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...

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.