The Rings of Power: Cardano's Genesis Keys

Hi everyone, this is Charles Hoskinson broadcasting live from warm, sunny Colorado. Today is October 11th, 2023, and we're making a video to talk about the Rings of Power and the seven Genesis Keys. Oh, so scary, those Genesis Keys! Much Genesis, much key. As is the case with Cardano, everything has been written down for a long time, and we're going to go ahead and look at the stuff that was written down.

Let me share my screen. In the beginning, it starts with our good friend, the Cardano Ledger formal specifications. This is a public repo, and these are the blueprints of Cardano. If you're ever curious about anything in Cardano land, from the beginning with Byron, Shelley, Alonzo, Babbage, and Conway, you can see the formal specifications we have here. The Rings of Power and the Genesis Keys were introduced with Shelley.

Let’s go to the specification. Right here, on page 29 of a 129-page document, it says a formal specification of the Cardano Ledger. If you go ahead and control-find and search for "Genesis Keys," you can see the first references to them. The document discusses the existence of keys that were hard-coded into the Genesis block of Shelley specifically for the purpose of changing system parameters and for initiating a hard fork. At the time, this was the new hard fork combinator mechanism that we had introduced.

The hard fork combinator gives us the ability to do seamless upgrades, but it needs a triggering mechanism. There are more than a dozen system parameters that the update system controls. We decided to distribute these among the three core entities: two to IO, two to Emergo, and two to the Cardano Foundation. The basic idea is that the majority of them—five of seven—would be able to upgrade the system after some form of a social process worked its way through. We mentioned the federated governance model of Shelley; it's in the core document.

I want to show you something a little behind the scenes. A social process forms, and there are two forms of social processes that have materialized: one for a protocol parameter update or treasury and MIR function, and the other side of the process is for a hard fork. For a hard fork, consensus is formed around the idea that 70% of the stake pool operators have to agree. Then we enter into what’s called the proposal mode. This is the off-chain mode, and this is what the documents look like—whether it’s category A or B, an MIR, a protocol parameter update, or a hard fork.

A collection of people agrees. In this case, 11 people from IOG, CF, and Emergo come together and agree to approve a well-formed update proposal that then gets submitted to the network. This is an example of the submission process. You can see the latency on it; a notification occurred in August, and the execution is now on October 9th. It hasn’t been fully concluded, so there’s still some additional data to put in.

The problem with this process, and the big frustration we have with the Genesis key system, is that the social processes are not clear. This is why SIP 1694 was such a big step forward. The social process, for example, for a protocol parameter update: we poll the community, and some people come together and say, “Okay, we want to upgrade K from 500 to 1,000,” or we want to get rid of another protocol parameter the Min Fee. What does that translate to? It translates to a consensus among the three entities, which has been very difficult.

Even if there was consensus, these are more custodial, almost an administrator of a trust-style role than a formal governance process. Years ago, we pulled a bunch of people together to discuss what we needed to do to enable a much more robust and resilient system. When you look here, this is SIP 1694, the actual SIP that’s sitting with the Cardano Foundation. You can notice all the different workshops that people attended and the attendees of those workshops. It’s been a very decentralized process of people having discussions.

For the relevance of these Genesis Keys, the entire concept is replaced with the idea of a constitutional committee. If you scroll down, there are seven governance actions inside CP 1694, three of which are regulating functions for the constitutional committee, and the other four to six replicate what occurred in this process. It’s defined here in the update proposal of Shelley with some extensions for the new things you can do in Cardano in Conway. This basically is a polling mechanism that gives you the ability to poll the community if they want to approve something. The hope was to use this to approve budget referenda, SIPs, roadmap items, and these types of things.

It’s kind of a catch-all for community approval. What these three things do, and how they’re voted on, is that the constitutional committee has no vote on those three things: the motion of no confidence, new committee, and new commission, each with a threshold of 1 to 2B. What they effectively do is take this from a federated and static hard-coded quorum that’s in the block and translate it to a term-based group. You can go from three to five to seven to nine; you can have different terms. The other thing is that the constitution itself enables constraints on the committee via smart contracts.

