Since the release of mainnet, IOHK engineers have not only started work planning the new features of Shelley, the next big release, but have also been evolving the way they work. The biggest change is that the team developing Cardano will follow a new release cycle where updates are more regularly made to the live software. This is now possible because we have the foundation of Byron to build on. This approach will benefit the community because it means we can deliver features to users sooner, and also has other advantages, such as allowing us to design very detailed tests for the code. Considerable planning has been under way to help the team shift to this approach, and we are confident it will bring good results. This blog post explains what is happening behind the scenes. Cardano involves collaboration from several development teams working towards a common vision following the same roadmap. The development teams collaborating on the project include Core SL (Settlement Layer), Networking, Cardano Blockchain Explorer, Wallet Backend, and Daedalus. Development follows the agile software development approach, which allows us to continuously inspect, adapt and improve the way we build and ship Cardano. Agile is an iterative approach where software is built incrementally from the start of the project, instead of delivering it all at once near the end, as we did with Byron, the launch of mainnet.

The development teams working on Shelley now follow synchronized two-week sprints, which are a set period of time during which specific work has to be completed and made ready for review. There are daily meetings to coordinate the teams and resolve any issues. The product backlog – where the prioritized list of features are stored and is essentially all the work that needs to go into developing Cardano – is being managed in an issue tracker tool. Individual teams have their own sprints that take their work from this shared product backlog.

After a two-week sprint, we will deliver a testnet release. After a number of testnet releases there will be a mainnet release based on feedback from the community and internal quality assurance testing.

Our goal is to reduce the time between mainnet deployments. To release early and often, we’re adopting time-based releases as opposed to feature-based releases. Time-based release strategies are used in many commercial and open source projects, for example, Linux. Moving to time-based releases means no more waiting for features to be ready; instead we merge only the features that are ready at the time of the release. This doesn’t include patches, which are updates to improve the software or fix bugs, which will continue to be released when they are ready.

One of the problems with the "big bang" release approach we followed for Byron is that it creates a bottleneck due to problems coordinating all the features slated for release at the same time. Decoupling features from releases, where possible, means that in future we will not have to delay a release because we are waiting for one feature to be ready. It also means that we can focus on getting smaller features out of the door and into the hands of our community quicker. The shorter feedback loops allow us to gather valuable feedback from the community on the direction that we are taking Cardano. It allows users, contributors and stakeholders to prepare and plan around a predictable timeframe.

However, scaling this agile approach across several teams working on the same product brings merging and integration challenges. We are using a well known, successful git branching model called git-flow to help manage this.

Once a development sprint is finished, our DevOps (development and operations) team branches off the code from the develop branch into the release branch. Changes are deployed to internal staging and once testing approves the changes, they are redeployed to the testnet. Once we decide to release mainnet, the release branch is merged to the master branch and tagged. The master branch is therefore always in stable state as the mainnet. We’re working to align our processes to enable moving towards more frequent, scheduled releases. Once a suitable release schedule is decided it will be shared with the community. The process described here is not an end state. We strive to continuously improve, so updates to our release process can be expected as we fine tune our software development processes.

Artwork,

Mike Beeple

Since day one, Ethereum Classic has been driven by principles. What began as a disparate group of people who came together after the DAO hack and the consequent hard fork on Ethereum has now become a strong and growing community, united by a belief in immutability and that code is law. So it was tremendously exciting to see everyone gather at the first Ethereum Classic Summit held last week and watch the community move beyond the realm of instant messaging to interacting in person and making new friends. There were many highlights of the two day summit in Hong Kong. It was a moment to reflect on how much Ethereum Classic has achieved in a little over a year, developing its identity, building its technology and securing its future. Grayscale, which provides Bitcoin and Ethereum Classic investment trusts, has provided much momentum by organising this event.

Barry Silbert, founder, explained that Grayscale will put a third of its ETC fees for three years into supporting the growth of ETC though development, marketing and the community, and the ETC Cooperative has been established to do this. Barry told IOHK: “We wanted to do our part and help support increased communication, collaboration and bring together all the various stakeholders at least once a year. I’ve been super excited to see the participation, the level of engagement, the quality of the speakers and participants and think this year has been a huge success.”

