 Welcome to Digital Asset News, the guitar stories in crypto and bringing out a bite-sized piece. So today, just like the thumbnail suggests, we're going to take a look at if the Cardano mainnet, which is going coming forth this Sunday, the 12th of September, is it a make-or-break moment and is this all functioning in the way that it should? So we're going to go over to take a look at a couple of things. First, we're going to take a look at the Cardano testnet troubles, min-swap responses, then we're going to do a mainnet predictions. And because I'm not a developer in any way, shape or form, I brought my friend on, Hashoshi, to put things in English for us because I don't understand some of these things. Okay, most of these things. So Hash is here to help us out. Hash, thanks so much for coming on. Yeah, thanks for having me. Yeah, man, cool. So look, you're busy on busy. Let's get down to it. First of all, this is Hashoshi. He is a good guy. He's got a great channel. I will link it in the description. So Hash, just real quickly, tell us about what you do as far as your JOB and then give us some of your investments style. Are you like a hardcore leverage trader? 50-100x? Just like me? Just kidding. Are you like more of an investor? Yeah, so my background, I come from a deep technology background. I've worked on the tech side and the development side of blockchain and crypto for six years now, maybe at least full time. Yeah, six years ish and researched it for even longer than that. It's just been my life's passion. In terms of investing in the space, because of that background, I'm really not a leverage trader or really a trader at all for that matter. I'm a fundamentals guy. I look at projects, what they do, how they work, whether I believe in their technical approach and whether and I think it's going to change the world or it has the ability to solve a problem, that's really what I do. Yeah, it makes sense. It's the same thing with me. I always talk about betting on people. It's just that Hash here, he's got more of an in-depth knowledge about what's going on behind the scenes as far as what project is gold and what is just trash. So Hash, thanks for answering those questions. Let's jump right in, shall we? Let's do it. So first things first, this is what the market is doing today. We're down a little bit. I think we're at like $2.1 trillion, something like that, $100 billion give or take, we'll say. Bitcoin's at $45,000, Ethereum is $3,300, Cardano is $2.42, and so on and so forth. Nothing's really up big in the last 24 hours except for Terra Luna. So congratulations, Terra Luna holders and Avalanche holders up 17%. Pretty good from yesterday because yesterday sucked. So that's just here for reference. But the thing I want to talk about was this. So the launch is confirmed. This is from IOHK for the main net launch. Right now, we're doing everything as far as the test net for Cardano's smart contracts, but everything looks to be going well and it's going to happen 12th of September, which is this Sunday. So here is that essential part. But the next thing we're going to talk about are the test net troubles, as it were. So this was an article I shared with Hash before we got on here and it talked about how Cardano plunges its critics take aim. And what I want to do is just read a section and I'm going to have Hash just talk about it. So the first thing's first. This was a quote from Eric Wall and he's the CIO, Chief Investment Officer at Crypto Fund Arcane Assets. And he says, Cardano was not built for the current DeFi landscape in its current state. It's going to require tons of workarounds for developers to build certain types of common DeFi apps. And I'll read these two sentences and I'll let Hash take it away. One is the concurrency issues, which is difficulties around multiple users interacting with the protocol at the same time. So let's just start with the concurrency issue first and foremost. Hash, what is this all about? How does this work out? Is it going to be a big fundamental flaw moving down the road? Yeah, I mean, this really comes down to the fundamental differences in the design decisions that were made in Cardano versus what everyone's used to right now in the DeFi space, which is basically Ethereum and its derivatives, right? So you have in Cardano, it's based on a UTXO model. It's called an extended UTXO, which we can talk about a little bit more later. But essentially, same as what Bitcoin established early on, unspent transaction outputs. And so basically when you make a transaction, for example, it behaves very much in a sort of in a cash like way, where you consume UTXOs as inputs to new transactions, which then makes them spent. And then the recipient gets a new unspent transaction output, then spend somewhere else. You have basically like paying cash and getting change. And what that gives you is a lot of cool things like mainly the thing you hear IOHK talk about all the time is transaction determinism, which is basically that transactions are going to behave and operate very predictably. You'll be able to predict the fees, whether it's going to succeed or fail, these sorts of things. This is very different than Ethereum, which uses the account