What it was all about was that you have Cardano assets and settlement. There we go, stroke width, all that stuff, and we'll zoom out just a little bit. There you go, assets and settlement. You have things like Cardano native assets, you have ADA, you have the extended UTXO model, you have Plutus, you have Ouroboros, and other artifacts that exist there. It's a real technological marvel when you look at what we've constructed...

So there are programs like Ouroboros Leios. There are PR programs like Babel fees. Uh, there have been huge improvements made to Plutus in the family of languages that compile into it, like Aiken, for example, which is a community project. Uh, and refinements and iterations to the extended UTXL model and obviously, a lot of discussion around improving the native asset standards...

...the thing is, this was built to be a tank. Uh, Ouroboros is absolutely extraordinary. Plutus is great, Extending UTXO is great. We're not going anywhere, and with Leios and other things, we're going to make it really fast. That input endorses an agenda, and there's a great roadmap here to make Cardano best in class. There's a whole bunch of great infrastructure here, but just because you...

...you know, those are the two big things I would love to see get done. Uh, you know, from a research perspective there's Ouroboros Leios and input endorsers. We worked really hard last year to lay some of the foundations of input endorsers as the directionality of the research. And this year, we've been kind of tightening the bolts, and really..."

Try a completely different execution model scripting language. You will have very different demands regarding your data availability, your storage requirements, and how you manage your blockchain. You will need different things that Ouroboros is not going to necessarily give you. You may want a different consensus notion and these types of things. So, it makes a lot of sense, for example, with World Mobile...

In 1694, for example, there were a lot of internal workshops that were related to particular technology. For example, we just finished a workshop either in Scotland for Ouroboros Paros. There's a huge amount of work being done under the hood. In addition to external meetings, such as the monthly meetings we have with the Wyoming stablecoin commission in the state of Wyoming for for their stablecoin.

Mitrhil 2 is almost done and about to be published. We're wrapping up our Ouroboros Leios, and hopefully, that'll be a strong end of year publication. Uh, that's the bedrock, uh, the backbone of what we'd like to do with input endorsers. So, there's now a whole prototyping stream that needs to be done for it. Uh, Praos, as I previously mentioned, is the finality gadget of Cardano, so that really...

Ouroboros still remains the best consensus algorithm in the industry: liquid, non-custodial staking, no slashing, no bonding. You don't lose your money, and the founders aren't afraid to stake their own money. Little things like that really do make a big difference. Also, it's a very extensible protocol family. The enormous amount of science that sits behind it is evident. I see a lot of lies floating around.

Ouroboros Leios, which is the input endorsers workstream, will allow mass parallelization and high-speed layer one. But we are also looking at rollups as an ecosystem, side chains as an ecosystem, and yes, evolutions of Hydra. I made a 45-minute scalability video about these things. But what people do is they take a single quote, a single paragraph, a single notion that was there to elucidate...

Advantage: liquid non-custodial staking with Ouroboros is the greatest example of that. Whereas Ethereum went down a very different road, which I personally believe is going to centralize their network and create unpleasant regulatory realities, especially in Europe. When you look at extended UTXO, it's very easy to graft on an accounts model. But at the core, with extended UTXO, you get all the...

Better, Mythril keeps improving. We continue to make advancements in the theory of Extended UTXO and the theory of Ouroboros. There have been various extensions documented and are currently under active development, such as finality gadgets and Genesis. Additionally, there is a promising plan for side chains, which I believe people will be very...

There's a wonderful website run by somebody in the community, and it's called HoskSaid.com. What it does is it takes all of the AMAs that I've done, and I suspect they'll even take this video. They aggregate and you can search and look for things like, for example, what did I say about Ouroboros? Then it'll say, "Oh, these are all the different YouTube links of things I've said."

said about Ouroboros, and it takes these nice AI transcripts. So, I asked the people who created the website to create a section where you guys can ask questions. They're now aggregating here, and there's a very long list of questions that are starting to aggregate. So, let's just start here, and I'll look through quickly. I only have a little bit of time, so I figured, why not?

