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.