Cardano Number 1

Hello from cold, gloomy London! After being in Italy and Switzerland, I'm almost done with my little tour of Europe. I'm here for some workshops for the Midnight people, and I'll be home soon. After that, I'm heading down to Argentina to set everything up with Malay and the rest of the gang for December's Constitutional Convention. I wanted to make a quick video because, from time to time, I comment on technology and projects in the ecosystem as a whole.

People are so radicalized and polarized that they anticipate the founder of Cardano to always say negative things about what others do. If I say anything positive, there's this immediate impression that I'm abandoning Cardano or somehow being disloyal to the project. First, that tribalism is intrinsically self-destructive, and second, it prevents us from learning and growing together as an ecosystem. Recently, I made some comments about SWE. I've been looking at the project with an objective eye.

The reason is that some of the technology comes from George Denis. I've known George for almost a decade, and we were one of the first teams to implement RS Coin, a protocol he wrote with Sarah Mikel John years ago, which we used as a precursor to some things with Cardano before the mainnet launched. We've always tried to find a way to collaborate with George, but he's always been busy at UCL, and we have our team at the University of Edinburgh. We're all in the same academic circles, and everybody reads and cites each other's papers. He wrote a paper called Narwhal and Tusk, which is one of the fastest BFT protocols ever conceived, with incredibly high throughput and low latency.

It has trade-offs, as do Red Belly and others, but George is a real researcher. If you look at the design of it, there is real research and a real team behind it. I'm not commenting on the distribution, the tokenomics, or how they've launched; I haven't looked at those things, nor do I care about them. I don't hold any SWE, and I'm not involved with the project in any way. I dispassionately look at these things to see if there is any interesting innovation that has occurred because it's important for us as an ecosystem to see what we can collaborate on.

As we joined D and are working on decentralized wallet recovery with Hedera Hashgraph, Ripple, and ALR as ecosystems. It's a universal problem that all of us are involved with. There's stuff floating around that Cardano's technology is old, that we only do one transaction per second, and that our best days are behind us. What's ironic is that Ethereum is desperate to try to be Cardano. They're trying to figure out how to do on-chain governance, how to have liquid non-custodial staking, and how to bolt on UTXO.

There are a lot of things we did right in 2018, 2019, 2020, and beyond that took some time to get out of the gate, but now we're enjoying the benefits of them. The thing is, Cardano is about compositionality and momentum. When we make design decisions as an ecosystem, we build on top of those decisions for years to decades to come. We don't regress or have to radically change the core design of the system. Plutus came out as a very tight system in terms of expressiveness.

Then V2 got better, V3 got better, and a family of languages emerged. We didn't radically change the programming model or the security model, but now it's exponentially easier to write applications on Cardano, and they're much faster and cheaper—in fact, ten times cheaper in many cases than they were just a few years ago—without any deviation from the core programming model, which was also built for technologies like Hydra. Hydra is starting to mature enough to do useful things, as well as where we want to go as an ecosystem with partner chains. Laos will be the fastest single-shard protocol around what's called a one-minus-delta protocol. You can't really get much faster than that without sharding the system and trading off decentralization and security.

In terms of prototyping, the SIP is written, and we're nearly done with the prototyping of it. All of that is being turned over to an RFP, which I believe Modus Create is currently bidding on. They were the ones who implemented Genesis, also known as Tweak, because Modus Create acquired Tweak. The exact same thing is underway with Oro and Laos now, and we have 6.8 full-time engineers working on the innovation team right now for Laos.

That will continue to scale because it's such a high priority inside the ecosystem. All of that is sitting over at Intersect. We're leading the primary push, but there are other companies, namely Sunday Swap and Well Type, that are also involved in the prototyping, and more will come as this becomes more critical. The point is that, plus the fact that we are still the most decentralized and have just turned on the largest decentralized government in the entire industry, demonstrates how Cardano is starting to speed up. Cardano's design decisions are cumulative; they're building on themselves layer after layer.

We have the best network stack, the best consensus architecture, and the best programming model. With the launch of Midnight, we'll be connected to pretty much everything in the industry as an ecosystem. Other frontier technologies like Babble fees allow people to pay in the assets they care about, and for markets to form with that. We will embrace zero-knowledge in ways that are very difficult for account-based models to do. Rolling up outputs of UTXO is much simpler than rolling up account systems, with fewer security trade-offs as well.

