The Age of Voltaire: August 27th

Hi, this is Charles Hoskinson broadcasting live from rough and rugged Wyoming, up here in Jackson Hole for the Salt Conference. The Federal Reserve people are running around, so we crypto people decided to hold our own counter-conference, given how much we love central banks. It's great to see the who's who of the crypto space—some new faces, some old faces, some friends, some rivals. Everything changes and stays the same; it's the great paradox of crypto. So anyway, it's been almost a decade that I've been working on Cardano since 2015.

I remember when I put together the original roadmap and laid out the eras: Byron, Shelley, Goguen, Basho, and Voltaire. These were just words connected to people who lived a long time ago and, in some way, influenced parts of my life or friends of mine. I thought it would be important to pay homage to them. I chose Voltaire because he was a great critic of democracy and also a brilliant Enlightenment thinker, a critic of monarchies at the same time, mostly because he ran afoul of the French monarchy, among others. His profound wit and brilliance, as well as statements like, "If you want to know who's in charge, just look at who you can't criticize," brought a unique challenge and opportunity.

the cryptocurrency space has always been built on decentralization and the concept of sound money. But another bedrock is this idea of governance by the many for the many instead of the few. We don't have leaders; instead, we come together as a community and decide on doing things. Building a decentralized government is a tremendously challenging endeavor. For the past two years, we've worked with so many different people in more than 25 countries to conceive of and design CIP-1694, the beginnings of a minimum viable government, which will inevitably blossom into a thousand flowers and a thousand approaches.

This took a lot of time and effort from so many of you, and there are too many to thank. I just wanted to make a video to share my incredible optimism for the future. It's also a little bittersweet for me because Cardano is going to be forever different as of August 27th, should the date be selected on the 23rd to initiate, which it looks it will be. Cardano will hard fork. We've been here before; we've done this before.

We did it with Vasil, we did it with Alonso, we did it with Shelley. We've gone through many eras before, but this is the most consequential because it unlocks the most advanced governance stack in the history of the cryptocurrency industry. It combines concepts like liquid democracy with a constitutional republic. It enables strong institutions to parse and work through things a budget and a roadmap, and it unlocks the crown jewel of Cardano: the Sovereign Wealth Fund, which is 1.5 billion ADA valued at almost $600 million at today's prices, and at the all-time high, $4.

5 billion. It's truly extraordinary to think that so many people who don't know each other, who have never met each other, are now going to work together collaboratively through a blockchain to make decisions whose consequences will ripple through the history of the world. The future of nation-states and the future of commerce could, in some way, be influenced—small or large—by what we do as a community in the Cardano world. The technology that's been brought to bear is truly extraordinary, and it's the hard work and product of so many engineers: from Sam Leathers, Jared Cordon, Phil Kant—some with us and some no longer with us, having moved on to different things—not to mention all of the collaborators from other institutions, like Matias Benor from the Cardano Foundation, and P. Lingham from Sunday Swap.

Again, there are just too many to name who worked tirelessly for two years to not only conceive of and figure out how to implement a dream but also to ensure that it in no way impacts the reliability and durability that we have all come to love and appreciate. Cardano has a reputation for being the most reliable cryptocurrency besides Bitcoin because, at the end of the day, if one is going to build the future economic, political, and social systems of the world, they ought to build it on bedrock; they ought to build it on granite, not quicksand. It's always been the promise and the dream, and we've had to do things the hard way as an ecosystem, accepting the criticism of our peers at times. Sometimes we’re not the first to market, but we will always be, at the end of the day, the best in market. There's no exception with governance.

By unlocking the millions of people and their representatives to actually sit and think about where we should go, we can collectively solve some of the hardest problems that have faced Cardano: how do we market and brand the ecosystem? How do we communicate about who we are? How do we find funding for those vital projects that desperately need to get to the next stage and have not been loved by venture capital? How do we ensure that the best developers and scientists continue to find funding to take the platform to the next level? Where should the roadmap go?

These are hard decisions that cannot be made by an individual, a company, or a leader, but only by the collective of an ecosystem as a whole. The purpose of Voltaire is to harness, aggregate, and ultimately refine that collective will into one clear voice. Despite our level of decentralization, we need to determine where to go and how to get there. The reality is that no one is smarter than everyone, no matter how brilliant or virtuous a founder could be. We will win just by virtue of the fact that now we have the collective intelligence of the whole.

This is the promise and magic of an on-chain government, and something that we will uniquely show the industry as our path forward. I’m proud of that. I’m proud of so many of you who spent so long working for nothing. You volunteered; you showed up. Nobody had to tell you to do it.

