Hi, this is Charles Hoskinson broadcasting live from warm, sunny Colorado. I've said those words a lot of times—always warm, always sunny, sometimes Colorado. But this is a good video, one I’m very proud to make.
Let me show you some live statistics from Gov Tools and allow me to be one of the first to congratulate the entire Cardano ecosystem for the ratification threshold for the Constitution. The Cardano Constitution replaced the interim Constitution with 85% approval to 6.62%. Only 7.68% did not vote, and the Constitutional Committee threshold of 67% was met unanimously; all seven Constitutional Committee members voted. This means today it will get locked in at the Epic change. It takes about two days to tally, and when that vote goes through, as of probably Thursday, I believe we will have a Constitution for Cardano.
A lot of the abstentions are from people delegating through exchanges. They want to get the rewards but don’t participate in governance. Exchanges hold the majority of ADA right now. Now, how about that? We did it in two years' time. It was a remarkable journey. It took a long time, a lot of effort, and many people were involved—more than 65 workshops, 1,800 people at a Constitutional Convention, enormous amounts of debates, and a lot of uncertainty at times. Many people wanted to give up and say, "Oh, I don’t think we can get this done," but we did. We brought people together from across the world. Fifty countries came together to talk about and create a foundation for Cardano to sit upon. It’s not perfect, and already many people have some rough edges and bridges, but the point is it will run, and it will give us invaluable data. Some things we’ll love, and some things we’ll hate.
What we proved is that as a completely decentralized organism across the world, we were able to come together with 85% approval, and the Constitutional Committee came together and voted to embed this in the chain. It’s a Constitution by and for the users of Cardano. Because we’ve done this, we’ve now created a proof point for the rest of time that we can do it again. As we collect all those grievances, issues, and things we’d like to improve or add or change over time, we can now update this Constitution. This means that Cardano is a living organism, a vibrant ecosystem with over 800 decentralized system (DS) Constitutional Committee members and 108,000 delegators participating in governance directly by delegating to DS. That number is going up dramatically with institutions like Intersec and many people building on it. It’s unstoppable.
We’re fully decentralized; there’s no centralized point of failure in Cardano. Like Bitcoin, the only other one that’s truly like this, Cardano is fully decentralized. Now, there are still some gravity wells of power, but there are checks and balances, and over time those diminish. It’s a moment for every single person who said they would commit to it, work on it, and get it done. I’m proud of all of you. While this final document didn’t necessarily reflect everything that you wanted, it’s a monumental achievement in social physics. People came together, worked together, and spoke different languages from different places, agreeing to something at a very high threshold. Seventy-five percent was the threshold that was set. Imagine the level of consensus you need to achieve 75% approval. I can’t remember the last U.S. president that had a sustained 75% approval rating throughout their term. The last time we changed the U.S. Constitution was, I believe, in the early '90s.
To give you a sense of it, I don’t think in this political environment we’d ever be able to get another Constitutional Amendment through at the federal level, but we did it here. We did it across the world with people who came to know each other through the process, and that’s a pretty special day. It’s a pretty special thing.
So, we have more things ahead of us. We have to get the product roadmap ratified, and we have to get the budget ratified. The interim Constitutional Committee members will now be replaced, so elections will be held in the second half of the year, and the terms expire in September. We need to get all those roles filled with elected people, which means that Cardano is basically a government—a living thing. It has a treasury of 1.5 billion ADA. We’re already talking about tax cuts, so I know you’re a real government, and we’re discussing strategy. Everybody has ideas of what to do, where to go, and who to elevate.
I couldn’t be prouder. Ten years ago, I thought about all this on a whiteboard, talking to some people in Japan. We said, "This is what we’re going to do. This whole thing is going to be amazing, extraordinary, and special." Everybody thought I was nuts and crazy. They said, "You’re going to create an on-chain government, and people who have never met each other all around the world are just going to work together, many of whom are volunteers who care about things and vote on things." I said, "Yes, they will do that." It’s just something that’s going to happen. They said, "No way, no how." But they were crazy enough to go on the journey with me, and ten years later, here we are. We did it with a little help and a little pushing from here and there, but more importantly, you did it. You guys got it done.
This is the direct result of so many people not only taking the process seriously but making the process their own. What you’ll see is that many of the people who voted yes and no also included their reasons for voting. I encourage anybody who’s delegating to read them. They took the time to write their thoughts down and be accountable—not a Fox News or MSNBC sound bite where they give you 30 seconds of whatever the party line is regurgitated. No, this is a well-written opinion of why they felt yes, why they felt no, or in some cases abstained. Some made videos, some wrote it, some tweeted. It didn’t matter; they found a way to communicate with you and let you know where they’re at and what they did.
As an ecosystem, if that’s the standard, we get better every month, every quarter. The government gets bigger and more accountable; it gets more capable and makes better decisions overall. The thing is that as we have this foundation, a lot of people are already thinking about what the next version needs to look like. It’s very much like software. They say, "Well, maybe we add quadratic voting. Maybe we add preference orders. Maybe we find more diverse ways to include people inside the ecosystem so more people participate." They’re already talking about compensation—who gets paid, if so, when, how, and if not, why. We’re tracking everything. You can see the level of participation among the people elected. Are they showing up and regularly voting? Are they voting well? Are they giving you answers to why they do what they do? It’s pretty exciting, and that’s what the vision was.
People often ask, "What’s Cardano’s core USP?" Certainly, there are blockchains with a higher TPS rate, and certainly, there are blockchains with a higher market cap. You can always pick some vanity metric and say, "Well, that looks better." The core USP of Cardano really is the fact that everybody who holds it has a say in it—sometimes small, sometimes big, but you have a say. This is just not the case with Bitcoin, Ethereum, or all these other ecosystems. They never took the time to believe that you were worth something. They never took the time to actually ask for your opinion. They never took the time to empower you. Instead, they said the only thing that matters is the code; code is law. All humans are bad; can’t trust them for anything.
