Cardano 1.4 Update “Coming Along Well,” Says Charles Hoskinson

The CEO of IOHK and founder of Cardano, Charles Hoskinson, recently did a surprise AMA (Ask Me Anything) on YouTube.

The AMA spanned an hour and a half, in which Hoskinson answered over 35 questions, ranging from technical and fundamental questions about Cardano to questions about Hoskinson’s personal life or opinions on various matters.

Over the course of the AMA, Hoskinson ended up talking about the upcoming Cardano 1.4 update, Shelley-related updates, the Daedalus wallet, Icarus, and so much more.

Cardano 1.4 Update

Regarding the Cardano 1.4 update, Hoskinson had this to say:

The update 1.4 for Cardano is coming along well and we’re in regression testing right now. We’ve had a few regressions but nothing significant is found yet and it’s a lot of new code. There has been a huge amount of refactoring on the core, and we’ve found new database solutions, so we’ve gone from lots of storage to little storage and become much more efficient.

He went on to further explain that the biggest development they have accomplished thus far is the back-end of the Daedalus wallet. He explained that the code will be able to connect to their “Rust” code and their “Haskel” code, making it the first piece of formally-verified code they’ve had.

Once the code is complete, the next thing IOHK will work on is migrating from the old address style to the new Icarus address style, which will allow Cardano (ADA) to have Ledger wallet support.

Furthermore, Hoskinson addressed that the development cut-off was a few weeks ago, but they are still working hard and are now working through the QA.

Hoskinson stated:

The update won’t be taking much longer, I’d say a few more weeks, and hopefully we should have the update 1.4 release by end of November or early December. And it’s the most significant update we’ve ever made to the Cardano ecosystem.

As the Cardano 1.4 update is so important, it’s best not to rush such developments.

Hoskinson stated in the AMA that the Cardano SL code was never meant to be used long term, and that their team at IOHK has been writing a lot of new code.

He explained that their Rust team has been expanding with new hires and their team is releasing new code “on pretty much a daily basis.” He also mentioned that the code currently being written will drop dependencies and make architectural changes to the network.

Moving Forward

To end his talk about the Cardano 1.4 update, Hoskinson touched on what will happen with the Cardano ecosystem afterwards:

After the 1.4 update, every update is going to be Shelley related, so the first major update will be basically some new code for Ouroboros BFT and that’ll get us all aligned up so that we can start moving towards some variant of Ouroboros.

If you’re interested in getting into the nitty-gritty of Hoskinson’s AMA, the entire video can be seen below. Timestamps to important sections and different questions can be found if you scroll down through the comments.