In this edition of the Cardano Foundation newsletter, we bring you updates from Poland, where we attended two successful Cardano community meetups! We also give a run-through on Project Icarus from IOHK and the Yoroi wallet from Emurgo. Read on to find out more!

Icarus

IOHK has released Icarus, a reference implementation for a lightweight wallet. Developers can use this source code to create mobile wallets and browser-based wallets for Cardano. This helps move the protocol further towards decentralization and creates an ecosystem around Cardano. To learn more, watch the video release from Charles Hoskinson, CEO of IOHK, and read the summary via the link below.

Introducing Yoroi

Emurgo has announced Yoroi, a light-client desktop wallet, which will soon be available as a beta version on the testnet and with plans to later launch on the mainnet. Yoroi is the first Cardano wallet built using Icarus and can be used as an alternative to Daedalus. This wallet will not require users to download and verify a full copy of the Cardano blockchain, so should be quicker and easier to set up!

Cardano Meetups

Cardano Meetups continue to grow around the world and this week, we bring news from Poland, where we attended meetups in the country’s capital city, Warsaw, and second largest city, Krakow. The Cardano Foundation team was joined by Duncan Coutts, Director of Engineering at IOHK, who shared with the community the importance of software quality and the philosophy behind Cardano’s development. You can read about the Foundation’s and Duncan’s presentations on the Forum:

On the other side of the world, Cardano community members came together in Shanghai, China. Over 100 people attended the meetup and it received widespread media coverage from various blockchain content platforms. You can find out what was discussed through the meetup recap!

Community Questions

Cardano Foundation recently caught up with Grigore Rosu, president and CEO of Runtime Verification. IOHK partnered with RV to research and develop a next generation virtual machine and a universal language framework for smart contracts. Grigore helped answer questions from the community about smart contract technology and IELE, the register-based virtual machine they are developing.

We pulled one of the questions from the webcast and present you with a rundown of Grigore’s answer:

Can you tell us about your general impression from your work with Cardano or other smart contract technologies on what your opinion is of the future of smart contracts or what could it look like?

Answer: Grigore starts off by providing the reason they came up with IELE, which was that they wanted a language that has smart contract functionality but more importantly, has human readability.

When you call into an EVM contract, you are actually entering a binding contract and this contract has the power to take money from your account. Therefore, you need to be able to trust that code and to understand how the contract is set to behave. The problem with EVM is that it’s not human-readable and that you just see a bunch of code that is not easy to comprehend.

Grigore compared this to working with lawyers. In that they will write documents and contracts, that you are required to sign and enter, but often you don’t fully understand all the terms and conditions. So, he sought out to develop something that will help make smart contracts more readable and understandable, as they should be.

To watch the full video of Jon from Cardano Foundation and Grigore from Runtime Verification, please head to the Forum!

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