One is the VRF improvements need to be obtained from their current state, which takes around an hour. However, this hour does not assure the absence of a rollback, especially for side chains. In practice, it usually takes just a few minutes to achieve sufficient finality. After that, the subsequent phase involves incorporating an actual finality Gadget into the system. This is a supplementary protocol that operates on Ouroboros, and it is part of the post-genesis work stream.

Called Ouroboros PRAOS, it takes you from about an hour to a magnitude of about 10 minutes. Then, when input endorsers come, upgrade it one more time to get to about the minute range. Then, what you do is, if you want sub-minute latency, you create smart contracts that provide instant finality, and somebody takes that finality risk for about a minute.

So these are continuous processes and while they require in some cases hard Forks like adding new versions of Plutus in to support proof structures and also the fast finality is something called Praos that's the next version of Ouroboros after Genesis that basically gives you a finality gadgets at the system so you can have fast settlement on both sides the main chain the sidechain and sidechain the main chain.

Now it turns out that occasionally you have rollbacks and based we're not roll ups roll backs and based upon the nature of the algorithm like Algorand versus Ouroboros for example they have different views of these things. Some things have fast finality and once it's settled there's no rollbacks other things they allow a probabilistic rollback so that's why people have to wait usually some X blocks for something to be really settled.

So there's an ongoing very aggressive research thread here. It's called Ouroboros Leios, and they're making really good progress. Praos is the high priority right now because fast finality is required as one of the last pieces to get side chains to work really well. That same team is also working hard on Leios.

We are among the most cited and respected research groups in the world. When you look at the raw citation count, thousands and thousands of citations for things like parallel chains and Ouroboros and all of the different papers, Ledger Redux, etc., that have been written to talk about how one would go about putting a protocol together that moves the trade-off window.

The basic idea is you establish a technical baseline showing you know how to read and actually work on the code, you establish a baseline for how everybody works together in the system, and then you establish a baseline for how Cardano works under the hood. Network protocol, extended UTXO, how Plutus works, how Ouroboros works, all the APIs etc etc. So, basically these type of things will get you up to speed as a core dev. So, if they are designed correctly, you should be in the position and demonstrate enough technical skill that you should deserve credentials.

So, while Proof of stake was under construction. There were papers being written like GKL and or Ouroboros ros Classic, and these types of things. There was a parallel effort that was looking at all kinds of advancements and proof of work. And so, there's log space mining, not outsourcing puzzles. Things like Minotaur eventually came of it, which was multi resource consensus and NIPoPoWs was another really, really big one.

Ouroboros Leios are still under construction. There's a paper coming out. Now there's some priorities. Got to get Ouroboros Praos out, Genesis out. You need to bootstrap from Genesis and we need to get that into the network. And you need Praos because you need instant finality, fast finality, so that your sidechain transactions are fast on both directions. BFT on this side it's Ouroboros on this side you need some form of finality gadgets.

Ouroboros Genesis was published in 2018. It was a very academic paper, and now there's been a deep and detailed design effort that's been going on for about a year now to translate what was inspired from the paper into a practical protocol that can be plugged into and on top what we have for Praos. It's a different chain selection rule, so there's going to be a handoff from the design team to the implementation team soon...

...Plutus, like Plutus V3, Plutus V4, and all the advancements that they're doing there, as well as natural iterations of Ouroboros, like after Genesis is out. I'd really like to see Praos and Chronos next year, so you have fast finality gadgets and proper timekeeping. I also really like how Hydra is evolving and I just love the complementarity...

What is the desired settlement time? A closely related topic is also finality gadgets inside the system. We're currently working on a paper called 'Ouroboros Praos'. Gotta love these names we use! Basically, it's about how we construct some form of a finality gadget on Cardano. Currently, it's in scope for use in sidechain transactions.

...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...

Whether we talk about evolution or the consensus protocol with Ouroboros, it continues to grow in great papers like Leos and Praos, among others. These will provide a lot of insight into everything, from finality gadgets to parallel chains that can be high throughput and allow asynchronous calculations to occur. We really have matured as an ecosystem.

...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...