based model, which has like a global state of balances, kind of like a bank account, right? You know, where you have a list of account IDs mapped to balances. Yeah, exactly. And what you see in Ethereum is one of the major issues, which is side effects, right? You're relying on a smart contract on chain to fix potential issues that happen from concurrency and from the execution of multiple transactions that are trying to affect the same state at the same time. So it's kind of like, you know, when you're at the store and you're going for, you know, the last filet mignon on the shelf, right? We're all high rollers, right? In crypto, you're going for the last filet mignon on the shelf. Somebody else reaches for the same one. You now have contention. Okay. You know, your task, both of your tasks, because I need to get that thing, you reach for the same thing. Like that's kind of a personification of a concurrency issue. You have two users trying to do or operate on the same thing. In this case, it would be a UTXO in the Cardano world. It's kind of a loose, generalized analogy, but the same sort of thing. And that's what they're talking about here, this concurrency challenge. So could you have, let's say two users, they're both interacting, you know, the same type of thing, and maybe like a third one comes in, and they're all interacting on the blockchain. And they're trying to do some type of transaction. Can they, can there be more than one user concurrently working on the blockchain and doing a transaction, or is it only has to be this one to one to one to one? So it's really at the UTXO level that you have this, this potential challenge. And it's really just a design consideration. So I actually completely understand where critics might come and look at this and say, this is a real issue because they have this sample size, and it's such a wildly different way of doing this. And what I think people need to take away from this is that while you are making a trade-off, no matter what, when you go and you make a design decision is so wildly different, we're going to go with UTXOs, we're going to extend it to support, you know, data and scripts. And we're going to do it this way, very different than Ethereum. If you compare it, and you measure it by Ethereum standard, the way that the Ethereum world does it, it's never going to look right. You know what I mean? So it's kind of the way that you're evaluating it. And this is, this is like going back to 2015, when Ethereum was first coming into the space and saying, none of this will ever work because people haven't figured out how to set up good quality token standards for fungible tokens and non-fungible tokens. Or great example, CryptoKitties, early NFTs, untenable, completely like really inefficient, cool, but not refined. Now we have much better standards. We have ERC 721, which still has some issues. It's expensive, but you also have ERC 1155, you have 998, you have all sorts of really cool standards now, and it's much more mature. Same thing's going to happen here. Just because it's not like Ethereum DeFi doesn't mean it's not going to be successful. You know, order book exchange, something a lot of people want because it works very much like what you're used to in traditional finance. Not really feasible to do on Ethereum right now. Might be way more feasible on Cardano. So it's going to be picking the right tool for the job. That's the key. I guess it all makes sense because we're in uncharted territory. We haven't really done this before. So now we're moving forward and people are like, this doesn't make any sense. How could this possibly work? Because it hasn't worked before. Well, yes, because it hasn't been here before. It hasn't really been created. I mean, yes, we talked about UTXOs and Bitcoin and everything else, but for it to move forward with smart contracts and empties and everything else that it wants to do makes a lot of sense. All right. So that is that part. Let's jump back real quick to the article itself. So we talked about the concurrency issues, multiple interacting with the protocol at the same time. And this was the issue with MinSwap. MinSwap is the first DAP on the Cardano public test net. It was supposed to be a decentralized exchange. And of course, they ran into this issue with concurrency. And they said, side note, and they had to shut down. It said, due to the massive influx of users, you may be seeing an error message that says UTXOs are being used this block a lot. That's the concurrency issue. And they had to shut themselves down and then kind of figure out what it's going to be in the future. And then it goes on to talk about unspent transaction outputs, UTXOs. This is what they're talking about. It says it makes the network impractical for use because of things like Uniswap, which of course is all ERC-20 based, which processes over 10,000 transactions on a daily basis. So again, just real quick hash. Anything else to add about that piece right there? Yeah. I mean, I think it's just following on what we talked about before. It's that yes, in a sense, if you were to try and just take the Uniswap model and just naively deploy it on Cardano, it wouldn't work well. But that's not necessarily to