOPERS AND ENTERPRISES, TOKYO

• Emurgo will hold a monthly meetup for developers and enterprises at their new Tokyo office.

• The objective is to create a community of developers and businesses who are interested in using Cardano. The meetup will encourage developers looking to build applications on Cardano and raise awareness of Cardano among enterprises.

PARTNERSHIP WITH CHINACCELERATOR AND MOX

• Working with two big regional accelerators will provide a springboard for entrepreneurs by giving them access to funding and advice.

• MOX has a unique mobile apps distribution platform that can help startups reach 190 million smartphone users in Southeast Asia and Latin America with no upfront user acquisition cost. The strategic partnership gives the entrepreneurs who are building applications on the Cardano blockchain access to a number of the top acceleration programs in the region.

INVESTMENT IN A BLOCKCHAIN PROJECT, SHANGHAI

• Emurgo will invest in LiqEase, a blockchain project that digitizes assets in international business to business trade.

• LiqEase is a blockhain based application for invoice financing. It is currently being built in Solidity, and plans to use the Cardano blockchain and the IELE Virtual Machine once Cardano CL is released.

R&D CENTER, VIETNAM

• A research and development center that focuses on the Cardano blockchain will be set up in Ho Chi Minh city.

• The center will conduct research for Cardano, develop tools, and APIs for its software, and offer a consulting service for enterprises. The tools will assist developers wishing to build applications on Cardano.

DISTRIBUTED FUTURES RESEARCH

• A City of London research program will explore challenges and opportunities for blockchain.

• Cardano Foundation has selected Z/Yen Group, a respected City of London think tank, as its partner for a research programme into blockchain applications. The Distributed Futures research agenda will explore how blockchain technology will make an impact on a range of industries, and thus propel Cardano’s development. The partnership will focus on a wide range of industries including banking, trade, and insurance, and aims to foster engagement with regulators, investors, and policy makers.

LEDGER WALLET

• Support for Cardano will be added to Ledger Wallet storage devices.

• In partnership with Metalair, a leading blockchain consultancy, support for Cardano is being added to Ledger Wallet storage devices. This means Cardano users will be able to hold their Ada offline, through the convenient and highly secure means of cold storage. The integration process has begun, and project timelines will be added soon.

DEBIT CARDS

• Launch of a Cardano debit card will allow Ada holders to use their funds for everyday purchases.

• Partnerships are being developed to integrate Ada with a cryptocurrency debit card. This will allow you to spend Ada just as you would do with any other currency, by using a Cardano debit card. Once you have applied for and obtained your card, you will be able to send Ada from your Daedalus wallet to load your Cardano debit card. The funds will automatically be converted into the local currency of your choice, for example Yen or Yuan. You can use the debit card to pay merchants as you normally would, whether it be with online retailers or in bricks and mortar stores.

CARDANO SOFTWARE AUDIT

• An independent audit of the code and documentation will help ensure a high-quality, robust product.

• Cardano Foundation has retained FP Complete to provide comprehensive code reviews of IOHK’s Shelley release, and subsequent Cardano code updates. In addition, IOHK’s documentation is being reviewed for comprehensibility, correctness, and thoroughness. This is an ongoing contract, and the independent audit will help generate confidence in the quality of Cardano’s codebase. Independent verification of Cardano’s technology by FP Complete will foster trust and provide the transparency crucial for industry adoption of the software.

SIDECHAINS (5% Completion)

• Sidechains will enhance the ability to move Ada within Cardano, enable scalability, and allow new features to be added without forking a blockchain.

• Sidechains allow multiple blockchains to interoperate with each other. There will be several Cardano blockchains. The main Cardano chain is a settlement layer, where the accounts holding Ada are. The settlement layer will be simple, allowing only for management and transfer of funds; they will not provide complex scripting. Keeping this layer simple by limiting its features enables better security, as there are fewer possible weak points an adversary could attack. Sidechains will be created as separate blockchains to enable more features for Cardano. For example, the smart contracts sidechain, or the Cardano Computation Layer, will be feature rich and will enable the expression of Turing-complete contracts without affecting the security of the main chain.