We're best in class there. Cardano is one of those things where you can go away for a few years, come back, and it's exponentially better. That's what makes it so cool. Alongside the hard fork combinator, we have seamless upgrades in the system. It's very easy to build high-performance protocols if you are willing to sacrifice decentralization.

It's also very easy to move quickly as long as you trust a central authority to do that on your behalf. It is much harder to do things in a fully decentralized way with an on-chain government. Cardano chose that road because it's a real cryptocurrency, and its aspiration is to be the dominant platform for the economic, political, and social systems of the world. It's been pioneering for a long time, and that's why it's been around for seven years, 24 hours a day, seven days a week. It also has a deflationary monetary policy and low inflation with the Ouroboros consensus algorithm.

We learned a lot from Bitcoin and built on top of those ideas. There is a lot of personal distaste in certain ecosystems and communities for me, a lot of misinformation, and a lot of just straight-up lies that people tell. But it doesn't really matter because Cardano is here and will be here tomorrow, the next day, and the next. The point is that we are number one because we figured out the recipe. A lot of what we've been doing in 2024 is sharing that recipe and getting it institutionalized so that custodians across the world will ensure that it is protected for decades to come.

Already, there's a vigorous debate occurring about the budget process. More than 500 people have signed up to be Delegates, in addition to the dozen-plus people serving on the Constitutional Committee. All the details for Chang Plus One are nearly finished, and we are on schedule as an EOS system for Node Version 10, which will enable Chang Plus One. There's a high probability the on-chain government will initiate it before the end of the year or early Q1 of next year, subject to their will because they're in charge of the process. In doing that, we will have a full on-chain government, and the Constitutional Convention is on schedule.

More than four workshops have been held across the world, and soon there will be 63 in 50 countries, with 63 delegates being voted on and alternates being voted on to descend to Argentina to ratify a constitution that will then be completely ratified on-chain. There's no cryptocurrency in the world that has had the audacity to try to do things in parallel and at this scale that we've been doing. That's just a fact, and we're doing so with no help from the VCs and a lot of people playing unfair games. Yes, there are certainly some problems, and we need to grow in certain areas. That's one of the discussions right now in the on-chain government, especially with marketing, branding, and growth.

I'm one of the loudest voices saying that the time has come for us as an ecosystem to market the USPs of Cardano and to get Cardano's brand out there as the most cutting-edge, state-of-the-art ecosystem and the safest ecosystem to build on. To grow Cardano at a steady and mature rate, there needs to be some discussions about what growth means and what KPIs are meaningful. That's the point of a budget process; it puts money down on the table to match intent. Leaders have to step up and do great things, but the point of decentralized governance is to give space for leaders to do so. Only Cardano and Bitcoin have truly escaped their founding teams; the rest are reliant upon them in some way or fashion.

That's just a fact, and that's what makes Cardano so special. We've created the largest decentralized brain, the largest decentralized government, and unlike Bitcoin, we have not succumbed to stagnation and anarchy, where there's no way to evolve the core protocol. Quite the contrary, there's a desire to speed up the rate of innovation. There are a lot of things that we have to relax as an ecosystem. There's already a lot of talk about a new version of the node, one that is less reliant upon Haskell and more polyglot in nature.

There are also discussions about alternative clients. Again, these are things being discussed in the budget process, and I'm in favor of a Cardano 2 in terms of a node architecture that relies upon all the lessons we've learned over the last seven years and builds this in the most inclusive way possible. We've already begun key conversations with members of the Cardano ecosystem who are outside of Input Output, who have been building infrastructure the TX pipes and DC Sparks, about serving in an architectural role to discuss a new node design. This is something I'll talk about in more detail in my presentation down in Argentina, where I will discuss the new roadmap and where we can go and what we can do. But again, this has to be endorsed, funded, and approved by an on-chain government.

That's the difference between us and those who aspire for decentralization. We've achieved it; it's done in a considered and deliberate way where no one is really left behind. That's the magic of who we are and where we're going. It's not sexy; it's not flashy. We don't wake up with huge announcements that surprise everybody, the "one more thing" on a stage like Steve Jobs.