say that that's the end of it. Minswap, I think the issue there was that maybe they got more usage than they thought. Maybe this was something that they anticipated happening, but maybe not at this... They didn't expect that type of volume and it exposed the issue much more quickly than they thought. It's hard to say what went through their minds, but that's what test nets are for. And the only thing I would have done differently is I would have said, here's this thing that we're seeing in our closed test nets. It's a concurrency challenge. Here's how we would approach this or here's some options, not giving away any secret sauce, but or don't do a test net. Everyone right now is embargoing their solutions to this problem, because it's been clear for a while that this would happen with UTXOs. This has been studied for a while. This is why Bitcoin has had issues with smart contracts, among other things. Bitcoin's UTXO is different than Cardano's has been modified for a reason. But that's the issue right now. No one wants to give up their solutions, because mainnet's not out there yet. As soon as you do that, you're given time for other projects to take what is now effectively open source code and work with it. Yeah, and it makes a lot of sense. And we're going to talk about that in a little bit when MinSwap puts out a little article, which we'll go over and talks about how people really aren't sharing. Sorry, we're front-running you. Yeah, they're front-running you. Just like we're front-running the banks. They're front-running everybody else. We have that issue right there. And then when we take a look at just this issue alone, Ethereum had the same problem with CryptoKitties. It just congested the network. And now we're having the same problem with Ethereum. The network's still congested and the gas fees are high. Does that mean that Ethereum will never work? And it will never have a workaround? No, it won't. At some point, they'll figure out a lot of smart people. That's why when people say, Rob, you talk about Cardano a lot. Yes, but guess what? I own a lot of Cardano. I think I own even more Cardano than even more Ethereum. I do Cardano. So it's the same thing that if you want to take an analogy of Blockbuster and Netflix, Blockbuster, look at Netflix. That'll never happen because you won't have the bandwidth to stream that much video. Well, guess what? Here we are. All right. So we have that piece right there. We'll figure it out. Now, let's take a look at, there's just two things. This was from, I thought it was funny, Anthony Cisano. This is the very last part. He goes, seriously, six years of peer-reviewed research and a $90 billion market cap later in the first DAP on Cardano can't even do a concurrent transaction processing. I thought it was funny. And Anthony Cisano, he's an independent Ethereum educator and an investor and advisor. So I think he's big into Ethereum. And I think that's one of my problems, too, is that I get so stuck into my own biases that I'm like, this, this, this, but I really need to open these things up. So even I fall victim to it. But this was what I really want to get into the MinSwap test net reflections or what they said about it. And this is, they just were honest that this is what happened. So MinSwap, just like you talked about, has known about the concurrency challenge since we first began building on Cardano over six months ago. It's not a fundamental flaw, but it's simply a design challenge. Individual teams have been working towards solutions, but thus far efforts have been siloed with little exchange of info amongst teams, just like what you said, Tash, because they're like, we want to keep our secret sauce to us. Well, you guys figured out, but really we should be showing a lot of information. That's the whole point of decentralization. And then lastly, to get into it, the resolution, the on-chain approaches we've explored are limited by the transaction memory limit and the off-chain ones either need a centralized entity or a robust L2 system, just like we'd have with polygon and Ethereum. Both of them take time and require a robust, simple dex first. That's the reason we decided to launch our dex, gather feedback, polish it before applying additional scaling layer upon it, and move forward. So that is what they're doing. So what do you think about those resolutions, those solutions, Tash? Can we do that? Is there something else that we could look at and what's going to happen in the future? Yeah, I think there's a lot of different solutions. So here's where I think there is due criticism, because this issue is not necessarily new in the sense that no one saw this coming. It's clear that most everyone who's building a dex and other certain applications that require this concurrent execution or pooling of assets where you might have multiple transactions trying to operate on the same unspent transaction output, there's going to be a lot of that. The challenge though is that because Cardano has been built in such a different way, all the way down to the language itself, its own scripting language, there's going to be a significant learning curve in place to build a lot of the things that people are expecting. So it's not going to