Great Momentum and Growing Up

Hi everyone, this is Charles Hoskinson broadcasting live from warm, sunny Colorado. Always warm, always sunny, sometimes Colorado. Today is July 20th, 2023. I'm finally back in Colorado after traveling a bit. I was just in Edinburgh with many of you, and before that, I was in Papua New Guinea.

It's been a wild ride the last 60 days. I think I'm getting old; you can see it in my beard. It was really wonderful to engage with the community at the Capstone 1694 workshop. It was a culmination of commentary from over a thousand people from 50 different workshops, about half virtual and half in-person, throughout the world. What we learned from the process is that we continue to have probably the best community of any cryptocurrency.

There’s a lot of alignment on the idea of minimum viable governance and many amazing ideas about how to take minimum viable governance, build something functional, and move it to something the community can then use to transform Cardano into something that engages as many people as possible, as opposed to just a subset of that. Node 8.2 is near imminent, and it’s carrying with it Sancho Net. What we broke down is a series of milestones in Sancho Net that will flesh out a full implementation of 1694, allowing people to test what it's like being a DRAP, submitting a constitutional update, writing custom code for DRAPs, including smart contracts, and managing multiple users as a DRAP to build political parties, software like dashboards, accountability software, and a whole bunch of things. It’s going to be a very vibrant summer, and a lot of stuff is going to happen.

There are also some great community events like Rare Evo and CNFT Con that will be attended by the community. At some point, there will be a community-wide vote for the ratification of 1694, and then it’s just a matter of what level of quality assurance is required to do a hard fork, should the community decide this is what they want to do. There are also a lot of things that have launched, for example, major changes to Catalyst. The Intersect organization, which is the member-based organization we keep talking about, has already had 150 people join. Throughout the summer, there are going to be a lot of grants coming out of the new Dev Trust for Cardano, and a lot of elaboration about how that works.

In the process, there’s a boatload of people coming out of the woodworks, both in a positive sense and a negative sense, expressing opinions about where we should go, what we should do, what’s legitimate, and what’s illegitimate. That’s exactly what should be expected because people are growing up, the ecosystem is maturing, and we’ve entered a new era of Cardano where there are many voices. Those voices are going to have to find a way to compromise and agree with each other. The good news is we predicted this state as a project, and it’s a healthy one. Many of the institutions and discussion mechanisms that have been put in place will be invaluable for the community to converge, rather than diverge, and move forward.

For example, the workshops held for 1694 had a very tight moderator pattern that many people agreed was productive for having meaningful conversations and giving people the right to be heard. That’s a super important thing. Those skills and techniques are not a one-off for a particular workshop; they now belong to a very large set of the governance community in Cardano to use for their own workshops and dialogue. Another thing that’s been happening is that we’ve done a really good job of speeding up development. You may have noticed that there have been several major releases, such as Mithril, which is starting to work its way to mainnet.

We just made an announcement that Hydras are still moving at an extraordinary pace. The development of Cardano Node, now that we’re on the 8.x series, is moving very quickly. Lace has a monthly release cycle, and we’ve already gotten to version 1.3, with 1.

4 on the horizon. Because of this release cadence, we’re starting to see a lot of really cool features coming, such as BLS support and Plutus on the horizon. There are a lot of exciting things to announce in the second half of this year regarding the sidechain strategy and what will come into play. IO, as an engineering firm, has finally found a healthy balance of rigor and formalism. For example, with the Conway era, it will be the very first era of Cardano to move to a full true formal specification with code extraction.

We actually have an active specification of the Voltaire ledger logic, and we can extract from that Haskell code and compare it to the production system. From a testing viewpoint, with constraint satisfaction testing, model checking, and property-based testing, there’s never been a more rigorous yet effective and efficient time to participate. There’s a lot of great progress in these areas, but there’s also been significant progress in workflow. The new PI system that runs quarterly is moving over to Intersect, the member-based organization. We have tribes within our development teams, the sidechains tribe, the core ledger team, the Voltaire tribe, and the smart contracts tribe.