When this was designed, we had no Shelley, no stake pool operators, no Plutus, none of these things. We had to have some form of bootstrap mechanism to upgrade the system. We said, “Alright, well, off-chain social consensus, kind of like how Bitcoin does things or Ethereum does things, makes a lot of sense.” We realized we had to go a step beyond that and start getting into the nitty-gritty of algorithmic adjudication and definition. We need to start electing constitutional committee members and rotating them through.

There’s a bootstrap with CP 1694, where you need some sort of an interim committee to roll over. But once the entire system is stable, which would probably take three to six months, you can begin actually electing term-based constitutional committee members and rotating out the interim members. You’ll also notice something: a trammel model. Instead of a social consensus forming and then people having to come together to approve signing of a key, you actually have the DS and the SPOs involved, depending upon what you’re doing. For example, in the case of a hard fork, we formalized the notion of the 70% quorum, and now we have a completely different decision set.

In other cases, for example, upgrading the constitution, it’s just the DPS in the constitutional committee. In other cases, a motion of no confidence or liquidating the current constitutional committee, these two are the people who decide: the DS and the SPOs. It’s a pretty good system, much more dynamic, and it allows knowledge transfer from one side to the other. This is more of a trustee-style role where the community instructs the administrator of a trust to do something, and this is more of a guardrail-style role where the constitutional committee is there to enforce a concept of preventing the other two parties from doing something. For example, if we want to distribute 100% of the treasury to Bob, and maybe Bob has an overwhelming majority of the DS and SPOs, the constitutional committee could say no.

Some people notice on-chain data that, in practice, when these certificates get signed, there are five signatures from the IO side instead of three. The historical reason for this is that while Emergo still gives us the legal authority to do that, for operational concerns, Emergo a few years ago decided to delegate their keys to us as a custodian. This is similar to how people store their Bitcoin or Ethereum in Coinbase custody or Copper and give them authorization to do that. This was due to a variety of operational and security reasons. Every single time something is done, there’s an exhaustive off-chain process we go through, and people have to sign.

You can see the signature of Ken Kodama when he signed for the MIR and Mezaki when he signed, and these types of things. That’s just how that system operates. We control three, two delegated as a custodian on behalf of Emergo, and with their original Genesis keys, they can revoke that if chosen, and then two from the Cardano Foundation. It’s a compromised model, and that’s how this model has operated since 2019. We keep pushing forward, and the community has decided to add things to that, for example, the 70% threshold for hard forks with SPOs.

There’s also the Catalyst consensus mechanism that decides on MIRs. There’s never been a clear consensus mechanism for protocol parameter updates, which is why they’re seldom done, much to my dismay and others’ dismay as well. This created an urgency to figure out a significantly better way of doing things, which is the entire point of the Conway era and what’s been under construction now with CP 1694. Some people have tried to make this an issue and argue that certain entities have total control over the network, but it’s materially untrue. There has always been, since the beginning with Shelley, a balance of 322.

It’s hardcoded into the Genesis block and is a custodial trustee-style role. What we’ve been doing is submitting updates after a social consensus forms. Now, let’s say the community disagrees. What would they do? They would do the same thing that happened with Bitcoin Cash and Bitcoin or Ethereum and Ethereum Classic, where an uncontrolled hard fork would occur.

Basically, the network would fork, which means that Cardano regresses to a governance state that is no better than Bitcoin or Ethereum. This is something that allows us to do seamless upgrades, and it allows us to do seamless upgrades with a trammel model. Every single role is either a role that has received its position because you’ve delegated stake to them to run the system, a stake pool operator, or you’ve decided to delegate it to yourself and serve in that capacity, or because someone has been elected to a fixed term to occupy that. It’s completely democratic with three different governance notions: two liquid in different ways and one term-based in modeling, much a constitutional republic. It’s a very good step forward in the evolution and progress of governance, and it allows the system to bootstrap more sophisticated forms of governance.

