IOHK signs contract with Runtime Verification

  • IOHK has signed a contract with Runtime Verification to develop Yella, among other things.
  • The roadmap for Cardano’s Goguen will be released on October 29th with IOHK’s monthly product update.

In a new AMA, IOHK CEO Charles Hoskinson once again talked about Cardano‘s current progress and provided some interesting information. At the beginning he again emphasized the new focus on better marketing. As the inventor of Cardano revealed, he is in daily contact with the newly appointed head of marketing. In a first phase, she will concentrate on comparative marketing with other blockchain projects, then she will concentrate on campaign marketing.

Hoskinson was also very pleased that over 3,000 people are already participating in the Catalyst project. But the biggest news of the day is that IOHK has signed the contract with Runtime Verification Inc, as Hoskinson commented:

So I signed it, it’s a seven figure contract. We are bringing them back into fold. We gonna do case stuff and yella. We gonna have a bunch of cool stuff there. I will make a dedicated announcement at a later time about specific deliverables and what we gonna get out of that. But I figured I just share with you guys the really good news. […]

Yella is one of my favourite projects. It’s incredible stuff, it’s really exciting and I think it gonna open up a whole new dimension of the product and I always believed that. After the great collapse of 2017 we had nice-to-have vs. must-have and that was in the nice-to-have column. Plutus, Marlowe and these things are in the must-have column. But you know, things are looking better.

As Hoskinson explained in an earlier announcement, Yella is a virtual machine (also called IELE) that will make Ethereum‘s virtual machine (VM) “look like a toy”. The idea behind the VM is that developers can write dapps in one of the popular programming languages, and then convert them using IELE (Yella) so that they can be executed. It is also supposed to support Ethereum’s Solidity programming language, making porting dApps from Ethereum to Cardano extremely easy.

Roadmap for Cardano’s Goguen to be released end of October

One user asked Hoskinson which parts of Goguen will be released this year. Hoskinson didn’t give a specific answer but said that there will be a number of upgrades and hard fork combinator events. Each upgrade will add new functionality such as extended UTXO or multi-assets.

And as Hoskinson also pointed out, the metadata functionality was already the first component of Goguen that was activated. At the end of the month, in this month’s product update, on October 29th, a concrete roadmap will be presented.

But let’s be very clear about something. It’s not the case that you flip something and you say ‘Oh, Goguen is here’. What has Ethereum done with their smart contract model. Since launching they made hundreds of changes in EVM, the added kinds of new capabilities, there’s tons of infrastructure around Ethereum.

So similar when you release something like this, you keep building infrastructure. […] So Goguen is a spectrum. […] And we gonna announce some of those parts, some of them, at the October update.