Charles Hoskinson giving his keynote speech

What might come a surprise to some is that Ethereum Classic is not a direct competitor to Ethereum. In his keynote speech on the first day of the summit, Charles Hoskinson, founder and CEO of IOHK, and former CEO of Ethereum, said: “Frankly, we compete far more with Bitcoin. To me, Ethereum Classic is basically a digital commodity, it’s digital gold. It’s really exciting because it can give us a very interesting design space that we can explore that’s totally independent of the design space that Ethereum is pursuing. We don’t have to embrace proof of stake, Plasma or the fork of the week. Instead we can start with principles and we can grow from principles.”

Charles argued that two separate philosophies had always sat uncomfortably together in Ethereum, even before the community split. “We actually had two Ethereums from the beginning but we didn’t know that. We had two philosophies at the same time. One was this notion that code is law, that code can’t care, it doesn’t matter what you’re running and it doesn’t matter about the consequences. But there was this other philosophy, the notion of a world computer, the idea that you could have universal infrastructure that would be a beautiful computation layer that could be added to the internet. But the fundamental problem is that these things are philosophically so different they can’t coexist. When you’re the world computer you have to fork, you have to embrace mutability and have a lot of flexibility in your platform.”

Now more than a year after the split, Ethereum Classic has developed its own identity. It had a great asset in its principled and warm spirited community, Charles pointed out and championed the development work being done. “We see a lot of great things coming down the pipeline. It’s got to a point where we can prove beyond reasonable doubt that we can keep up with Ethereum Foundation and in some cases we’re writing better software. As a comparison, Bitcoin Core has about 110,000 to 120,000 lines of C++ code. The Mantis client does more and it’s 10,000 lines of code. It’s twelve times more concise. “The Sputnik VM, pulling the VM out and having it as a standalone, is a phenomenal idea, it’s a great piece of engineering. It’s far better than anything coming out of the Ethereum Foundation.”

A highlight of the conference was hearing about the steady pace of development of the ETC protocol. The eight-strong team of engineers that make up ETCDEV team are working on implementing the monetary policy, a flexible software developer kit that can be used to build applications on Ethereum Classic, and making performance and reliability improvements to the Ethereum Virtual Machine. Isaac Ardis, Go developer from ETC Dev, outlined the direction and purpose of the Emerald Project, which is not just a wallet but a library and suite of tools for third party developers. Licensing projects under Apache 2.0 makes them commercial-friendly, and easy to implement.

Igor Artamanov, CTO of ETCDEV, told IOHK that he believed Ethereum Classic would rise to be in the top three cryptocurrencies. “We’ll continue our work on open tools for developers who will build apps on top of ETC blockchain. Our goal is to set up development processes and help with building various tools for engineers and open source libraries around ETC.” A theme of the conference was formal verification, and on that topic Igor said: “It will be cool to have. We are not experts in formal verification, but if someone will decide to introduce it to SputnikVM, we’ll appreciate that.” On monetary policy, Matt Mazur, advisor to the ETC Dev team, gave a clearly explained presentation on ECIP 1017, the proposal that contains changes such as capping the amount of ETC that can be created, in contrast to Ethereum’s uncapped supply.

The [ETC monetary policy](/blog/ethereum-classic/a-joint-statement-on-ethereum-classics-monetary-policy/ "ETC monetary policy, iohk.io") is modelled on Bitcoin’s monetary policy, and is designed to reduce risk, create simplicity, and encourage investors. Every 5 million blocks, there is a 20 per cent reduction in block rewards. The question of how Ethereum Classic will scale has always been an issue of debate. Igor shared insights on how sidechains could be deployed, making use of public and private sidechains and having the main chain for security. Cody Burns, ETCDEV adviser, talked about cross-chain interoperability and how [cross-chain atomic swaps](https://medium.com/@DontPanicBurns/ethereum-cross-chain-atomic-swaps-5a91adca4f43 "Cody Burns, Medium") could allow people to exchange coins in a trustless manner.

There was news from the Grothendieck team, the IOHK developers that are dedicated to ETC and who have over the past year built the Mantis client for Ethereum Classic. Alan McSherry, team lead, gave details about integration with the Daedalus wallet. It will be fantastic for the community to have another option for a wallet, where they can securely store their ETC. “The Daedalus release is going to happen hopefully in December. That’s taking the Daedalus wallet, the UI that was built for Cardano, and putting it on top of our Mantis client, our ETC node, so you’re able to use a familiar UI with Ethereum Classic.”

