Cardano Ballot and CIP 1694

Hi everyone, this is Charles Hoskinson broadcasting live from warm, sunny Colorado. Today is November 16th, 2023. I'm making a video quickly about Cardano ballot and discussing the upcoming vote. I've been sick for a little while. I went to Dubai and Abu Dhabi, picked up something there, and carried it with me to Greece and Iceland.

It started as a throat issue and turned into a sinus problem, and now it's working its way into my chest. Those damn rhinoviruses get you every time. Anyway, I want to talk a little bit about something. I'll share my screen. There's a bit of commentary on this, and every time you see it, it's fair to say, "Hey, let's have a chat.

" This is a tweet we just put out today. It states that the polling event on SIP 16 1994, utilizing the Cardano ballot tool developed by the Cardano Foundation in collaboration with Input Output and Intersect, is a temperature check on the progress made thus far on the Cardano governance journey. It outlines that a snapshot will be taken on the 21st, the ballot will open on the 1st, people can vote, the ballot closes on the 11th, and the results come in on the 16th. The tweet storm explains that the ballot is a non-binding poll and an opportunity for the community to share feedback more formally on the Cardano on-chain governance journey. Beyond voting, the feedback gathered will help inform the 2024 plans and priorities in governance activities and development.

The poll will count both stake and participating wallets for a mix of data points. When voting, users are encouraged to add comments via a feedback form. Your insights will be incredibly valuable. If your ADA is on a hardware wallet and you don’t want to move it, you can vote with as little as one Lovelace to register your feedback. In Q1 of next year, there will be a fresh poll including hardware wallet support.

Polling starts December 1st and runs until December 11th. To participate, make sure you have ADA staked via a compatible wallet by November 20th. These are all the compatible wallets, and it's free to take part. This is an example of a governance tool. What we’re trying to accomplish with the Cardano Foundation is twofold.

One is to start the process of temperature checks to see where people stand, what their feedback is, and what they understand or don’t understand. The easiest way to do that is through hot stakes. Later, we can get a broader set of people, including all the hardware wallets, for a second temperature check. The second goal is to develop an open-source platform for temperature checks on questions about governance in general. When you think about the reality of SIP 1694, if you are a Delegated Participant (DP) or a constitutional committee member and you want to pull people to gauge their opinions, you need a set of tools to easily solicit feedback.

I hope we can see the Cardano ballot tool as a template and starting point for a fast and rapid polling mechanism that people can use regularly for various significant decisions, such as hard forks and the Cardano treasury budget, which will be an annual concern. We’ve been gradually rolling things out with Intersect, the Cardano Foundation, and Input Output. We aim to get this tool out as a minimum viable vote, conduct a temperature check with hot wallets, update it again with cold wallets, and then the final level of temperature check will be the 70% threshold that the SPOs have. Around the same time, you may have noticed that Cardano Node has just reached version 8.6, and 8.

7 is almost out. The Soncho net is reaching a nice level of maturity, and there’s real momentum building. People are starting to experiment with it. Throughout the rest of the year and into Q1, we should see rapid improvements in governance tooling, and people will begin running testing scenarios like hard forking the test net, changing parameters in the test net, and new constitutions. The reason I’m making this video is that there were some questions about hardware wallet support.

Numerous people have said they won’t participate in this round. That’s fine because it serves a dual purpose. One is to get a temperature check of those who do participate, providing a statistical sampling. Then, as we broaden the set, we get a different statistical sampling, which will be interesting to compare. This will give us a sense of the distribution among cold storage, hot storage, and exchange-based storage.

If you want to participate and happen to be in one of those hot wallets, I’d love to see you do that. The ballot is a really cool tool, and kudos to the Cardano Foundation for all the work they’ve done. A lot of effort went into it, and we assisted where we could. Hopefully, this encourages the evolution and development of standards, namely SIP 30 and SIP 95, and continues to build up that stack of resources for the wallet ecosystem to make voting very easy. There’s a long road ahead, and there’s a lot to do.

There are a few updates in SIP 1694 related to the PKI side of things, especially the rotation of credentials for DPs and committee members. That’s probably the next thing coming. Overall, people are working hard, and we’re getting a lot done. It’s encouraging to see the community stepping up. I was just in the Civics committee earlier today with community members like Lloyd, Adam, and Northpool.

We talked a lot about the constitution process, the guardrails, and the budget committee. Rick has been doing a great job with the community on the security side and best practices. There are some really good recommendations and discussions starting to emerge. 850 members have joined Intersect already, and that’s just the beginning. We’re going to see huge growth next year.

There’s an active transition right now of all the repositories from the IO side to Intersect. I owe you guys a midnight video, and I’m going to try to make it today. I’m seeing some crazy stuff floating around and a lot of misunderstanding and misinterpretation. I guess we could have done a better job of layering information, but that’s okay. It’s a lot all at once—the whole partner chains concept and the Cardano service layer and what these things are all about.

As soon as I make that video, I think you’ll feel a lot more comfortable. It’ll be a whiteboard session. I’m not feeling so good today, but I’ll try to make it regardless. I just need to stop coughing, and I think I’ll be okay. I hope this video helps a little bit about Cardano ballot.

I’m excited to see what people have to say—yes or no. You can always include a reason, and it’s a nice temperature check to see where everybody’s at and what everyone’s thinking. Also, to begin testing governance tools, take a look at Cardano ballot. If you intend to be a DP and have a wish list of features you think would be cool to have as a governance tool to help you get departure checks on your constituents, please do comment on that. I’d like to see this turn into a proper open-source project.

Thank you, everybody, and I’ll talk to you soon. Cheers!