When you do a consensus upgrade, it is a rather significant event for your system. However, this particular protocol is much simpler than Ouroboros Genesis, which means that testing can be done more quickly. So, 1.5 is on its way. Look for that and you can watch it work its way through QA if you're clever about how commits work. We'll let you guys know when and how that's, that's going to come out.

Over time, and while working our way through that event, we discovered there were many small details in the specifications that needed slight changes here and there, and cleaning. However, what we've managed to do is mostly resolve that. Now, we're in the process of taking the implementations that we've done for Ouroboros Praos and Genesis, and then deriving specifications from those implementations.

Now, I've got some questions. Why are we doing this? What was the point of the variety of this Q&A process? Well, it's because I've noticed repeatedly on Twitter and Reddit that people don't really understand how Ouroboros works, how staking works, or even the basic mechanics of what we're proposing. For example, there's this impression that you have to freeze your ADA...

...a great example of this is where it has a lot of merit, and in some cases, trusted hardware is magical. However, scientists can make a career out of finding nothing but holes in that scheme. When I was at CCS in Toronto, right after we presented Ouroboros Genesis, just down the hall, there was a group of scientists. They've published several papers showing where Intel's claims about security are wrong.

...rigorous mathematical description of how staking works, but this is not consumable by the general public. So, our hope is to work with you guys to basically create some content that everyday people can understand. About what his registration, the stake pool, how staking works, and some of the dynamics behind Ouroboros. So, in the description of this video, after I get done shooting...

...which corrects a few of the lingering issues from versions 1.4. In 1.5, the users won't immediately notice any difference. There are no material changes being made to the wallet back-end, and no material changes being made to any features. So, you'll install it, but nothing will happen. It'll just be like your normal wallet. But under the hood, what's happened is that we've stripped out the classic Ouroboros implementation...

... and we've replaced that with Ouroboros BFT. Now, this is the first step on the road to Shelley. How Shelley is going to work is that there's going to be a series of iterative updates that will first put core infrastructure in place and then basically put a process into place that will gradually decentralize the network, epoch by epoch. So, the first...

...infrastructure or Ouroboros BFT, the next infrastructure piece, is going to be version 1.6, which will ship the decoupled wallet. So, if you look at our repositories right now, you'll see a repository that says 'Cardano wallet' and we're almost done with this. What's going to happen is we've taken the current Cardano wallet, which was coupled with the back end, Cardano SL repo.

...to get the Rust client ready by sometime in February so we can launch a test net and start the process. Essentially, what will occur is two parallel efforts being made by two separate teams. One is about getting the core infrastructure constructed and verified. There will be a series of gradual updates, starting with Ouroboros BFT decoupling, and then verification.

...doing that is recognizing that we already have a pretty cool unit of time for a system that's an epoch and that currently consists of twenty thousand six hundred slots. So what we can do is take the Ouroboros BFT Federation and say okay, instead of making one hundred percent of the slots at time equals zero, epoch equals zero - Schelley, it's only going to make 90 percent, for example, and then...

...network is just a temporary measure to ensure high security and all the rewards go to the actual slot producers, so that's kind of the road we're starting with Ouroboros BFT. That's the protocol that will be used all throughout the life of Shelley to get us to Shelley, decoupling a bunch of wallet-specific features - excuse me - and then from decoupling, we're moving on to verifying that the new Rust back-end...

...Proof of stake paper and other side chains proof of stake papers were accepted to Oakland. Oakland is a major cryptographic conference put on by I Triple E. In fact, it's one of the hardest conferences to get into. The original Ouroboros paper was rejected; instead, we went to crypto. So, it's really exciting that the sidechains paper is much better and the sidechains...

...getting some pulmonary benchmarks for Ouroboros Praos way back in the day, this was in 2017. They were asking for a greater than 200 PPS rate. So, we said that's great; this gives us a lot to work with because Bitcoin operates at a much, much lower rate. This is about 30 times better than that, and for most networks, this seems to be a pretty reasonable load for sustained rates.

The mechanistic way, a mathematical way, is called parallel chains and parallel chances. It was written by Mathias Fitzy, Peter Gauzy, and other scientists. This is the very first step in the Ouroboros Hydra research agenda. Basically, we know all the common charting techniques. These parlances have existed for a long time, and we know how to run chains in parallel. You know, that's not rocket science.

