Now, things like BLS for example are a big component of this but there's other constructions that are needed and that's coming in Plutus 3.0, for example, the very next version of Plutus BLS support.

Optimizations is about better resource utilization while on chain. For example, Plutus 2.0 that shipped with Vasil, you'll notice a lot of the DApp developers saying hey we've had a 10x Improvement in terms of the utilization of resources.

So, a script that's a kilobyte now is a hundred bytes. Well, that's crazy, that's a 10x that means just much more efficient utilization of the resources that we have. So, there's lots of iterative optimizations that are being done on the network layer, the block structure, the authenticated data structures that are used, Plutus optimizations and other things which gain meaningful percentages over time.

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.

Optimizations obviously are happening on a regular basis. For example, you guys saw node 8.0 or the Vasil hard fork with all the Plutus improvements that have happened. So a lot of people have strong opinions one way or the other, and that's why decentralized governance is so important. Those opinions really do need to be included and discussed.

It's easier to draw it, it slows me down a little bit, and also it allows us to have no ambiguity, which is very important. Right now, we have the IO repos, and they're going to move over to the Intersect repos. At Input Output, we have this concept of tribes, and each tribe is connected to a different concept like smart contracts, for example, core technology. Smart Contracts covers things like Plutus, Marlowe, extended UTXO, core technology covers core node, network, consensus, we have tribes like identities, sidechains and so forth.

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.

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.

People are actually swapping real time while I'm talking, and it's a Plutus V1. So this I'm in a very efficient contract. Ooh, some scripts. Over here, people are using smart contracts. You got NFTs, smart contracts, DEX transactions.

Now, here's the thing. Every one of those blocks. They're going to get more efficient; Plutus continues. To get more efficient version one, version 2, version three, is on the way. Already a 10X reduction you go from like a KB to 100 bytes. Many cases for things. And Plutus V3 three even more capabilities, like BLS and these things, so more stuff goes in to each block.

For example, BLS support and Plutus is on the horizon. There's a lot of really cool things to announce second-half this year about the side chain strategy and what will come to play.

We look to the future and the vision there's plenty of things we're going to need to do to clean things up. Improve TPS, make transactions a little better, make it easier to write smart contracts. But let's look at how far we've got. Wasn't too long ago that we didn't even have smart contracts in the system. Now we're in version 2, soon to be in version 3 of Plutus, and we've already gotten a 10X improvement in many different categories, and it's much easier to write contracts today than it was just a year ago.

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.

Then you have Plutus and there's still a lot of scoping right now for V3, there's a lot of optimizations that still need to be done. The question is how much is semantic level, meaning it's hard fork and it's a different version versus tooling like improving the compiler and the tooling and the SDK and these types of experiences. Plutus team hard at work in those definitions, but one real important thing is BLS signature support, because that really opens up a lot of capabilities.

Given Plutus has a limited time budget per blog. So, things like BLS are pretty straightforward. Pasta would not be. So therein lies kind of the rub of of what needs to be done to accommodate heavier, more persistent, event oriented crypto primitives without necessitating field arithmetic conversions. So, conversion like a Pasta to a BLS because it's a very expensive conversion of a of a proof.

So that's why a lot of the dapps and define Cardano are so novel, interesting and innovative, because they've actually had to redesign and rethink their protocols from the perspective of extended UTXO and for Plutus.

That's great, but on the other hand, on the peripheries of it we have a very vibrant, diverse set of opinions, like for example, the programming language side with projects like Aiken. Radically different from Plutus and people are trying to bring TypeScript into Cardano. There are sidechains that will come like flowers, thousands of them blooming over the next 24-36 months.

As you know, we have a long academic legacy here at input output and we have many incredible research fellows and senior research fellows, but one of my personal favorites and a good close friend who we've collaborated with for a very long time throughout the legacy and the Co inventor of Plutus, the programming language of Cardano. Philip Wadler, professor Wadler at University of Edinburgh, has been elected as a fellow at the Royal Society and I just wanted to share my screen real quick for the press release.

Fellows are elected for life on the basis of excellence and silence, and are entitled to use post-nominal FRS letters, Wadler is one of the legends in many things. He created Haskell with many others, and also he's contributed to C#, F#, GO, Rust, Scala and Swift. But for us he's the guy that helped us design and think about Plutus. We're so proud of him and it's a great honor that we have as a senior research fellow, someone who is a royal fellow like Sir Isaac Newton, Charles Darwin and the rest.

Keep chipping away at it. There's obviously a lot more work to do on peer-to-peer, lot of quality improvements to do. Plutus 3 to do. So, there's a whole family of non-governance things that are under heavy development right now in Cardano node, but in terms of Cardano node 8.0, this is a major step forward and obviously there's a few known issues and various things. So, if you take a look at this list, these are some of the known issues.

