Cardano [ADA]’s big announcement of 15th August made early by Charles Hoskinson

On 14th August, Charles Hoskinson of Cardano broadcast a YouTube video on his channel regarding the ‘big’ Cardano announcement that was supposed to be made on 15th August.

Here, he revealed partial details on the upcoming reference project, which is a Google Chrome extension called Icarus. In his words:

“So we never intended to launch a product but rather build something that we’re going to give to our partners to launch and try to encourage the development of a third-party application ecosystem and that is called Icarus.”

Subsequently, Icarus can easily be ported to other platforms such as Mozilla Firefox and mobile applications. Therefore, it is a wallet running in Google Chrome that does not have a copy of the blockchain but can enable the users to perform actions as they would on Daedalus.

Hoskinson mentioned that a Daedalus wallet can be imported into Icarus and recovered, which only takes a few minutes. The wallet acts much like a light wallet since it does require one to download the entire blockchain to be used.

This is applicable specifically to those who have been facing network connectivity issues, stated the creator of Cardano. He added that the application has been security audited and was written in Rust and JavaScript as a hybrid language. Hoskinson also said that the team wanted to build a reference design as the result of finding security issues with third-party applications on auditing. In his words:

“…now we created this because what we wanted to have was a reference design for people who wanted to do mobile wallets and browser-based wallets because we were a little worried about the security. Some people had come to us and they said ‘hey we’ve constructed a light wallet and look how cool it is’… And we did a little audit in the design and we realized that that’s not so good and that the reality is that it’s probably going to be insecure.”

The founder believes that Icarus is analogous to the Vanilla Android, which is a reference design for Android constructed by Google.

Next, he spoke about the hard-fork of Icarus, which is to be created by Cardano’s partner Emurgo. The announcement regarding this hard-fork will be made tomorrow [15th August] by Emurgo. The Testnet is expected to be completed this month while the Mainnet is expected to be launched in September. About the purpose of this project, Hoskinson stated:

“Our hope is that people can start building an ecosystem around this so that as ADA gets more capabilities like ledger support and multi-sig and these types of things that the mobile client will be able to keep lockstep with that.”