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.

Okay, so Hydra is middleware. It's on mainnet, and it's growing very rapidly. So, the release cycle is not like, oh, this big thing, it requires a hard fork. No, it's a straight-up smart contract, and the idea is that a dApp takes Hydra, and then it starts putting some stuff off-chain.

In fact, if you guys want to participate, I'd recommend you go to hydra.family. This is the website for it, and you can see there's just an enormous amount of stuff going on. And if you go to the Discord, a lot of, let's see, how many users are there, actually 1600, 12000 members that are online right now.

And there's a big chunk for the Hydra community, and then you go over to GitHub, and you actually take a look at the project, you can actually see here the roadmap. Things are moving really quickly, and this all the stuff that's already been released, and these are all the cards for various things.

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.

Also, a lot of traffic gets driven to the sidechain which means there's less load on the mainchain. So, there's some things that you do to get stuff off the chain. So, Hydra for example gets stuff off the chain, roll-ups get stuff off the chain, side chains get stuff off the chain.

Babel fees also will require a fork and fee markets will require Fork so there are some things here for the 2024 and Beyond agenda but this is a very easy to conceive of system. Hydra will continue its rampant Evolution and for the most part will work its way into a lot of dapps that require scale and consistency.

The job here is to get the proof of concept finished and have a very clear view, continue the research to basically get those designs in place, and then kind of let the community decide. When you look over here, there really isn't a movement in the trade-off profile. The existence of Hydra doesn't change what people signed up for with Genesis.

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.

There has been eight years of research. Probably about 30 of the 180 papers in the portfolio that we have is strictly about the Basho era. There's been enormous wins. Hydra didn't exist as code three years ago. Now it's on mainnet. People are using it. An open-source ecosystem is growing around it and it evolves every week.

It builds on how we've handled a universal backlog and it can learn from things like how Hydra has been a very successful open-source program and then we get to do some cool new things like blockchain-based certificates to get credentials so you actually can drive some of the change of Cardano onto the blockchain itself.

That's the point of good governance, that you can get things done but you get wise good things done on a regular basis. What's also super cool about this structure is that this structure can act as a primary secondary concern. What I mean by that is that you have Cardano as your top-level project but then you have these other projects like Hydra for example, Open Prism, Plutus as the language because that's different, Marlowe.

...from the IO GitHub repos to the Intersect repos and how we intend on an open-source project kind of growing and really becoming the thing that we've all wanted to love and treasure. You know the code is open source. We certainly have a lot of contributors across the space that work on it, but we could do better if we look at Hydra, for example, there's over 40 people show up regularly for the meetings that are happen. There's already parallel projects like Hydrozoa from MLabs.

..and a lot of third party contribution for the HYDRA code base and a nice open cadence as well as everything living in git. So that's what we should aspire for, and it's going to be a lot of fun to move things over. A huge amount of progress as well on CIP1694, we had the workshop in Edinburgh. It was very successful as a closing workshop to finalize a candidate spec and now Sanchonet is underway. That is a very specialized test net specifically to give Bleeding Edge features.

Hi Charles, how's the update with Hydra? Great to see aging. Guys, Open source software is like this. Let me show you a little something. I'm gonna. I'm gonna show you. I'm gonna show you guys some right here.

This is the Hydra, website hydra.family And it has a user manual use cases, core concepts, topologies, benchmarks, API reference. OK, if you click on GitHub. All right, so if you go ahead and take a look at the project. Here's the road map. This is all publicly available. You guys can all see you asked me in the AMA, but really with an open source project you just have to see things and if we take a look at our releases, uh, let's see here code and we go over here you can see 7304 commits.

You can see all the features, event source, persistence, authenticate network messages. Ability to read protocol parameters by APIs. Submit layer one transactions through Hydra node, remove commit. These are all features anticipated for 0.12.

Where do they come from? They came. From the open Source project all the. People using Hydra, all the people building on hydro, all the people excited about hydro. That's where they came from and they're right here right 1/2. And to less than .1, they're all features that they want to do beyond the point 1-2. Really. So, the team of people from the community work every day and these cards are well defined features in a backlog.

The intent of Hydra is that it works its way into as many gaps in the Cardano ecosystem as possible. And that software as it evolves, makes using Cardano better, faster, cheaper and gives properties like instant finality and other things. Now those capabilities are not ten years out. They literally are evolving week by week, by week by week and do not require a hard fork of Cardano to work.

So, Hydra is an indispensable long arc thing. That every week, every month, every year, you come and look at it. It goes from wow we're playing around with it to its running on mainnet to it is in many of the applications in Cardano. Now you sell those things like a million TPS. It's very unfortunate people even thought this way because at the end of the day, what they're really talking about is you're alleviating the need for TPS.

