Product Development and Commercial Success in Tough Markets

Hello. I'm a little under the weather today, but I wanted to make a video because everybody's talking about a variety of different things related to the budget. I think it's important that we have a fact-based, reality-based conversation about where we currently are and what's going on. When you do product development and create a product, you have to make decisions about how to compete in a broader ecosystem. Cardano, as a protocol, has to compete against SUI, Aptos, Ethereum, Solana, and dozens of other smart contract systems.

We have one large pool of liquidity, token flows, transaction volume, DApps, users, and other such things. When you look at a budget, you don't just spend money for the sake of spending money. You spend money to chase a vision of how you're going to win. It's pretty simple. It's what Apple does when they think about the iPhone.

It's what Microsoft does when they think about Windows. It's what Google does when they think about Android, Google Search, and Gemini. It's what OpenAI does when they think about ChatGPT. Where do our customers come from? Where does our transaction volume come from?

Where are we going to get Total Value Locked (TVL) from? How do we grow the ecosystem? The budget should reflect what core capabilities we need, what philosophy we are following, and ultimately, where we think we need to be as an ecosystem to be competitive—not just for today's neighbors, but for those that are coming in the future. It's a moving target. What you needed to be competitive as a cryptocurrency when I first started was to fork Bitcoin, change the monetary policy a little bit, and become an altcoin.

We saw this with Litecoin, Feathercoin, and others. Obviously, that changed a lot in 2013 when people started building bespoke systems. They wrote their own code and consensus algorithms, adding new features that deviated from Bitcoin's features. You saw that with what I did with BitShares and Dan Larimer, with Ethereum, and with what the NXT community did. It was a very different time.

2017 was different. 2020 was different. 2021 was radically different. Now, in 2025, we're in a completely different headspace as an industry. When you think about a product roadmap and funding for a product, you have to look at the totality of that.

This document is something that everybody has seen. It has been voted on, and the majority of DREPs approved it as an information action. It's the Cardano roadmap. When we look at it, it considers a collection of categories and acknowledges that we have a lot of work to do in scalability and a lot of housekeeping to address. Not scalability historically—because Cardano is a very performant protocol for where it was at—but scalability for the future.

How can we as a system process billions of transactions every day? How can we keep up with where other protocols are going? There are many ideas here because we don't know for certain which of these ideas will be in vogue. For example, there are state channels and rollups. There's a continued effort in building up the Mithril ecosystem, but there's also a lot of housekeeping that needs to be done to make Cardano an easier ecosystem for diversification.

Then you look at usability and utility and start asking, how do we make Cardano as a platform as easy as possible for people to build on? That's where we talk about things like Plutus, Plutus, and Aiken. We discuss identity, privacy, intents, and Babel fees, which are the first movements in that particular direction—one of the most important components of where the industry is going. Then you ask, how are we as an ecosystem going to get users? Interoperability is a foundational necessary component for that to be achieved.

You need to be able to communicate with other blockchain ecosystems, transact with them, and work with them. Partner chains are a big component of that, and it's crucial for how we will grow and keep large projects like World Mobile in the Cardano orbit; otherwise, they'll go away. This is a combination of these three pillars for the IE side, and research has a vision of what foundational ideas we need to put together for the next three to five years so that we can stay competitive as paradigms change. Baked into this is an understanding that we're going to continue investing heavily in governance and workshops. We're also going to ensure that more leaders are brought to the table.

Node diversification, for example, getting the REST node where it needs to be, getting the Go node where it needs to be, and getting the TypeScript node where it needs to be. This will bring more diverse ideas and engineers to the table. One of the things that will kill Cardano, and frankly any company that wants to be competitive and construct something, is if you take a product vision that is a composition of many different things and then dissect it piece by piece, tearing out elements with no understanding of why they are there. A cell phone is a phenomenal example of this. These are a composition of many things: a camera, a CPU, memory, sophisticated networking hardware, antennas, and specialized equipment that allows it to understand its orientation in space and time.

When you move your phone, it can rotate the image so you can always read it in the appropriate orientation. It has a multi-touch display and sophisticated glass that is resistant to shattering. It has a very sophisticated battery that must not explode when charged at 40 watts, and it includes various peripherals and waterproof chassis. Could you imagine how difficult it would be to build a phone by committee? Just think about it for a moment.

