The immense success of the Shelley incentivized testnet seems to have left Cardano invigorated and ready to pick up the pace when it comes to development. According to Charles Hoskinson, the CEO of IOHK, the company is up for quite an eventful couple of months. He shared upcoming plans and events in a recent interview and AMA.

The past few months have been ‘illuminating’ Hoskinson says

For a project that has been so widely criticized for its slow development, Cardano now seems to be moving at the speed of light. Following the successful launch of the incentivized testnet for the Shelley era of the Cardano blockchain, the team behind the ambitious project seems to have crossed an important threshold that put its development into overdrive.

According to Charles Hoskinson, the CEO of IOHK, Cardano’s parent company, the past few weeks have been “illuminating.” Not only has the company changed its product and project, but they’ve also significantly updated their management estimations, he said in a recent AMA.

The company, known for its no-nonsense and transparent updates, has set up a new release cadence, with new updates and releases expected on a weekly basis. The Shelley Incentivized Testnet just received its first update of the year, the Daedalus wallet is on a weekly release cycle, while Haskell will receive updates every two weeks.

Frequent updates to Daedalus are necessary to complete its hardware support, Hoskinson explained, saying that users will soon be able to restore their ledger devices to Daedalus. Hardware multi-sig and hardware cold staking are also expected to happen in a future firmware update.

All of the work that Cardano teams have been putting in won’t be in vain. Hoskinson said that this is all in anticipation of the release of the Shelley mainnet. In the meantime, the company has been having “great conversations” about staking-as-a-service, he went on, adding that the continually evolving software will ease Cardano’s release into more exchanges.

“”I’ve never seen the company so unified and moving so quickly.”

Cardano reveals an ambitious strategy for 2020

When it comes to the company’s plan for the upcoming year, it’s safe to say that the team’s schedule will be packed. The launch requirements for Goguen, the era of Cardano that will enable Dapps on the network, are currently being prepared. To create an infrastructure that will facilitate a healthy dapp ecosystem, both IOHK and the Cardano Foundations are knee-deep in discussions with potential partners.

Hoskinson himself will use his trip to the World Economic Forum in Davos as a “networking opportunity,” as leaders from both the blockchain and the traditional finance industry will be attending the event.

February and March will also be packed. According to Hoskinson, Cardano’s first workshop with auditing giant PwC will be held sometime in February, while the first output from the workshop should be available in early March.

The OBFT hard fork will most likely occur in February, but Hoskinson noted that Cardano is still “interfacing” with its exchange partners about it in order to make sure all of the infrastructure necessary for the fork to occur is lined up. The Haskell node for the Byron reboot will be integrated with the Haskell wallet backend and should get out to users in February as well.

The company’s partnership with McCann Dublin advertising agency, which was tasked with leading Cardano’s rebranding effort last month, is expected to yield its first results in March. This, Hoskinson said, will allow the company to talk about Cardano’s unique selling points to a wider audience.

Cardano’s work with the European Union is also expected to pick up the pace in the following few weeks. Hoskinson said that the company was working alongside IBM research and the Horizons 2020 project for the E.U.-sponsored decentralized software update program. The work that has gone into the program has resulted in a 39-page paper about decentralized software updates, which is an achievement Hoskinson seemed particularly proud of.

Working on communication

Hoskinson’s latest YouTube update also seems to be in line with the company’s general plan for the first quarter of the year. At the end of 2019, he said that Cardano plans on setting up a regular communication schedule to keep the community informed about all of the in-house developments.

“These regular updates won’t stop at the incentivized testnet,” Hoskinson revealed, adding that product managers will also begin giving weekly updates on their areas of expertise. The ultimate goal, he said, is to hit a monthly cadence for product updates.

Hoskinson’s effort to create a transparent communications channel between the team working on Cardano and the Cardano community seems to stem, at least in part, from his aversion towards crypto media. In an interview with Hackernoon last week, Hoskinson said that the media doesn’t have the right incentives to focus on “good journalism.”

He admitted that Cardano hasn’t done the best of jobs to communicate with “everyday people,” which is why most of the media coverage Cardano has seen in the past couple of years have been focused more on sensationalism than on the ground-breaking research that the company was built on.

And sensationalism is one of a handful of words that are becoming increasingly hard to attribute to Hoskinson. He remains one of the few high-profile industry figures that doesn’t shy away from praising his competition—his latest YouTube update began with a kudos to Dash and Ethereum Classic, both of which have achieved significant success over the past couple of weeks.

One of the many efforts IOHK is putting into improving communication is hosting hackathons. The Cardano Foundation is already looking at master plans for the entire year to ensure that the blockchain the hackathons will work on “is going where it needs to go.”

“We’re looking forward to having a hackathon or event every month in each major development area,” Hoskinson said, adding that this is the best way to let people know that Cardano is a platform you can actually build on.

When it comes to the rest of the market, Hoskinson’s input seems to be that the entire space is slowly beginning to wake up and mature. He noted that the bull trend the market saw in the past weeks isn’t an anomaly, but a representative sample of the rest of the year. While it’s hard to say whether the bull trend will turn into a full bull market, he seems to believe that the ice from the year-long crypto winter is finally thawing.

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