Once you have this in place, you can start talking about different weighting for voting that’s not stake-based. You can talk about different voting systems like quadratic voting instead of just a threshold condition, and you can talk about different stages of decision-making. That’s what we mean when we talk about minimum viable governance. But for this to be effective, you have to have the ability to replicate all the things that we’re currently doing: initiating hard forks, changing protocol parameters, which is not working as well as people would hope, treasury withdrawals, which is currently limited to Catalyst but will be opened up to general treasury withdrawals once the system turns on, and a general catch-all that gives people the ability to vote on things they care about. That’s effectively how you bootstrap this stuff, and it’s worked really well in practice.

Unfortunately, it doesn’t work well here, and you need to diversify the set of custodians in this respect and move beyond that to a completely democratic notion. If you’re very interested in Sancho, you can go to the Sancho Network website, which shows you how everything is running. If you’re interested in the specifications of the system in general, you can take a look at them here. These are the formal Ledger specifications of Sancho, the work-in-progress spec. I figured I’d make a video on that.

I appreciate that people want to check everything and verify everything, but everything has been written down since 2019, and people have been aware of this. These are social systems at their core, and there’s stuff that’s defined in the algorithm and stuff that’s defined through social process. When we wrote the Shelley specification, we didn’t formally put in the notion of 70% of the stake pool operators upgrading to initiate a hard fork. Now it’s kind of there as a social process, and it’s something we honor and follow. If there’s a deviation from that, the consequence is an uncontrolled hard fork because the people won’t tolerate that deviation, and they’ll take their network and change some things.

The point of 1694 is to memorialize and formalize tradition and precedent into something that is algorithmically adjudicated. But you have to move as your capabilities move. When Shelley came out, we did not have extended UTXO and Plutus. If we had, we’d have put a lot of the off-chain stuff that’s done on-chain. Now that it’s here, we’re starting to do that.

Concepts a constitution constraining the behavior of a constitutional committee can be formalized with guardrails, so they actually can’t sign transactions if they violate those guardrails. Initially, that’s a very primitive notion, but then the notion grows over time. That’s how, in practice, you upgrade a system with this level of complexity and a system that requires on-chain governance. It’s the same way when you think about how PKAD, Tezos, Ethereum, and others have done things. There’s a balance between what’s formal and what isn’t formal.

When you have seamless upgrades with a hard fork combinator, you have to have an initiation for something like that. From an operational viewpoint, many things are done for security reasons, following best practices of a custodian. You don’t want a situation where there’s a flaw or hack because, in practice, it won’t destroy Cardano, but it would create an uncontrolled hard fork situation and take weeks or months to clean it up and put all the pieces back together. Solana does this on a yearly basis because their consensus algorithm forces them to do these things. One of the reasons Cardano has never had this issue is because of the foresight that went into the formal specifications and the gradual rollout from a federated to a completely decentralized governance notion.

You have to build checkpoints along the way for these types of things. So those are the Rings of Power. They’re nothing special; people have known about them. They’ve been discussed, and it’s just that people have decided to bring it up recently. The reality is Sancho Net is in version 8.

5, and if you look at the velocity of things, within a few months it should be feature complete. This means it’s going from “Hey, how do we get all the functionality in?” to discussions about integration testing, QA, and what it would look like to initiate a hard fork on Cardano. To bring that in true to form, there has to be a social consensus. Unlike the prior social consensus where 70% of the stake pool operators had to agree, there’s an additional social consensus coming to vote using Cardano Val ballot to see if this is really what you want to do.

The community has to decide because it’s such a significant hard fork. Additional guardrails were put in place, far from somebody centrally controlling the entire system. We’re always transparent; we always tell you what’s up. You can see these things, and you’ll notice a recurring pattern where things are written down on a pretty regular basis. Since you wanted to see how things work behind the scenes, that’s currently how that tripartite governance structure works.

