...from Byron to Voltaire, on-chain governance on the Cardano Network Stack, liquid non-custodial staking - there are thousands of innovations that live here. Moreover, a very powerful design philosophy resides here. The goal of this design philosophy is to gradually upgrade this system to truly make it the best place to issue assets and the best location for fast settlments.

...and we're going to go ahead and play. Let's look at the stuff that was written down. All right, let me share my screen. All right, in the beginning, it starts with our good friend, the Cardano Ledger formal specifications. So, this is a public repo, and these are the blueprints of Cardano. So, if you're ever curious about anything in Cardano land, from the beginning with Byron, Shelley, Allegra, Mary, Alonzo, Babbage and soon to be Conway...

I know I wanted the original Cardano roadmap to be done in 2020. It was 2015 to 2020. They said it's a five-year thing. It's years late and most of that was just mistakes made with the original design of Byron, the necessity of the Byron reboot, the complexity of doing some of the things we wanted to do, and the use of formal methods which, while they produced remarkably stable software, added a lot longer development cycles of the software.

...it's just that we couldn't get the transaction size -- the performance. We couldn't get the integration. We couldn't get it into the formal specifications of Cardono, and it made no sense to burden the system with that much complexity. Had we started way back in the day and that was the paradigm, we could have probably gotten it done, but it didn't happen with the Byron reboot.

It's also an opportunity to simplify some of the blueprints of Cardano because for example there's been a lot of conversations about retiring some or all of the logic of Byron and to massively simplify the design and reduce the complexity of the code which would mean there's a much faster time to market for the Rust and TypeScript clients and there shouldn't be any consequences to the users of Cardano because those are legacy concerns.

...statement discusses the historical evolution of the project. It is absolutely true that the original code base with Byron had to be rewritten, a process we called the Byron reboot. The original team that handled that task is no longer here, and that code is no longer present. However, the consequences of that rewrite set the project back by about 15 months. This delay was for implementing the extended UTXO or Ouroboros, Hydra, Mithril...

So, Byron was launched in September of 2017, late in September, and we are now reaching the end of life of Byron. The last major update to Byron was 1.4, and the first update to begin the Shelley era for our current code base in ??? is 1.5. So, 1.5 is the OBFT update. It's been a QA hell for a bit because the CEREC code has been so...

Jared, the head of that effort, is currently cleaning up the specification. He's also going to be merging the Byron Ledger spec with the Shelley spec. If you look at how our system works, we're changing the way that validation works on the ledger. In many cases, we're simplifying things and in many cases we're making it a little easier to understand and implement. So, Shelley is...

...in a way, it's a massive improvement over what we released with Sarah Kells' code and fire. But, in order to validate older transactions and run the old chain, we still have to have the old legacy rules. Therefore, these things have to be combined. Now that the delegation spec is in its final stages of refinement, the Shelley and the Byron spec will be synchronized, and then G will be introduced.

And they don't find too many issues, so a natural question asked is, "Well, where are we going to go from here, and how do we get to Shelley? What's the bridge to Shelley?" So, we're retiring Byron. In fact, 1.5 will be the end-of-life update to Byron, and it's part of the Shelley update. So it's the very first Shelley update, and it's the very last Byron update. So excluding the hotfix, which is shipping soon 1.4...

...that we've constructed, and taking the Haskell client with the new code, if you look at our repos, Cardano Chain and Cardano Network, they will replace the deprecated Byron-based Cardano SL and throw away the SL, inserting Cardano Chain and Cardano Network into that wallet backend. Now, what this essentially means is that once that's done, 100% of the legacy code will have been basically replaced...

Then there's the actual rollover of what we have today - the Byron system - to where we'd like to go, Shelley. Now, this means that we're going to have to issue series of updates to the Cardano Client. At least two updates will be required. One is that the current implementation of Ouroboros, this Ouroboros classic is a very old implementation. It's based on the ideas we had back in 2017, but...

What's really nice is we've actually managed to take the ledgers back which defines all the rules for validating what is legitimate Ledger and what is not legitimate leisure and create almost like a DSL to describe different Ledger rules and so it's very easy for us to describe the old ledger, which is the Byron Ledger and what the new Shelley Ledger is going to look like...

So, when we released the client Byron back in late September of 2017, there were a few goals that we had. Number one, Due to the nature of how ADA was sold. The buyers had to redeem vouchers to get their ADA. So it was a high priority that the buyers redeem into the system. This is more than 80% of ADA in the circulation. So, to us it was very important that that group understand how to install Daedalus, use Daedalus, redeem their vouchers and learn how to safely use exchanges. So, they can have liquidity if they so choose, and then ADA could also get more broadly distributed from the initial distribution.

Where are we going? There's January and February and many months coming. And then there's the Shelley release. So, the immediate priority is that there is some technical debt in our architecture and our code from the Byron release. And we've been working towards reducing that debt in parallel to finishing the specifications for Shelley and starting new code work for Shelley.

For example, easy submission of logs is something that slipped the Byron release. It was something I really wanted to get in, but unfortunately software is software and occasionally you have to cut it somewhere.

So, there's a few other things that we're working on under the hood to try to make the Daedalus experience better, few other things we're working on to make the code much more concise and clean in certain areas that just didn't get where they needed to be during the Byron release and our hope is that in the coming weeks we're going to be able to chip away...

OK, so that's Byron and that's Byron for the next two months, expect things to gradually get faster. Expect the connecting to network issues to start receding. Expect patches coming in February and in March, which will dramatically improve things. Expect more exchanges coming and we're certainly going to work really hard.