Author: kopi master

Goguen: Plutus and Marlowe

Of Tokens and Dapps

Goguen is Cardano’s smart contract platform for building a global social and financial operating system.

Currently with Shelley, developers can already build web/mobile frontends (e.g. wallets), integrate with payment gateways and build apps that transact with Cardano (e.g. games).

Moving on to Goguen, Cardano will be implementing multi-asset ledger, Plutus applications and Marlowe contracts.

Multi-asset Ledger

You will be able to define, forge and transfer your own tokens on Cardano, and this does not require you to invoke a smart contract to make transfers or maintain balances, unlike say DAI on Ethereum. Not only is there no cost or performance penalties involved in handling custom tokens, users also inherit the security model of the Cardano blockchain.

You will have the ability to view your transactions and balances on a Cardano wallet and explorer, and you can use a simple graphical user interface for issuing assets on Cardano.

Even before smart contract deployment, you can already do many things using the native multi-asset ledger, namely issue utility tokens and branded currencies (e.g. used in gaming), and run loyalty and reward programs. With smart contracts, you can operate collectibles, crowdfunding and auctions.

Plutus Applications

For Plutus, Cardano is splitting the release into two phases,  namely Plutus Foundation and Plutus Application Framework.

Plutus Foundation, the first phase, enables smart contracts on the Cardano blockchain. With this, we can build Escrow-based DEX, ICO with vesting periods, payment channels, centralized stablecoins and traceability solutions.

In phase two, the Plutus Application Framework will continue to improve developer experiences, by allowing them to focus more on specific business logic for their applications. The use cases here are lending and microfinance, stablecoins and derivatives, tokenized securities and assets, identity management, and voting systems.

Potential upgrades to the Application Framework will add functionalities such as libraries for building oracles and decentralized identities, and managing regulated assets (security tokens).

An application store can also be built as a way to publish and distribute applications and updates.

Marlowe Contracts

Marlowe is a domain-specific language (DSL) based upon the Plutus platform and it allows domain experts to build financial contracts without having to first master a difficult programming language.

Marlowe utilizes visual programming tools (lego-like blocks) in an online development environment to implement standard financial instruments (including the ACTUS standards).

Hence, Marlowe is an easy-to-use smart contracts development platform optimized for finance. It is a fast track for finance experts and finance engineers to build smart contracts with blockchain technology. It is also a prototype DSL for similar languages in insurance, supply chain and legal.

See below for the Goguen rollout plan.

Adrestia: Gateway to the World

Personalized Addresses Anyone?

Adrestia is the goddess of revolt and vengence.

Which is rather ironic, because Adrestia here is all about building bridges. And these very important bridges allow external parties and apps to communicate with the Cardano chain.

Adrestia is Cardano’s Gateway to the World

Cardano-wallet, ReST and Graphql bring chain integration to wallet apps, exchanges and blockchain explorers. Haskell Shelley mainnet is built to be robust, so as you can imagine, it is not an easy task to build bridges to Daedalus etc. without sacrificing security and performance. Rightly pointed out by many, Adrestia is not the light of the Cardano party, unlike Goguen or Voltaire. But it remains an understated yet critical piece of the Cardano infrastructure.

The implementation of Bech32 will soon allow personal & recognizable addresses, a great boon for wider adoption of blockchain technology. Not sure about you, but I can never remember the string of 20+ alphanumeric characters for my public wallet key.

Also discussed is the possibility of “Polyglot”, meaning additional support for languages such as Javascript, Python and perhaps Rust. Currently Haskell is the only available language target.

Official Links:

Adrestia User Guide: https://input-output-hk.github.io/adrestia/

GitHub: https://github.com/input-output-hk/adrestia/

Rest of 2020 for Cardano

ERC-20 Converter and More

As we accelerate toward Shelley mainnet hardfork on 29 July, Charles has explained in a little bit more details on Cardano’s path ahead for 2020.

August is the month of clean up for the core engineering team after the hard work of Shelley mainnet launch. But other teams running parallel projects will still go full steam ahead.

August will be the month of Voltaire, with topics of balloting and dcfunds coming to the fore. The big question here will be “Who should get the money, and for what?”.

We can also expect developments on Ledger, Trezor and Yubikey (firmware, etc) to be announced.