There’s a social consensus, either through a voting system like Catalyst or a polling system, or the signal of the stake pool operator upgrading after an extensive amount of work on the test net. Then it goes into a formal process of approvals. The trustees of those things go through that process, they sign the keys, and then a transaction is submitted to the network. The network upgrades; that’s how that’s done with SIP 1694. Any person in the entire Cardano network can submit a request to upgrade the system or do something to the system.

It was very important to me that this be included. We’ll test the scalability of that, but I believe it’s in the SIP. Once they do that, there’s a tripartite governance model, and the relevant parts according to that table will come online and do some stuff. You get to vote on the quorum for the constitutional committee, vote on DS via delegation, and of course, delegate to your favorite stake pool operators. All of these people are now pulled for governance.

It’s a massive leap forward over a federated trustee-style model. The next step is to have more resources to pull from, maybe real-life human identity if you can find a good way of doing that, and different voting systems like preference voting and quadratic voting. This would be the successor of 1694. You’ll notice each step of the way, the network gets more diversified, resilient, and decentralized but doesn’t compromise ease of upgrade and operation. You don’t want a situation where your governance system, as you upgrade it, creates a massive disruption in operation, lowering quality, or you run into a Bitcoin-style situation where it’s impossible to change anything.

We thought a lot about this. In fact, we wrote a very nice paper with DNS, Zros, Agalo, and others titled "Blockchain Upgradability." Let me grab the link real quick for you guys, and I’ll show you the paper, which talks about some of these fundamental concepts of updatable blockchains. Here we go; I’ll give you guys a link to it. I’d encourage you to look at that too because it really starts talking about how hard it is in practice to upgrade this software, especially if your goal is to get more and more decentralized over time.

It’s been a long journey from 2015 to now in 2023, and everybody’s learned a lot. We all do things very differently. What we’ve achieved is a truly decentralized, very unique ecosystem with millions of people all around the world. We saw that when we sampled for 1694, looking at all the different workshops that were held and the different people who participated. It meant the world to us that everybody showed up and shared their opinions about what is necessary for minimum viable governance.

True to form, not everybody agrees, and the people who disagree are very vocal on Twitter. That’s fair. What’s not really fair is when they imply that there’s some conspiracy or dishonesty on our part or ill will or a desire to completely control the network. The reality is, if 1694 does not pass, I’m out of ideas on the best way to move forward for having an on-chain upgrade system. In that case, I don’t want to be involved in designing the new one.

What we’ll do on the IO side is just burn the Genesis Keys we have, and Emergo and the CF will have to figure out if they want to continue along those lines or not. It’s not a matter of control; we’ve put our heart and soul into this for two years and worked with the community. We think this is the best way to move forward to get things done 3 is one great example of that. It's just not intellectually honest, and it's not fair. As I mentioned, it's been a very long road.

I wanted the original Cardano roadmap to be done in 2020; it was set for 2015 to 2020, which was a five-year plan. It's years late, and much of that was due to mistakes made with the original design of Byron, the necessity of the Byron reboot, and the complexity of doing some of the things we wanted to do. The use of formal methods, while it has produced remarkably stable software, added a lot longer to the development cycles of the software. We had to learn as an ecosystem how to develop within that paradigm. A lot of technology we would have loved to have had turned out to be better suited somewhere else.

For example, using Yella in the Cardano service layer as opposed to being on the main chain, making it a side chain. There have been some really awesome wins, like Mithril 2, which is done and has just been submitted to Eurocrypt. It's been a great journey along the way, but the point of governance is that at some point, it has to change over. As a community, you have two options. You can decide whether you want to continue down the road of using the hard fork combinator, building a system around this idea of protocol parameters and hard fork combinator, and having an on-chain governance system for that.