Because you're creating something in your application with other components where a lot of your logic is now running a lot of your expensive stuff is not running and the end result of that concept is what? It is better, faster, cheaper, less TPS on the main chain or TPS over here, lower latency. Free transactions, instant finality, all kinds of capabilities. That's the point of Hydra, and there's isomorphism.

It's a lot of work and to bring all these different people and they have working groups for different concepts like the core node, scalability, things like smart contracts, identity etcetera, etcetera. Lot an enormous lift. So much work has to be done. But as it moves in that direction, you can see a single concise website. And you're moving from left to right. Right. And the community is deciding the cards just like with HYDRA that go in there and every day you come back and week by week, by week, things get better, faster, cheaper.

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.

And you got that. That's what you have. That's Cardano. When you're a Cardano user, that's what you have, alongside Hydra, alongside Marlowe, alongside all these other things, plus the best community, the cryptocurrency space. I don't know guys, you know.

And bolt load of stuff to do download sanchonet we'll have a website for it, just like we have for Hydro dot family and obviously all lives in GitHub, just like Hydra does. Can't wait to see what you guys construct and a lot of really exciting things to come. It took a very long time to build all these pieces and all these pieces are now coming together.

Hydra is still moving at an extraordinary pace, the development of Cardano node. Now that we're on the 8.x is moving very quickly. Lace has a monthly release cycle and we've already gotten to version 1.31. 1.4 on the horizon here, just a a little bit.

...backlog actually turns into a full open-source program and we've learned a lot about how to do this in practice from projects like HYDRA, for example, which have a very high level of community participation and a pretty agile high-volume process.

There's now so many different ways to participate from the CIP editor process to Sancho net to building governance software, to participating as a dRep, to joining intersect, to building new software in the ecosystem, to contributing to an open-source project. TXPIPE or HYDRA in the ecosystem, being core developer.

The reality is that we're all working together and we're getting a lot of progress. You know, Cardano is really maturing. Cardano node 8.11 is incredible. Plutus is really shaping up, especially with BLS support on Plutus. Lot of wonderful things happening on the sidechain side, lot of really wonderful things happening with HYDRA.

Come on. Let's be good. Let's be positive. Let's look to the bright side of things and the industry as a whole, our best days are ahead of us. We got Hydra, we got rollups, we got great sidechains. We, you know, we got amazing things coming in Africa. We didn't give up on anything.

There's also an enormous amount of effort with Mythril and HYDRA at the moment. Hydra team continues to deliver very rapidly and there seems to be some misunderstanding over Twitter and other places where people say when HYDRA, when it's Hydra coming, Hydra is running, it actually does work on the mainnet and there's a very vibrant community of developers that are using it as middleware and exploring and experimenting with it. From Obsidian to MLabs to others who are actually intending to take Hydra to the next level, so the core team is speed. And Hydra technology continues to improve.

It's not like a light switch where something gets delivered and then magically everything is insane and great. It's a spectrum, and the point of HYDRA is to be software to integrate into people's dapps, to reduce the on chain blow, and on chain operational cost and improve the speed and finality of things.

Now there's flavors of Hydra, like the tail protocol and head-to-head protocols, and these types of things. And those are road map items with this rapidly advancing team. And what's wonderful is Hydra is probably the best open-source program that we have in the Cardano ecosystem at the moment, given the level of collaboration the meetings regularly have more than 40 people in them from many different organizations, and actually the Cardano Foundation is even Co developing HYDRA and they have developed dedicated developers on it along with Obsidian and IO and other people.

So it's a very decentralized program already and it's gotten a lot of community adoption. So we're we're really proud of that team and what we're trying to do is just make sure that it continues to improve in velocity and gain more resources and throughout the year, it's going to just keep being built up and it'll get more and more capabilities if you go to hydra.family you can actually see the website for it and if you go to the GitHub you can see the entire road map and what's planned in each of the releases.

And the advantage is here they're kind of pre-set up to start adopting technologies as they become available like Hydra for example. So it's exciting to see those types of things and it's exciting to to see things work their way through.

And when you take a look at the technology, as we move towards the members-based organization, the repos will move over and it'll be a complete end to end contribution, open source contribution guidelines very similar to how HYDRA is materializing as a program and project.

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.

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

Doctor Fong recommended intermittent fasting, so I decided to bring that into my lifestyle about six months ago. I went from my peak, 242 pounds to about 220 pounds and so I've lost 22 pounds since I've done that, and I feel a lot better. The only meaningful change has been going from eating whenever to eating within an 8 hour window every day so I don't eat for 16 hours and then I eat for between usually 12-8pm. I've been trying to get to a ketogenic diet so that's a diet mostly based on fat and protein and not much carbohydrate.

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

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.