Hi, this is Charles Hoskinson broadcasting live from warm, sunny Colorado. Always warm, always sunny, sometimes Colorado. Today is a fun one. Let me just double-check that we're actually live-streaming. X has been having some issues with this. Yeah, it looks like we are. Okay, good.
So, today we're going to have the lovely time of talking about Cardano funding and other things. Yeah, and everybody's just going around going "Whee! Whee!" Guys, let us cook. There's actually some goodness here. So, let's figure this one out.
I have a whiteboard here. We're going to talk a little bit about funding the ecosystem. First and foremost, there are kind of three layers to this: I, U, and E. For a very long time, we've lived in the I space. I stands for infrastructure. Infrastructure is great. I love infrastructure. I'm an I person. It matters a lot. It's very important. It's a big part of who we are and what we do. But it alone is not enough. You also have utility and experiences.
Infrastructure includes things like Ouroboros Leios, the nodes, where Plutus lives, where Aiken lives. It's the art of the possible of what your stuff can do. It's the universe of discourse of possibilities. Then you have utility, which is what you actually do. Typically, that's reflected by the DApp and DeFi ecosystem. This includes Plutus and Aiken, composable contracts, and data availability. Well, that's a capability, but that doesn't mean you actually do it. This is like SundaeSwap, MinSwap, Bodega, Strike, USDM, these types of things.
If you don't have infrastructure, you won't be able to do stuff. You won't have the utility inside the system. And then up here is how you do it. These are things like wallets, account abstraction, and the on and off-ramps. Generally, the user lives here.
First and foremost, everybody has to understand that we are usually talking past each other because each person has a preference. You're either an I person, a U person, or an E person. For example, Merrick from Blockfrost is an I person. He is Mr. Stake Pool guy. He runs an infrastructure company, and that's all he does, and he's really good at it. A lot of people use his stuff. Pi Lanningham is a utility guy; he built SundaeSwap and has an actual DApp in the ecosystem. There are plenty of wallet people, like Vespr, and many who live on the experiential side. If you're an influencer or a KOL, you're generally in the E side of the house.
Historically, when we talk about funding the ecosystem, Catalyst and the Cardano treasury were overrepresented in infrastructure and underrepresented in utility and experiences. There wasn't enough money for experiences or utility. Marketing tends to be experiential; you start from where you want to go and work your way down. Right now, there's not a lot of money for the KOLs of Cardano, for content creators, or for those building the interfaces into Cardano's utility DApp DeFi ecosystem.
As expected, because we're overrepresented with infrastructure, we have a situation where there are a lot of funding requests coming through in a disjointed and fragmented way from various teams. They try to sweeten it up a little bit and say, "Oh, if we don't spend all the money, we'll give it back to the treasury." These are good teams, like Blink Labs, who value their independence and just want to propose something. There's Ergo Maru, Harmonic, and others. Historically, Input Output has lived in the infrastructure side of the world. Then everybody's like, "Well, that's not good enough. Cardano shouldn't fund any of that. Let's throw the baby out with the bathwater. All these people should work for free or somehow make money."
You don't make money with infrastructure unless everyone is prepared to pay a transaction fee every time they use one of these nodes or wants them to go proprietary and pay a subscription to use a Cardano node. I don't think you're going to be in love with the Windows model. So, generally speaking, that's free. Hydra also lives here, along with various middlewares. Bitcoin DeFi and the infrastructural capabilities live here. Generally speaking, that's open-source, available to all, and it doesn't have a revenue business model. It's core infrastructure. The business models and revenue live up here and here. This is the revenue zone.
Here's what we're thinking: there's a collection of infrastructure providers, and two things have to happen. First, the cost per infrastructure needs to go down to reflect the fact that the ecosystem isn't doing well. The cost of running a node team is about $1 to $5 million per year per node, assuming you have an established design. This is just what you're doing, and you're going to sit somewhere between about 10 to 40 full-time engineers plus staff. You have to really ask how much redundancy you need.
My recommendation as an ecosystem is to use Haskell, Rust, and Go. These are the three projects that are most mature and most likely to be making blocks and working in tandem with each other. They're unified with something called Project Blueprint, which talks about the core of Cardano supervised by Pragmatic and Intersect. Then you have a bunch of open infrastructure considerations, like what to do with Hydra, Bitcoin DeFi, and languages like Aiken and Plutus. So, some package of three nodes plus Hydra, the languages, and a few other programs—that's your infrastructure funding, give or take. These are all the teams you know and love, and they do all these things.