And so forth, there are details that have to be worked out. That is why we also have this aggressive side-chains agenda. We are pushing really hard to get parallel chains and side chains to eventually converge together and become Ouroboros Hydra, which will be kind of the capstone protocol. Now, the idea there is this concept: as you add more staking pools, more delegates, more people doing...

Dollars are being spent on a regular basis and with lots of great engineers, not just scientists, we're building practical production things and getting these things into circulation. So, that's your spectrum, and those are the three areas in research. We have Markoff Cole Weiss leading the zero-knowledge side of things. He figured out a way to make an Ouroboros private if we ever wanted to go down that road. It's

...called Ouroboros ???. So, it's impossible to pronounce all these Greek names. We also have him working on a lot of zero-knowledge stuff related to these types of things: off-chain verification, programs off chain calculation of programs on chain verification. We have been parsing the Lightning world, and we're setting up a dedicated group in the first half of 2019.

There are some discussions about given how transmit our blockchain, given how our network stack works and given how Ouroboros works, what's the most optimal way of doing a light client but this is not insurmountable challenge, and the advantage would be that when you download that you just click it, it boots up very quickly, kind of like how Yoroi boots up quickly and then when the background if it's left on it will gradually upgrade itself to a full node, but it should not stop you from using the wallet.

So we have to do that first. Cardano 1.5 should be dropping soon. It's going to be a singular update. It's movement from the old Ouroboros to Ouroboros BF.

OK, so basically how Ouroboros works in a nutshell is that you have this concept of an Epoch, and you have slots. So, an Epoch is a bounded period of time, and it could be a day your week be a month right now we've set it for five days. Slots are what you conventionally think about as a block producer, so in a Proof of Work system, when you win a block and you have the right to make it, that's what we can eventually think of as a slot. So, Epoch has a fixed set of slots. In case of Cardano is 20,600. For this version of Ouroboros. OK...

So, in the testing dimension we have a family of new protocols. We've constructed new network protocol, Ouroboros Genesis, the delegation scheme and the incentive schemes that we've come up with has alongside this concept of stake pools and all the logic behind them.

Now we've written prototypes now of our network stack prototypes now, Ouroboros BFT, Praos and Genesis and we've written prototypes of other types of some of the delegation mechanics as well as the incentive scheme.

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...

We've evolved quite a bit in our design of protocols so what Ouroboros Genesis looks like versus what we have in our repo are very different things. So, there's going to have to be at least one fork to get us to Genesis. So what we've decided to do is use a halfway house solution where we implement Ouroboros BFT...

So basically, you're going to see 1.5 Ouroboros BFT. We’ll give everybody a heads up about that and we'll have a much more graceful upgrade path.

That will be done in a very visible, transparent way, and what will likely happen is that we'll have a gradual winnowing of Federated control to decentralized control, where Epoch by Epoch basically more and more of the slots are made by stake pools and less and less the slots are made by the Ouroboros BFT. And then eventually that just disintegrates and 100% of the slots are made by stake pools following the protocol.

We've had a huge amount of successes here with the Ouroboros program. I think this is one of the crown jewels. There's really two major crown jewels of Cardano's portfolio, the other being Plutus and Marlowe, and our work with Yella and K and Ouroboros is the other crown jewel.

We've had a huge amount of success with it. Starting with Ouroboros Praos earlier this year, going to Israel to Ouroboros Genesis, where we went to Canada, to CCS to or Ouroboros BFT and all those surrounding infrastructure around Ouroboros, we now have multiple implementations of Ouroboros BFT. We actually have five separate implementations for varying degrees of uses...

From our enterprise Ledger offering to ????? Involved Cardano and things on the Scala side, we also have several prototype implementations of Ouroboros Genesis. In fact, the Haskell implementation of Ouroboros is so elegant you can reparametrize the same code base to run a BFT mode Praos mode, Genesis mode and you can even put in different network stacks, so it's pretty cool.