What we can do is mirror the leadership structure as committees, and the member-based organization, Intersect, can manage those committees. We can join them, but members of the community can also join them. This means that when you sum up what they do, they write the product backlog that gets executed on a quarterly basis, turning the product backlog into a full open-source program. We’ve learned a lot about how to do this in practice from projects like Hydra, which have a very high level of community participation and a pretty agile, high-volume process. Some things are going to have to migrate from Jira to GitHub and other open project management systems, and that’s going to be some of the growing pains as the repositories move from the Input Output repositories to the Intersect repositories, allowing people to become contributors.

The good news is that there’s never been a better time to participate in the development of Cardano. For example, when we had our workshops in Edinburgh, there were five different sets of them. One involved inviting members of the community to come together to design a SIP for wallet integration for voting tools, SIP-95, being co-designed with the wallet makers. We all worked together, had a hackathon, and made an enormous amount of progress very quickly to avoid the mistakes made with the rollout of SIP-30, which was very nice. Unfortunately, because of version differences, it created incompatibilities and made it really hard for a lot of people to deploy a wallet that worked with all the wallets.

People had to work around very similar mistakes to those made by Internet Explorer 6 with the implementation of the CSS standard, where you had to actually break your sheets for them to work. That got fixed, but it was painful to fix, and we want to avoid that with future SIPs. It was really cool to see the community come together and co-author that standard, moving very quickly for voting tools that can be useful for Sancho Net and eventually the mainnet. It’s a new dawn for collaboration, interoperability, and integration, and a lot of projects are starting to get elevated. There’s a lot of diversity in warming this active specification.

At some point, it’s going to work its way through the totality of Cardano, and the sum of that would actually be one set of blueprints to show the canonical design of Cardano. What that functionally means is that for the first time ever, we’d have an end-to-end specification that is implementation-independent and can be used for third parties to build competing clients for Cardano, which is a major milestone forward. But we need to do this in a way where those clients can enjoy similar quality to what people have enjoyed with Cardano itself in the Haskell sense. I would love to see a Rust and a TypeScript client, for example, but a lot of work has to be done to get us to that moment. We’ve already taken a major leap forward to facilitate that, and the governance of Cardano can set priorities and decide whether it makes sense to move towards a polyglot ecosystem, among many other things.

Our role is really moving towards a time-and-materials business as usual on a quarterly basis to get some great things done. But it also frees up other parts of the organization to really start looking ahead to the future—2025, 2027—and asking some very fundamental questions, like how do we become a fourth-generation cryptocurrency? How do we build a system that is as useful as possible to a billion people from many different use cases and ultimately transform their lives? At the end of the day, Cardano is an ecosystem built upon exponential technologies, but we have yet to fully take advantage of those technologies and get them into everyday people's lives. Another part of my company can then also focus a lot on building on top of Cardano.

Many of you are fans of and know about Midnight and our real plans for getting real finance into the hands of people in Africa and other places in the world. These are aspirations we’ve had for a long time, in some cases deep R&D projects, but we’re building them on Cardano for the people of Cardano and the broader ecosystem of the cryptocurrency space. It’s really exciting to be able to build those products and let them compete and do cool things. So when one changes a role, you get some of the past, but you also get new things in the future. In terms of the vision, there’s now a way to debate and ratify it through a member-based organization, Intersect, and there’s also a way to vote on it.

That’s the point of 1694, and the community can decide whether that vision makes sense, or another vision, or a hybrid vision makes sense. The single most important thread among all of this is realizing that we all have to upgrade the EQ, not just the IQ. Cardano has the highest IQ—180 papers, moon math, and all kinds of magic—and it’s not easy to write active specifications. It’s not easy to write Haskell code. People absolutely understand the rigor, discipline, and sheer brilliance of the research side.

What’s missing is the human element. If we’re going to win, if we’re truly going to get to number one, we don’t have leaders; we have each other. That means we have to work well together, which means we have to understand each other. We have to listen to each other and have a high degree of empathy for each other’s positions. We must truly try to understand—not talk at and shout over—but listen to each other in a way that allows us to learn from each other and understand each other’s values.

