Remember Kids, X isn't reality

I'm up in Gillette, Wyoming, actually, at the clinic. It's a beautiful clinic. Have you ever heard of Gillette? Drop by the clinic; you'll love it. We actually have a Bavarian coming in, and we'll have the only poison dart frogs in the entire state.

There are no zoos in Wyoming because of some weird old laws and historical reasons. I want to make a quick video before I fly to San Diego to do stem cell and regenerative medicine work with Dr. Harmon. I want to talk a little bit about where we're at in the proposal pipeline and remind people of a few things. We have nine proposals, and we're doing X space for each one.

We're systematically walking through them. There's a website, and what's nice is there's a coalition accountable party for each of these proposals. We believe in them. It’s kind of silly to say, "Let's build the engine, let's build the transmission, but let's not build the tires." It's a system.

If you don't put all the pieces together, it's really hard to have the car go anywhere. You might find a way to build a car with maybe eight of the nine pieces, but if you start cutting them out, it leads to a really bad experience overall. X is always challenging. I left it for a bit, came back, and we were trying to build an AI avatar. We're still working on it; it's called Project Nix, and we've made some great progress.

The challenge is that the end-user license agreement forbids me from turning over to complete AI without labeling the account as a bot. If it's labeled as a bot, it automatically downgrades me in the algorithm, so many of the posts you'll never see. The other thing is that the Iran war broke out, and X is really the only place to get real-time news that isn't going through a propaganda filter. It's a little challenging because there's stuff in there that I'm trying to figure out how to replicate. I've been exploring using OpenClaw via my fork of it called Logan to facilitate some of that.

Hopefully, we can get off sooner rather than later, but that's not reality. X is filled with a lot of people who bark really loud, and that's fine. Where it becomes problematic is when they utilize the platform to attack volunteers or people who get a small stipend and allege that their bot sold it paid for to support Input Output. That's never okay, and it's damaging to our ability to build effective, positive, happy communities. Midnight is really fun because it's young and new.

Not a lot of drama has happened. When you go to the Discord and attend the night stream whiteboard sessions and talk to people, there's a lot of optimism, hope, and positivity. These ambassadors come from many different walks of life and many different chains. Some come from Solana, some come from Avalanche, and we even have some XRP people there. We leave preconceived notions and the fights of the past at the door and just have a reset.

One of the most important rules of being there is to be nice to each other and avoid drama. It's not really fun when certain members of the Cardano community, for competitive reasons, decide to start attacking and victimizing people who, for the most part, aren't paid anything or, if they are given a small monthly stipend, it's certainly not enough to move the needle one way or the other. They do this because they're falling apart. Their commercial progress is not where it needs to be, and they view what we do as a direct competitor, realizing that it's probably a better value proposition in the future. It's shameful and sad that certain members of the community decide to go down that road.

Governance has been exceedingly hard for Cardano, creating derangements and divisions that are not only unnecessary but so counterproductive that they make people want to quit Cardano altogether. I'm definitely not a perfect person, and you can make a very long list of things you don't like about me. But one thing you can't doubt is my passion for helping Cardano succeed. Cardano is my life's work, and I've put an enormous amount of effort over the last ten years into trying to make this ecosystem grow, thrive, and evolve. Over the last few years, we have become a tremendously collaborative company.

This required a lot of hard work, cultural changes, and actually letting some people go. Some of the people we let go accepted it and understood it; others became brutal and bitter adversaries of the company, carrying grudges that continue to this day. That was a reality we just had to accept. We accepted it because the greater good of Cardano as a whole is that if we become collaborative and bring lots of people in, they can grow, thrive, and eventually become leaders in their own right. In other words, it is necessary to decentralize the ecosystem as a whole and bring in new blood and new leadership so that Cardano continues to grow and thrive.

More importantly, you get differences of opinion that become pragmatic compromises, making the protocol stronger overall. You see that with Project Blueprint, the Know Diversity Workshop, the creation of Intersect, the empowerment of Intersect, the growth of the Cardano government, and our ability to work with people we disagree with. For example, with the Pentad, we've had strong structural grievances, but for the greater good of the ecosystem, we've been able to come together. Some people simply can't accept this, or it's inconvenient for them to accept these data points. They would rather label all the people that work with us as owned, corrupt, or captured.

Typically, this is because they are either economically incentivized to say this or because they're just fundamentally immature people who live in a world where everything is black and white and everyone is an adversary. Cardano cannot succeed if it's just the Input Output show. There is a responsible and systematic way to diversify all things in it, and I think we've made more progress than any other cryptocurrency in the entire space in the last three years to facilitate that decentralization. Everywhere you look, you have multiple flavors, not just vanilla. There is a commitment in this ecosystem to decentralize and offer people many options.