The delegation work and the rewriting of the entire code base. The smart contract stuff was done by a scholar team and done by a language designing team. The language designing team was led by Philip Wadler and Wilshire Vardy ?????, and they're based at University of Edinburgh, and they had their own group, their own resources and they were following a two-year track and that Plutus track and Marlowe track have now come to a research end, and we've been moving into actual implementation. So none of the Shelley delays from the Ouroboros side and the delegation side cascaded into the language side...

So the first major update will be basically some new code for Ouroboros BFT and that will get us all lined up so that we can start moving towards some variant of Ouroboros either Genesis or something along those lines. We've been...

...doing a lot of test implementations of Ouroboros BFT, we've actually have five different teams that are using it in various capacities, and we've learned a lot about that particular protocol, and we recently published the paper on eprint Ouroboros BFT.

We chose a top-down approach for it and we've come up with all kinds of cool, interesting novel solutions to various problems that are endemic in the entire network the world of the cryptocurrency space and some that are specific that we have to overcome for Cardano, given the nature of Ouroboros, it's a completely new protocol but overall things looking pretty good there.

VRF implementation and test KES implementation is done for Ouroboros.

We have a paper coming out soon called parallel chains that with the sidechains research, it will converge to Ouroboros Hydra.

We also are kind of keen to understand what a quantum adversary looks like. So what does an adversary who has a quantum computer? What are all the things that that person can do? It goes beyond just breaking signatures, and that's a really deep and interesting topic, and it's an under study topic. So it's something we'll definitely. Do after we have our feet wet with just picking a signature scheme for Shelley and then moving beyond that, we'll examine Ouroboros in that perspective.

Especially with the papers that I see our cryptographers writing, it's it's really admirable where you can see the development of Ouroboros, where first it started from a very rigorous definition of what is a blockchain. That's the GKL model.

And then from that they say, oh, OK, by the way, we can create that secure Ledger using this beautiful construction and it's secure because we can prove these interesting things about this object called for couple strings and then based on that, you can just keep going and going and going and talking about networks and all these other things and you can even throw away the clock. We have this new thing called Ouroboros Chronos. It allows you to abstract that out.

Ouroboros is just streaming along. We have many prototypes we've created. We have new variants of the protocol coming out almost monthly It seems. From privacy preserving ones, the BFT ones, we see great acceleration and progress with the Rust Cardano code base and the Cardano rewrite is progressing with great speed, so Shelley is coming and it looks really interesting.

We have an enterprise version of Ouroboros called Overboard BFT. We also have a version of Ouroboros with probabilistic finality that we could deploy for permission letter to your setting and it would be nice to see if we could.

So the next step is to Ouroboros BFT, the paper for That will be published at the end of the month and that's a halfway house protocol between what we need right now, Sarah Kyle didn't fully implement Ouroboros the way it needed to be implemented to make It easy to move from Ouroboros to Genesis. So we have to fill that in and Ouroboros BFT is a really, really simple easy way to do that for us. So we have a plan.

So 1 aspect of the post 1.4 work will be Ouroboros BFT as a halfway house transition for us to get to Shelley. Another dimension of that work will be decoupling the wallet backend which is currently connected to the Cardano client to pull it off as an independent standalone product.

Building manual transactions and offline transactions and extending that API for other parameters like delegation and so forth. We can do that without being on the normal release cycle for for Cardano. So those are going to be near term goals. That we're working towards me and meantime we have three parallel teams working full time on all of the Shelley related stuff, some on delegation, some on Ouroboros Genesis. Other dimensions of that stuff and some on the new Ledger rules You know some on how we're going to extend the UTXO set to include Plutus and Marlowe. It's a humongous amount of work.

The next versions will be on Ouroboros BFT and decoupling of components in preparation for Shelley. And then Shelley testnet next. And then after that, it's basically Shelley. Decentralization. Then very short leader after tackle on the side chains, extended UTXO and yeah, Plutus, Marlowe and then K-EVM and IELE. So lot of stuff is coming soon and long long overdo.

So at I'm heading to Canada on Sunday to go to CCS. It's a major cryptographic conference where or Ouroboros was accepted for Ouroboros Genesis.