Let’s put all the features of a phone on a table and have people come in with various levels of expertise and experience. Someone might say, "I like that you have tungsten in there, but tungsten's too expensive. Let's switch that out for copper." Well, do why the tungsten is there? Not really, but I think copper is cheaper and prettier.

Let's just put that in there. Then there’s an argument over that. Or someone might say, "I really like your microphone, but I think you should go with this microphone, but it won't fit in the case." Well, you just have to figure out a way to make it fit. You would never build a phone or a competitive product this way.

This is what happens in large companies with a lot of bureaucracy: too many cooks in the kitchen, and you can’t get anything done because they argue over what to cook and how to cook it. The proposal we put on the table reflects what we think ought to be done for Cardano to be competitive and continue growing philosophically in the direction I’ve been advocating for ten years. When you talk about cleaning up the node, you’re also implicitly talking about making it easier for others to compete with it and build other nodes. When you talk about scalability, that’s a universal benefit for everyone, and it’s a story that helps us with adoption, investment, and for our DApps to argue why building on Cardano makes sense. This is a product vision as much as it is just doing work.

That’s what you’re paying for at the end of the day. If you just want to pay for time and material developers—of which there are 150 FTEs allocated in this proposal, not to mention all the scientists—I have no interest in that proposal. I don’t want to work on things that fail. I don’t want people to open up a product vision, tear it apart, and arbitrarily take pieces out, deprioritize this, and prioritize that. You’re funding the IO vision for that part of the budget, which we think needs to get done for Cardano to be competitive, and the price is the price.

That’s how much we charge to execute that. Some is profit. Not a lot. We’re probably going to end up taking a loss, assuming ADA stays stagnant. If it goes up, it’ll be profitable.

If it goes down, we lose money. We take that risk. But you’re funding our vision. You’re funding how we think about building the product, what we need to do, and what features are important for that product. If you want to do it a different way, that’s fine.

But then you have to have a completely different mechanism to build a product roadmap. You have to somehow figure out how to build the iPhone or the Galaxy in public. You can do that; it’s what Linux is. It’s taken them about 30 years to figure out how to do that. Even still, that’s the foundation, and there are thousands of variants and forks of it.

Nobody ever uses the stock Linux kernel; they always do something with it and bundle it. That’s why you have Red Hat and Ubuntu, and so many variations of these types of things. While you have a loose open-source project with many great ideas, which are often controversial, they move slowly. There’s no token, no heavy competition, and no urgency to move ultra-fast on things. There’s a tendency towards conservatism.

If you want to win against competitive protocols, you have to invest in an agile roadmap that moves quickly. People say, "What about decentralization?" Well, invest in decentralization then. Fully approve the budget proposals of Pragma and fully approve building up many people who deeply understand the protocol. Invest in the people who have a product vision about how to bring users into the ecosystem.

There’s not an either-or here. The whole point of having a larger NCL gives the optionality during reconciliation for the DREPs to make multiple bets. One bet is the IO bet, another can be the Pragma bet, and another can be a commercialization bet. Then there’s a frank conversation about whether you the institutions you have and if you want to continue with them or change them, shut them down, or replace them with other institutions. That is a judgment call you get to make with the 1.

7 billion ADA in the treasury. What’s not an option, though, is to come to a person who says this is a package and a vision and say, "We don’t want to pay for the whole price. We’re just going to break it open, take two or three pieces out, and only pay you for that because I have the engineers." What do I do with them if you only utilize 30 of the 150? I have to reassign them somewhere else to work on something else, and they won’t come back because then they’ll be on a new product, a new project, a new set of incentives, and they’re going to stay on that.

It’s unfair otherwise. You’ve just downsized one of the most elite engineering and research teams in the world for cryptocurrencies to a time-and-materials team because you only liked Laos but didn’t understand the rest of the stuff. That’s why we said it’s a package. We put it together and said, "This is the package." If you don’t the package, don’t think the vision makes sense, or don’t think this will make Cardano more competitive and improve the ecosystem, then vote no on the package.

