Roadmaps and Polarization

Hi, this is Charles Hoskinson broadcasting live from warm, sunny Colorado. Today is July 1st, 2024. It's hard to believe it's already July. It's been a long year, and it's gone quickly, but there's so much that has happened. We're all starting to get a little older and heavier; the hair is falling out, and the white hair is coming in.

Why? Because we're working hard and getting it done. The reason for this video is to address a paradox about completion that tends to invite bizarre criticism. The closer you get to completing something, the more some people seem to think you didn't do it, and they become incredibly vocal about it. Cardano is probably the most ambitious of all cryptocurrency projects because it sought to achieve many difficult things simultaneously.

As a startup project, it aimed to do things you'd expect NASA to do. We committed to formal methods and peer-reviewed research, bringing scientists together in a hyper-competitive environment that moves in weeks or months, all while being decentralized and rallying a whole community around a very aggressive roadmap. We started in 2015, and now in 2024, nearly 10 years later, when you take an accounting of the things, the reality is that Cardano has nearly achieved all the goals it set out to accomplish. Critics of the project may say this is a lie, that it's techno-babble and not verifiable, but when you take a firm accounting of what's been achieved, what we've built as an ecosystem, and where we currently sit, we are leading the entire industry. For example, Vitalik is writing about epics and slots, and his diagrams are starting to look a lot like some of the things we've been discussing for years.

When you look at the cation count and the code in the repo, you'll see that we are turning on the largest decentralized government in the entire industry. When we look at the eras from Byron to Voltaire, and take account of that, it's pretty remarkable. Byron was all about launching a cryptocurrency network built on the foundations of peer review and formal methods, written in a very obscure language called Haskell. We achieved that; it's undebatable. Shelley was about transitioning from a static and federated model to a dynamic and decentralized one, making it liquid.

We achieved that, with thousands of stake pool operators registered and making blocks today. Ouroboros is live and operational for more than six years, and magical things have been happening. Many of the people listening are part of that group. Goguen was about introducing a completely new development paradigm, extended UTXO with smart contracts written in a functional style, very similar to what Bitcoin wanted to accomplish but couldn't quite get there. We achieved that, and in fact, we’re about to enter the third iteration of that language, which has added amazing infrastructure that allows for rollups and interoperability with other ecosystems.

There's now a diversity of languages from TypeScript to Rust that compile down to EUTXO. It's a completely new paradigm, and I think it's future-proofed. Many of our competitors in the ecosystem are actively looking to copy that in some way. You can even see Vitalik's blog posts on UTXO. When you look at Boso, it was always a multi-phase approach taken in parallel with Voltaire because it requires trade-offs that can't be made by a single firm or even a coalition; it requires the consent of governance.

Part of Boso was producing a roadmap of alternatives and paths and trade-offs in an on-chain government to select such a thing. In the next 180 days, we will turn on the largest on-chain government in the history of the industry. This is an undeniable fact. If you take a look at the Constitution Committee, the DREPs, and the on-chain Constitution, these are not hypotheticals; they are turning on imminently. In fact, Node 9.

0 should probably be available this week or next, and after 70% of the SPOs upgrade, there will be a hard fork. This means that something we've been discussing together as a community for two years has come to fruition. That on-chain government will look at Hydra, input endorsers as realized by LEO, zero-knowledge technology, the partner chain portfolio, and other things. They will receive recommendations from the institutions created to serve them about where to go and what to do. There’s a development team ready to finish that job, accepting the trade-offs and leaving no infrastructure behind.

In other words, mission accomplished for Boso. We have best-in-class scaling; it’s on paper, it’s in prototype, and some of it is already realized via Hydra. It’s there. Some people may choose not to believe it or say it’s a lie, but what have you written? Have you written the papers?

Have you written the code? Do you have the engineers ready to go? They’re there. Are you saying the engineers don’t exist? Are you saying the papers don’t work?

Are you saying it’s unobtainable and not achievable? What basis do you have to say that everybody else is better when they’re hyper-centralized and have to reset their networks all the time, with 70% of transactions failing? We are this close to solving not only the governance trilemma but also the scalability trilemma that people talk about. Paradoxically, as we get closer to it, there are people who say nothing has been achieved and it’s all lies. They are very loud and like to point out missteps or things we couldn’t quite get over the line or recontextualize things.

For example, the ERC20 converter, at the time it was deployed, had a lot of interest in migration. What ended up happening is that we saw things like Milkomeda that added EVM support, and that became a chain that people could target for migration. Some projects, for example, SingularityNET, which currently sits at a billion AUM, migrated as a direct consequence of that program. Does SingularityNET just not exist? Did it not happen?

