Post-Consensus, Markets, and Thoughts

hi everyone this is charles hoskinson broadcasting live from warm sunny colorado always warm always sunny sometimes colorado today is june 13th 2024. 2022 excuse me still tired just got back from consensus 17 000 people showed up we had a community event with over 1200 people there a lot of vip stuff we had a lovely party and elijah wood showed up and was djing an ice cube showed up so i never in my life thought we'd be doing these types of things but it was fun gave away a bunch of stetson hats and texas is always enjoyable i ate way too much barbecue but that's what you do when you're in when you're in consensus the event was pretty special in that we had an outsized impact i think as an ecosystem right now there's a strong hunger for stability quality and certainty you notice that bitcoin is down about 14 today markets are not doing very well and there's a good chance we could see 20 000 or less bitcoin and that's just because things were overheated and things are now retracting the equity markets are terrible inflation concerns are significant interest rates are going up we are in a recession in a global sense it's it's hard to get anything done when it's seven dollars for a gallon of diesel it's 28 dollars i think for four liters just gives you a sense of how expensive things are so the power of consensus with that we had a chance to engage with a lot of builders in the ecosystem cardano ecosystem and ask them why are you here what are you doing are you here from the long haul or are you here for a short term and every one of them passion it's problem solving pushing hard and just getting it done it was really remarkable to see all the different things from air nodes that are broadcasting internet across an entire country to completely new worlds that are being built meta versus being built a ton of nfts a lot of really interesting things on the deck side and a lot of excitement a lot of great conversations about developer experience we had several really deep meetings with a lot of people in the d5 side of the cardano ecosystem about new feature requests we also talked a lot about the cardone open source project which will probably as an ecosystem be able to make an announcement sometime in september about long and short is that things are moving towards a member based organization the time has come for that type of organization so an enormous amount of intersourcing a lot of stuff getting off jira and to get it's going to be a very busy summer all things considered and there's a sense of calm i feel about everybody that we have because well every day is the same we just work we just get it done everybody ecosystem is building and that's a lot of fun and we learn a lot along the way and we keep publishing input endorsers are coming along and we're making huge progress there and duncan and team are really digging into the deep nuances of the problem we continue to evolve the network stack of cardano as an ecosystem and find new use cases and utility ton of progress on mithril ton of progress on hydra there really aren't any surprises in that sense and you see all the surprises that the space has when you look at the celsiuses or the terra lunas or these other things i think you get into a lot of trouble when you try to financial engineer your way into super amazing guaranteed permanent returns the reality is any human endeavor whether it be a technological endeavor a commodity endeavor an intellectual endeavor there's going to be ups and downs there's going to be successes and failures and there are no guarantees in that respect our industry is no different and just because we're adding the word crypto doesn't in any way shape or form change the the laws of financial physics where in the absence of diversification in the absence of deep research in the absence of risk management you'll see tremendous volatility and inevitably a lot of winners and losers much more biased towards the loser's side and our industry amplifies that because it's a new industry and there's exciting new things here i've engaged a lot with lawmakers over the last month and a half two months and we've had very deep and detailed discussions senate hearings are coming congressional inquiries are coming there's a lot of interest in the legislative branch about the future of cryptocurrencies and what's positive about that conversation is there's a wholesale acknowledgement amongst most reasonable politicians that crypto is here to stay markets go up markets go down some people commit fraudulent behavior but just the traditional marketplaces and traditional technologies that no way invalidates the fact that this is a revolutionary technology that has a lot of use and utility behind it that is fundamentally transformative that said rules need to be established the game has to be kind of figured out because right now it's not working as well as it needs to and so finally the legislative branch is waking up to that and something will come in the united states and i believe that something will like start by aims oxley or these other standards ripple through the entire world and regulations will be made in reflection of contrast to or a merger in some capacity with what the u.s standards become from our part we're trying to solve fundamental questions for example we're very concerned about the notion of decentralization to that end we're going to bootstrap up a decentralization index and try to start measuring things just so we can start the conversation it is my hope that that index eventually can be become embedded at nist or some standards body like that and be used as a common metric that people can score to demonstrate that their ecosystems have achieved certain milestones we need definitions for throughput we need a consumer protections bill of rights to clearly articulate the rules of the road on the innovation side breaktech is going to be one of the fastest growing parts i think of the cryptocurrency industry the automation of kyc and aml the embedding of identity and metadata into transactions for certain use cases makes a lot of sense the problem is that there seems to be a visceral almost childish attempt to to say that anything along these lines is problematic let's be very clear here no lawmaker in the united states no member of the executive branch is responsible for big connect or tara luna none we are as an industry and for some reason we don't think it appropriate