On Governance and 2025

I'm sorry, but it seems there is no transcript text provided for me to edit. Please provide the text you'd like me to clean up. Hi, it's Charles Hoskinson broadcasting live from warm, sunny Colorado. It's always warm and always sunny, sometimes in Colorado, and other times in Argentina and Chile. I was down there for the Constitutional Convention and took a few days off to see Patagonia because it's always been on my bucket list.

I thought it was time to relax and gain some clarity after a long year. As many of you saw from the output of the Constitutional Convention, that was the culmination of two years of effort around the world. Hundreds of workshops and thousands of people from more than 50 countries participated, with 50 elected delegates and alternates converging to vote on a document. Despite its imperfections, 95% of the delegates decided it was good enough to try. That's a remarkable achievement, especially considering that when people first entered the process, support was less than 50%.

These delegates came from different parts of the world: Africa, South America, Australia, New Zealand, Asia, Europe, and North America. We even tried to find someone from Antarctica, but we couldn't manage it on short notice. In any event, it was a great moment for us as an ecosystem and one of the proudest moments of my professional career. I witnessed something I dreamed could happen ten years ago actually come together. In 2025, we have challenges ahead, particularly the need to fully decentralize the governance of Cardano.

Every founding entity, institution, and person involved has different viewpoints and concepts regarding that decentralization. For my part, I believe the key is to build member-based institutions and on-chain governance, ensuring that all significant roles are elected and constrained by the rule of law—algorithmic law first and foremost, as it is the strongest, followed by constitutional law. This should be by and for the people who use Cardano and own it daily. Others feel there needs to be a longer transition period and institutions to hold people accountable, but that shouldn't be subject to the democratic whims of the ecosystem. This is antithetical to everything I stand for.

At what point do those institutions become self-serving instead of dissolving themselves and allowing the democratic mandate to take over? We are experiencing this with the U.S. government right now. While judges are appointed or elected, legislators are elected, and the president is elected, the vast majority of federal government employees are not.

They are hired for life, accumulating enormous power over our day-to-day lives. We've become so bureaucratic and over-legalized that many people inadvertently commit crimes due to the complexity of the legal code. I believe we have about a million pages of tax code at this point, which would take a human lifetime to fully read and understand. It's not a just society; it's an overly bureaucratic one. You can't vote your way out of it because the bureaucracy tends not to listen to elected officials anymore; it's just a ceremony, not a compulsion.

From the very beginning, my goal was to ensure that Cardano never fell into that state. We established a tripartite structure. When I flew to Japan in February 2015 and discussed with the Japanese who wanted to build the Ethereum of Japan, there was a lot of early discussion about governance. All of the governance failures we see today are indirectly or directly my fault because I was the person who took the time to think about the tripartite structure and made the recommendations to implement it as it is. I was young and didn’t fully appreciate how complicated and serpentine governance can be.

We were the protocol architects. I built a great technology company, and for better or worse, we aggregated one of the largest groups of scientists, formal methods engineers, and software engineers in the history of our industry. We've written hundreds of papers, millions of lines of code, and built something that truly stands the test of time. For seven years, Cardano has been running 24 hours a day, seven days a week, under constant technological and social attack, yet it’s still here, still in the top 10, still has value, and still has a community. I’m proud of that.

Yes, we've made many mistakes regarding our roadmap and what to prioritize and when. I've personally felt the sting of those mistakes and missteps. There were many things we should have done differently, and had I the experience I have today, there would be no contest; we would have done those things differently. It's just code and momentum, which encapsulates past decisions. Even if you want to change, you can't do it instantly; it takes time because you have to preserve and protect what you've already created and what people rely upon—from exchanges to stake pool operators to DApp developers who have invested countless hours into building on what we have today, not what we aspire to have in the future.

Mergo was supposed to take on the role of ecosystem growth hacker. They were meant to act as close to consensus as possible, building alliances and driving growth and adoption. They initially focused on Asia, then grew to Africa, and eventually Europe and North America. Stronger controls could have been put in place, and perhaps wiser people could have helped execute. Because we didn’t execute as well as we should have, many of you in the community have felt it’s been difficult to get listed on exchanges, secure venture capital, and ultimately receive fair representation for the time you’ve put in.

There have been many people throughout the years at Mergo who have put in enormous work. For example, Sebastian and Nico, the chief engineer and CTO of Mergo, left and created DC Spark, leading to Flint and Pima and many amazing things. Meny Singh was the chief investment officer of Mergo and made some great investments while there. I’m good friends with many former and current Mergo employees, and I truly wish they could have been better, just as I wish I could have been better. But it is what it is, and we move forward.

The Cardano Foundation has been the biggest anomaly because it was started the wrong way. I brought in a person from Japan named Michael Parson, who helped us get everything started. Michael brought his friends in, and we had an understanding that the Foundation would take care of governance functions and become a community-driven organization. He incorporated the first Cardano Foundation in the Isle of Man under the name Digital Asset Foundation. The reason for this was that the Isle of Man passed a law in 2015 to welcome distributed ledger technology, making it a good jurisdiction to run and operate a flexible cryptocurrency blockchain foundation.