But don’t open up the package and fight the whole thing. You’re getting my time, my company’s time, our vision, and our strategy. That’s what you’re buying for that package. Do not reduce my people to commoditized developers as arbitrary FTEs and bicker over how much their salaries should be. I’m telling you the price for IO’s participation.

It’s no harm, no foul. If you say, "what? The juice is not worth the squeeze. We don’t think you guys are the ones to deliver this type of thing," that’s fine. You can go in a different direction.

It’s not immature or childish; it’s just business at the end of the day. There’s opportunity cost in everything you do. I have a construction company. If I have multiple competing projects—someone wants me to build a hospital, someone wants me to build a house, and someone wants me to work on an Air Force base and pour concrete in South Dakota—I look at the resources required. If they’re all using the same resources, I say, "Where economically is the best place to put these people?

" Nobody complains if I choose the Air Force base, the hospital, or the house over the other two because they understand it’s just business. You have an elite team of people prepared to work on Cardano, who have been doing so for a long time, uncompensated, and they’re saying this is what we need to do. The benefit is you’re going to get interoperability and scalability. You’re going to get all these downstream things to make the ecosystem more competitive. You get our presence, our strategy, and our commitment to work on this.

You get us fighting for it and showing up, saying it’s the best thing in the world. That’s the price tag for that. If you say no to it, that’s okay. There are other bidders in the world. But you can’t complain when we reassign and go work on another project.

That’s the decision you get to make as a DREP, and that’s how it’s done in every business in the world. Whether it’s Lisa Su at AMD, taking it from a $2.5 billion company to a $250 billion company, or when Apple bought NeXT Computer, brought Steve Jobs back, and he took them from bankruptcy to a trillion-dollar company, or when Satya Nadella came into Microsoft and did the same thing. That’s how business works. Leaders show up with strategies, visions, and ideas about what needs to be done, and they tell you what they need to make that happen.

I’m not asking for 5% or 10% of the ADA supply. I’m not Elon Musk asking for a $50 billion pay package. I’m simply saying I want you to cover the expenses of my engineers and leave a little profit for us. We will be committed to continuing to work hard. A lot of you run around saying, "The roadmap's not finished.

" The roadmap is never finished because it evolves. The definition of scalability in 2025 is different from the definition in 2020. Our contracts with a token-generating event entity expired in 2020, and they were best effort, which means we haven’t received a single revenue inflow from writing code for Cardano since 2020. That’s just a fact. We’re not complaining about it, but we are pointing out that this is where we are.

At some point, we as a firm have to treat it a business. We have to say there’s a cost for us to do things. We’ve told you what that cost is. You get to decide if the juice is worth the squeeze. What you don’t get to do is tear my company apart and bicker and argue with me about my bid.

It’s my bid. You can accept it or reject it. It’s that simple. If you accept it, what you’re getting. those engineers, what they can do, and what our product people are going to do.

what these protocols are responsible for. I have a paternal desire to see Cardano succeed because it’s part of my legacy. Whether we win or not, I’ll implement Laos because I think that’s a wonderful way to sunset Basho. We also took a strategic investment in Midgard, and we’re working closely with them. I think the combination of these two is more than enough to say that Basho’s done.

If we don’t win and you say no to our bid, we’ll responsibly start pulling out, and that will be the last thing we implement in Haskell. If we do win, then we’re here in the room. Part of decentralization is working together on how to build a decentralized product function. But decentralization doesn’t mean that you don’t have someone making decisions. It means you endow someone or an institution with the authority to do that on your behalf.

It’s perfectly fine to be a decentralized ecosystem and hire someone to take care of your vision and product for a period. There’s nothing contradictory about that because you can fire that person or change the direction you want to go. If you want to build a completely decentralized product function, we earnestly tried to do that with Intersect. There were some accomplishments, but the same people complaining about the budget now were the same people who complained about the bureaucracy of Intersect, questioned its existence, and said it wasn’t accomplishing anything. You can’t have your cake and eat it too.

It will take years to build up institutions and product functions to replicate the decentralized product function we typically see in things the Linux Foundation. There are many encouraging developments, from the rise of Pragma to a lot of open-source infrastructure forming, and these people are starting to communicate with each other. One of the things we pushed for wasn’t just an IO budget and vision about where we think Cardano needs to go to be competitive, but also for the CDC to start funding a coalition to give funds to people to rise up. The idea is that those people would have the ability over time to take more and more of the product conversation and be more involved day-to-day with the standards of Cardano and the things that make Cardano special. No single budget can solve everything, but I think this interim budget for 2025 is pretty good.

