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...

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.

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.

The design for Praos should work its way throughout the summer, and then the very next thing is Leios. And then with Leios, alongside lots of modeling, should have a direct line on the site of a very good design for the system. Then once that design is in place, the community through CIP1694 can decide if they like the trade-off profile, and then input endorsers can be implemented through a series of upgrades and iterations.

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.

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.

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.

...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.

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.

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.

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.