Cardano Updates Their Roadmap: What’s Coming Next in Q4 2018

For a blockchain with a mainnet that has barely been live a year, Cardano is making tremendous strides in terms of both development and community.

September was busy with launches and releases, and on October 4, Cardano updated their roadmap to account for what they have achieved.

Roadmap Updates

If you examine the Cardano roadmap, you will quickly see that  is not laid out in a linear flowchart format, with one milestone leading to another.

Rather, they have different phases of development named after 5 historical artists. For example, they are currently 55% of the way through developing a testnet (Byron stage) and are concurrently working on multisignature transactions for HD wallets (Shelley stage).

Currently, Cardano is focused mainly on developments in the Shelley stage, which deals with growing the foundational technology into a fully decentralized and autonomous system. Some community members have pointed out that Shelley was originally scheduled to go live by Q2 2018, and it has now been pushed back to Q2 or even Q3 2019.

Some Reddit users expressed worries about the sheer scope of developing a decentralized proof-of-stake protocol. Dontuseliqui observes, “Delegation Implementation is a vital part of Shelley and that’s only at 5%,” and Sargos has doubts about Cardano’s ability to keep up if industry competition, such as Ethereum’s Casper, gets there first.

Others point out that it’s better for Cardano to take their time developing strong and secure tech infrastructure – slow and steady, etc.

Reddit user Stocksprite states:

“The hard deadlines pushed by other coins that promise and ‘deliver’ milestones are [merely] creating the illusion of progress on an unused [network]. Remember that falling apart at high speed will cost more to repair than its worth.”

Progress From the Month of September

However, despite the community’s worries, it cannot be denied that Cardano has had great momentum throughout September.

Most recently, the Yoroi Light Wallet for Cardano was launched on the mainnet, which will serve as a secure, fast wallet for storing ADA. It can be downloaded from the Google Chrome Web Store, and will have a function for seamlessly transferring ADA from the Daedelus wallet to Yoroi.

Also on October 1, IOHK, the blockchain company behind Cardano, announced the launch of the Rust project, a high-speed systems programming language that boasts such features as zero-cost abstractions, move semantics, and guaranteed memory safety.

The Plutus virtual machine is still under development. However, the project now has a solid team working behind it, and the new Plutus repository is active, with the ability to do higher-level proofs.

In addition to technical developments, Cardano has also been investing in their team and community in September. They hired a new Chief Market Officer, Florian Bohnert, to step up their marketing campaign. They also have hired various community managers for their regional offices, and are still looking to hire Japanese translators and help desk leaders.

Meanwhile, Cardano CEO Charles Hoskinson traveled to Mongolia, to meet with government officials and build Cardano’s brand globally. (And, apparently, to watch some camel herding.)

The Cardano team then celebrated their 1-year anniversary of their mainnet launch. In China, community members celebrated with an online WeChat event, 10,000 members strong. And in Tokyo, Emurgo hosted a meetup community event, with a tutorial provided to teach attendees how to develop smart contracts on Cardano.

What’s Coming in Q4?

Even though certain milestones from the Shelley stage have been pushed back, Q4 2018 will see fruition of current works in progress.

For example, v1.3.1 of Cardano will be released soon, which contains prep work for the upcoming testnet and has addressed certain bugs found in the previous version.

In addition to that, the testnet IELE will be coming out, allowing developers a safe platform to test their smart contracts before deploying them on the mainnet.

Cardano will also be releasing a paper on Ouroboros, their proof-of-stake algorithm which lets companies build their own side chains on Cardano. The paper will explain the process for developers who want custom solutions.

Finally, the Cardano team are excited to announce that soon ADA will be supported by the Trezor hardware wallet, which will go far in recommending ADA as a cryptocurrency for investors.

For a more in-depth look at Cardano’s progress for the month of September, check out their update video below.