…preserving our principles, it's obviously imperfect, but actually if you look at the productivity of the Ouroboros team as the case study or the Plutus team as a case study, uh, we're moving as faster, faster than our competitors. In fact, in our opinion, we feel we're ahead of Casper and in our opinion we feel that...

And there's just a heck of a lot of cool innovation and interesting things going on. So there's a lot of great case studies. Learn from there, but it's important to understand that to build a good protocol is about a three to five year endeavor. We've been working on Ouroboros for about 3 years no. Just now, and we're just now starting to see the real fruits of our research agenda.

Second, you must function effectively in a team environment. Research is a team sport. Our team working on Ouroboros includes ten people from different universities and different walks of life. Some are more mathematically inclined, some are work horses, some are idea people who don't enjoy putting things on paper. They come up with profoundly amazing ideas, but a harmonious team is vital.

In the original version of our protocol, Ouroboros, we follow a protocol called "follow the Satoshi." We've made some slight adjustments to that for subsequent versions. The principle remains that if you own 25% of the supply, you should be elected 25% of the time or delegate that authority to someone else to create the next block.

Start with probably the one of the most interesting fights recently, this is tell us about the Twitter fight with V so no Twitter fight with V yet, but basically what happened was that we had a thread about Ouroboros Vitalik posted some questions and concerns about Ouroboros.

I answered Vitalik, answered back, and then I realized that Reddit probably wasn't the best of mediums, so I had a discussion with the scientists behind ouroboros and I said, could we write a formal rebuttal?

All of the ouroboros papers have been accepted, major conferences, people from all over the world.

Core claims of ouroboros.

What's extraordinary about that statement is despite the fact that we've been publicly working on ouroboros for over three years, and he never really reached out to us.

We got some great things coming for ouroboros to accelerate downloading the blockchain.

We're going to go ahead and work on Ouroboros Hydra.

Will there be a minimum stake required to register a stake pool in production? Yeah, I've seen this a lot where they say, oh, well, only 100 stake pools can exist, or only 100 people can control the network or something. It's. It's crazy. OK. So first, Dpos and Ouroboros does not stand for delegated proof of stake. Some people can't read. I'm not going to mention their names, but they can't read. It stands for dynamic proof of stake.

Then it's actually advantageous to have a lot of stake pools because instead of having 100 people do the same thing, you're having 100 people do different things. So, it's probably a good idea to have tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, millions of people involved in the validation and consensus process, because then it means you're getting amplification. As you add new nodes, not replication, that's called Ouroboros Hydra and it's a research effort that we're right now looking aggressively into from principles and as we enter 2019 and 2020...

His name is ????? who's from Switzerland and he worked at ETH Zurich, and we brought him on board specifically to work on this type of project. And overtime you'll see some papers being published. If you're more curious about trade off profiles, there's a great paper called Omni Ledger OMNILEDGER, which is written out of Community College and Ecole Polytechnic, CERN. And this is a starting point, and we'll do the exact same thing with Ouroboros Hydra.

We have invested over $2.24 million, written 5 papers in three years on just the Ouroboros thread. That, and we've involved ourselves with institutions. I think 8 different universities at this point. People who at those universities have gone to euro crypto crypto Eurocrypt again and will be at other conferences soon showing off this technology.

But once we've solved something and we're confident about that, that's granite, it's bedrock. And we're starting to really seize great fruits being produced. At this point, we're very confident that or Ouroboros Genesis is a wonderful consensus algorithm to run a cryptocurrency with. And what you'll see, our delegation and our incentives paper, these three things together are everything that you would need to run something much better than Bitcoin, much more performance than Bitcoin. And it doesn't cost billions of dollars a year to run.

On on the longer term horizon, we are working on the formal verification and specification of Ouroboros Praos, which is the next generation of the Ouroboros protocol.

We're trying to make provisions to accelerate that work stream. But it is among the most technical and complex of all of our work streams involving the production of a new psyche calculus, as well as a lot of coding and languages like Isabelle, so the preliminary work has already been done. It's public and we have a repo and I believe it's IOHK Ouroboros spec on GitHub so people can follow along, but there's quite a bit more to do.