So, for the users of our testnet if you've used Mallet to deploy smart contracts to the K-EVM and into Yella, a lot of those concepts and ideas that we have there will be taken and put into Cardano wallet for Plutus as well as the eventually the sidechain connections that we have for Yella and for the K-EVM.

So given that Plutus is embedded within Haskell, if we're going to have a good experience with people deploying these scripts and running those using Template House code on the client side in addition to the blockchain, the server, we need to have a way of getting this into a browser and there's two routes we can take.

It also means that when you write a Plutus style smart contract, your development tools, your development environment, and even the Dapp deployment environment could conceivably be 100% inside the browser or within Daedalus because Daedalus is built on top of electron.

So, the question is, will security tokens be a sidechain or will they be incumbent within the system. The nature of Plutus and Marlowe makes our system uniquely well suited for people to build an asset that will conform to many of the characteristics that just mentioned.

And one of the things we wanted to do before we got there was first have a really deep understanding of how expressive our UTXO model was going to be. So, we needed to create Plutus and Marlowe for that, second, we need to have a really good understanding of how we wanted to handle both delegation and voting. These are the ingredients that go into address complexity.

And the goal there is to try to make that transition as easy as possible. That's reflected with the Plutus mindset with our organization where we see there's just a fundamentally different way to write these types of applications, which is more elegant, more secure, lower cost to maintain and more realistic with how these systems are actually being deployed.

So, we have Haskell, Plutus, Marlowe. It runs the client server and blockchain and there's lots of things we can do within that model, to make those things easy.

If we're right and we think that we'll do for a new paradigm. Plutus will take off and become the successful paradigm and be able to go off and convince people that this is the better way of doing things.

Hi Charles, can you please talk about your plans for Plutus hackathons getting devs on board to learn Plutus. Thanks very much. So, the good news is that Plutus already has a fan base and a user base.

So in my view, when you're trying to prove out an ecosystem and show that an ecosystem can really do something special you invite the best of that party and we felt that by going niche with Plutus in Haskell, this would give us the best opportunity to do that.

Now, I love comments like this, Cardano has no smart contracts it can use today, like blockchains already have. We have 3 testnets. You can run Plutus contracts, you can run EVM contracts, and you can run Yella contracts.

I just returned from my long trip all around the world. I final trip was in Scotland; I was in Edinburgh for Plutus Fest and that was a great degree of fun. I had a chance to finally sit down with the Plutus and Marlowe team.

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.

So we're going to be doing the workshop for IOHK and some of our third-party partners come early January in Berlin specifically about the delegation specification and to finalize that specification, much like Plutus Fest kind of forced us to finalize the specification for Plutus 1.0 and Marlowe 1.0, we'll be doing the exact same with the with the delegation specification, which will also be made publicly available, just like the wallet backend spec was made publicly available.

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, there's still a lot more to do. There's still a lot more testing to do, but the concepts like extended UTXO, how Plutus works, how to integrate Plutus, how to integrate sidechains. How to run a sidechain with the Mantis network and roll that over into production code...

Now, because Plutus playgrounds are out, and Yella is out. People are using these things to write interesting scripts and anticipation for the network launching.

Coming home for a little bit, then I'll be in Vegas, and I'll be in Scotland for Plutus fest and then from Plutus Fest I'm going to, I think Abu Dhabi and then after that I'm going down to Uganda where we're going to have a lot of cool announcements about various things we're doing in Uganda and that'll be in December. So,look for those.

But our our Pan-African strategy is really coming together and it's pretty amazing to see how fast things have been growing in terms of Plutus fest, that's going to be really cool. The Plutus team has been working for about a year and a half on Plutus.

And they've really done some amazing things there and Plutus fest is the first opportunity to kind of show this off to the world and we're working really hard to make it easy for people to write test Plutus contracts.

We have this concept called a mock chain and basically the mock chain is making it like a fake blockchain so you can write all these Plutus contracts and you can deploy them on the mock chain and run them and it's an operating environment that's kind of like what you would expect when the Plutus gets integrated into Cardano.

So, so Plutus Fest will be really the first time we open that up and do tutorials. And our hope is to probably have a hackathon or something like that along with a few tutorial sessions. There are going to be two tracks with Plutus Fest.

And that's that's mostly meant for the PHD's and people who care about that stuff and then the other track is going to be for developers. People who are interested in writing Plutus smart contracts and people interested in this extended UTXO model, as well as how does Pascal, Plutus, and Marlowe, How do they all fit together and what does that development experience look like.

