...Knowledge and recursive structures for the Trustus bridges, which are useful for all Cardano DApps, speed up the development work of Mithril, enhancing the steak pool experience. These are all direct benefits of adding a partner chain framework into the Cardano ecosystem. In addition to the thousands, if not tens of thousands, it brings to the Cardano ecosystem because now we're a multimodal approach with many different languages and approaches better prop up infrastructure, which is another example of the things that we bring.

...you look at Cardano as a whole. Input endorsers on the horizon will make Cardano one of the fastest blockchains ever conceived. That will just happen. It will take a while, but it will happen. Hydra is the best thought about how to really do that layer two stuff. Meanwhile, you have Mithril already in its second generation with ALBA, and it will get integrated into the core node at some point. We've got a great...

Sylvia, I still have the utmost respect for many people in the Algorand ecosystem. Lo and behold, we collaborated with some of the people in the Algorand ecosystem just recently. When you take a look at Leo Raisen, who worked with Algorand on the compact certificates idea and then went over to Scotland for six months and helped us design and develop ALBA for Mithril 2, that's an example of mature process.

For example, Mithril 2 is done and it has just been submitted to EurocCryp. So, it has been a great journey, you know, along the way. But the point of governance at some point is for it to change over. And you, as a community, really have two options. You have to decide: do you want to continue going down the road of using the hard fork combinator, and building a system around this idea of protocol?

This means that we actually have to do integration, testing, and QA, among other things. However, this means that Sanchonet has been fully realized, and people can begin to experiment with it, play with it, and have a lot of fun with it. So, we're kind of moving along, getting those things done. 2024 is really looking from an IO perspective to be the year of the side chains and Mithril.

It's new development paradigm can't be everything to everybody, and you know, it's a completely new network. No one's ever seen these types of things before. Yet, the assumptions we made in the lab are coming to fruition in reality. For example, many of you saw the tweet about Mithril - a 20 minute bootstrap time for a full node, and this is just Mithril version one. Mithril version two is almost done, according to Leo Raisin from...

Protocols, that's why there's Mithril 2 to succeed Mithril one. There are already discussions of how we can make that ubiquitous and actually even integrate it into the blockchain, in some form of a data structure, like in the header or something. When you do that, it's really powerful because smart contracts can interact with it. When you do that, it's very beneficial. Yeah, so that's just the nature of how things are.

Of external meetings with foreign regulators, talking to them about how they should regulate cryptocurrencies, a lot of DC stuff is still floating around. There's a lot of engagement at the state level with various actors. We've been floating through, plus maintaining all of the open source programs and projects that we have like Hydra and MytMithril, as well as the publication.

And obviously, we'll have a lot of people from the Voltaire team there to talk about governance. Sam Leathers is going to be there, and Sam is going to do a master class workshop on Sanchonet, which is 1694's testnet. The Hydra team is actually in the office today preparing for RareEvo to talk about a Hydra Master Class where they're going to show you guys how to use Hydra, Mithril, and other technologies together.

So, here's what we've been doing today for Cardano. There's really four major items: Hydra, Mithril++, we get sidechains one of these days, we should probably use a bigger, better term for that, so Hydra, Mithril, sidechains, and optimizations.

And so that's a fast and continuous notion of scalability. So it always improves the profile, and things just keep getting better. Now you'll notice something on Mithril. This is really the beginning of data availability and proof systems.

Okay, so this also includes a concept of roll-ups. And we've just released the first version of Mithril, and what's going to happen is Mithril is going to follow a very similar evolution to Hydra. But there is some science here, so there's kind of a question of Mithril 2.0 and how should we go about building good data availability layer for the system. Well, there's a great video that's from DC Spark and it says data availability Solutions overview Chia, Polygon, Algorand, Celestia, IPFS, and Ethereum.

So Mithril's on mainnet, there is a whole research team working on a much more efficient Mithril 2.0. Mithril is already amazing and we can really get a lot more. Mithril is actually going to be an essential component on input endorsers, and I'll explain that in a little bit and there's a lot of cool things that were pushing into on the more complicated snark systems the recursion and roll-up side of the world and it'll be real cool in November to kind of showcase all of that.

Mithril is already going to be a huge win for the wallets because you guys are going to be able to get full nodes that have fast sync, you don't have to wait three days for a node to sync and your light clients will have full node security. Well, that also works its way into the whole DApp consideration and there's tons of amazing things that can be done with data availability.

Now a lot of stuff had to be thought about for example turns out if you use technology like Mithril and also extended UTXO that this helps you figure out how to do this in a way that it resembles this type of system especially as you zoom out, but you get the throughput of this kind of system.

The existence of Mithril and adding Roll-Ups into the language system, that's just better utilization of the blocks. Yeah, it requires a hard fork for fast finality, but that's a subset of the system where some SPOs come together and create finality locally so that transactions can settle. But it doesn't change your incentive structure, how Genesis works, or any of the security guarantees.

That is a parallel work stream to this work stream for Basho. This one right here is already underway, and you guys are seeing it. Hydra is on mainnet, Mithril just got on mainnet, sidechains are very mature, and lots to say in just a little bit about it.

Mithril didn't exist until two years ago as a paper. Now it's on mainnet and it's working its way into wallets throughout the year. The sidechain set of things is in the code side and it's going to be on mainnet sooner than people think. It's going to add a lot of dimensions of complexity to the system.

So, you have security guarantees that what happens here is the same as what happens down here. So, we're moving along and Mithril is the same way. And as things move over to intersect the Cardona members based organization, Cardano core node will be that way. The network stack will be that way. The smart contract project will be that way.

