Public blockchain project Cardano just touched a major milestone and is progressing as planned, according to founder Charles Hoskinson, co-creator of Ethereum.
Hoskinson announced upcoming staking and the testnet release date via Twitter.
“The tentative snapshot date will be November 29th, we will do an information dump on December 5th for all the staking rewards information including percentages and the testnet will be released December 9th. These dates are subject to development milestones.”
Cardano, which utilizes the cryptocurrency Ada to send and receive digital funds, promises to revolutionize the crypto space and power the most highly-advanced smart contract platform by implementing more sophisticated features than its competitors.
On Wednesday, Hoskinson gave a shout-out to the team of developers using the programming language Haskell to bring the project to fruition. His message draws attention to the work that is happening behind the scenes, far away from the speculative trading that commands much of the interest in cryptocurrencies.
As developers work to build a more open and accessible global financial system, progress appears to continue despite market volatility, lack of regulatory clarity and pushback from governments, policymakers and incumbents.
Says Hoskinson,
“Congratulations to the entire Haskell team for the release of Cardano Haskell 1.0 to the relays and soon new core nodes. This is a major milestone stemming from over a year of intense effort and I’m incredibly proud and pleased to see this entering production.
We should also take a moment to recognize that this release moves beyond just a Haskell application. It also serves as reference code for how an application should be built in Haskell and proof that Haskell can be used to build real applications that are competitive with the mainstream languages. As it’s open source, this knowledge is now available to the entire Haskell community and the broader development community.”
At a recent meet-up in Dubai, Hoskinson charted the type of drive that gave birth to Ethereum.
It’s the same drive that continues to fuel the engineers who are building the next generation of infrastructure that aims to push cryptocurrency onto the world stage as viable payment options for everyday transactions as well as the currency of choice to complete fast, secure and inexpensive cross-border payments. Several years ago, when the price of Bitcoin (BTC) initially rose from single to triple digits, and as BTC began to garner more attention, developers wanted it to do more.
“Here’s what happens when people start taking you seriously: they start pointing out all your flaws. They point out all the things you can’t do. And that’s where Ethereum basically came from. It was a project of frustration. All of us who created Ethereum back in the day, we worked on different projects…and basically we had this problem where we said, we want money to be programmable. We’d like, for example – when you send a transaction – that you can specify your terms and conditions. You can specify redemption conditions. You can create other assets, like your own tokens. And it turned out that on Bitcoin this was super hard to do…
So Ethereum was really the second generation. Let’s make money programmable and useful. Just like Bitcoin, Ethereum was an experiment. We had no idea if it was going to work or not. We would have planned things a little differently if we actually knew it was going to be as successful as it was.”
As Bitcoin and Ethereum grew, it created a new industry. The ecosystem has evolved, sparking significant challenges and the next generation of cryptocurrencies designed to meet the need to scale, maintaining, if not improving, transaction speeds as the user base grows.
Says Hoskinson,
“We’re now going to have hundreds of thousands, millions, billions of users. We’d like these systems to actually talk to the legacy financial world. We’d like these systems to be in compliance with the legacy financial world.”
…
“Beyond scalability and interoperability, now that we’re victims of our own success, is the who-pays and who-decides. Who will pay to maintain these systems, upgrade these systems and how do you do that in a way that doesn’t centralize around a particular actor, and how do you decide how to upgrade the system? How do you decide what to do with the system?”
Hoskinson says now is the best time to be in the cryptocurrency space as builders are working on a diverse range of platforms that are tackling problems, devising infrastructure for the world’s next-generation stock market or venture capital fund or a game. These new systems can be global and open in scope.
“This is infrastructure that you have equal access to – as I do, as do the people in Africa, as do the people in Argentina, as do the people in Asia. There’s never been a time in human history where we’ve ever talked about a global system – where everybody has access to the same thing and everybody is on equal terms. That’s why I’m in the space.
I didn’t really sign up to go ahead and replace the dollar. It’s a good pursuit but the people who try to do that tend to get shot. I signed up because I really want to innovate. I really want to change the world. The reality is there’s a lot of people living in the world right now who are excluded from the world.”
You can check out Hoskinson’s full discussion here.
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