Instead, it's the tireless work of thousands of people across the world, many of whom have never met each other, who all just want a better world. That's why they contribute. Cardano is here to change the world's economic, political, and social systems, and it's built purposefully for that expressed reason. We've truly innovated in every area you can look at, from how you measure decentralization with the Edinburgh Decentralization Index to how governance works with SIP 1694, to how one should approach light clients with Mithril, to how people should approach state channels with Hydra, to how side chains need to work in a way that promotes interoperability with partner chains, to the one-minus-delta protocol, which is Ouroboros Laos, to the entire formalization of the consensus logic of our industry as a whole, leading to liquid non-custodial staking built upon the ethos that Satoshi set out. We've realized the dream of colored coins with Cardano native assets, expanded the accounting model that Satoshi invented with extended UTXO, allowing us to do proper smart contracts in a UTXO system and derive all the benefits of them, including verifiability, determinism, and local predictability of resource utilization.

The seamless upgrades with the hard fork combinator, the utilization of literate Agda that allows us to have formal specifications that extract both HLL and soon Rust code, and the poly nature of Cardano smart contracts with TypeScript Aken, which functionally looks a lot like Rust and Haskell for high-assurance applications, means you pick your own adventure. These are all amazing innovations, not to mention Project Catalyst and the 1,900 funded projects it has, and the soon-to-be $600 million on-chain treasury at the consent and deliberation of an on-chain government. You pick the dozen-plus wallets that are community-developed and all the amazing standards there, and a T Prism now Hyperledger Identist, which gives us the best-in-class identity stack. These are undeniable innovations comprising millions of lines of code with thousands of engineers who have touched and conceived of these ideas over the last seven years the project has been live, and nine years total, backed by 223 research papers. There's simply nothing in the industry that even comes close to the cumulative effort of this endeavor because we sought to be different, to do things differently, to think differently, and to think from first principles about what is required for us to change the world and make those changes stick, not get co-opted by large corporations, the banking industry, or the convenience of avarice, especially if the founders are afflicted by it.

I'd like to believe we've been successful. Now, I fully agree with you; we don't get enough credit, and we're not growing as fast as I would But all things considered, to go from nothing to a multi-million person ecosystem in nine years is pretty impressive, especially when it's more valuable than the vast majority of companies in the world. If you think about it, no, there are not 30,000 daily active users; there are 1.4 million wallets currently delegating. Yes, the DeFi side needs to grow, and it has not gotten sufficient love from the VC side of the house, nor have we enjoyed the majority of the meme coin surge that's occurring.

But I do take a little bit of pride in the fact that we don't have to rely upon Ponzi schemes for growth. Let's be honest here: the vast majority of the meme coins in the industry succumb to this. The only reason they're valuable is that lots of people are buying them, and the goal of the insiders, the early adopters, is to dump on new entrants, hoping they can get out before it collapses. That, by its very definition, is a Ponzi scheme. The vast majority of projects on Cardano are trying to build things, like SingularityNET and World Mobile, as examples.

Iagon is another. There are dozens of incredible entrepreneurs every day waking up and working on interesting things for a cumulative total of more than 300 projects that have launched and about a thousand that are underway in various forms and functions. In fact, it's hard to track all of them, and it's hard to know all of them because the ecosystem continues to grow and evolve. Again, I'm not saying we're done; in fact, this is just the beginning. There's a lot to do, but it's being done, just like how the parent protocol is being done.

The vast majority care about decentralization, proper incentives, good governance, and working together to get things done. That's why when we look at the pool of Delegates and members of Intersect, the member-based organization that hosts many of the governance conversations occurring off-chain, they are made up of people building projects actively on Cardano. That's an impressive thing, and I'm proud of that. So I will praise, from time to time, good science, good engineering effort, and interesting protocols that come across. But that doesn't mean in any sense that I'm no longer on the Cardano train.

Let me be very clear here: I do believe Cardano will become the largest cryptocurrency ecosystem in the world. It's going to take some time, and it's going to be done by the collective efforts of millions, if not tens of millions, of people working diligently in their own interests and their own projects over the coming years and decades. I'm a young guy, and many of you are too. We have the time to get it done because we're getting it done with principles, and that's what this has always been about. It's very important that we learn from others.

It's very important that when we see interesting approaches or unique projects, we praise them and try to find ways to work with them and integrate with them because, after all, we can trade with each other. The age of blockchain versus blockchain is coming to an end, and the age of blockchains trading with blockchains is starting to begin. We have so much more to gain working together as an industry than we do working apart. I've always believed that. I think tokenomics, cults of personality, and the very nature of social media at times can get in the way of this, but overall, I think we are working our way in this particular direction.

So I just figured I'd make this video quickly. I'm a little tired, but that's okay; we're pushing. Just wanted to tell you all that I'm here to stay. I love every part of this, and thank you so much for listening. Cheers!