From the very beginning, there were problems in the relationship. Basic governance functions, such as membership participation and allowing community members to vote on board members, were not being accomplished. This culminated in a realization that those principles did not align with what the ecosystem wanted. This led to the creation of the Guardians of Cardano, who, along with many others in the community, ousted the Cardano Foundation board through social pressure alone. That board was replaced by a majority led by Mergo and Input Output.

We were interim and transitory board members, and we decided to relocate the Foundation, which was in Switzerland. Parsons moved it from the Isle of Man to Switzerland using MME Partners to the United States to set up what would have been Intersect today. The Swiss government stepped in, liquidated the entire board, and appointed Swiss board members who are not members of our community. To this day, those board members are still in power. They then hired an entirely new executive team and built the new Foundation.

It’s been challenging, and I’m not going to lie; working with this new Foundation has had its difficulties. We wanted the Foundation to be a member-based organization, with the entire board elected by the Cardano community. We felt that was an important nexus, and basic things the GitHub repos and the SIP process should be there because it would be a fair and neutral place. It also received Genesis funding explicitly for this purpose. I know this because I was there at the beginning and created this ecosystem.

I’m kind of an expert on why the money was distributed the way it was. Instead, almost immediately, they said it wasn’t possible to do under Swiss structure, usually citing ESO or some other regulator. The mandate of the Foundation would be self-described, and they published that. We tried to work with them to create a neutral organization. Initially, we decided that the Linux Foundation was a good candidate.

They hired a person named Dirk, who worked diligently with our team. We had a workshop in Colorado; they attended, and we had high hopes of working well together. Throughout the process, it became clear that the Linux Foundation would not include the majority of ADA holders and actually requested that I personally could not participate in governance, nor could I, which doesn’t make a lot of sense. Excluding ADA holders doesn’t seem wise, given that this is a protocol controlled by people who have ADA. So we scrapped that plan and moved on.

Input Output took the lead with Mergo, and we created Intersect. We asked the Foundation to join the board of Intersect; they initially said that it sounded a good idea and needed to understand more about the structure. The structure is an American not-for-profit organization, and it has a Dev trust that we set up in the Caribbean that funds it. We donated our MGO and Input Output funds to bootstrap the organization for roughly a year to a year and a half, so it doesn’t have a large endowment; it’s just bootstrapped from a fund. They used the existence of this entity in the Caribbean as an excuse not to join at the board level.

After about six to nine months—it's hard to remember because things have been moving quickly—they created Pragma, an alternative organization, which we asked to join. Unfortunately, membership is not clear, and it’s closed at the moment, even though we contribute to Aken and have high hopes to contribute to the Rust node, given that we have many Rust developers because of partner chains, the incentivized test net, and our legacy work in Cardano. We asked them to participate on the Civics committee, which they did, and many of the committees of Intersect and the rank-and-file of the CF participated there. We had productive conversations occasionally and sometimes unproductive ones; that’s the nature of governance. We wanted them to be involved in drafting SIP 1694 with the community and the Constitution.

Some members of the CF, like Matias Ben Cour, did participate, and we were glad to have them there and in the interim constitutional committee. Unfortunately, the level of participation on the constitutional side was not significant. I personally funded the Constitutional Convention, even though I wanted it to be co-funded by the Foundation, but it was not a priority. We also wanted the Foundation Summit to be in Argentina so the entire community could be part of that constitutional process, but they chose to do it in Dubai instead. About a week before the Constitutional Convention, without any notice to our people, they drafted and launched their own Constitution.

I believe the intent wasn’t to spark conversation but rather to create an anchor point to use as an excuse to vote against the community ratified Constitution. We also believe they are preparing their own budget to vote against the current budget being prepared by the Intersect budget committee and the community as a whole. This is where we stand in 2025. This dirty laundry has been internal to the two organizations for years, and we have tried for years to work together effectively. They have coached my employees and spread a lot of discontent.

I know people who occupy offices, the Tasos Foundation office next to theirs, and what their rank-and-file employees have to say about us. At the end of the day, setting ego aside, I couldn’t care less about whether they think I’m a good actor or a bad actor. Input Output knows what we’re doing, and we don’t know what we’re doing. Whether their strategy is to simply wait us out and hope that the “evil Charles” leaves so they can take over or not, all I care about is a successful transition of power to the community as a whole. I want every single person who represents ADA to be an elected official by and for the ADA holders.

This is imperfect because one token, one vote has intrinsic flaws in its design. It is a bootstrap criterion for a transition, but we have to get to a point of having a diverse collection of resources from which to find leaders. I agree, and this is why we created Minur and why Ouroboros Omega exists on the roadmap. This is a first-class citizen in the path forward. The intent of this video is not to attack the Cardano Foundation; in fact, it’s quite the opposite.