What we did is we said, "Let’s take the best of both worlds." There are algorithms, and they matter. They enforce deep principles and prevent the system from being misused. This is the lesson of Satoshi: humans, in the long run, cannot be unilaterally trusted. But on the other hand, we’re tremendously creative and capable people. If engaged in the right way, we have the ability to build a better system. When you constrain people through constitutional law and algorithmic governance, you can bring out the best in people. You can hold people accountable and ensure they don’t become corrupt, thus getting all the good things they do. You get the goodwill, the empathy, the emotions, the desire to be creative, the love of aesthetics—you get all those things, the poetry of the soul. That is what is missing from all these other mechanical systems.
We spent two years, a lot of work, trying to chase that poetry of the soul. And you know what? We proved today, unambiguously, that not only do we possess it, but we want more of it. The coming months are going to be a lot of fun; the coming years are going to be a lot of fun. We’ve got Bitcoin DeFi, we’ve got Laos, we’ve got Midgard, we’ve got partner chains. Cardano is becoming one of the largest ABS systems in the world. All kinds of stuff is coming down the pipe that will foundationally increase our competitiveness and make it easier to deploy dApps—better, faster, cheaper. I don’t worry about these things because that’s just technology, and we’ve proven beyond a reasonable doubt we’re good at that too: 168 scientists, 24 to 40 academic papers, 10,000 citations, millions of lines of code, dozens of development companies, and now four full nodes under construction. We’re diversified, and we know how to write good code.
But really, what truly matters is that we also have the largest governance layer now, which means we’re the smartest cryptocurrency ecosystem. We can crowdsource any idea, any strategy, and augment it with AI. My Lord, we are unstoppable as an ecosystem. Not only can we crowdsource it, but we can also converge to a single common understanding.
See, the dirty secret of decentralization is that the more decentralized you become, the more difficult it is to actually make a decision about how to change something. While you can preserve the status quo, it’s almost impossible to update the status quo to something better, even when everybody acknowledges that it’s a good idea. We call this the great AI middle of the internet. Core protocols of the internet were developed in the 1970s as a DARPA program by Vint Cerf, Bob Kahn, and others, including some people that work for us. But yet, you ask yourself how often do we update those core protocols and add new and exciting things like QUIC or RINA? The answer is seldom because it takes so much coordination effort to be able to update and modernize that infrastructure. Thus, we suffer from the consequences of it and have to have a dirty patchwork of half-measures and solutions in browsers, routers, and other things to try to make the internet semi-reasonable as an organism.
The same is happening to other cryptocurrencies. The larger they get, the more distant they get from their founders, and the harder it is for them to find the social momentum to reach consensus on how to upgrade the system. Thus, to be competitive, what people tend to do is try to centralize the cryptocurrency. Then I have to ask: how is the cryptocurrency any different from the very banks we’ve been trying to escape? How is the cryptocurrency any different from the large monopolistic oligarchies in the tech world that we’ve been trying to escape from, and the totalitarian governments that love to know everything about their people and hold it against them?
The expectations of centralization are that you get something in the short term but trade your soul in the long term. We see this again and again in our industry. So, in the long term, the only option is decentralization. The true innovation of Cardano is decentralization with the ability to move as fast as a centralized entity. No one has ever achieved that in the cryptocurrency space, and today we proved we can. Everything else is a formality; we will win. It’s inevitable. There’s no founder, there’s no foundation to crack and fall apart, and there’s no scandal that can undo Cardano. We have all the benefits of a Satoshi system but none of the downsides. We have the brains; we have the largest decentralized brain in the world by wiring all the universities together.
As our competitors mocked us for white papers and research, what they failed to realize was we were putting together a collective intelligence that is self-renewing. Tell me how a university gets its brains: the young go there, study, contribute, and then they move on. More young people go there, study, contribute, and then they move on. By wiring in and creating permanent institutions, we ensure that we always have the youngest and brightest working on our problems. As we grow, eventually we’ll have more of the youngest and brightest working on our problems than every other project combined. So, we’ll always have a technological advantage, and by having a true decentralized governance system that speaks with one voice, we can move in a systematic, deliberate, and efficient way towards executing that brilliance.
It took a little while to figure out; no one had ever done it before. It was absolutely insane to enter into a "move fast and break things" environment and say we were going to follow the rigor of peer review and formal methods. But not only did we achieve it, we achieved it at a scale that’s never been done in human history—from Tokyo Tech to Stanford and everywhere in between. The sun never set on the principles of this project, and I’m proud of that. I’m proud that in seven years since we launched, soon to be eight, we never once deviated from those core principles. Hundreds of millions of transactions and blocks—the network’s never gone down. Seven days a week, 24 hours a day, we’ve been operating, and that is something worth something. It tells the entire world there’s true value in what we’ve done.
Now we’ve inculcated an entire generation of leaders to carry those torches, to carry those flags and push us forward to illuminate the way. They’ll inculcate an even larger next generation and an even more capable one. While there are many challenges ahead, we have to continue investing in the technology of decentralization. We have to be ever vigilant of threats to the network, and we have to continue innovating.
We all get to celebrate today. This is a good day. We played a different game than everybody else in the cryptocurrency space, and not only did we win this game, but when they come to play it against us, our advantage and lead are so significant they can never catch us. After ten years of working on this, thank you all for being part of it. Thank you all for contributing to this moment, to this day. Cardano has a Constitution. Cardano has a government. Every ADA holder now has a voice, and because of that, Cardano is the global standard. Thank you all. Cheers!
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