as an industry to accept and own the mistakes that were made and acknowledge that people have been heard and if we are able to do that then we can gain some wisdom and we can come collectively up with an approach that means we can continue operating as an industry the way that we as an industry would like without the moral hazards that continue to appear again and again and again and again and again and again this bear market is a great opportunity it's an opportunity for rivalries to be set aside it's an opportunity for poaching to stop it's an opportunity for the toxicity that we see amplified by social media and by community managers trying to gain points on people to fade away and for us to collaborate on standards on laws on basic technology research these types of things we have consistently reached out to many different organizations from members of the hyperledger groups from firefly to others to create alliances the utxo alliance other cryptocurrencies the horizons and the ergos of the world and we have a great relationship across the board with many of the science coins including el grand in many cases people flow back and forth between the two organizations and that will continue because we gain knowledge both ways through that collaboration this is how it should be in a bear market we should be building we should be deeply considering the direction and point of what we do as an industry we should be engaging in discussing things with people and ultimately we should be converging to a point where we can look back and say we did something well it is unreasonable to believe that self-custody is the only answer for every single person what about the person who gets alzheimer's what about the person who dies suddenly your keys are lost no estate planning no inheritance solutions need to be built the point of the industry isn't about stripping one philosophy away and replacing it with another the point of the industry is to give people choice of what philosophy they want to be in do not deny people the right to self-custody but also don't tell people who choose to do something differently that they have somehow committed a moral sin it's a choice we weren't given that choice before cryptocurrencies we were told how the banking system works we were told what level of economic agency and privacy and the nature of our identity now for the first time ever we have a say it's a small window of time and people will attempt to strip it from us if we don't in this small window of time solidify the rights that we're starting to give ourselves back but the way to get there is to listen to the complaints it's the listen to the concerns the moral hazards the things that are happening these down days are great opportunities for those reflections and there's no reason entrepreneurs can't build great experiences there's no reason entrepreneurs can't build great technology better wallet interfaces better ways of recovering wallets better ways of storing keys safer ways of doing those things than improve everything for our part i think we need to find a way to take the entire u.s code all laws in the united states and other nations and make them machine understandable make them a digital object that can be manipulated and and transformed and used with ai and other techniques so that they can be embedded into smart contracts and entrepreneurs can ask simple questions of whether is this transaction legal or not without necessarily needing to consult a lawyer that's the future we could go towards we also can start exposing the inconsistencies contradictions and loopholes of the current legal system and work with lawmakers to fix those things where when they make sense it's a lot to be among the leaders in this industry you have to be an expert it seems on everything and you always have to bat a thousand you're judged harshly when you don't and you're seldom given credit when you do but that doesn't matter because it's a collective effort of the masses that matters that's who we are cardano did not get nor did ethereum or bitcoin to where it's at by the tireless work of an individual got there because a large group of people decided it's a fundamentally good idea to choose freedom and liberty and thus we must remember that lesson on the down days the bear days we must consider that lesson and we must take it to heart and we have to find a way to make what we do as accessible and inviting as any other endeavor more so if possible again i'll ask and i'll probably ask every day we have to set aside the toxicity in this industry the backbiting in this industry and we have to be intellectually honest in this industry about the things that are not working well we need cross-chain standards we need smart contract standards we need to have the regulatory conversation because it's right now being had with or without us as an industry so it's incredibly important that we be participants in that so that we can influence and change it to a point where the innovation the job growth the amazing things this industry brings the resilience this industry brings the change in thinking that this industry brings is preserved otherwise it will be absorbed by cbdc's permission systems and ultimately a dystopian reality where the few have absolute control over the data identity and value of the many we cannot allow that to happen and it will by default if we continue being petty as an industry it will by default if we continue to succumb to the demons of maximalism and it will by default happen if we don't innovate our way out of it a lot of work we have to do and in the coming weeks and months we'll continue doing it cardano ecosystem is definitely doing it there are 14 wallets in the cardano ecosystem now it's pretty impressive considering it started with just one we have to create certification standards as an ecosystem to ensure that they're safe wallets that when people use them they can have a reasonable expectation of security there are over a thousand projects building on cardona right now by tens of thousands of people around the world we have to ensure that when those projects are deployed as an ecosystem that they adhere to basic standards so that we don't suffer from what's happened by other chains there are enormous questions of intellectual property legal wrappers for dows all kinds of things that are brought up in the governance of these dabs as well as the assets of them such as nfts the only way we're going