You get better data availability primitives. You got Mithril coming. And it's all evolving in parallel as you look. And yes, input endorsers are underway. People say. Oh, did we abandon input endorsers? Ohh endorsers are bad. No, they're not or.

The very next thing after that is input endorsers. Is it necessary when you got Hydra and Mithril and you got rollups on the way, and you got sidechains. It will be and it will be in a horizon about three years to five years. That's when it's necessary.

Now the other thing that's been happening is that we've done a really good job of speeding up development. You may have noticed that there's been several major releases of things like, for example, Mithril and starting to work its way to mainnet, and we just made an announcement there.

Now companion project is Mithril. And there's always been a big debate about how do we intend on using Mithril. So, Mithril is kind of our in-house super lightweight proof certificate, and there's been an enormous discussion about optimization of them, reduction of certificate proof sizes. In fact, we managed to get Leo Reyzin from Boston University to come out to the University of Edinburgh, spend the summer with us to talk about version two of it. But the Mithril team has done great work, and now it's getting to a point where Mithril is getting mainnet ready for version one.

On the light wallet side, it means you can vastly improve the security of light wallets on the full node side there's a discussion about using Mithril for parallel validation of Epochs, meaning you have a Mithril certificate for each epic and you can sequentially validate them against and parallel validate each of those Epochs against them. So potentially your validation times scale to the amount of processing cores you have in the system. So much much much faster sync for full notes.

So there's a lot of discussion right now about where to take Mithril beyond just wallets, and in particular, we're very interested in using Mithril with. Input endorsers and that whole work stream, and how one can kind of put parallel validation together with it.

And so we're writing papers right now along those lines. And there's a beautiful combination of concepts from parallel chains and prior papers, the extended UTXO model and Mithril certificates and putting these things together, so watch for that throughout the summer.

The other side of Mithril is the combination of Mithril with more sophisticated and heavier cryptographic primitives, in particular recursive snarks.

They can actually be used together and where they would be most useful is when we talk about the sidechain model of Cardano, so the whole sidechain ecosystem and also about reducing the size of Mithril certificates so that they have more ubiquity.

This is how I'd like to spend my time. Now there will always be a need for infrastructure and because of the way I've structured IOG, we could have a subsidiary that worries about infrastructure and wakes up every day about increasing throughput, making Hydra better and Mithril better and making sure to implement all the white papers that the scientists have written.

...crypto Tech Generation is venturing into Cardano, so Mithril and things like Roll-Ups are what we're working really hard on. It seems like it's so far away, but actually, Mithril is not. It's almost mainnet ready, and it's going to happen before the end of the year. There will be Mithril enabled wallets for both accelerated syncing and full node security. It's pivotal.

...process for adding these capabilities to the system and hopefully, also give some understanding as we go into July about what a tendering process would look like for community tooling for CIP1694 and how big of a delta that's going to be. So, a lot of progress there, a lot of great progress with Mithril and Hydra. So, part of the Lace initiative is and the...

The initiative is starting to pull together a working group to talk specifically about what it is going to take to do Mithril integration into a wallet. Lace will more likely than not be the first mover and bear the burden of the integration costs, but if we do that in the right way, it should be relatively straightforward for other wallets in the Cardano ecosystem to...

...adopt-- uh, excuse me-- to adopt Mithril into their stack and massively improve security. So, what's happening with Mithril is we're starting to get to the hardening and auditing part, as opposed to the functionality part. Probably one more Pi cycle is going to be required for that, but we will dig deeper into the details. However, I wouldn't be surprised to see that library being...

...an integration-ready state is probably in the summertime, and then it's just a question of how quickly it can be integrated into a wallet. There are two different modes with Mithril: one is full node security for a light wallet; the other mode is fast sync for a full node. Basically, it allows you to do parallel validation of epochs, which effectively gives you a chance to go...

...multi-core so, basically, however many cores you have, you can sequentially validate each epoch out of band, and the Mithril certificates give you a checkpoint to let you know that each of those epochs looks good. Um, there have been some discussions about congestion control on Cardano, most notably with the Meld issue, as there's a whole working group that's come together to kind of talk about this.

...the construction of Mithril certificates, you're going to have a situation where stateful operators create intermediate certificate advocates and exchange them amongst each other using the protocol. Then they eventually assemble the final product and commit that. There's a lot of batching that also happens in Hydra. This is a reused pattern again and again, and it would be nice to have a...

...The Pi cycle, it's really exciting to see how that's been growing. So, we're just firing on all cylinders there. There has never been this volume of work progress, and just diversity of progress, in our ecosystem. Literally, there are major innovations and side chains, governance, consumer software, identity software, off-chain frameworks like Hydra for systems like Mithril, and language design like Plutus...

...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...

...mainnet; that means over the horizon, as we look to the next 12 to 24 months, that tech stack is going to get increasingly more integrated into every single application people build on Cardano, where they need that scale. Mithril continues to evolve at a blinding rate and my hope is to see Mithril-enabled wallets on Cardano on mainnet before the end of the year. We look to things like the...

...who refuses to acknowledge your existence or give you the benefit of the doubt? There's no productive way to get anything out of that. Uh, you know, since we've accomplished nothing, I was like, Okay, instead of UTxO, we created Marlow. Through this, we created the Ouroboros consensus model. We created NiPoPows, which makes Bitcoin considerably better. Or, we created Mithril. We created, uh...