It’s just to give some context on why you see friction from time to time between my organization and theirs. I don’t hate them; in fact, quite the opposite. I like Fred Gard; I’ve had many productive meetings with him, and I respect him as a leader and his character as a person. I’m just perplexed at times about the behavior and cooperation. After the Constitution was ratified, it was an emotional moment.

Many people were crying, waving flags, and there was standing applause—a great triumph for a two-year process. The only people in the room who weren’t celebrating were the CF delegation, who, after the applause ended, rushed the stage to talk to Lloyd to express their discontent with the process and how they felt excluded. This was despite the fact that they were asked to be co-equal partners in this for over two years, starting with SIP 1694 when we launched the Age of Voltaire workshop in Edinburgh in 2022, all the way through to today. I don’t understand that. If you wanted to be included more, why not be a co-equal partner in hosting the convention?

Why would you drop an alternative Constitution that the community hasn’t read or understood a week before a convention that is the result of 65 workshops in 50 countries? Why wouldn’t you introduce these concepts and ideas at those workshops so they could be meticulously included in the final draft? It’s perplexing. I really don’t understand it. Governance doesn’t mean we agree; it doesn’t mean we get along.

Governance means we can eventually converge to good decisions as an ecosystem. These statements are participated in by what appears to be a whistleblower. We haven’t confirmed who that person is, but on Twitter, someone leaked an email to Big Pay and HOSY and other community leaders. I think the sentiments reflect what’s going on in the rank and file. Many of my employees and many of the rank-and-file employees of the CF don’t understand where this is coming from and ascribe it to either ego or alternative visions.

To tell you the truth, as the CEO of Input Output, I don’t fully understand it either. My intention has never been to try to get rid of the CF or replace it. Frankly speaking, I think they should change their name. No one in our ecosystem would have a single problem with them if they called themselves the Cardano Enterprise Foundation and focused exclusively on Fortune 500 adoption and government adoption. I would be their best friend because every single day, whether it be a delegation from Paraguay or people in the states of Alabama or Arkansas, or dozens of other countries or states, they come to me with amazing RFPs from the government or from companies that would like to adopt blockchain.

I would be their best salesman, throwing deal after deal after deal. They’ve already demonstrated great competency in this domain, from their work in the country of Georgia with wine to their work in Dubai with law enforcement. Frankly speaking, I think they could close dozens to hundreds of deals on an annual basis. They don’t seem to have the right people or attitude, though, to be a significant player in the governance of Cardano. They also seem to want to build an alternative client for Cardano, and I question the wisdom of this—not the act of building one, because we need a polyglot ecosystem—but the concept that the CF should be a first-class citizen in that conversation.

We already have TX Pipe, Harmonic, and Anastasia, along with dozens of other great core developers who aren’t IOG, who could come together with additional funding and do this. They need to work with the Haskell developers because we have to agree on basic principles, the formal specifications of Cardano, which are implementation-agnostic. At an incredibly productive meeting, for example, when I was in Argentina with the CEO of TX Pipe, we discussed basic principles of collaboration between Pragma and Intersect, particularly forming a working group with developers from both sides. That working group can talk about the formal specifications and ensure that we can do active extraction to Rust, so they have a test suite to verify that the client they build is interoperable with the Haskell client. This gives them the freedom to innovate while also ensuring the ecosystem as a whole knows we’re all following the same set of blueprints, beholden to an on-chain governance process.

That’s just basic stuff, and there are so many qualified firms that exist and have been in software engineering for years or decades that want a shot at that. That’s where I want to take the ecosystem. I think it should be dozens, if not hundreds, of development companies working together. I question the wisdom of forming yet another development company and building a strong set of developers when that’s not what we need. We badly need adult supervision and basic things like training and work to get more people to participate in on-chain voting, as we’ve seen with Catalyst.

The CF is absolutely right when they say that 180 million ADA shouldn’t tip the scales when there are tens of billions of ADA in circulation. That’s true, and they made a point by voting that there’s too little participation in Catalyst. The answer to that is changing the voting systems and growing the participation base. That’s where the funds should be spent. If I were in charge of that organization, these are the types of things I would care the most about.

The outflows would be in funding community conferences, bringing our developers to major conferences like Token 2049 and Consensus, and working with exchanges so that Cardano native tokens can get listed. There was a deal that John McPherson, who used to work at the CF, negotiated to get Circle to Cardano in 2021 for about $3 million, which was not executed. That’s what John directly told me, and I believe he’s also told people on Twitter, so it’s public news. Whether he’s lying or not, I do believe it because I know Polkadot got the same deal, and I also know Alaran got a similar deal. You forget that their CFOs and CEOs ended up working for me, so I kind of know how the ecosystem works.

That deal is no longer on the table; it’s much more expensive now. These are things we need. We need good Oracles in our ecosystem, better representation in the VC class. We need A16Z to like us because they’re forming a cabal with the U.S.

government. You see people like Coinbase, ConsenSys, A16Z, and BlackRock coming together, and they’re going to have enormous influence over crypto policy in the Trump administration. If they choose to exclude Cardano, it’s going to be very difficult for us as an ecosystem. We need to find ways to partner and work with them.