With 1694, you can literally use that to modify it in any direction. You could move towards an open governance model like Polkadot has or a Tezos model, or you could keep it along this model but just add new voting capabilities. Alternatively, do you want to move more towards a Bitcoin-style governance model of chaos, where everything is an uncontrolled hard fork? Every time you do something, you might end up having a Bitcoin Cash situation. Some people in the Bitcoin space say that's the best way to do governance, and it's the best thing ever, but that's not my decision to make.

I've taken it as far as I can as a protocol architect, and IOG can as a company. We've reached a point where there's a checkpoint, and the community has to make some decisions about what direction to take. I'm out of ideas on how to create an alternative upgrade system that would keep everybody happy. At the end of the day, the stake pool operators absolutely need to be included. There needs to be a dedicated governance class that's dynamic and reflective of day-to-day concerns, and there needs to be an institutional class that is term-based and has the ability to have a longer time horizon.

They should be a bit insulated from the daily issues, which is more protective about preventing the system from going too far in one direction too quickly. That's the idea of a triad governance. We've had these discussions for two years now as a community, and for the most part, the response to these types of things has been overwhelmingly positive. My belief is that when the community is given the opportunity to express their voice, they think this approach is the right one. If it's not, then that's an indication that someone has to go back to the drawing board.

Frankly, I think maybe the CF is the best organization to figure that out, and we'll work through them if that's the case. Ultimately, there's no indication of that at the moment. The indication has been that the approach with 1694 is a very good starting point for minimum viable governance. It's a lot more dynamic and robust, and it’s a lot more decentralized at its core. It doesn't require the notion of trustees for easy upgrades and doesn't require these social off-chain processes, which are ever-changing and, in some cases, you can't get to the right consent.

It really does make things much more organized, and that's my hope—that people see the brilliance in that and the value in that. One of the things you have to learn as a cryptocurrency founder, and for someone who builds these things for a living, is that your opinion is only one opinion. You have to know when to be in the room and when not to be, when to express your opinion and when not to express it. For a very long time, Cardano has no longer been an "I" thing or even a "we" thing; it's an "us" thing. There are millions of people here, and they have to have a say.

The point of a dual consensus model of getting a vote done and doing an SPO poll is that it is an expression of the will of the community. You accept it one way or the other, and you let the community lead if they feel they have a better idea. That's how open-source software should be done. Regardless of outcomes, I honestly believe our best days are ahead of us, and I want to spend the majority of my time in 2025, 2026, and 2027, as these transitions happen, building applications, side chains, and utilities for Cardano. Cardano was not just built in a vacuum.

One of the reasons I founded this system was that I was very curious about concepts like economic identity. How do you bank the unbanked? How do you connect the unconnected? How do you take resources like data, computation, and networks and decentralize them? I saw a world where all of those things are being taken from us as people.

What I’d like to do is focus on building those types of things. Midnight, for example, gives us a completely new way of looking at data confidentiality and privacy. I'd like to spend a lot of time working with Iman and his team to ensure that that grows so it becomes the place where we can do all those things with principles that preserve and protect the freedom of association, commerce, and expression. I can't tell you how many people come to me and say, "Charles, we’d a decentralized Twitter, Facebook, or YouTube." I couldn't agree more that this is useful and necessary.

If we want to live in a free society that embraces free expression, we must have these things because they’re being taken from us. You can't even go to YouTube anymore and search for keto videos without some algorithm deprioritizing things that don't fall into orthodoxy. I don’t want to live in a world in 2030 where a Ministry of Information gets to decide for us what we’re allowed to think. The point of having systems like Cardano is that they are launchpads to do these types of things. We’ll never stop thinking about research and core infrastructure, but by definition, like Linux, that has to be an endeavor with hundreds of companies working together and reaching compromises.

