IOHK Summit 2019 (My Big Takeaways)

This post is about the big takeaways I personally got from watching the live stream of the IOHK summit that took place on April 17th and 18th. Now this is just my opinion and this is not everything that was presented or shown. Video of the live stream is available on the IOHK YouTube Channel if you would like to check it out for yourself.

with that lets begin!

IOHK and the Cardano Foundation have a partnership with Tangem and they worked together to create a Cardano/ADA Card. From what I can tell so far it is a form of cold wallet storage device with a security chip that allows for NFC payments, and all attendees received one for free. It supposedly allows for offline transactions which is great for building a payment infrastructure in countries that may not have internet. This card has the ability to be updated. Some of the functionalities and features they plan to add in the future is quite amazing in my opinion. They plan to have this card act as a form of Identification for people. This is huge when it comes to people in third world countries who for the most part do not have any form of ID whatsoever. This I would imagine would have huge implications in countries that have any form of voting and could play an important role in not only limiting if not completely eliminating fraud in the system but may in fact encourage people to vote and raise voter turn out.

Another feature that may be implemented is the ability for this card to act as an access key which could have many applications from security to a persons right to be in a certain area giving people security clearances of sorts. Possibly allow people to access a file or deed to a house the potential uses are countless.

Again as for developing in third world countries this gives people a way to save their personal wealth in a way that they couldn't before. This is crucial who do not have access to the traditional monetary, banking, financial system, or the world economy at large. This would be the stepping stone that will then allow them to finally participate with the rest of the world.

These devices pictured above are Rock Pi(s) created by Marcus Gufler and Robert Kornacki of clio.one. This hardware device will allow anyone to run a stake pool at a low cost in terms of the device price and the low energy consumption. Another benefit is it's small size. They will cost about 80 to 100 dollars

Here are some of the main specs listed above for the more technical people. Once everything in Cardano is up and running (stake pools, nodes, smart contracts, voting center, treasury, dapps etc.) the estimated energy use of the total network is said to equivalent to 1 household or 3 air conditioning units for one year, at least that is what I have heard and have been hearing.

Now Shelley is the next phase in Cardano development which will allow users to stake their ADA coins and get rewards based on a Proof of Stake system (POS) instead of a Proof of Work system (POW) as well as fully decentralize the Cardano Network. During the Summit we were shown some demo pictures on the whole process and how for the most part staking and stake pools work. Now even though we do not have a specific date on when users will be able to stake we did recently get formal specification papers on Shelley on I believe April 16th. Plus the 1.5 Daedalus is technically the first Shelley update that allows for the foundation of Shelley to be rolled out gradually over a series of updates. Just think of it this way Shelley is there but in a hibernation state and will slowly wake up overtime.

IOHK also talk about working in Ethiopia and Africa and there goal in building infrastructure and the 23 students who completed their training on developing and coding. Again as mentioned before it is a big step to bring a financial infrastructure to those who don't have access to the traditional one. Now imagine, because I was thinking how incredible it would be if one or a number of these developing countries were to adopt Cardano ADA as their national currency and have them "leap frog" first world countries and fully implement and integrate crypto-currency in their society. There is just so much potential in that prospect.

Then there was also a discussion of how blockchain can improve supply chain lines. It will provide more accountability and reassurance of the current state of a given product providing details and information on when it was produced where it was produced and any other relevant information one could want or need depending on circumstance.

Now a lot of people were anticipating that the big announcement the implementation of Shelley, that was not the case. We did get something called ATALA by IOHK. So what exactly is ATALA? Well the simplest way I could put it based on what I heard is a way to put data other than money on the blockchain. Data like:

Degrees
Car registry
Assets
Deeds
etc...

ATALA vision is to do for all kinds data what Bitcoin did for money.

There are three components that make up ATALA a Ledger Framework, Data Framework and an Agreement Framework.

A simple example of this is say we have a product and we have a Buyer and Seller. The Buyer and Seller would be part of the Agreement Framework component. The Manufacturer of the product would be part the Data Framework component providing all information/data of the product. ATALA would be part of the Ledger Framework component in essence I believe will be recording everything to be stored on the blockchain from my understanding, please know that I could be wrong on this process in part or in full we may just have to wait and see what is to come.

That was the end of day 1 of the summit.

On the second day of the summit we were given information on future development on the Yoroi wallet. First was their new slogan which is: Yoroi wallet your gateway to the financial world. They plan on doing a lot more to connect crypto to the real world.

They even shared some stats like the fact that they have 30,000 installs across all platforms (chrome, IOS, Android, Brave Browser) Also that Yoroi is storing 20% of all ADA which is pretty amazing being that the relatively new. They also talked about their recent ledger support and custom themes in the wallet.

Announcements were made that Paper wallets for Yoroi would come in April though no specific date was given.

Another was that they plan on having Firefox support for Yoroi in May, again no specific date was given.

Ledger Nano X would also be getting supported through the Yoroi Mobile wallet this summer of 2019, no specific date given.

Lastly there will be multi-sig and a staking center allowing for staking in both the mobile and browser extension versions of Yoroi.

Seiza means constellation in Japanese So what is it in the context of cardano? It will be a new Bockchain Explorer It will allow users to get all the important information they need regarding stakepools as well as having a staking simulator. it is supposed to make traversing the blockchain easier for users while providing all the most important information. Plus it will have a darkmode. It is set to be released in early May.

Lastly, even though not absolute last thing mentioned at the summit was a startup by the name of Tesseract. Now I don't have much to say about this but that's only because it is simply explained: They do dapps (decentralized applications), but more importantly they can bring dapps to mobile phones.

If you want to check them out go to:

gettes.io

Well that is pretty much it. Of course this wasn't everything if you want to see the full summit watch the video of the stream on IOHK You Tube channel.

I hope I was able to present and break it down for people who want a summarized version who didn't see or didn't have time to see the full summit stream

Thanks for reading, hope you enjoyed and got the information you needed out of this.