All news is rigorously fact-checked and reviewed by leading blockchain experts and seasoned industry insiders.
- According to Charles Hoskinson, Cardano has a competitive advantage over its competitors through the use of Haskell, because the programming language makes it possible to implement the phases after the introduction of Shelley much faster.
- With Cardano’s identity solution Prism, which will be presented at the virtual summit, IOHK wants to compete with big names like Microsoft.
In an interview with Ryan Selkis from Messari, Charles Hoskinson, the inventor of Cardano and founder of IOHK, spoke about the progress of the project, the challenges of the last weeks and the future roadmap. As Hoskinson noted, Cardano had a reputation in recent years for taking a very long time to develop and making no progress.
The last two years, 2018 and 2019, were very difficult years for IOHK, as the strategy was overturned and the company decided to go with Haskell, a programming language that is initially very difficult to learn. Currently, however, as Hoskinson explained, the advantages of this decision are becoming apparent.
But the reality is that all the things we were working on for the last 5 years are coming together all at once. Now we are in the situation where we can ship things in a matter of weeks that normally would have taken us month with the old code and processes. […]
The other thing is we are starting to get a competitive advantage from Haskell. What people don’t understand about Haskell und functional programming is; yes, it is very hard and there’s a big barrier to entry, but you have to write a lot less code, so cases 5-10 times less code than C++ or Java.
IOHK will present a new roadmap for post-Shelley developments at the virtual summit for the launch of Shelley. One of the topics will be how Cardano can be used commercially. One product that Hoskinson pointed out in particular was Prism, an identity solution that uses decentralized IDs and is also intended to compete with products from Microsoft, for example.
Like our identity product Prism. We gonna do a major demo at the summit in July and then we should give you guys a beautiful roadmap how we want to get it out in the market and compete with Microsoft and the other offerings, probably before the end of the year.
And what’s nice that is already used in production. We are using parts of that for the credentials system in Georgia and we are bidding on a farmers vouching system […] and it allows us to be very competitive in the permissioned ownership space which is where security tokens live and these other asset classes.
When asked how long it will take to release phases after Shelley, Hoskinson stated that IOHK made the mistake of showing linear development when publishing the roadmap. In reality, as Hoskinson explained, many development processes run in parallel. For example, there has been a Goguen team for three years now, and they are currently just waiting for Shelley to finish, so they can start programming.
Also, with regard to Basho, first concepts like sharding using Hydra have already been conceived. The same goes for Voltaire, for which there is already a whole team working on it. At the virtual summit, there will be more information on where Cardano exactly stands. In general, the ADA community can expect much faster results:
We have some surprises about the roadmap. In terms of the magnitude of the remaining work, there is significantly less work remaining that there was even a year ago. The hard part was to build an entire new cryptocurrency, we had to design a completely new network stack, we had to figure out how to get the consensus model stable … [and much more].
