Cardano: Update on Goguen, Hydra and DSLs for smart contracts
- The development of Cardano’s third era, Goguen, continues to make great strides towards a release, with a timetable for this to be released later this month.
- Hydra will enable Cardano to scale securely, with specific DSLs to ensure the security of the smart contracts.
Charles Hoskinson, the inventor of Cardano, continues to post updates on the progress of the project on Twitter almost daily. Hoskinson has recently posted a new video about various developments in different areas of the project. According to the CEO of IOHK, the development company behind Cardano, the next phase, Goguen, continues to make big steps towards a release.
We are real close to Goguen. The end of the month we will be able to talk around some of the realities of Goguen, some of the ideas we have and give some dates for certain things and give you a sense where this project is at.
With the update at the end of the month, Hoskinson says, the community will also be able to give a better insight into where Cardano stands in terms of partnerships and how the developer ecosystem around the new framework for smart contracts and dApps will evolve.
Cardano’s approach to secure network scaling
Hoskinson also addressed the future topic of scaling the network and referred to a recent study from Stanford University. This revealed two potentially critical security vulnerabilities in Ethereum‘s Casper Proof of Stake protocol. According to Hoskinson, the cause lies in the complexity of the Ethereum 2.0 system.
Hoskinson noted that while IOHK is investigating various sharding solutions, it will initially prefer and implement a much simpler solution with Hydra. Hydra will allow the Cardano network to scale as the number of users increases. In addition, Hoskinson says there will be no unpleasant surprises like the Stanford study:
So whenever you have these very complex protocols they have so many different ways how they can break or things can go wrong. So it’s much more appealing if you don’t have to embrace complexity to achieve the same. The elegance of Hydra is that stake pool operators are very natural to put Hydra channels on and every time you add one you get much more performance. […]
I think we have an incredible offering for performance and when Hydra comes, simply put, there will be no one faster, and when we need to shard, we gonna do that well, and definitely better anybody else […] and there will be no surprise Stanford papers to blindside us that require us to address them.
A focus in the future development of Cardano’s smart contracts will be on the issue of security in particular. According to Hoskinson, developers must be given frameworks to write secure smart contracts. To this end, Cardano will develop various DSLs (Domain Specific Languages) for smart contract specifications to enable certified smart contracts.
So when you look at the foundations where we at and how we can extend that from domain specific languages for domain experts, such as Marlow to financial experts, and the DSLs that come later for others like lawyers, supply chain experts and medical databases and so forth and how easy it is to develop and deploy these, to Plutus being beautiful glue code between on- and off-chain […] I think we have an incredible offering.