Then we see conflation where people say, "Oh, there’s this cash grab. All these people are asking for funds from the treasury." That doesn’t absolve the DREPs from their reconciliation responsibility. Your regulating mechanism is not the NCL. Your regulating mechanism is for the DREPs to do their job, go through the spreadsheet of every proposal, see which ones they support and don’t support, and chop it down to a reasonable window.

What the community has done through 72% voting is decide that the reasonable window is 350 million ADA. That’s what’s been decided. People with sour grapes can’t accept it, so they keep trying to litigate it and stop everything. You now have a 350 million window. The next stage of the job is for the DREPs to get together, look at all the different proposals, and fit them together into that 350 or less.

It’s their decision on how they want to do it and the process they want to follow. We’ve offered a lot of advice on these types of things, and it’s obvious that many of the things in there are not serious proposals, the Husky cash grab, for example. It would be unfair to say that those are an accurate reflection of all the things people are doing. There are going to be some proposals to try new things, diversify, make strategic investments for alternative options, and follow the visions that got us here. Then you vote yes or no.

Once it’s closed, you live with the consequences one way or the other. I am a vendor now, and I’m trying to communicate to the ecosystem the price of our participation. We are not a time-and-materials software development company; we’re an innovation company. We build products and have a great track record. We’re offering that service to continue innovation, product development, and strategic alignment for Cardano.

We’ve told you what Let's be real. Look at where we were and where we could be. We could be looking at $3 ADA, $5 ADA, or even $10 ADA. So, let me get this straight. We say, "Hey, 50, 60, 70 million," and it could double, triple, or quadruple the size of the ecosystem.

And you’re saying that’s too much? Really? That’s the argument? Or do you want to do something different? Great.

How will we compete then? A new developer entering in—why Cardano over all this other stuff? What are we selling to them? What are the USPs that we’re really emphasizing? And who are the custodians of those USPs to help refine them, grow them, and get them?

Do you want to completely invent them in a totally decentralized way, or do you want to hire a company to be a custodian of some of them as an interim budget? Because those processes aren’t where they need to be. You’re going to have to hire some companies, whether it be TXpipe, DC Spark, or Input Output, to be custodians of some of those USPs on your behalf. That’s just where we’re at as an ecosystem. Now, we can invest strategically to make it much more decentralized, or what you could do?

You could just say it’s good enough as it is today, and we’re going to stop all of it. We’re going to invest only in decentralization, and we won’t move forward at all on the product side or on the technology side until we have a fully decentralized decision-making process. What signals are you sending to the markets when you make these decisions? What are you broadcasting to the people trying to make decisions about where to build, what to buy, and where to go? Ask yourself that.

You have to live with the consequences. I’m not here to tell you whether you should do consequence A, B, C, or D. I’ve made my opinion clear, and it’s reflected by the ask that we’re making. It’s ultimately your decision about what you want to do and what you’re prepared to live with. If you’re prepared to live with it, there’s no drama.

There’s no controversy. You’re still acting. Many people are still acting in this political learned helplessness that, unfortunately, most modern democracies have pushed upon their people. At the end of the day, we really don’t actually get to choose our leaders. We don’t have a say in foreign policy, monetary policy, fiscal policy, or any of these social policies.

We get to vote every so often, but that’s mostly an endorsement of the systems for things that are already predetermined. So, what we do is respond with cynicism and criticism, and we attack the leaders as illegitimate. It’s a natural human thing to do. If you take this and put it into this process, you shouldn’t be surprised if the output you get is very bad and good people leave. If you take a step back and realize there’s real agency here, and we’re on the foundations of a new way of thinking, then you shouldn’t be surprised if great things happen in that process.

Ultimately, it comes down to how you express yourself, how you work with people, and how you collaborate with people. I am deeply frustrated that I see a lot of duplicity when people tweet a certain thing and say, "Oh, no, no, we support you," but by structure, what they’re saying guarantees that we have to work for free, or there’s a negotiation, or there’s a massive reduction of our scope. Then they’re not being genuine. They’re not being honest about that. Either they’re naive—which they’re not because they’ve been around for a while—or they’re using this as a referendum to settle scores that they have.