This is why Intersect was formed as a member-based organization to take over the code, the GitHub repository, the formal specifications, the working groups, and ultimately the product backlog of the protocol. It's also why in SIP 1694, an info section was included. That info section gives you, as a community, the ability through that mechanism to approve a SIP, a roadmap, a direction forward, and these types of things to give consent for people to start pursuing certain initiatives and expending resources in a certain way. It's also why the treasury is now completely open with ZP6 ID. The idea is that this gives you the ability, for the first time in the history of Cardano, for the government of Cardano to decide upon a budget.

You can start asking questions like, "Who should be paid to do marketing, adoption, and growth? Who should be paid to do development? Which institutions and what standards should we have?" On an annual basis, we should be able to look and say, "Are we doing a good job? What type of reporting and outcomes and key KPIs do we expect?

" That's the point of having the power of an on-chain government: that people can come together, express their will and wisdom, and put money down on the table for that will and wisdom to get things done. Of course, because we have a lot of great capabilities, we’d be part of that conversation. We’d be there because we want this infrastructure to be awesome. A different part of my venture studio will be heavily involved in building actual applications to do things like banking the unbanked. For example, John O'Connor's company, the Realy initiative in Kenya, aims to provide a KYC-like experience on a phone using a stablecoin and a blockchain instead of going through the centralized banking system.

We want to have those loans go down or midnight with data protection or any of the other things we have cooking, a Tler Prism, for example, with the idea of self-sovereign identity. These are the projects that are meaningful because they bring millions and billions of people real-life use cases that we, as an industry, continue to say we’re going to pursue. The protocol and its capabilities, I would argue, should evolve to ensure that such use cases are not only capable but efficient and cost-effective. When we do these things, they should be competitive with the legacy systems. That’s why you would argue for such things, and other people building other things would argue for their initiatives in a neutral place, a member-based organization, and let them make those decisions.

That's the point; that's where we need to go, in my view. The point of 1694 gives us every one of the fundamental resources to recursively improve the governance system towards that end, to hold institutions accountable that have taken money from the Cardano treasury, and to establish public trust. Ultimately, it allows you to fire your leaders should you feel they are not doing a good job, in real-time in some cases with D's, and on a term basis with the Constitutional Committee. If the committee is really not doing a good job, you can shut the whole thing down and start over. I think that’s a good approach.

That’s just one man’s opinion. Ultimately, each and every person listening who is an ADA holder and part of this ecosystem has the right and ought to express their opinion and move forward. Obviously, I'm going to defend my company, my reputation, and the actions we take when I feel that people are misrepresenting them or being dishonest about them. When things are materially not true, like when people make a statement that there’s a permanent dictatorship or tyranny, I need to point out that not only is that materially untrue, but it’s never been the intent. There are compromises made for the benefit of the community, the ecosystem, the ease of upgrading, and other things.

You use social consensus to enable and preserve those things. But just a hermit crab, you outgrow your shell, and we have outgrown the governance structure of Shelley. You’re all going to have to make a decision soon in the coming months about where you want to go and what shell you want to occupy. We’ve built a new shell that we think is fit for purpose, and you have to decide if that’s the one you want to live in as a community or if you want someone else to build another shell. I think moving forward, we can get there one way or the other.

In no way have we lost our passion for Cardano or our belief that this is indeed the best set of design decisions. The reality is I think we’re leading the entire cryptocurrency industry. Recently, we saw Vitalik saying maybe this B-molded staking thing is kind of a good idea. We know that we told you six years ago that it’s a good idea, and they’re just catching up. Eventually, people are going to catch up to the merits of extended UTXO when you talk about an asset and settlement layer and the ideas we have for side chains and where they’re going to take Cardano.

This concept of a service layer for Cardano is awesome. We’ve written nearly 200 papers about where we could go, what we could do, and what this technology can accomplish. No other cryptocurrency project has had enough respect for the people that work with it and in it to do that because these papers basically give you ideas of who we could be, where we’d like to go, and what you give up and gain for each of those decisions. You’ll notice something: there’s not a single bit of marketing speak, not a single bit of moonboyism—just good old-fashioned peer review in each and every one of them. That’s the integrity of the system and the bedrock upon which we all stand.