In some cases, this hurts us because, with those options, it's hard to have them all be good. If you have ten average things instead of one good thing, you get judged as average, even though the totality of the work is exceptional. For example, the developer documentation is trying to create one source of truth for onboarding people and bringing a coalition of different actors together to facilitate that. We have a great DevEx, and AI knows where to look to buy code because that's where all the engineers are. There's some prescience in what we do.

My long-term goal is to find a path to ensure that no matter what, Cardano remains and continues to grow as the most decentralized cryptocurrency. Every single decision I make is controversial, and that's just the reality of things. Catalyst needed a transition, so we transitioned it to the best-funded and most capable entity. Even though we've had historic disagreements, we did so with community consent because we felt it could be better suited there than with us. Many people disagree with that decision or think it will not result in what the community needs, and that's fair.

It's perfectly reasonable to disagree. It's also true that many of the things we currently work on need to be transitioned to proper open-source projects like Plutus Core, Hydra, and the Haskell node itself. There's a process and a path to facilitate that. Much of the funding this year is about that. It's not just about building new features or finishing old work, but also about a philosophy of how we move things in the right direction so that everything is sustainable, resilient, and decentralized.

The things we commercialize and work on, we share the wealth. That's not just a statement; it's an objective reality. When you saw Midnight, even though it would have been much easier to launch from a different ecosystem with a different distribution, Cardano received half of the supply. That was because of the legacy and respect for the people I've become friends with and the ecosystem as a whole. For future partner chain projects, we expect similar results.

The tokenomics may be different, but we're never going to forget Cardano. From time to time, we also ask the community to get some skin in the game for these things. That's what we're doing here. There's something truly extraordinary about this model. We can get five or ten partner chains to be successful on Cardano.

As an ADA holder, in addition to ADA for staking rewards, you'll get five to ten other tokens of great value. There is no other cryptocurrency currently in the market, from Bitcoin on down, that has that kind of value proposition. When people ask, "What's on Cardano?" if there are five or ten multi-billion dollar projects that are thriving and have multi-chain appeal, you can simply list them. Just like Steven Spielberg's CV, you can say, "Jurassic Park," "ET," "Jaws," and people will say, "Oh yeah, I watched all those.

He's a good director." You have to have brand names to create familiarity and allow people to make quick judgments about whether something is still relevant, thriving, and has the right to exist. The success of Midnight and the successors of Midnight, the partner chains that come after it, will be the single biggest marketing vanguard and customer adoption we have available to us. I believe that in 2016, when I wrote "Why Cardano," which is still online and can still be Googled, I clearly articulated that Cardano was a multi-layered system. One core layer, Cardano SL, from which security and truth can be issued, and then computation layers to facilitate blockchain services to the industry as a whole, referred to as Cardano CL at the time in the paper.

Midnight is a realization of that intention from ten years ago. It's not a new thing, not a pivot, not an abandonment, but a realization of a ten-year vision. Two things have to be true: one, we plan in decades, and two, I do what I say I'm going to do. It would have been very easy ten years ago to write some stuff down and then, as markets change, pivot and walk away from that commitment. Instead, every step of the way, I try to find a way to make it work.

That's who I am—one of the most consistent, disciplined, and relentless people in this industry. I keep going, I keep taking the hits, even when I don't have to, and we fight for sustainable, fair, and reciprocal relationships. In some cases, funding is not even about getting the money; it's about an acknowledgment of an appropriate relationship. If we do work, we should be paid for that work. Some out there on X, because X is not reality, are even subscribing to the notion that all pulls from the treasury should be loans.

Tell me, what's the commercial model of the Cardano core node or the Haskell framework? Excuse me, the Hydra framework. What's the core model of that? Should I put a toll on that every time you send a transaction, some of it goes to me? It's open-source software with no commercial model.

How would a loan be appropriate for these types of things? It makes no sense, but they say it because they haven't really thought it through and they're just upset and angry over the fact that ADA used to be $1.10 at the turn of 2024 to 2025, and now it's at 25 cents. They want someone to blame. We accept that we're going to take the majority of that blame, fair or unfair, as the largest entity in the ecosystem and the one that's been around the longest.

So every time the markets go up or down, we get praised or blamed accordingly, regardless of our particular involvement or lack thereof. And that's okay; it is what it is. The dogs bark, and the caravan moves on. The whole point of delegated governance is that brighter minds and wiser minds can prevail. In the coming weeks and months, hard decisions have to be made about where we go, what we do, and how we get there.

We have laid out a vision in consultation with months of discussions with people at Intersect, people at Pragma, the Cardano Foundation, EMURGO, and many builders in the space about their concerns and how to resolve them. We've also tried to make this vision as economically efficient as possible. The proposals we've put out over the last few months, these nine proposals, are half the price of the treasury draw that Input Output gathered last year. This has resulted in us having to change some things. We've had to let people go at Input Output, consolidate departments, and restructure things.