be like, okay, we're going to build the most performant, high quality dApps that do everything you would expect with perfect user experience on September 12th. That was never going to happen. And it's very possible that there will be even more things that people find, hey, here's a performance issue, or here's a user experience problem that we need to solve. That is literally the experience of building software of any kind is that you always face these types of things, particularly with something new. So I would just set expectations slightly differently in this regard. If I'm all these projects, and even IOHK, IOG is this is the first step. This is the tools are out there now. Building the best stuff is going to take time and lessons learned and building best practices, those only come from doing it. And so that's that's my perspective, at least. And it's easy for external parties to opine in a very generalized way, because of how complex the stuff is. I mean, if you use a computer or a phone, any technology whatsoever on a day-to-day basis, you experience both concurrency and parallelism in your everyday life all the time. A single processor device that you interact with, you're trying to achieve a task, it might have all these different things it has to do to achieve that task. It's one processor with one core, it can only do one thing at a time. It looks like it's doing things concurrently to you, but it's really finishing one thing, changing to another thing, then to another, to another, to another, until it finishes the task. Or you have something with multiple cores, it's parallel, parallelizing, breaking it into smaller pieces and doing them at the same time. But most people don't think about things in that way, because why would they, you know? Yeah, I don't, that's for sure. I just, my computer pops on, I do a bunch of tasks, I got a MacBook Pro, it all seems to work concurrently. But in actuality, it's not, it's doing a lot of things behind the back, I don't even see. Okay, gotcha. All right, so Hash, thanks for answering those questions. So let's just get, and then we'll finish off like this. September 12th comes around, mainnet launches, what do you see happening besides what you just talked about, which is we're going to see issues, we're going to see problems, they're going to be fixed. I mean, I think we're going to see a lot of the solutions to this problem. You know, I know, and this is me, this is speculating, right? But I am willing to bet significant amounts of money that most every project that's doing something on mainnet day one, right, has some kind of solution for this. Some solutions will be better than others. Some will work better than others. That will be a great lesson for us day one, what works and what doesn't. Same way, it's always been in every other space. Research, and this is where some of these, you know, critics have a point, right? It's research and form of verification is only going to get you so far. The only way to really prove anything is to put it out there and build and it will happen. And I think this is the start of expectations properly that it's going to take time for everything to have that uptake and the community is going to be key. Gotcha. So an analogy I can think of is this, I can go fight Conor McGregor tomorrow. I can, I can do it. If I just find him in a bar, I can definitely do it. However, I probably want to prepare as much as possible before I do that to eventually lose. But I guess it'd be the same thing as like peer reviewed and all the different things that IOHK and IOG types do. Try to get as right as they possibly can. But just like you said, you got to get out there and do it. So I am hoping that this all works out. I'd be interesting to see all these different answers that all the different formats and different platforms actually are coming or all the different DEXs and all the different things that are building on Cardano, what they're going to say the solutions are and which one actually takes hold. Now, as far as like price prediction, me and Hash are the same way. We're going to bet a pretty good amount of money on this one. But it's all up to you, watching the video. If this is investment opinion on investment advice, if you think it's a buy the rumor, sell the news, then do what you got to do. Or if you think that this has this has some legs, there's going to be a lot of things coming in the future, you might want to stick around. So that is it for today. Hash, I want to say again, thanks for coming on and speaking English because I couldn't understand what was going on. So I appreciate you breaking it down. It's tough. It's tough. I mean, sometimes I'm, I'm reading things that are very nuanced and people are taking hard stances based on very nuanced topics and it's like, well, that's, that's problematic. So totally understand. That's crypto, baby. That's crypto. All right, everybody. Well, thanks for watching. First of all, go check out Hash's YouTube channel. There's a link in the description. He's also one of the guys that I have put in every description of my video as the people that I watch almost every day when I can. And that is it. Give it a like, subscribe, and we'll see you on the next one.