Charles Hoskinson:  We started working on Cardano in 2015 and the initial launch was in 2017.  We have been steadily as an ecosystem doing updates. We have gone from being a static and federated system to a dynamic and decentralized system. The latest updates are all about scalability. So, that is basically as you have added users how to have predicable costs and predicable performance.

It has been a remarkable growth in just a few years to over a 3 million.  There has been a 5 billion assets issued on the ecosystem and there are thousand Dapps under construction.  And, so we definitely need the new tech to scale to enhance.

Question:  Cardano does not really move fast and break things approach.  The changes made to the software were rigorously peer-reviewed. In the past it was a slow roll out of technological upgrades.  Could you characterize Cardano’s use today, features and where do you see it heading out in the future of finance?

Charles Hoskinson:  Part of the legacy of Cardano has always been evidence-based software development.  You have to have evidence that your software actually works.  And, if you are using protocols that has to come from a peer-reviewed-process.  The project has written over a 140 academic papers.  They are all public, open-source and many of them got peer reviewed at major venues of cryptography.

On the software side, we apply formal methods to create specifications and demonstrate that the software actually works. Now, the intent is for the software to become a financial operating system across the world, but.  One area of passion that I particularly have is in the developer forum.  So, the idea is economic identity and agency for those who don’t have it.

There are around 3 billion people who do not have reliable access to banks.  They pay high prices for remittances, credit, insurance, and other financial services that they can even get them.  So, a lot of our company’s rollout has been in Ethiopia, Kenya, and other places either directly or indirectly through partners in places like Zanzibar for example is constructing an ISP. So, they are actually going to rollout internet across the entire country and build a blockchain based system.

In Ethiopia we are doing an academic credentials project.  It has about 5 billion students who are being taken gradually on board.  So that their grades and credentials can be checked using the Cardano blockchain system.  In Kenya we have microfinance products.  This is just about our company.  There are many companies working across the globe.

We also see a lot of traditional use cases in traditional crypto, but you have obviously new stuff like DeFi.  So, decentralized exchanges, oracle, Stable Coins and these types of things.  There are great countries building on Cardano Blockchain. And, in case they are trying to do something.

One surprising area of growth on Cardano is the NFT space.  About 40% of all the applications that are being deployed are NFT related. And, there is a ton of credible work of Metaverse space and it is really impressive to see how it has grown in the last year.