Run for the ICC

Hi, this is Charles Hoskinson broadcasting live from warm, sunny Colorado. Today is May 29th, 2025. I'm about to head to Austin, not for Consensus because I wasn't invited, but to meet with a certain presidential candidate. We'll discuss that later. In any event, I wanted to make a quick announcement about an election that's just about to start, which is relevant to all Cardano people.

As we're starting the movement towards SIP 1694 with the Chang hard fork. Intersect just posted a tweet encouraging all applications from across our ecosystem to join the Interim Constitutional Committee (ICC). The ICC will consist of seven members upholding the interim Constitution during the interim period as the community upgrades to Chang. Four members will be a rollover from Input Output, Cardano, Mergo, and Intersect, while three seats are open to the community. All members will serve a one-year term, which is subject to change with the final Constitution.

We're excited to facilitate the election process for the three open seats. Any member, or not, can register their candidacy to join the ICC. Later in June, the Summon platform will host a stake-based vote open to all ADA holders, confirming the seats by ranked choice. Here are the key dates: registration is open, the voting power snapshot takes place on June 8th, registration closes for candidates on June 10th, and voting will occur on the Summon platform from June 13th to June 23rd. The three elected seats will be confirmed.

You can read more about it on the blog at Intersect. Community-led governance takes another step forward, and I'll post a link for you guys in the chat. If you want to read more about the Summon platform, it's a wonderful platform with great people. Already, there are some people quite interested. For example, Rick McCracken says we have a group of Cardano enthusiasts who would like to run as one institutional committee member using multisig, so all six people would count as one vote.

Members potentially include Mike, Adam, Jenny, Thomas B, and myself. I suggested it should be a Wyoming DAO. It's important to understand what the Constitutional Committee is. Chang has a lot of components, including Plutus V3, but most importantly, SIP 1694, which is the governance framework for Cardano. It blends three concepts together: democratic representation, democratic consent, and the Constitutional Committee.

The on-chain government includes the stake pool operators and institutions, which are organizations the members-based organization, Intersect, and the Cardano Foundation, that advocate for the people. Finally, there’s constitutional representation, which preserves the integrity of the system. Initially, there will be an interim Constitution, and we need to turn the government on. Chang has two hard forks, pending approval from the stake pool operators. One is to implement Plutus V3 and all of the SIP 1694 logic with the democratic system turned off as a governing body but registration turned on.

The goal is to spend about 90 days allowing people to register to become delegates, getting delegation preferences and other things in place so that people can get used to the system for fair distribution. Then, we will turn on the additional hard fork using the Constitutional Committee and the democratic system. At that point, we will have a fully functioning government with the democratic system, an interim Constitution, and the Constitutional Committee alongside the stake pool operators. The next major governance event will be the Constitutional Convention, followed by the constitutional ratification of the output of that process. We will have an interim government, and the final form for government 1.

0 will be when the final Constitution comes into play. Everything is, of course, fair game, including deviations from SIP 1694 and different ways of selecting Constitutional Committee members. The term of the Interim Constitutional Committee is basically to get through the entire process of turning the government on. That’s why there’s some rollover from the old Genesis key holders, as it requires five of seven to turn things on. Those three elected people are necessary for that, even if there’s complete consensus among all the institutions, which there seldom is.

This is a temporary government, and its purpose is to get the democratic system where it needs to be and facilitate the first budget process and the first Constitutional Convention. The Constitution has the freedom to redefine the Cardano government in the articles, which means how the Constitutional Committee members are selected is up for fair game. The nature of the democratic system is also up for fair game, along with additional features and functionality for Cardano. The process involves a Civics Committee and a subcommittee within the Civics Committee called the Constitutional Committee. They are drafting a proto-Constitution that will incorporate all their thoughts from at least 50 workshops around the world.

Each workshop will provide feedback on what they and don’t and then elect a delegate and an alternate. The delegates will convene in Argentina, tentatively set for December. I’m personally going down to Argentina in July to help plan, and JJ is already there right now; he’s been there twice already. The delegates will host a Constitutional Convention where all of those markups from the 50-plus workshops held around the world will be discussed. We hope to make this as decentralized as possible, taking all of that input, along with the first budget process, and everything people liked and didn’t like about Intersect and other things.

Each delegate will have a vote. Once the delegates are satisfied and a majority or some governance faction agrees on the Constitution, it will go to the blockchain for a vote. It's important to understand that while this is one process to get to a Constitution, due to the nature of SIP 1694, there can technically be competing conventions if people desire. That’s the magic of Cardano; it’s the most decentralized cryptocurrency in the world and will remain so. We’re demonstrating to the entire cryptocurrency space in real-time how to build a decentralized government for everyone to enjoy and use.

The fact that there are already many candidates excited to be interim Constitutional Committee members shows how truly decentralized Cardano is and how magical that is as an ecosystem. It’s a long road ahead in terms of things that need to get done, but temporally speaking, it’s moving very quickly. We’re getting very close as an ecosystem to 9.0, which is the fork candidate for Chang. As 70% of stake pool operators have to agree that this is a good path forward before an upgrade can be done.

