The release of Cardano 1.5 marks the start of the shift from the Cardano Byron era to the Shelley era and is an excellent opportunity to describe the ongoing work for Shelley and how the transition will happen. Roughly six months ago, we switched almost all our development efforts to the Shelley code base, and work has been progressing quickly ever since. The last major work in…

The Symphony of Blockchains project had its public debut last week at a packed event in Bristol’s Arnolfini Gallery. Over a hundred visitors took the chance to explore the bitcoin blockchain in full virtual reality (VR), at a joint presentation from IOHK creative partners Kuva and IOHK's creative team. The Symphony project is an educational initiative, with the goal of creating…

IOHK has a history of putting great research into practice. This includes the use of functional programming languages, adoption of formal methods, and — of course — implementing our own peer-reviewed research into blockchain consensus algorithms. We approach the problem of software deployment in similar vein, using ideas which have emerged from recent academic work. This system…

Ada is not among the 26 cryptocurrencies identified by US researchers last week as being vulnerable to ‘fake stake’ attacks.

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The Cardano blockchain underlying Ada is based on proof-of-stake (PoS), but its Ouroboros protocol uses no bitcoin code and is not affected by the PoSv3 problem.

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This is not just good luck, but a consequence of the thorough, formally-verified approach…

Please note: this post originally appeared on the Well-Typed blog. Stateful APIs are everywhere: file systems, databases, widget libraries, the list goes on. Automated testing of such APIs requires generating sequences of API calls, and when we find a failing test, ideally shrinking such a sequence to a minimal test case. Neither the generation nor the shrinking of such…