Then, and only then, can we get to one backlog that we can all agree is a useful backlog for moving forward. The debate cannot be done on Twitter. Certainly, you can try to drag it there, but remember that social media is built from the ground up to divide us, make us angry, and reduce the depth of a conversation to something shallow. It’s also fundamentally unfair to think people are one-dimensional. The reality is we’re very complicated.

One of the things I was most proud of when we put all these workshops together with the community for SIP 1694 was the diversity of people in the room. There were people who worked really hard to travel all throughout South America, including writing a candidate constitution and principles—almost revolutionaries inside the room. I’m really proud of them. There were people who put workshops throughout Africa, like Mercy in Ghana, a wonderful woman with a huge heart who brought a lot of voices that normally don’t get heard. We had people from Australia, New Zealand, throughout Asia, Europe, and North America all in one place, representing the voices of thousands of people.

We come from different languages and cultures, but we have a common goal: we just want a better world, and we think we’ve stumbled across some tools that can get us there in a very ethical way. One of the biggest areas of upgrades in Ephesus is not to do with protocols or software at all; it has to do with communication, respect, and empathy. It’s going to be tough because we all have to grow and learn, but if we do that, we will have created an ecosystem that is worthy of having a billion users and transforming the entire world. If we fail to do that, the best-case scenario is that we will have produced a lot of really interesting technology and potentially some market value for that technology, but we will be a footnote in history as we get replaced by the people who did figure that out. This ecosystem is built for everybody, by everybody, for the purpose of making everything, everywhere, better for everyone.

That’s just the fact, and that’s the intent. So we’ll get there; it’s just going to take a little while. There are now so many different ways to participate—from the SIP editor process to Sancho Net, to building governance software, to participating as a DRAP, to joining Intersect, to building new software in the ecosystem, to contributing to an open-source project like TX Pipe or Hydra, or being a core developer. All of these opportunities and options are yours, or you can just talk about it, and that’s valuable too. Talk about it on YouTube, do some interviews, host some Twitter spaces.

There are a lot of really cool people there. The Cardano Stoners Club, for example, was represented in 1694. I never thought I’d see them there, but they were, and I remember some of my fondest memories joining late at night on Twitter and talking to them. It was really cool to see that they’re engaged and want to educate people as well. So that is where we’re at.

There are a lot of conversations to come and a lot of hard decisions to make—some philosophical, some practical—but we will, as one community, one ecosystem, get there. I have absolute confidence in it. Now that we’re a little freed up as we move to this new paradigm to think about a vision, there are a lot of great moonshots and great technology. One of our other superpowers is that Cardano has within its ecosystem an entity that has the best engineers in the world and the largest cryptocurrency research group in the world, which now has good operations, good velocity, and a lot of domain experience. Some people like to point out that there have been delays, that we missed some deadlines, or that version one wasn’t as good as it needed to be.

Those people tend to forget that the iPhone launched without the App Store or 3G. Do you remember that? Because that’s not what great products are about. Great products, at the end of the day, are about the vision, the community, and ultimately the evolution. How fast can they get something new and interesting, and how do they take that new and interesting thing and really give you an experience you’ve never had before?

When we look to the future and the vision, there are plenty of things we’re going to need to do to clean things up, improve TPS, make transactions a little better, and make it easier to write smart contracts. But let’s look at how far we’ve come. It wasn’t too long ago that we didn’t even have smart contracts in the system. Now we’re in version two, soon to be in version three of Plutus, and we’ve already achieved a 10x improvement in many different categories. It’s much easier to write contracts today than it was just a year ago.

Think about how quickly we can move to a new state, yet we keep our principles of determinism, predictability, and security. Whereas our competitors find it hard to get these things by design, they can’t have them. It’s a pretty magical thing to doggedly hold on to one’s integrity because when times get a little tough, people truly value the institutions that can’t lie and the institutions that can’t fail. As slow as we’ve been for over 2,000 days, Cardano has never failed. That’s a pretty remarkable thing when millions of people have tried to break it, and it has lived through pandemics, staff changes, markets up and down, and everything in between.

We’re resilient, and that’s because of the integrity of the process. We won’t lose that; we’re just going to make the process better every day and eventually conquer the world. Thank you all for listening. It’s a pleasure to be here. It’s good to be back, and we have some work to do.

We’re going for number one.