You just woke up in the morning and said, "what? I can make a difference. I’m part of something bigger than myself." I honestly believe the work we do here matters, not just for us but for the world as a whole. That means a lot to me, and from the bottom of my heart, I’d like to thank each and every one of you for the time you put in over the last two years—in the workshops, in the forums, online, and in person.

It means the world to me, and I want you to know that it’s not forgotten or lost. It’s now reflected in the fact that we, together, before the end of this month, will be able to embrace a new era, which is the beginning of a new journey—a journey that will take us to the highest peaks. Cardano is built to look at the world in terms of decades and centuries, a stark contrast to the "move fast and break things" blockchain industry that we’ve all become accustomed to. We don’t particularly care about the ebbs and flows of the markets because, the reality is, we’re here to stay, and we’ve proven that fact time and again. We’ve also proven that in the long term, we end up making the best decisions—whether it be first to market with liquid non-custodial staking, which everybody’s trying to copy and replicate, or more recently with Hydra and the power of the extended UTXO model paired with state channels and how far we can go.

We’ve seen how easy it is to do rollups on an extended UTXO model, as we’ve seen with ZK-F and other ventures, or our partner chains model, or the things that come with input endorsers. Every step of the way has been guided by more than 210 academic papers written across the world by 168 scientists and an army of engineers from dozens of companies, from South America to Japan and everywhere in between. We have been able, as an ecosystem, to chart out a path into the wilds that leads humanity in a new direction. For the first time ever, we can match that incredible innovation and engineering with an army of people on the governance side who are ready and willing to serve and able to navigate in a way to get us where we need to go. I freely admit that throughout the last 10 years, mistakes have been made.

There have been missed opportunities and roadmap items that should have been prioritized in different ways. This is the direct consequence of the fact that no endeavor is ever going to be free of error. The power of decentralized governance, if appropriately harnessed, gives us the freedom to admit such things. We know how to leverage those failures to pursue even wiser and better ventures in the future. Our ability to overcome our mistakes, to gain wisdom, and to learn and grow without an ego forcing us down an unproductive lane is a unique competitive advantage that all of our competitors currently do not have.

We are not captured by a dogma or the ego of a founder. We are not captured in any way by a desire to pursue vanity. Instead, we’re just here to do the right thing. We want the world to be a better place for everybody to live in, and we want to fully realize Satoshi’s vision. When he wrote the paper in 2008, Bitcoin was a social contract; it was a direction for humanity’s future.

It wasn’t the end but rather the beginning of the story. We picked up the flag and continued to carry it time and again. Now, in 2024, I am more confident than ever before that not only do we have a path forward, but we have a way of leaving no one behind as we move forward. That’s truly what makes this special. These are hard times and hard markets, and it’s been tough for many of you.

Many of you have put everything you have into it, and you’ve worked tirelessly—60 hours, 80 hours every week for years. At times, it can be demoralizing when you don’t seem to think that we’re making progress. But I hope you understand that not only have we made progress, but the industry deep down inside looks to us for our leadership. Following this path is a tough one; it’s not sexy, it’s not glorious, and it often doesn’t lead to quick wealth. In fact, the opposite often leads to criticism, scorn, and stagnation in many cases in the short term.

But in the long term, we will pioneer a new world where each and every person is truly equal and has fair consideration with algorithmic governance. By the end of the 21st century, all of the economic, political, and social systems have the potential to be touched by a blockchain. If we continue this path, that blockchain will be Cardano. The world will run on it because that would be the just thing and the right thing. It’s only by the fact that we were willing to endure the journey that we get to see the summit.

I’m proud that you’re all here, and I’m proud that you stuck with it for these 10 years. It’s been hard, but it’s been fun. I’m not going anywhere; I’m still going to be here. But you, I’m a member of the community now. There’s no special Charles; that’s the way it ought to be.

We’ll still have an army of engineers and scientists. We’re still going to be figuring things out and proposing roadmaps and arguing our points, but it’s a single voice in a very loud and large chorus, and other people get to sing in it too. That is the truth of decentralization, and that is the reality and nature of a structure that is here to stay. It can survive the death or loss of its founders; it can survive the founders being wrong; it can survive bad roadmaps. We’ll wake up tomorrow knowing the institutions are strong, the governance is strong, and we’ll wake up tomorrow knowing that it’s going to be a better day than today.

So I can’t wait to see the next 10 years with each and every one of you, and I firmly believe that they will be even better than the 10 years that we’ve had. I’ve been to 74 countries in these 10 years; I’ve met tens of thousands of people, and I’ve personally seen the passion, enthusiasm, and excitement. what? I can’t wait to go to a hundred over the next 10 years, and I can’t wait to meet millions. I can’t wait to see Cardano run nation-states.

We’re going to make that happen. We’re going to make that happen together as equals. So to all of you listening, thank you so much, and welcome to the age of Voltaire. Good night.