Did all meetings with Ben Goertzel not occur? We didn’t quite get the wave we anticipated. By the way, Luna collapsed, FTX collapsed, and there was a 90% reduction in altcoin value in the industry, along with a huge wave of litigation. Maybe that fact escapes you. That’s what macro changes mean.

Nobody gave up; in fact, it led to a more nuanced discussion of interoperability, realizing that it’s probably not wise or possible to combine a single EUTXO with both accounts and extended UTXO. But we have the papers to show that the thoughts were there. Chic Ledger was a great example of that, and there were many discussions about how to put something EVM-like, in this case, Yella, in the base ledger. Upon reflection, it made more sense to go back to the original model proposed in a paper I wrote in 2016 called "Why Cardano." That’s an undeniable fact; you can see it.

You can see the timestamps on it; use the Wayback Machine. We were discussing these things nearly eight years in our industry before parachains existed, before Cosmos existed, many of the other projects that I’ve been floating around, conveniently ignored by people who continue to attack the project or say they’re lies. When you look at Yella, there were millions of dollars spent and a lot of good science trying to get the promise of Yella working. I was one of the biggest believers and adherents to it, and I really wanted to live in a world of semantics-based compilation. If you look at reachability logic and Gorrio’s tremendous pedagogy, his CV, the papers he’s written, the things he’s done, the students he has, and the dream of RV, we really tried hard together.

The reality was there was always a delta in terms of capabilities and performance and what existed in code. After years of trying, it made sense to pivot a bit and focus on more tangible things, such as building up EUTXO and the compilers to EUTXO and bringing mainstream languages in. That’s what the community did with AEN and TypeScript. Did we get universal interoperability? No.

Did the dream get lost? No. There are still people working full-time right now at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign on K and its promise, having discussions about how to achieve that and get it done. But the reality is that you can’t do everything. When you look at a large ecosystem, you have to pick winners and losers.

Some things are best left to the community, some to academic institutions, and some to engineering efforts. In the case of Yella, that was an example of something where people tried really hard to bring it into the stack because we thought that would give us a unique competitive edge. The same goes for what cloud Haskell brought to the table with the OTP. We thought about the alternative to TCP/IP, which is the Recursive Internetwork Architecture. While we didn’t quite achieve what we wanted with Reena, the Cardano network deck inspired from it is best in class.

You can clearly see it, for example, in our mitigation of recent DDoS attacks, among other things. There is a lot of power in how we do things with Cardano. Oftentimes, you start with a good idea, iterate, and eventually get somewhere interesting. Are you done? No.

Is it perfect? No. You have to iterate and refine. The fact that we, as an ecosystem, have the ability to do that is a testament to the work that’s been done. Yet, oftentimes, if it’s not perfect, it gets reinterpreted and attacked, and we’re told that we have achieved nothing.

The reality is there is no project in our industry that has done more science, written more code, and ultimately had a bigger impact on the overall thinking of how cryptocurrencies ought to be built. We are by no means perfect, and there are a lot of things we would do differently as an ecosystem and as a project. But what? These failures, we fail together, and we succeed together, as evidenced by the strength of the on-chain government. As we turn these things on, especially for the people who will be members of the on-chain government, it’s important to understand that as we close out the original roadmap, we have accomplished our mission for that decade.

As we look to the next decade, we fundamentally have to ask ourselves what we chase. When you talk about interoperability and some people say nothing has been achieved, then I ask you, what’s the purpose of Minerva, which spawned, by the way, from Layer 1 and the whole merge staking idea? What’s the purpose of partner chains? These things are creating incentives for direct observation of dozens, if not hundreds, of chains and bridges that actually work and are trustless across our entire industry, creating incentives for chains to communicate with each other instead of us being in this zero-sum tokenomics that we currently sit in. Talk about scalability; then please explain to me how that is not achieved with a combination of rollups, Hydra, and Ouroboros.

If we talk about governance, please explain to me how that’s not achieved with what was written in SIP 1694. Don’t use innuendo; please explain that to me I’m five years old. It seems that the goalposts always move, and the criticism never stops because, at the end of the day, people have dug in their positions: either Cardano is a scam, the founders of Cardano are evil people, or everything we’ve said can’t work. Perhaps there’s a deep insecurity brewing that maybe, just maybe, we’re actually winning. If you look at the fundamentals, we have the strongest community, the best depth of research, and ultimately the best engineers and builders.

There’s no one I’d rather bet on or ride with than our people. Many people in my organization have been working with me for a very long time, and a lot of them have gone on to form companies in the Cardano ecosystem. In fact, I was just in an interview with Dan Friedman, who started a commodities exchange called Zengate. Alex Chireano used to work with us, created Scorex, and later on created Ergo. How many people in the Ergo ecosystem are in the Cardano ecosystem or, of course, on good terms?

