Cardano [ADA]’s Charles Hoskinson on the implementation of formal methods for Cardano 1.4

On 16th September, Charles Hoskinson, the Founder of IOHK, a cryptocurrency and distributed systems research and development organization released a video update on Twitter. Hoskinson spoke in detail about the recent audit report that the Cardano Foundation released regarding the dependencies that IOHK uses in relation to the Haskell Codebase.

Hoskinson began by saying that the current code for Cardano-SL is going to be replaced and heavily refactored. Furthermore, dependencies will be dropped and architectural changes have been made to Cardano-SL.

Hoskinson stated:

“If you look at the arc of development in Cardano, there are really 3 phases in its development. The first was the liquidity phase where we contracted a firm who made a lot of design decisions and built a cryptocurrency based on business requirements we gave with some supervision.”

According to Hoskinson, the code and the currency constructed was a Proof of Work concept that could teach the organization how to actually launch a product, get listed on exchanges and get a working wallet. Moreover, the code could instruct the platform on how to build question and answer and help desk processes.

The Founder believes that it is tremendously complicated to do any of the above with a distributed team such as Cardano’s. He mentions that the Cardano-SL code was never meant to be something that is long-term and that would remain in production for years.

According to Hoskinson, IOHK now has a methodology to produce long-term code that will be in production for years. This could be done first by writing a formal, executable specification and writing a few prototypes from that specification. The code will eventually be written from these prototypes by applying tooling like ‘quick check’, ‘fuzzing’ and ‘bi-simulation’. Hoskinson stated:

“This in order of magnitude is more complicated. It involves a lot of complicated engineering and focus. The types of engineers who do this and the types of tools you use to do this are distinct from the types of tools you would use to write a web application or a cell phone application.”

IOHK has spent over two years as an organization building a formal methods group and working with great firms and academia who have formal methods capabilities. The platform has also interfaced with academic individuals such as Manuel Gerardi and Phil Wadler who have long established careers in the formal methods and the world of programming language.

Hoskinson stated that IOHK has built quite a bit of capacity to use the formal methods technique. The platform has utilized this kind of technique as a Proof of Concept with the wallet backend. When a user views the Cardano Docs, they can see the formal UTxO specification that was written. Furthermore, IOHK has prototyped and implemented it as well.  Hoskinson said:

“The implementation is near done and we’re just polishing it. It will be deployed soon with Cardano 1.4. We’re going to take delegation for Shelley, Ouroboros Genesis and a litany of other components of the system and do the exact same thing for the wallet backend by leveraging all the knowledge, experience, expertise and the acceleration that we gain.”