I just don’t need it anymore at this stage in my life. I have nothing more to prove to anybody. We’ve done great things, and we continue to do great things. Input Output builds products. We build ecosystems.

We’re a venture studio. We build new and interesting things. Whether it be my clinic up in Gillette, Wyoming, which we’re opening on July 4th—a 70,000 square foot facility with 40 providers and 13,000 patients—or the anti-aging products we work on, or the glowing plants we work on. You guys read about the direwolf things happening here. There’s an opportunity cost of time.

I have a finite amount of it. I can decide to either do it here, or there, or there. I love Cardano. I love our people. I love the ecosystem.

I love going to the conferences. I love being here. But I’ve invested now 10 years of my life in this. I did not sign up for unlimited, unrestricted abuse. I did not.

And I did not sign up for having to work for free for the rest of my life for your financial benefit. I got us to a point where we have a fully decentralized government. Now, as a member of this ecosystem, we, the innovation company, are saying this is what we’d like to do. There’s no duplicity behind it. There are no lies behind it.

There’s no power grab behind it. We’re simply saying this is what we’d like to do, what we can do. Here’s our track record. Here’s the price tag. You get to decide if that’s worth your time or not.

That’s it. If not, those people will work on other things. That’s not a childish thing to do. It’s called business. It’s basic stuff because they have careers.

They have families. They would like to get equity in things. They would like to build towards a retirement. What am I going to do? Tell them that they’re just public service employees?

This is the pension agencies. It’s an extraordinary thing. Sometimes you have to have a come-to-Jesus conversation. Sometimes you have to have tough love. I think we’ve been very fair throughout this entire process, and we’ve been very direct in this process.

I’m being as blunt as I possibly can be because me as an honest person. I’ve had AMAs pretty much every week for the last 10 years. I come up every week and tell you what I think, and it pisses some people off. It makes some people happy. A lot of our growth came as a direct consequence of that genuineness.

Sometimes I get it wrong. Sometimes I didn’t understand it as well as I should, and we have to go and correct the record. I’m just telling you right now, April 25th, 2025, my frank opinion about where we’re at and how we ought to do things. There’s a reconciliation process that’s coming. The net change limit has passed.

All of you trying to litigate that, okay. But 72% of people said we should just stick with 350. Let’s build the budget then. Let’s put it together in reconciliation. Make decisions about who you want to work with, and let’s vote yes on that and move on.

For 2026, let’s build a better process. Just like in 2026, we can have a better constitution and stronger institutions. The DREP should probably include funding from some of those proposals to ensure that there are adequate resources to do those types of things so that the next cycle is more efficient. That’s how we make forward progress. That’s how we get somewhere.

That’s how we create certainty. That’s how we show we’re adults in these types of things. You have made decisions through your elected representatives about who is in the room to make those decisions. They weren’t appointed. They weren’t selected out of fiat.

I didn’t pick them. You did. That’s why they’re there. That’s why they make those decisions. If you don’t like that set of people, pick a different set of people.

It’s your decision. With liquid democracy, you have that power. But now the time has come for reconciliation. I’d like to continue thinking a lot about the growth and success of Cardano. I really would.

I’d like to continue making this my life’s work. I’d like to continue investing in the ecosystem, building in the ecosystem, thinking about how we make Cardano large, successful, and great. I really want to do that. I’m telling you right now as a business what it costs for us to do that. If you like that, vote yes on that.

If you don’t like that, vote no on that. But then pick another person to do this. Congratulations, you’ve satoshied your founder, and perhaps there are other people who are more qualified and capable of leading it from here on out. It’s not my decision. It’s your decision to do these types of things, and I accept it any way it is.

But at some point, I have to draw a line in the sand. After about five years of working for free and being criticized by some people for saying that, I’m done. I’m not going to do it anymore. For the sake of my employees, for the integrity of my business, and for common sense and self-respect, I’m going to draw a line in the sand and say this is what we are, and you get to decide whether that’s sufficient or not. Thank you all for listening.