Charles Hoskinson, the CEO of Cardano and one of Ethereum’s co-founders, recently made some interesting comments regarding Cardano’s upcoming smart contract functionality update, Goguen.



Goguen will bring smart contract functionality to Cardano



Specifically, these comments came during a live YouTube interview with cryptocurrency and blockchain educator Ivan on Tech. Perhaps most notably, Hoskinson stated that Goguen will see a mainnet release sometime during 2019.



Goguen is seen as the next major update stage to Cardano, following implementation of the Shelley update. Cardano’s official roadmap pertaining to Goguen notes that it will, among other things, include the development of a ”next-generation virtual machine” dubbed IELE.



Moreover, the Goguen roadmap phase also references the development of a new ”universal language framework to be used as core infrastructure for future blockchain technologies.”



In addition to this, Cardano also states that this proposed technology will build on ”state-of-the-art programming language theory” and formal methods, which is intended to bring ”much greater security and dependability to blockchain systems” and will lower the risk of vulnerabilities.



Put simply, however, the main benefit Goguen will bring is support for smart contracts for the Cardano ecosystem.



Shelley and Goguen are decoupled, will launch on mainnet in 2019



In the interview, Hoskinson went on to specifically discuss the Goguen update. Moreover, he noted that even though Goguen is slated for a later release than the full Shelley release, it is not sequentially dependent on the Shelley release.



Rather, Hoskinson highlighted that the development of Shelley and Goguen are decoupled from each other, with separate teams working independently on the two updates.



Furthermore, Hoskinson also mentioned that the smart contract functionality brought by Goguen ”can be done whether the system is centralized or decentralized” which indicates that the Goguen update can begin to be rolled out even if Shelley would face delays.



Although Hoskinson argued that it would be better to deploy the smart contract functionality in a decentralized capacity – in order to minimize liability – he revealed that this can nonetheless soon be done ”at any time”.



”And we’re getting very close to actually being ready for Goguen, so this year both of those releases will come out and they will just get iteratively better as the year goes on.”



As such, Hoskinson also remarked that Cardano will consequently leave 2019 stronger than ever:



”So we’ll leave the year a hundred times more decentralized than Bitcoin and with smart contracts, and with all the bells and whistles people have come to expect.”



Image Credits: Charles Hoskinson on Youutbe