Cardano Roadmap

The entire Cardano team is made up of experts around the world. With IOHK and its engineers and scientists as the team leader, the core technology team also consists of Well Typed, Tweag I/O, Runtime Verification, Predictable Network Solutions and ATIX. External auditors such as Grimm, RPI Cryptography Group and FP Complete ensure the quality of the product by holding IOHK accountable. Three principles that guide the development of the roadmap are: first, the growth of the community and its needs; second, a distributed and resilient network true to the original vision of Satoshi, and third, balancing the pace of research and development so commercial advantage does not win out over the application of scientific rigour. We are currently in Byron, the bootstrap phase, where we are making improvements. These include to the code, for example in the wallet backend, and debugging. We will improve the design of Daedalus and make integration through APIs to third parties simpler. We will then move from Byron to Shelley, where the network becomes decentralised. As we progress through Shelley, work will be done that contributes to stability, interoperability and governance. Throughout the arc of development, Cardano’s protocols will increase in complexity, interdependence and use more exotic cryptographic primitives. A cryptocurrency is only as good as the community behind it. We’ve been humbled by how amazing, patient and helpful our community has been. Our hope is that the roadmap is something we can build together over time and it becomes one of our strongest pillars. Existing smart contract models lack rigorous foundations and IOHK’s development aims to correct that. To do so, IOHK has deployed leading minds from the field of programming language theory to the design of smart contract languages and platforms. We have increased our allocation of resources into two parallel tracks of research. One is focused on fixing the issues seen with Ethereum’s smart contracts, and will be a development area for Professor Grigore Rosu, of the University of Illinois and Runtime Verification. The other is focused on the general foundational design, or ontology, of smart contracts, as well as other computational models that achieve similar ends without necessarily involving the complexity or cost of Ethereum. The next phase of Cardano’s development will be Shelley, a path to the full decentralization of Cardano. The milestones of this phase are listed below.