Thread by @_KtorZ_

It seems like many people in the #Cardano community, builders or not, still don't know about the #CIP!

So let me explain a bit, and quickly dive into some of them👇👇

1/n

CIP stands for 'Cardano Improvement Proposal' and refers to both a process and a collection of technical solutions to common problems of the Cardano ecosystem.

Proposals take the form of written specification files, hosted in a public code repository:

github.com/cardano-founda…

The CIP is geared towards the community and everyone is welcome to participate in the discussions.

There are different types of CIP for different purpose, some are informational (i.e. explaining how something work) and some are standards to facilitate interoperability.

A group of "editors" ensure that the proposed solutions are sound, organize the conversation with the community and enforce the correct following of the process.

Current editors include myself, @SebastienGllmt, Duncan, @ACryptoMuppet and @COSDpool.

The initiative started almost two years ago and there are now over 30+ accepted proposals.

For a while now, we conduct bi-weekly meetings open to all in crowdcast to go over the latest proposals and discuss them with their authors.

crowdcast.io/cips-biweekly

One particularly popular CIP over the past weeks has been the CIP-0030

github.com/cardano-founda…

which lays down the foundation for DApps <-> light wallets interactions.

This is what will make DApps seamlessly work with any of the wallets (provided they follow this standard!)

CIP-1852 has been around for a while as well, and is used by a lot of wallets (e.g. Daedalus, Yoroi, Adalite, Ledger, Trezor...) as a way to organize secret credentials...

github.com/cardano-founda…

Pretty essential! It also has several extensions nowadays, also CIPs.

Some are not necessarily complicated but are really about agreeing on details that makes interoperability easier between applications.

Like CIP-0005 which standardizes prefixes on encoded bytestring like "addr_" or "pool_"

github.com/cardano-founda…

Some are more specific to a particular use-case like CIP-0022 from @amw7 which details a protocol for securely authenticating an SPO to some other service like adapools, adascan or pooltool

github.com/cardano-founda…

CIP-0013 is another interesting one which defines a URI scheme for Cardano, like sharing a payment request or a delegation choice across two different applications.

It opens the door to many use-cases!

github.com/cardano-founda…

I am pretty excited to see wallets implementing something such as CIP-0018 to enable multi-delegation from a single wallet and allow users to maintain portfolios of stake pools!

github.com/cardano-founda…

All-in-all, if your are building on Cardano, there's a good chance that some CIP is relevant to what you do.

If you're doing something completely new, there's probably room for standardizing some parts it to make sure others may re-use or integrate with you!

In the long run, we hope to move more and more core decisions as CIPs like protocol changes or improvements proposals on the ledger, the mempool and whatnot.

It's a space for discussion and sharing. Fully open and in constant seek for improvements.