There are dozens of examples of this where people really do believe in the vision, and that is where our strength comes from as an ecosystem. Unfortunately, the toxicity of social media has reached a point where we now live in alternate realities. This is best demonstrated by the fact that once people criticizing Cardano realized they couldn’t attack us on the DDoS attack because we won that one, they are now claiming that we DDoSed ourselves as an ecosystem. It couldn’t possibly be true that something we built worked as intended, and it couldn’t possibly be true that a community member, not a founder, managed to stop it. It couldn’t be true; it has to be a lie because it radically conflicts with their view of who we are and what we’ve built as an ecosystem.

It’s a pretty sad reality, but it’s also an indication that we have to change the game. The next 5 to 10 years in the cryptocurrency space will not be defined by moving water from one side of the bathtub to the other—in other words, taking market share from Solana, Ethereum, or Bitcoin. Simply put, that ecosystem is what it is; the network effects are what they are, and cargo cults lead them. In the next 5 to 10 years, victory will be in who brings in a billion people. I would much rather bet on people who care about first principles, decentralization, and ultimately have a great community that’s warm, friendly, and welcoming.

I think Cardano still has the best chance to bring in the billions who don’t have financial services. We never gave up. From World Mobile to what Zengate is doing, to what we’re doing with RealFi, there are hundreds of ventures, and Power is another one, where every day they wake up and care about trying to bring people who have nothing into this ecosystem so they have something and own the fruits of their labors, whether it be their money, their identity, or their data. I can’t find the scam in that—having a desire to give people their human agency back and fighting hard to build technology that, by design, cannot be centralized, that self-audits, and has no leaders behind it. Rather, it belongs to everybody.

It’s not about token price; it’s about changing the world. It’s not about your meme coin; it’s not about your particular project. It’s about everybody and the utility that everyone brings to the table and the common decency of living in a world where your vote counts, your voice counts, your money is sound, and ultimately, you own yourself, your own identity, and your own data. If we’re ever going to have a shot at changing the economic, political, and social systems, we have to outgrow the madness of the crowds that we exist in right now in the culture of crypto, which at times has become counterproductive to the original mission of crypto. Cardano should not be equated as a Charles Hoskinson project; it never has been and it never will be.

Cardano is a project by and for millions of people who came together and said, “Thanks, but no thanks. We don’t want to be part of the legacy system. We’d like to build something different, new, and better that’s on more firm foundations.” That’s why we took the hard road, and for 10 years, we’ve been paying the price for it. It is not easy to do what has been accomplished, and I will never allow people to lie and say it hasn’t.

The reality is, again, we have solved, in the coming months, the governance trilemma and, in the coming years, the scalability trilemma that people talk about—the blockchain trilemma. You can see it in the papers we’ve written, you can see it in the code we’ve written, and ultimately, you can see it in the fact that our protocols operate and run transactions 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Every time there’s a hole, the community comes together to find a way to plug it. I am not saying this is a flawless system and that everything always works. I’m not saying everything is perfect; in fact, it’s frankly impossible for anyone to say that.

What I’m saying, though, is we have the right culture, regardless of the circumstances and adversity before us, to be able to resolve the problems that come before us. That is what will ensure that we’re around a decade from now, a century from now, and that people will still be talking about Cardano in the 21st, 22nd, and 23rd centuries. It’s the collective whole of the users. Thank you so much to those in the Cardano ecosystem who have put up with all of this for so long and endured so much. We have made great progress, and never allow anyone to tell you otherwise.

Thank you to those who are yet to join the Cardano ecosystem for one day becoming part of it. Because what? Better, whether you it or not, somehow, some way, Cardano is going to find a way to grow around you or under you, and somehow, some way, you’re probably going to end up using our infrastructure because we will be the best. We will go for number one; that’s who we are and that’s what we do. It’s not about a token; it’s not about a price; it’s not about just some ecosystem or culture.

At the end of the day, it’s about making the world better for everybody. When that’s your mission, how can you fail? When you have so many brilliant, motivated, and disciplined people who have faced a lot through the years and taken a lot of criticism, they won’t give up. We’re going to get it done one way or another. I can’t wait to see Chang and I can’t wait to see what the ICC does in just two short weeks.

They’re going to be right here in this office, the people elected, and we get to talk about the future. We’ll discuss precedents, budgets, and people. In just a few more short months, the DREPs will show up, and it’s going to be a larger, far rowdier group of people. In just a few months thereafter, we’re going to be in Argentina with an army of people from all around the world talking about a constitution that will stand the test of time. That’s just the beginning because that’s the minimum viable governance, by definition, the worst it’s ever going to be, and it’s only going to get better from there.

It’s pretty good in the beginning, not to mention the fact that a budget and a roadmap will be ratified, and hundreds of engineers and dozens of firms will wake up and start chipping away at it to get it done. what?