I've had to say goodbye to some friends who have worked with me and for me for years. But that's just the reality of a downturn in the market. You can't get everything; you have to cut the fat. It would be unfair for me to complain about this because every project in the space is suffering the same. We just saw JPEG Store, for example, announce that they're going to collapse and shut down.

It is what it is, and you have to adapt and survive in these new environments. The fact that we've been able to find a path to do more with substantially less is a major improvement in the ecosystem as a whole. We'll continue this optimization as aggressively as humanly possible. For some, that's not enough, and they have this unrealistic expectation that everything should be free. For others, they'll recognize deep down that we're trying; we're all trying.

While there is no certainty, there is at least some camaraderie in the attempt to try. We're here; we want to win. We want to see this ecosystem grow, and we're getting real tired of the noise. We're getting real tired of carnival barkers and vacuous conversations. We have to stop attacking each other.

Where I get most enraged and defensive is often not when people attack me, but when they attack people who don't deserve to be attacked—ambassadors, volunteers, open-source contributors. These people are the lifeblood of our ability to grow and thrive. Anyone, I don't care who they are, who starts going after them for just being passionate and voicing their opinions, it's not appropriate; it's wrong. People who do this are not productive, good members of our community. They will destroy Cardano a cancer.

No one wants to be in an ecosystem where they're being attacked, and no one wants to be in an ecosystem where that's the standard. I know many of you listening will cite the Cardano whale debate. In the prior video, I told you the real-life consequences of it. We'd currently be up 332% on the sovereign wealth fund if we had just simply done something that was common sense. We could have had a debate about it.

I'd even have been comfortable having an X space about it with Cardano whale and fighting for my position while letting him represent his. There was no debate; there was a recusal of any argumentation, and he just simply left the ecosystem, but not before automatically voting no on every IO proposal out of principle. We are now seeing similar behavior from other people. The immune system of a good community is to have the courage to accept that sometimes these people have to go. If you feel I'm one of them, then vote no on all of our proposals and let IO go so you can go it alone.

If you feel that I'm part of the solution, vote yes on our proposals, and we'll be here fighting in the trenches, going to the conferences, being there for Cardano on national television, and being there for Cardano with world leaders in every medium that matters. I've spent now, as I've said, more than ten years of my life on this project. I'm not old, but I'm not young anymore. As I look to the next decade of my life, I'm unwilling to spend that decade if I'm not welcome or if my only purpose is to be a scapegoat for all the ills and sins of others. I'm here to win, and I have to believe there's a path to do that.

If we have each other's backs, fight hard, want to win, and have a good plan and strategy, then I'll stay. If this is just one place for cynical, toxic people who burn each other down for a minute they don't get their way and descend into ad hominems, there's no sense in being here. I'm going on a plane to California soon, and I'm going to sit down and talk about a stem cell program. I can spend the next ten years of my life doing that instead of doing it part-time; I can do it full-time. There's a paper sitting on my desk right here that describes a patient in China who received induced pluripotent stem cells.

She's 28 years old, already had a liver transplant and pancreas transplant, and had severe type one diabetes and was dying. The stem cell transplant she received not only resolved the diabetes but completely regenerated her pancreas. She's now you and me; most people listening don’t have to take insulin anymore. She went from probably going to die in her 40s with a very poor quality of life to living well. Sitting in a clinic that's 70,000 square feet, has 20,000 patients, dozens of providers and scientists, and is on the dawn of a stem cell breakthrough, I can spend my time translating that study in China and doing a clinical trial here to fix the diabetics of America, not to mention the thousands of other diseases.

There's an opportunity cost to having these fights day after day, and I find myself asking at times, "Why am I still here?" If this is a community that has respect, if this is a community that wants to win and invest in itself, I have an answer. If this is a community that praises the people who divide us and burn us to the ground, I don't. That's just the harsh truth of it. I'm really tired of my intelligence being attacked, my character and integrity being attacked, and a perpetual bad faith mentality.

I'm very tired of my motives being questioned. There's something called reputation, and after showing up every day for ten years and fighting hard for you on the good days and the bad days, and every single bad day, showing up and being there, at some point, I should get some form of benefit of the doubt that at least my intentions are genuine. I appreciate that a lot of people let you down. I feel deeply let down by this administration. We didn't ask for a lot; we just asked for some basic decency, and we couldn't even get that.

That's fair. But do not allow the fact that other institutions have let you down and the markets are in a bad state to then, with one broad brush, say everyone is evil, everyone is a thief, and everyone's here to screw you. I'm sorry; I just don't have time for it. The people at Input Output don't have time for it. We can do anything.

We choose to do the things that we do. Midnight, we choose to do. I choose to wake up and work on genetically engineered plants and make them glow in the dark. I choose to bring back animals from the dead. I choose to work on stem cells.

I choose to be a bison rancher. I enjoy these things; they're fun, interesting, and novel.