Alan McSherry also offered a look at what the team are thinking about in terms of Mantis development in 2018. With regard to K Framework, the important research to create formal semantics of the EVM done by Professor Grigore Rosu at the University of Illinois, and funded by IOHK, he said: “With any luck, that will result in the possibility of writing Scala contracts that can be compiled to run on the EVM, or a slightly different version of the EVM, and we’ll have the formal verification and it’ll be a question of trying to create formal proofs around those contracts.” IOHK research into sidechains could allow the possibility of creating contracts to allow interactions between ETC and Ethereum and ETC and Bitcoin, while other features on the horizon for ETC include zero knowledge proofs and anonymous addresses, he said.

And Alan Verbner, developer on the team, gave a reminder of why the team use Scala. “Functional programming allows you to create less and more secure code and that’s why we are trying to build in Mantis compact code that is safe and you can check its correctness. Our client has 10,000 lines of code, it’s easier to read and easier to access. We are building open source software so we like people to look into it and analyse it to look for bugs and security issues. You have fewer lines of code to test.”

The theme of principles arose again when it came to hearing from Ethereum Classic miners. We heard how mining pools chose ETC because of the core principles of the community, proving the attractiveness of the code is law philosophy. There was good news from the 91Pool, the first group that ever mined on ETC, when Meicy Mei announced the group has purchased a building in Shanghai to serve as a dedicated hub for the ETC community in China, with a cafe and bar that will host meet ups.

A final reminder of the principles that brought the Ethereum Classic together came during an impassioned keynote speech from Meredith Patterson, an expert in programming language security. She recounted the scorn that Ethereum had responded with when formal methods of software development were suggested as a good idea. She argued that Ethereum Classic still had the chance to adopt formal methods – an approach that IOHK is a strong advocate of and actively pursues during its development process. For code to be law, she said, the meaning of the code must be unambiguous, and users must have the same understanding of it that machines do. Steps to get there include adopting a rigorous formal semantics, like KEVM. Deficits in test suites should be found and the problem corrected. Solidity should be replaced.

The importance of coming together as a community to debate these issues cannot be underestimated. The results of these discussions will drive the development of Ethereum Classic. Sharing this view, Barry told IOHK: “I think in the digital currency space there’s a little too much interaction done through social media and through anonymous forums and it’s important to get people together to meet each other, challenge each other, and do it in a way that is respectful and that fosters communication and collaboration. So I do think it’s important to have summits like this. I absolutely expect that we’ll do it again next year and hopefully the year after that will become an annual event that everybody in the community looks forward to.”

The launch of Cardano brings to an end an exciting first phase of development for us at IOHK, after more than a year spent planning and developing the technology. Now we’ve handed the product over to users and they are getting to know how it works. Using new software can be tricky – some people won’t need any help, but there will be those who need a little assistance. To make sure that people know how to use the software and aren’t experiencing any problems, IOHK and Cardano Foundation organised a help desk tour around Japan. As far as we know, this is the first time there has been a customer service tour for a cryptocurrency.

Over two weeks, starting from the end of September, the team visited five cities in Japan: Osaka, Nagoya, Hiroshima, Fukuoka and Tokyo, where we are holding three days of seminars. To figure out where we should go, the Cardano Foundation had previously sent out a questionnaire to find out who needed our help, and what kinds of questions people had. This helped us plan the tour accordingly.

We started out on a Saturday at the end of September in Osaka before moving on to Nagoya and making our way around Japan. Being able to meet and talk to the community of Ada holders was a really good experience. People were excited, eager to learn and had lots of positive comments and feedback. There was a mix of different ages, with the youngest people aged about 20 and the very oldest about 70. There were men and women, and there was a good turn out – sessions were nearly always just about full. Kondo, aged 45, heard about Cardano through Facebook and joined the online community to learn more. "I think Cardano’s future is very bright," Kondo said at a help desk seminar. "I brought my PC today and managed to redeem my Ada. I don’t think I could’ve done that without the staff’s help. I’m glad that everything’s solved."

Some people came along to meet other members of the community. New "crypto friends" swapped details so they could use talk about cryptocurrency using Line. Others were excited and wanted to share their thanks with the team and good wishes for the future of Cardano. Each Cardano help desk programme lasted a full day, over which we ran several sessions. The most popular presentation was on exchanges, and explained cryptocurrency markets and Bittrex, the exchange that Ada launched on. That session included a demonstration of how to use Bittrex, given by Daniel Friedman, a Japanese speaking IOHK staff member based in Osaka, and Toshiaki Miyatake, a Cardano community moderator from Tokyo, and the presentation was followed by a question and answer session. Aside from making sure that people had no technical problems, another objective of the help desk tour was to inform and educate. Cardano has attracted many people who are discovering an interest in cryptocurrency, so we want to help them get started by providing them with high quality resources and information.