I’d like to see that continue moving forward, but it’s not my decision anymore, and it hasn’t been for a very long time. To be frank, it’s your decision as a community. I imagine it’s going to be a compromise somewhere along the way between formality and agility, between which features to emphasize, and whether certain core bedrock features, the determinism of our transaction model, will be violated for developer expediency or preserved. We’ll find some other approach that’s above my pay grade to make these decisions, and it’s yours. The point of 1694 is that you now get to explicitly, in an on-chain way, express those types of opinions.

If that’s the shell you want to occupy, Sonano Net is the roadmap to get there. We see a lot of really good people working every single day towards that end. It’s really been the greatest challenge and privilege of my lifetime to occupy this role and be with all of you. I can’t wait to see how it transforms and changes in 2024 and 2025. There’s a degree of unpredictability about it, but the passion is not lost regardless of how that changes, and the mission is not lost regardless of how that changes.

There’s nothing else I can do in my life more meaningful than being right here, right now, on this microphone with all of you. This is the goal of anybody—to be in the room where we actually can have a say in where humanity goes. Nobody got to be in the room in 1944 with the Bretton Woods Agreement. Nobody got to be in the room when we got rid of the Bretton Woods Agreement—just a small group of people you don’t get to meet, you don’t get to influence. All these major geopolitical decisions are made, nation-state borders being redrawn, dictators coming and doing things, people claiming they have democratic consent, but the reality is you don’t get to pick your leaders.

Look at the United States of America, where one political party has decided that their nominee process is a coronation, and they’re just going to hand it to somebody who’s in his 80s. The other political party is debating between a group of insiders that are self-selecting or a person who may even be imprisoned by the time the nomination process concludes. That’s what the Americans are given, and you’re told you only have those two choices. Every other person, even if they’re significantly more qualified, doesn’t even get to be on a ballot unless they are willing to spend a hundred million dollars of their own money to do that. When they do, the media presupposes they can’t win.

The fact is the system is rigged so they can’t. That’s not a democracy; that’s not real choice; that’s not being in the room. That’s basically being told we’ve invented a fiction so that when somebody is picked through this process, you’ll accept that they now have the ability to kill people through drone strikes, start wars, spend your money, imprison you, and do all the other things just above revolution. That’s not for the 21st century in an age of globalization, the internet, and other things. What we should aspire to is to ask for basic human rights, basic human dignity, and self-sovereignty.

The blockchain movement, as maligned as it has been and as many scammers as it has attracted, aspires to these principles: self-sovereign identity, power to the edges, be your own bank, have your own economic identity. On-chain governance is the ultimate emergent reflection of that. It carries a lot of challenges, a lot of confusing directions, and everybody has a different view on how it should be done. I’ve tried my best, and now it’s in your hands to decide what to do. In the coming months, you’ll make that vote in the ecosystem, and we’ll see if that’s the direction you’d like to go or if there’s a different direction.

That’s okay because at the end of the day, we’re all going to figure it out together. Different people take different roles, and I’ve had mine for this end. Moving forward, I think the governance structure, wherever it ends up, will be suitable for the purpose of continuing to rebuild the world in a way that’s a lot more honest and has a lot more integrity, as long as we agree to work together and have faith that everybody in this movement is just honestly trying to do right by each other. I believe that, and I think you do too. I hope this gives you some more clarity on who we are, what’s been going on, some of the behind-the-scenes things.

It’s a lot more boring than people have it come out to be, and where we’d like to go. I’ll see everybody at the Cardano Summit here in a bit. As I mentioned, Cardano ballots are under heavy construction as CF and IOG have a lot of votes and things to do. Ultimately, we as an ecosystem are just going to pick what to do and move forward. If you’re interested in governance, become a DP.