Cardano Celebrates New Year With Newly-Published Proof-of-Stake Paper, Trezor Wallet Support

Popular hardware wallet Trezor now supports the Cardano (ADA) token, Cardano founder Charles Hoskinson revealed in a video on December 30, 2018.  The announcement was accompanied by several others, including an advanced user mode and general improvements to the Cardano reference wallet.

Trezor support has been one of the Cardano community’s most desired features, and the milestone has been received with enthusiasm.

Trezor support for the ADA token was first announced in October. Ledger wallet support is also expected, likely this quarter — in the next month or 2, said Hoskinson, as implementation for the 2 hardware wallets is not very different.

One of the project’s 3 main teams behind its general development, Emurgo, was fully responsible for the Trezor support, said Hoskinson, who went at length to describe Cardano’s achievements in one of his trademark informative videos: 

Hoskinson praises Emurgo, saying:

This is the first time in the history of the Cardano project where something of this magnitude has been done without any effort – coordination with IOHK. The Trezor integration that Emurgo has done is 100% them… and they’ve done a real great job with it.

A lengthy year in review video by Hoskinson detailed several other intentions for 2019, including Firefox web browser support and lite-clients.

Cardano is not the only project working on PoS mechanisms — the Ethereum project’s Casper protocol (along with sharding), arguably the most anticipated PoS development, which was expected in 2019, is now expected to arrive sometime between 2019 and 2021.

Cardano Releases Paper on Proof-of-Stake Protocol Ouroboros

One of Cardano’s most anticipated upgrades, a whitepaper on the PoS mechanism named Ouroboros, was published on December 31, 2018.

Emurgo engineering lead Sebastien Guillemot tweeted on how the mechanism is a critical part to facilitating sidechains on the network:

Sidechains, as the paper’s abstract rightly describes it, are a tantalizingly viable way of scaling blockchain and permitting interoperability, and a major research area in the space. Projects likes OmiseGO are also committing to the scalability efforts.

The paper offers a formal definition of sidechains and security mechanism in the event of sidechain failures and attacks. One of these security features, called “firewall property”, reduces collateral damage by limiting the failure to one sidechain. As the paper describes it,

In case of failure, the firewall ensures that transfers from the sidechain into the mainchain are rejected unless there exists a (not necessarily unique) plausible history of events on the sidechain that could, in case the sidechain was still secure, cause the particular transfers to take place.

With the arrival of new features and improved user experience, 2019 is shaping up to be a monumental year for Cardano.