So we're going to have a lot of people and you'll have a first-hand chance to meet them. Talk to them. We're going to be giving away free T-shirts, some mugs with the Plutus logo and some other surprises. We're also going to try to get the operational semantics of Plutus on a napkin because back in January of this year in Portugal, we were amused aloud if it was possible to get the semantics so simple that they could be on a dinner napkin.

And they're going to be quite robust and a lot of them will deploy relays in addition to just doing staking services. And there's a strong potential we could layer on top of that a payment channel system and layer on top of that and oracle system and federate these things. So that's going to be a high priority for 2019, especially as we pull Plutus into the base ledger.

Is Plutus going to have dependent types like Idris, ADGA, or COQ, that is a really good question. The closest I think will come to that is probably refinement types. If you're familiar with Liquid Haskell, you should look that up, and those ought to be sufficient for most verification work that you want to do. We could do dependent types, but then it begs the question of. Would it just simply make more sense to write an Idris to Plutus compiler? And then you could just simply write things in Idris. You know, and then you could reuse that ecosystem. But we find that types are certainly something we're interested in. IOHK is going to start investing money into liquid Haskell and making sure that that ecosystem becomes much more prevalent. We're also going to start investing money into GHCJS.

So it would be nice to see liquid Plutus and bring that in. So that's something we'll definitely talk about at the summit.

Plutus fest is coming up in December, and we're going for the first time ever show off Plutus and Marlowe and let people write smart contracts and have a great chance to understand this new innovation that we brought to the space our sidechains research it's really just incredible.

Phillip and Rick, I think are going to do a phenomenal job and we also invited them to come out to Plutus fest, so hopefully I'll be able to meet them in person for the first time ever, and hopefully they'll be able to do some episodes there and interview Philip Wadler, Manuel Chakravarty, and the rest of the people on that team, including Duncan Coutts. So that's all I have to say here.

It's not an end all be all technology, and it's not something we've bet the entire farm on as we have a whole team doing something very different with Plutus. But it is something we feel gives us a really compelling story about interoperability and can bring a lot of mainstream regular everyday developers into our system. Having this almost universal language.

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.

…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...

Can you explain the difference between Plutus, Marlowe and IELE and the K-EVM? So, you can break smart contracts and financial transactions into kind of two worlds. There is the world of I am sending some notion of value between one actor or group of actors to a another actor or to another group of actors.

So Marlow and to a certain extent, Plutus is about that notion that saying I want to have very rich financial relationships and transactions between Alice and Bob or Microsoft and Google or Goldman Sachs and Chase. I want to have an ability of writing down intent...

So that's the difference between the two. One, it's really all about. I want to write better financial transactions and better assets and these types of things, the whole family of thought. And that's what Marlow is all about. And to a certain extent, Plutus. And then the other side of it is all about, I want to have a that service in that triangle to do something for my application, which is going to run on your computer on a server.

And kind of the utility side of allowing smart contracts in some form in a functional form at the base layer with Monroe and Plutus and the extended UTXO model or if it really ought to be outsourced to a different Ledger that's meant specifically for safe contracts.

Whereas Plutus is a completely new thing and there's a lot of potential execution.

So we've already started some preliminary discussions like we talked around JIT and Nikki wazoo about Liquid Haskell and this idea of introducing refinement types into our own development process and it'd be so cool to have, like liquid Plutus or something like that where we can introduce that notion into our stack.

Bitcoin only covers a small sliver of it, and that's one of the original biggest frustrations that I had and others had with Bitcoin was It only covered a sliver of this beautiful, rich financial ecosystem. So what we decided to do is say, all right, why don't we build an accounting ledger that allows you to represent the types of assets and those types of transactions in the most efficient and parallelizable way possible? 00:20:29 So, you can get these to scale long-term performance, but then you can also do everything that Wall Street is used to doing. So, we created a domain-specific language called Marlowe. We also created a general-purpose programming language that was functional that Marlowe embeds in called Plutus, and we really rigorously thought about the UTXO accounting model. We also came up with a method to issue assets within that model that's interoperable with the Ethereum-style account.

What's really exciting is Plutus and Marlowe, cause that's a totally new thing and we think people are going to really love that. And our hope is to pull that into SL itself if possible, so that you have the absolute best Ledger to issue assets on if that's your desire.

And we're glad to see that there is still some innovation there. We still do learn from ideas that Blockstream has presented. Russell O'Connor's work on simplicity, for example, was very elegant and really helped us think through some ideas about Plutus. We would hope that the Bitcoin core developers take some of our work more seriously, in particular, work on sidechains, and in particular our work on UTXO wallet design.

But we can install IELE, which is a cardano's virtual machine, into this framework and then deploy a test that so that we can begin testing Plutus and solidity smart contracts on the IELE virtual machine so that we can do things like fine tune the gas model and also clean up a lot of the engineering rough edges.