If you want to add a few more nodes, you absolutely can. But understand that you're not really getting any value on the utility or experience side above a certain point. The cost of these things is going down because of vibe engineering. The new stuff, the utilities and experiences, is where it gets interesting because down here, nothing is commercial. This is all free. Everybody gets to use it. There's no revenue model. You don't have to pay a toll for Hydra, the Haskell node, or the Rust node. You don't have to pay anything for that.
When you're up here, you're picking and choosing winners and losers. That's why it's the third rail, and less brave, less ambitious core entities may not want to touch it. They want to be friends with everybody. But here's where you have to have an opinion. For every person you fund, there's a project, team, or entity that you don't fund. That's a fight. It's controversial. It's going to be a huge thing, and everybody's going to be upset about it. It is what it is; it's the nature of governance.
With respect to utilities, you have to first ask what the health of the ecosystem is. You measure this by how many are revenue positive, looking at monthly active users (MAUs), total value locked (TVL), and transactions per day. There are many different KPIs and metrics to consider in the ecosystem. I don't care who you are; I don't care how you measure this. All of these on Cardano are sad. They're not doing well. You're lying if you say they are. It needs a refresh. It needs a facelift.
There are a lot of DApps and DeFi in the Cardano ecosystem that are losing money. They don't have many users, TVL, or transactions. This is not a blame game; this is an objective measurable reality. Some decisions have to be made about winners and losers. How you pick a winner is by saying, "Okay, the ecosystem, when it's picking winners and losers, doesn't give free money. No free money." Sorry, that's bad behavior. It makes strategic investments. You give something, you get something.
Typically, you do a weighted index of projects and tokens. You have token one, alpha one, alpha two, token three, all the way up to the last. The sum of all of these represents an index token. Because these people need the funds, these are not small amounts. It's between 10% to 30% of the total supply for each.
They get a big capital infusion. ADA comes in and purchases a weighted index of all these things. This then becomes property of the treasury, managed for the treasury, and it's an investment in the ecosystem. It comes with a lot of strings. The strings include oversight and operational expenditure (OPEX) reduction. They all agree to take salary cuts and let go of redundant staff.
Alignment is also crucial. You need to get them aligned with some vision strategy. I would argue for two things: Bitcoin DeFi and agreeing to upgrade to be hybrid DApps with Midnight. I'll explain my reasoning in just a second. Finally, they won't like this, but partial revenue goes to buying ADA and then donating it to the treasury.
For example, if $1,000 worth of fees are collected in a day for DApp A and the index, then let's say 10%—$100 of ADA a day—has to be purchased and donated to the treasury. This way, the treasury starts replenishing itself through protocol revenue.
Now, why Bitcoin DeFi and Midnight? We need new customers and TVL. This is one of the largest wells to draw from, and we have a protocol called Pogen, the Bitcoin DeFi protocol Omar runs. It's going to take part of its revenue and donate it to the treasury. It opens up the bridge for Bitcoin DeFi, creating a non-custodial lending product. You can lend your Bitcoin to a stablecoin to play in Cardano DeFi, get a yield, and be paid back in Bitcoin minus the fees paid in ADA, which are auto-converted by DEXes.
You want a larger customer base that can play capital. You also want a differentiating unique selling proposition (USP). Cardano will not compete on cost, liquidity, or users. We don't have the MAUs; we're not the cheapest protocol to run, and we don't have the most capital. It's just not going to happen. So, stop thinking about it. End users don't care about security. Let's be honest; they don't.
How are we going to compete? We're going to compete on differentiating features, the new features. Privacy is a big one, and that's something that can differentiate because Ethereum apps, Solana apps, Sui apps, and Bitcoin apps don't have that. They don't have private DEXes or private stablecoins. Even when they do, they don't work very well.
You want a collection of differentiating features, and you want to get alignment within the index that they agree to implement them. They're connected to the ecosystems we want to make money from, and those differentiating features are taken seriously. We can use them to bring new people, new value, and new capital in.
You create an index owned by the treasury that injects ADA. Concessions are made, including oversight mechanisms, OPEX reduction, alignment with business strategies, and a partial revenue share with the treasury directly. As these protocols go, they buy ADA. Every day, there's demand for ADA, donated to the treasury, taking it out of circulation.
As the KPIs improve—meaning the MAUs, TVL grows, and revenue goes up—the value of the index goes up. You then have a treasury management strategy to gradually divest part of the index and repurchase ADA. Over time, the investment pays itself back, probably in 1 to 3 years.
If the index is created correctly by category, it creates a diverse and competitive utility layer. This is what you actually do. There are plenty of great use cases on Cardano. They are competitive, have better governance, better oversight, and are aligned with the USPs of the protocol. They've been aligned to create buy demand for ADA.