to get there is if we get there together we're trying to do our part at i o with the edinburgh decentralization index and a lot of deep discussions with policy makers to try to figure this out and of course our engineers more than 200 of them working on cardano every day in different ways just in our company and 15 other companies working on cardano many of which you saw at consensus in their way some with differences of opinion there are some things you can do for a call to action you may have noticed that people are starting to work for cardano full time now or part-time not a company but the blockchain itself i would like to see over the next six months three to five more sip editors come from the same process that sebastian from dc spark followed if you are technical and you have time to spend to read sips and speed up the sip process review them then i would love to see you apply for funding from catalyst if you do so i'll definitely look at it if you're a reasonable candidate i'll throw my support behind you too i think it's really important that we build up a deep bench of people the same for anyone building infrastructure and tooling the cardano ecosystem this is not a wait and see if you're building go to catalyst let's find a way to get you funded in catalyst so you can work directly for cardano and continue to build the same for ambassadors the same for people who are involved in every aspect of the ecosystem the time has come for a thousand flowers to bloom from the community not just a few companies here and there but from the community to add to the already large group of people working on cardano and add diversity checks and balances and controls to an already resilient system these are the things that we need immediately if you're technical you understand plutus the cardano stack exchange answer questions mentor people go to github and recommend new documentation we need to collaborate in that respect and as i mentioned a members-based open source project is imminent and if you have a company or you're an individual and you would like to sit on a governance steering committee technical steering committee we're going to put up a website just to try to collect names and information so that we can send out a whole package of information at the announcement so we can start building a small army in that respect these are short-term things we can do now if you are interested in law and policy write your congressman and write your senator and tell them what you think we ought to do as an ecosystem spend some time and read the bills the lummus bill and others and the summaries of them and try to really understand what is going on we need tax standards custody standards asset definition standards i just was at a book signing with don tapscott he just finished a book called digital asset revolution the front cover there are nine little tiles on it each one of them represents a different type of digital asset under us law we don't even have a proxy or proper taxonomy of digital assets this is housekeeping that needs to be done and these are essential pieces of foundational legislation that need to be passed in order for us to be able to navigate our way and have regulatory clarity so that we as an industry can survive and grow and thrive be part of that process talk to your state representatives your federal representatives and let's work together on that again we'll try our best to lead and we'll try our best to work with you and find other leaders to lead as well but we're only one small voice and a very big chorus and i do not want this industry to be defined by the celsiuses and the lunas the bit connects and all the other things that have come before that have resulted in catastrophic loss or failure over promises and ultimately destruction we just can't allow that to happen it's not right it's not who we are it's not why we set out to do these things we set out to do these things to build one system for everyone one collection of protocols for everyone that gives each and every person equal consideration inclusive accountability and an assurance that they will preserve maintain and enjoy the fruits of their labors with liberty i think that's fair and that's the lowest common denominator that i think we can agree on and achieve everything else there's of course going to be differences of opinions based on facts and circumstances but each and every human being is entitled to freedom and is entitled to assurances that they're going to be treated equally with their peers as a condition of birth it's who we are and it's the society we should live in we as people have failed in delivering that and while we can write pretty language on constitutions and try to build institutions to preserve and protect these things the institutions get corrupted the constitutions get ignored and ultimately people are people machines need to be used to preserve some certain things certain liberties your right to privacy your money your identity these things they matter and that's why we created cardano our best effort at trying to figure out how to preserve those things and get as many people as possible to believe these things matter too so it's a hard day i can imagine for many people but for the people here at i o and for many in this project just another day it's a monday and there's going to be a tuesday and there's going to be a wednesday and that's the mentality i think you all should have have to have if you truly do want to change the world there are hard days all the time and there are good days but you have to keep the faith keep the discipline and keep pushing forward so i look forward to the amas i'm going back hopefully i'll be able to do one this weekend and as i said we're building a nice little studio we'll add some more formats and cool things of course there's always announcements throughout the year always things to do throughout the year consensus was an incredibly successful event i think for our ecosystem and for us it really showed the world that cardano exists and there's a lot of unwritten stories as a result of that footprint that we left in fact some people jokingly said that consensus was a cardano event and i'm pretty happy about that i also heard that the metamath booth which was right next to the cardano booth complained about the noise because there were simply too many people there and we said well if you have an issue you can always send an email to support iohk.