Dear Cardano community, on the 12th of February, I have been simultaneously:

☑️ kicked from the aiken-lang GitHub org and crates owners;
☑️ kicked from our shared Twitter @aiken_eng account;
☑️ stripped of my admin access from our shared Cloudflare account and all aiken repos; Hence, I completely disengage from anything said or shared from the @aiken_eng account since that date and onward.

Note also that any wording such as "we" or "us" no longer reflect a shared agreement between Aiken maintainers.

2024 has been an incredible year in my journey with Cardano. I am part of a fantastic team of builders and mad men.

As promised, I wanted to give an overview of what our team has been doing this year, and some of our key achievements.

That'll be a nice conclusion for 2024 👇 First, the (rest of the) team, in order of appearance.

- @rvcas
- @MicroProofs
- @mattpiz

2 in Toulouse and 2 in Miami. We have very different profiles, and at the same time, are like-minded about many topics. Everyone is technical enough to get things done.

Okay, so let's actually do a little recap of what happened on my side in 2023.

Half of the year is already gone and I feel like it just started. Though, seems like a lot happened too.

Let's do this chronologically

👇 The beginning of the year was full thrust on @aiken_eng. In case you've missed it (seriously?), that's a new smart contract platform for Cardano geared towards developer experience.

We originally wanted to announce the alpha release back in January but there was a lot to crunch

I'd like to toss another perspective into the CIP-1694 debate which it seems many folks forget.

The engineering reality.

There's a lot of discussion about what we want as governance but not so much about when we want it. Yet, these dimensions are deeply connected. 👇 One important thing to keep in mind is that CIP-1694 isn't the end of the story. It isn't proposed as the final governance protocol of Cardano.

Rather, it describes an approachable step that gets us closer to the ideal governance.

And discussions should happen on this basis.

Time to fly to warm sunny Colorado.

I am glad that @InputOutputHK went for a CIP regarding the first step of evolutions for the protocol.

Yet it seems that the CIP process, its goals and actors are still not well understood. In particular w.r.t CIP-1694

Some clarifications👇 Let's say it here again clearly:

The CIP process is not a governance mechanism.

CIPs are neither voted, nor are they *decisions*. They are *solutions*.

In the same way that having multiple designs for a car doesn't tell you which one is picked at the end.

As kindly suggested to me, here's a thread-of-threads, to list past threads I wrote and future ones I'll write.

See it as a "low-effort" blog 😊

I thought it would be an appropriate way to end this year in retrospective.

Enjoy.

👇👇

https://twitter.com/_KtorZ_/status/1461037582704422916

In case you wondered, here are some quick clarifications about the infamous 'collaterals' in #Cardano.

There was an interesting conversation I was brought into and thought it could be interesting to turn it into a proper thread.

All you ever wanted to know about collaterals 👇 With the Alonzo era and the introduction of Plutus scripts was also added a new feature to transactions: collaterals.

In essence, a collateral is an input which is consumed when a script fails to execute in a transaction.

But, aren't scripts supposed to be deterministic?

Some months ago, I was asked what I thought would be #Cardano "next big thing".

At the time, we only had a vague idea of what Leios was. The recent CIP from Duncan & al has shed some more light on it.

Ouroboros Leios is definitely the most promising L1 upgrade to come

👇 The idea behind Leios is (surprisingly) simple. So let's try to make sense of it.

Cardano is a distributed system, where nodes reach consensus by sharing blocks according to a schedule for which they're elected. The more stake they own, the higher the chances of being elected.

Today was CIP editors meeting #54. We selected a few CIPs related to wallets and dApps integration, and we'll try to keep doing similar themed meetings moving forward.

Here's a summary of what we covered 👇 An addition to CIP-0030 (github.com/cardano-founda…) − the wallets ↔ DApps connector, to introduce a new endpoint allowing DApps to retrieve a chain identifier from the wallet. This allows distinguishing between multiple test networks (e.g. preprod vs preview).

Today is Sunday. Like every Sunday. But today, let's talk about *the mempool*. And more specifically, the Cardano's mempool(s).

Buckle up 👇 Let's start with a definition: what's a mempool?

It is a virtual buffer of memory where (valid) transactions sit before being inserted in a block.

Every node has one, including those that do not produce any block.

The Hard-Fork Combinator (a.k.a HFC): the good, the bad & the ugly.

A tale of software engineering 👇 With the upcoming Vasil hard-fork, it is time to upgrade existing software to live through it. As many already know, Cardano's secret sauce for such upgrades hides behind something called "The Hard-Fork Combinator".

But, what exactly is that thing?

1/5

Situations like this always make me reflect on what I do as a software engineer. I've been working in the FinTech & Blockchain industries for a while now and it's so easy to get something wrong that would then have massive consequences.

Some thoughts... 2/5

Even fully tested and formally verified software might experience issues. More testing and formalism reduces the risk but it's never zero. Plus it often depends on hypotheses you make and hypotheses are hard to formulate when they are intrinsically linked to social behaviors

Let's talk about transaction finality on Cardano today, because I keep seeing all sort of (wrong) claims on social medias, discord and al. (1/n)

👇 Firstly, we need to distinguish two things:

Finality vs Latency;

or as some call it, 'chain confirmation' vs 'transaction confirmation' though I really dislike the term 'confirmation' in this context (there's really no one actively 'confirming' anything).

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…

Another hot and quite captivating topic these days is whether or not #Cardano needs a *fee market*.

I don't have myself a definitive answer for I think a large part of the answer is not software-related, but about economics.

Here's my two lovelace nonetheless... 👇👇 1/n Firstly, why do we need fee at all on blockchains? For two reasons mainly.

(a) as a security mechanism to prevent spamming attacks against the network.

(b) as an incentive to pay those powering the network -- typically nodes, but in PoS, this also includes delegators!

Does #Cardano need rollups (optimistic or zk)?

Probably not.

Rollups are a technical solution to a particular problem: cost of on-chain computation.

Rollups move on-chain computation off-chain, while keeping most of the traffic on chain.

1/n This is crucial for Ethereum for which on-chain contracts have turned into large and complex programs that are very resource demanding.

Blockchains are *not* general-purpose programming platforms. They do poorly if one tries to execute its entire app logic on it.

2/n

Perhaps an unpopular opinion but, I truly dislike the wording "smart contracts".

I used to find it confusing when I first got into crypto years ago, but now I dislike it even more in the context of Cardano.

Why?👇 Compared to most existing smart-contract platforms, Cardano takes a much different road. Recently, we've seen a lot of discussions going on about "concurrency issues" and "EUTXO vs accounts". While equally expressive, Cardano programmability is different and atypical.

Ethereum Arbitrum vs #Cardano #Hydra, a thread about Layer 2 solutions.

👇👇👇 With the recent release of Arbitrum on Ethereum, and the upcoming Alonzo hard-fork on Cardano, there has been many discussions and comparisons about layer 2 solutions. As some knows, I've been working on Hydra with a few others for some months now and I want to shed some lights.