Another presentation covered the Daedalus wallet. This wallet is where Ada is stored, and where users send and receive Ada. Step by step, we walked people through using Daedalus, including showing them how to store their private keys, how to add their Ada to the wallet and send it to the exchange. This session included offering one-to-one technical help, for anyone who needed personal assistance. People brought their laptops and we had memory sticks to install Daedalus for them if they hadn’t installed it already. There was also a popular presentation for people who wanted to join the growing Cardano community on social media. Miyatake showed people the Twitter accounts, the official Facebook group and how to join the conversation taking place in channels on Slack, with both Japanese and English language accounts available to join. Meeting Cardano users was enjoyable and hopefully provided them with all the help they needed, but it was also helpful for us too.

IOHK founder Jeremy Wood at the help desk tour

During the course of the sessions and meeting and talking to so many users, we uncovered a couple of small bugs in Daedalus, which our developers could begin work on fixing. Some of the bugs or issues we discovered were:

• Using Japanese characters when naming the wallet could cause the wallet to crash. A fix for this is due to be made soon.
• Daedalus now requires Windows users to synchronise the clock on their PC to the time on the internet.
• Windows users may find that when they try to connect to the network for a second time after quitting the application, they are stuck connecting to the network. Developers are looking into issue, which can sometimes can be fixed by restarting the computer.
• For a small number of people, transactions may not seen in the wallet despite being registered on the blockchain when they try to make a withdrawal from Bittrex. A fix for this is being worked on by developers.
• We have had reports that Daedalus may be wrongly identified as malware by the machine leaning algorithms used in some anti virus software. With time, this should change. Please be cautious if you are unsure and file a bug report. If you have a problem, first make sure your wallet is backed up, then download Daedalus again and reinstall it on your computer.
• Windows users may not be able to use a tablet and instead should use a desktop computer.

It was a busy but rewarding two weeks, now finishing up in Tokyo, where high demand means we had three full days booked at TKP Garden City in Shibuya. Now that Cardano is in the hands of the community there will be a special event in Tokyo this week to mark the successful launch. All three partners who are responsible for Cardano – IOHK as its developers, the Cardano Foundation as the standards body and guardian, and Emurgo, the venture builder for decentralised applications – will come together to talk about what users can expect to see with Cardano over the next three years. For coverage of the event, and to join the community, follow our social channels on Facebook, Twitter, and Slack.

We are excited to announce that there is now an Ethereum (ETH) client built specifically for the Ethereum Classic (ETC) community. The release of this beta client, Mantis, will take place today and is the culmination of seven months of work by the Grothendieck Team, the IOHK developers dedicated to Ethereum Classic. There are three reasons for the client. First, IOHK wants to demonstrate that it has the technical competency and culture to be a leader for the development of ETC. Second, IOHK wants to dispel the myth that ETC is a “copy and paste” coin that uses other people's code, and show that it is an independent and viable alternative to Ethereum. Third, the client is built in Scala, which is a functional programming language that offers security guarantees that other languages do not.

This release is comprised of the four functional milestones we have been working on since January.

• Blockchain download
• Transaction execution
• Command and query interface
• Mining integration

These are some of the features that made it into the beta release for the Mantis client:

• Mist Integration
  Connect the Mist browser to the Mantis client over HTTP.

• Multi-platform
  We have tested the application on recent versions of Linux (16.02), Mac OS (El Capitan, Sierra) and Windows (10, 8).

• Testnet and Private Chain Support
  The client supports synchronizing with the Morden testnet and also creating private chains.

• Documented Configuration
  Our client uses neatly formatted configuration files in the “conf” folder to configure the client, all the keys and values have descriptions to help the user optimize the client's utility.

We are also able to include a “Fast Sync” feature in this release. From start-up, the Mantis client (using default settings) will attempt to discover existing ETC nodes on the internet and fast sync the ETC chain from them. Fast Sync is fantastic feature for a blockchain client because it downloads a recent snapshot of the blockchain and this speeds up the process of setting up a properly functioning full node. It also downloads the entire blockchain history to have this available to other peers on request. Fast Sync is faster, and more convenient than downloading all of the blocks from peers, although this is also supported and can be switched using a flag in the configuration file.