Moving on, in September/October, Native Assets and related topics of security tokens and stable coins will be the focus. In addition, Charles has revealed that there will be a ERC-20 converter built by an external party on a fixed cost contract. This is exciting news because this converter will allow current ERC-20 tokens on the Ethereum platform to be redeployed easily onto the Cardano platform. The issue of high gas price might prove to be a push factor for ERC-20 tokens to migrate to Cardano.

Hydra (scalabililty) and Cross-chain communications (inter-operability) will be the focus for the remainder of 2020.

And this is merely the technical roadmap. Hopefully soon we will receive some updates on the commercial and regulatory fronts as well.

Value Proposition

Why Delegate to KOPI

As a pool operator, KOPI’s responsibility to our delegators is to provide consistent rewards.

KOPI would also like to provide the best bang for buck setup to maximize your rewards.

To do so, KOPI needs to:

  • Provide an optimal pledge
  • Minimize operating costs to provide low fixed fees
  • Set a margin that preserves delegators’ rewards

Let’s address these three points in details:

(1) Pledge

The size of our pledge reflects our commitment to both the stake pool and the Cardano eco-system.

In an ideal world, all the stake pools will have as large a pledge as possible, so that the delegators can receive maximum reward.  This is because the larger the pledge, the larger the rewards, while keeping all other parameters constant.

However, this is impractical due to two points:

  • To have a large pledge, the operator must buy the required amount of ADA. Not all operators can afford these purchases. To this end, the Cardano eco-system ends up with fewer small-size operators and more large-scale multi-pool operators. This is unfortunately against the spirit of decentralization and the promotion of small-business operations.
  • The marginal increase in rewards tapers off dramatically with increasing pledge. As an example, the  extra rewards generated by a 2m pledge vs a 200k pledge is visible, but not significant.
Hence, with the KOPI philosophy of decentralization, our stake pool will commit to a comfortable pledge to secure rewards for delegators.
 

(2) Fixed Fees

Fixed fees should ideally reflect the operating costs of the stake pool.

Operating costs include the costs of hardware, cloud-hosting, web-hosting, electricity, broadband, etc.

In the interest of delegators, it is the operator’s responsiblity to minimize costs without compromising on performance.

It will be fun for a stake pool to run the fastest CPU, with the fanciest GPU, until you realize these enhancements add substiantial costs and only contribute minimally to pool performance.

Similarly, it will be technically awesome to run a pool with fifteen relays on all six continents, until you realize it comes with both financial costs and computing costs. And again, its contribution to pool performance is minimal.

Remember that Cardano does not require a computing arms race unlike BTC.

The Chinese saying “不管黑猫白猫，捉到老鼠就是好猫” is particularly relevant here. It does not matter if it’s a black cat or a white cat, as long as it catches mice, it is a great cat!

As long as performance is not compromised, KOPI will use the 80-20 rule to minimize our operating costs and maximize your rewards.

(3) Margin

Margin is the variable fees allocated to operators before rewards are split among delegators.
 
For the delegators, you should want to see minimal margin.
 
For the operators, you can, but won’t, set sky high margins, because free market will decide your pool’s attractiveness.
 
KOPI believes that margin should be a fair reward to operators to compensate for their dedication in running, monitoring, diagnosing, and upgrading their pools. Without stake pool operators, there will not be a secure Cardano eco-system.
 
Moreover, time and efforts are required to write up blog posts, send tweets and in general, keep the public up to date about happenings within the Cardano sphere.
 
KOPI will set a fair and competitive margin to maximize your rewards.

Tony and Jimmy Saga

Decentralization: BTC vs ADA

This is an important whiteboard video from Charles that illustrates the path to decentralization (or oops… federation) for both BTC and ADA.

To summarize a 40mins video into a few lines, three factors point in favor of ADA vs BTC:

  • Decentralization does not depend on patented technology (no need for ASICs)
  • Decentralization does not depend on power costs or geography (consume little power)
  • Decentralization does not depend on wealth (as long as you can afford some ADA)
It is crucial for Charles to provide a timely response to Tone and Jimmy’s accusation of Cardano printing free PoS money, for having no security, and for not being decentralized.
 
And to be expected, many Cardano (or PoS) fans are rallying and calling Tone and Jimmy stupid, or worse (or much worse).
 