Typically, that takes about a month for that level of consensus, so we’ll see how long it takes for 9.0 to come and what level of quality control people require. Many people in the ecosystem community have been vigorously testing Sono net to look for flaws or other concerns. A lot of those concerns, which aren’t related to 9.0, will be resolved in the coming months.

There will be a gap between where the protocol is at and where the Constitution mandates we ought to be. That gap will be part of the new roadmap for Cardano. We’re also working on creating some consensus among the different development organizations. A group of developers has aggregated to collaborate with the Cardano Foundation and others leading that effort. We participated as well, and there was some thought about writing an open letter about how development in Cardano works.

I think it’s an excellent idea to merge that effort with as many people as possible who are using and developing the protocol into a manifesto for how product development should work moving forward. There’s been a significant leap forward in transitioning the GitHub repositories to Intersect in anticipation of a full open-source project with community participation in every aspect of development. However, this requires a more inclusive approach to how core developers work and how requests for proposals (RFPs) are done, as well as the roadmap itself for the ecosystem. We know that the Constitutional debt will certainly be an important roadmap item. There’s also a lot of R&D we’d like to include in the roadmap, especially through the RFP process, along with everything the community wants.

All these elements must be put together into a coherent step-by-step process. The good news is that things are completely open, and they’re speeding up the prototyping of Oror Leos in Paris. That work will be done completely in the open. Several months of work have already been completed in Paris, and that entire prototyping group is moving to Intersect. They will start opening up the meetings, and the LAYOS paper should be coming out on Friday, depending on some last-minute adjustments and changes, alongside a big drop of videos and other materials explaining how it works.

My hope is that we can complete the prototyping throughout the summer and fall and then have an open RFP process to implement it next year. This is very different from how things used to work, but that’s the point of increasing decentralization in on-chain governance. We’ve always been by and for the people, and we’ve always tried as an ecosystem to pull things together. This is just another example of that. The Constitutional Committee is a very powerful body; they are the gatekeepers of the Constitution and function a combination of a Senate and a Supreme Court.

They serve terms and operate differently than the democratic system, which is more a liquid democracy. We are the first system in the world to take the principles of a constitutional republic and combine them with a liquid democracy system. No one has ever done that, and no one has ever done that with a blockchain, especially with millions of people around the world who have never met each other. Yet, we’re doing it in real-time with grace and dignity. I’m very proud of everyone participating.

This is going to be a fun election. It serves a very specific purpose: it strengthens the governance muscle a little bit and brings a lot of new, fresh blood into the conversation. Many institutions also have to offer support. There have been open questions, for example, about Constitutional Committee members eventually getting budgets and staff to assist them in their roles. This will be something open for debate in the first Cardano budget that comes out as SIP 1694 turns on.

The governance class of Cardano, both the democratic system and Constitutional Committee members, do need some help because the volume of governance work is considerable. Just like Congress members and Senators have staff, it makes sense for us to allocate some budget to each Constitutional Committee member to assist them. This will be an open and vigorous conversation. Tooling is also very important. The governance tool and the deification of things have been a lot of fun during Sono net, and there are certainly great platforms to poll people and understand their intent, as well as build dashboards to visualize things.

However, we also need some integration of AI into our ecosystem. We probably need our own large language model based on something open-source and fine-tuned for the needs of Cardano to assist the lawmakers of Cardano, the democratic system, and the Constitutional Committee. These are topics that will be discussed at Intersect and outside of it, and we will try to find ways to work them into the roadmap and budget. This is an example of how we get things done through a considered, deliberate, systematic process in a transparent and open way. I believe this will become the shining beacon for the rest of the cryptocurrency space about what decentralization is and how a decentralized government should operate.

We can’t control the markets; we can’t control the ups and downs of things. What we can control is our own integrity and our mission. At the end of the day, Cardano was created to be the financial operating system for those who don’t have one. There are billions of people around the world who need what we build. That’s a fact demonstrated every day by how many people are unbanked and how much they pay for remittances and microfinance transactions.

Even in my own country, the United States, there is enormous inequity and unfairness in the way things are done. It depends on where people are born, who they’re born to, and the luck of the day. I’ve always believed that it’s a human right for all of us to use the same systems—same voting systems, the same financial systems—with integrity that can’t be evil, instead of “don’t be evil.” That’s why Cardano exists. We don’t just solve the problems of the world; we solve the problems at home at the same time.

Each and every one of you who participates in this process, large or small, is taking a step forward on the road toward the liberty of all mankind. That’s a privilege that I don’t think we’ve ever been offered before. Thank you for helping all of us. Thank you for being part of this, and I can’t wait to see this election. We’re getting real close to Chang, and we’re getting real close to the new era of Cardano.

Welcome to the age of Vol, my friends. Cheers!