Although Fast Sync is quicker, it is still slow by today's internet standards. For those who would like to get a node synchronized as fast as possible a “bootstrap database” has been provided. This database contains the whole chain up until August 2nd 2017. Users can download this large file, unzip it in their data folder and then start the Mantis client.

The Mantis client is now being passed into the hands of technically savvy community members. Enthusiasts, who are comfortable with a command line interface and are willing to install code that has not been fully tested, will have a lot of fun using the Mantis client and can provide us with valuable feedback. We would like to encourage anyone with the necessary technical skills to try out the client and report any bugs to the ETC Slack channel.

We will have more updates and news coming soon, and will share our progress with the community in the upcoming weeks. Please stay tuned for more details!

A magnificent view across the Black Sea from a sunny rooftop terrace in Odessa – it’s hard to imagine a more beautiful location for a blockchain conference. Guests and speakers from more than 20 countries were at the fifth Blockchain Incredible Party, BIP001, a leading cryptocurrency and blockchain event in eastern Europe. The event started only two years ago but has already built up a following who keep coming back for the friendly atmosphere, line up of international speakers and emphasis on social events put together with a hospitable touch.

Lilia Vershinina and Pavel Kravchenko, the organisers and founders, say Ukraine is fertile ground for blockchain start-ups because there is funding, a pool of talented developers and a general appetite for new business ideas. "There are a lot of people trying to experiment, and they are not afraid," said Pavel.

The event aims to showcase the Ukrainian scene and strengthen ties between blockchain advocates in Ukraine and the west, he says, pointing out that they are a long way from Silicon Valley. Another goal is providing education for the enthusiastic and fast-growing Ukrainian blockchain community. Speakers at the sold out conference included Vlad Zamfir, developer at Ethereum, Giacomo Zucco, CEO at BlockchainLAB, Rob Viglione, co-founder of ZenCash, and Pavel Kravchenko, co-founder at DistributedLab.

Charles Hoskinson, CEO of IOHK, took to the stage to talk about the biggest challenge that he sees facing cryptocurrencies.

He drew a sobering comparison between what he said was a current cryptocurrency bubble, and the early period of the 20th century. Tracing an arc from the Knickbocker crisis of 1907, when a three-week financial panic crashed the US stock market, to the founding of the Securities Exchange Commission in 1934, Charles charted the excesses of capitalism that ravaged the economy during those years. From insider trading scandals to the novice investors who ploughed their savings into badly judged investments, the financial turmoil of that era took the US to the verge of bankruptcy and triggered the Great Depression.

Comparing then to now, Charles said: "We are in a bubble and there will be a collapse. A lot of businesses will wash away; the strong will survive. Moving beyond that we either repeat history and create another Federal Reserve, or we can ask ourselves, 'what can we put into code?'"

 "That is the ultimate challenge we face as a space. If we are successful, not only do you create something much better, more transparent, and efficient – it will be a global system. That is my hope for what cryptocurrencies can achieve. If we can get there scams will disappear, and there will be an expectation that things will work the way they ought to, as opposed to today."

Other speakers also tackled the growing trend of ICOs, or looked at the issue of regulation.

Also at the conference was Professor Roman Oliynykov, part of the IOHK Veritas team, which is based in Ukraine. Set up in 2016, the six-person team conducts due diligence, research and development in the area of cryptocurrencies. He summed up the local interest in the subject:

"In my city, Kharkiv, there were more than 1,000 registrations for the last Bitcoin meet-up, which would have been unimaginable only six months ago. There is a huge popularity of blockchain systems in Ukraine and there are many qualified professionals for scientific research into blockchains."

A main focus for the Veritas team has been research into treasury systems. This mechanism provides a pool of funding for the development of cryptocurrencies and allows communities, rather than single individuals or entities, to vote on the decisions that determine the future of a cryptocurrency.

Roman said: "Researchers at Lancaster University in the UK in collaboration with the Veritas team have almost finished a new voting protocol for a treasury, which provides privacy in voting, yet in a transparent process. It also provides delegation. Moreover, we can find out how popular each expert is, how many people are delegated to each expert, but the delegation itself remains private."

An expert as referenced in this case is a person trusted by the community. Some people will prefer to delegate their vote to experts.

For the organisers of BIP, an expanded programme is being planned for the next event. Pavel is looking at the possibility of a week-long conference that could include courses too. That would be great news for the loyal fans of this well put together event.