• Allowing sidechains to interoperate means that Ada can be moved from one chain to another. It can be minted on the main chain, moved to a sidechain, change ownership, then move back to the main chain. Moving coins between chains happens automatically through your wallet client, without requiring user interaction. All sidechains are “two-way pegged”; if you have Ada in one blockchain, you can move it to another and back. This is a key enabler of scalability and fundamental to the development of blockchains. By off-loading the work of the main chain onto the sidechains, the capacity limits of the main chain can be broadened, allowing a form of blockchain sharding. Sidechains allow smooth upgrades because experimental new blockchain features can be enabled in sidechains without the need to fork the blockchain. People who want to use the feature can move their coins to the sidechain, take advantage of the feature, and move the coins back.

ACCOUNTING MODEL (10% Completion)

• To move value consistently between ledgers using UTxO-style and account-based accounting models we will develop a formal understanding of both methods and their relationship.

• In cryptocurrencies, there are different prevalent accounting methods: the unspent transaction output (UTxO) model of Bitcoin, and the account-based model used by Ethereum. Cardano will be a multi-layered system: different Cardano layers can use different styles of accounting. The settlement layer (or the main chain) uses UTxO accounting, while a computation layer (sidechain) based on IELE will use Ethereum style accounts. To safely transfer value between the main chain and a side chain, a clear and unambiguous understanding of the relationship between the accounting styles is indispensable.

• We will base this understanding on formal definitions of the accounting schemes. With this, we will be able to constructively prove their equivalence, in the sense that they can simulate each other. This will guarantee that value cannot be created or lost when moving between chains.

PLUTUS CORE (12% Completion)

• The Plutus Core language will be finalized and integrated into the Cardano Settlement Layer and Computation Layer.

• The philosophy of the Cardano settlement layer is to keep things simple and secure. In keeping with this philosophy, the settlement layer has only a simple scripting language with very simple interaction between scripts and the blockchain. Plutus Core is the language used. It is highly expressive yet simple and secure. It is based on well-understood ideas from programming language theory, for example, pure functional programming, which will enable verification techniques to ensure correctness of scripts. Plutus Core is not designed to be written directly by programmers, but to be a target for compilers, including the Plutus language.

• Plutus Core will also be used at the computation layer, executed either directly or via IELE. In this setting it will have richer interactions with the blockchain, allowing it to be used for sophisticated smart contracts.

IELE VIRTUAL MACHINE V1 (33% Completion)

• IELE, a virtual machine with a universal language framework for translating and executing smart contracts, will be created.

• Based on the research defining KEVM, the semantics of EVM in K, the K team is designing and defining a new virtual machine. IELE will serve as a uniform, lower-level platform for translating and executing smart contracts from higher-level languages, which can also interact with each other by means of actual function calls. IELE will be a register-based machine, like LLVM. It has an unbounded number of registers and supports unbounded integers.

• The virtual machine will provide a uniform gas model, across all languages. The general design philosophy of gas calculation in IELE is “there are no limitations, and you pay for what you consume”.

• IELE will make it easier to write secure smart contracts. This includes writing requirements specifications that smart contracts must obey, as well as making it easier to develop automated techniques that mathematically verify and prove smart contracts correct with respect to such specifications.

• The design of IELE is done in a semantics-based style, using K. Together with a fast (LLVM-based) execution backend for K, it is expected that the interpreter obtained automatically from the semantics of IELE will be sufficiently efficient to serve as a reference implementation of IELE. To validate IELE and especially its gas model, translators/compilers from Solidity and Plutus Core to IELE will also be developed as soon as possible.

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INTEGRATION AND IMPLEMENTATION (15% Completion)

• The sidechains and accounting will be implemented in the SL and CL. IELE and Plutus Core will be integrated into the CL.

• This will integrate all the work described above into the Cardano Computation Layer (CL) and Settlement Layer (SL). Integration includes taking the sidechains and accounting research and implementing it in both SL and CL which will allow assets to be moved between SL and CL. The work also includes integrating Plutus Core and IELE in the CL, which will allow executing smart contracts in the CL.

SMART CONTRACTS DEPLOYMENT & INTERACTION

• A set of tools will be available for developers of smart contracts, including a private test network to try out code before it is deployed to the mainnet.

• Cardano will ship with a set of tools to help provide developers with a high quality development experience. These will include a Cardano development network, a private test network for testing the code before deployment to the mainnet; interactive REPL (an interactive computer programming shell) for interacting with the Cardano node API and Plutus; and easy compilation and deployment of smart contracts using the command line interface.