However, I think that they merely act in a way that is (1) aligned with their BTC interests, and (2) out of fear of both their individual and their chosen tech’s (BTC) impending irrelevance.
 
Once you understand incentives vs outcomes, it all makes sense.
 
 
 

Staking Calculator

Worthwhile to Operate Stake Pool?

IOG has just released its Shelley Testnet staking calculator.

At first glance, we see that reward yield for delegators has gone down quite drastically from ~10% during ITN to ~4.6% for Shelley mainnet.

Although this is widely expected, it will still be pretty disappointing for investors looking for high returns in the crypto space. For perspective, one should note that bank yields globally hover around 0%.

There is no free lunch in the world. The lower returns also make the Cardano eco-sytem more sustainable for the long-term.

One heartening point is that marginal rewards from increasing pledge tapers off quite dramatically (using the start of mainnet settings). Putting up a 200k vs 2m ADA pledge results in a visible, but not too significant yield difference.

While taking into account the issue of Sybil attacks with the introduction of pledges, this does not preclude small pool operators from taking part. I feel that this is important as it’s in line with the spirit of decentralization.

We probably do not want to see FAANG among pool operators!

For more details on the reward parameters settings, please read the blog post “Iterating for growth with IOHK research“.

Scam Alerts

Twitter Hacks and Giveaways

Riding on top of the recent wave of Cardano giveaway scams, Twitter accounts of prominent persons such as Obama, Biden, Bezos, Elon, Gates, etc. were compromised today, and were used by the perpetrators to proclaim BTC giveaways.

Send me 1 BTC and I will send back 2 kind of scams.

Such free lunch is usually met with immediate skepticism by seasoned and wary crypto-folks. But giveaways  by “blue check marks” are rare if not never, and they do somehow offer a sheen of legitimacy.

And this is dangerous.

The use of 2FA and password managers seem unable to stop these hacks, and it is likely that hacker(s) exploited the weak link posed by 3rd party apps connected to Twitter.

Watch the related video of Charles discussing the recent Cardano scams below.

As Cardano progresses and gains prominence, scammers inevitably take advantage of the price bump to swindle unsuspecting ADA holders.

Stay safe on social media. If something sounds too good to be true, it most probably is.

Internet of Blockchains

Of NiPoPow, cLitecoin and GaaS

This video by Charles is mind-boggling stuff.

I had to watch it twice to have any semblance of understanding, as my mind was swirling with endless possibilities during the streams.

As of July 2020, there is no dominant or large-scale practical cross-chain communications among blockchain projects. At least I admit I have not heard of any. And other than the proliferation of ERC-20 coins building atop the Ethereum platform, we have also not seen many popular instances of projects communicating with and riding on services provided by others.

Now we have a grand vision for the future.

Harnessing NiPoPows, blockchain projects can communicate with the Cardano platform if they opt to, and this opens up potentials that are currently unavailable. For example, Litecoin owners can leverage upon Cardano’s governance and voting system and use is for their own cause, and in doing so pay for the services using wrapped Litecoin (cLitecoin) on the ADA blockchain.

Hence we can build an Internet of Blockchains (IoB) to bring out the best in all projects. I do believe that blockchain projects can co-exist, just like fiat and cryptocurrencies can co-exist. This vision by Charles and Cardano simply brings this beautiful and vibrant coexistance into reality.

The possibilities are endless.

1.15.1 Shelley Testnet

1.15.1 Shelley Testnet

KOPI has updated its Shelley testnet version to 1.15.1.

Mainnet candidate is currently on hold as the wallet backend will only be available later this week, so it is more productive for us to revert to STN to familiarize ourselves with the new bech32 address format and updated CLI commands.

We are now much more conversant with the process of Cardano build update and pool registration, after building and testing various versions since 1.13.0.

Watching the network topology spreads its reach and interconnects across the world is an amazing thing. The two KOPI relays are represented as red dots in the topology map above, which is rather symbolic since Singapore is also known as the little red dot!

KOPI Software

Software and Infrastructure Configuration

KOPI pool operation is based upon this software configuration:

  • Ubuntu 20.04 LTS
  • Cardano build 1.16.x
  • 1 block-producer node with 2-3 relays (global topology, see diagram below)
  • Firewall for block-producing port
  • Cold keys encryption
  • Grafana dashboard for monitoring & alerts