That's my proposal for Pentad V2 from a 30,000-foot view. The devil's in the details. A lot of things have to be sorted out. Alignment has to be created with the other people, and we have to see if we can actually make this worth our time. This is not a small commitment; we're talking about 10% to 30% of the total supply of the overall tokens for each project.
The next level up is experiences. We have a problem where we don't pay our KOLs. If you're in Solana and you make content for Solana, they pay you. If you're in Ethereum and you make content for Ethereum, there's someone on that food chain that pays you. The same goes for Bitcoin and other places. People actually cut you checks for making videos that talk about the ecosystem one way or the other.
What we do is not only not pay them, but we also expect them to pay out of their own pocket to do it and then attack them anyway. If they ever ask for anything, they’re told to go away. The ambassador core is mostly uncompensated. The KOL layer is mostly uncompensated. That's why the supply of people talking about Cardano is going down. There are about six people reliably making content in Cardano today, and none of them are really making any money at all. That's the truth of the matter.
We created this as an ecosystem because nobody is covering that. What is the consequence? In the dialogue, Cardano is considered to be the uncool chain. Yet again, Cardano is considered to be the uncool chain, a ghost chain. Nobody uses Cardano. Cardano is a dead project. You hear it so many times again and again. Why do you hear it? Because there's nobody on the other side of the argument to say Cardano is actually valuable. It's something you should spend time in.
We're getting our asses kicked on the brand and marketing side because there's almost zero investment. It was never a priority of the foundation or Emergo. IOHK long since stopped paying for these things. We funded the Cardano Effect and other initiatives way back in the early days, but we pulled out and said, "Other core entities, please do it." They didn't do it. The KOL layer was unfunded. We haven't had meaningful control over the narrative and dialogue since 2021.
You can complain about it, point fingers at people, or solve the problem. Part of experiences is making sure there's ample funding, oversight, and management to rebuild our ambassador and KOL layer. For Midnight, every Friday, I have a seminar. People come in who want to be part of the Night Force, the Midnight Ambassador layer. I do a webinar for two hours to explain why Midnight is special and why it's awesome. My goal is to train up 1,000 Midnight Ambassadors by June. It's a commitment I'm making, and I will need to build that up.
There's a whole incentive layer and other components because we need a group of people to talk about why Midnight is special. There are plenty of amazing things in the infrastructure of Cardano, the philosophy of Cardano, and the Cardano ecosystem and community. Who is the equivalent person to do this? It can't be me. The ecosystem needs to step up. The entities in the ecosystem need to step up. We need to figure out what the RACI is—the responsible, accountable, consultant structure—for the KOL layer and the ambassador layer of the system.
That's one component of it. The second is the experiences with wallets. POO from the Hosky community—proof of onboarding—is two QR codes. It takes one minute. I did it myself. Some people from the Hosky community were here in the office last week and gave me the QR code. I scanned it, installed the Vesper wallet, and in 30 seconds, I was ready to go. I scanned the other QR code, and boom, I have Hosky token. One minute onboard, and I'm ready to use the ecosystem. That's why there are 100,000 people onboarded to Hosky.
What is the POO equivalent for ADA? How do we beat that? How do we ensure that it's relevant to the conversation? We need easy-to-use onboarding, good on-ramps, and off-ramps. You need to get a class of people to talk about it because we're currently uncool. People say we're dead. We need to make ourselves cool.
Then, we need to have a good onboarding experience. The wallet providers, the backbone of the ecosystem, need something. We need to be mobile-first, make it super simple, and ensure a great account abstraction and user experience. Those experiences have to be hardwired into everything in the index.
Part of the concessions they make, part of the alignment they have, is that there are experiential requirements that would then be put in place. You remember the old days when it said "Intel Inside" or "Made for Microsoft"? There are criteria for experiential requirements that need to be established.
We need to do the same as an ecosystem. There are experiential requirements, an onboarding flow, and a beautiful experience for the entire thing. We also need presence. We need to ensure we're in the right places. There needs to be adequate funding for Cardano to be present where cryptocurrencies are.
You see with VeChain, for example, they sponsor UFC, as does Crypto.com. People attend crypto conferences and there are non-crypto events as well. We need a collection of places with eyeballs, new users, and a collection of ambassadors to go to those places to put Cardano in the forefront.
A real budget does all three of these things: infrastructure, utility, and experiences. On the utility side, it's an investment. The ecosystem takes an investment in itself, creating a revenue share and token ownership. As the ecosystem grows, it pays back the investment in dividends and surplus.
On the experiential side, your KPIs are what? Growth in the user base, growth in TVL, and growth in the utility of the system. This is what ConsenSys did, the ENU for Ethereum. Joe Lubin was one of the best in the business, which is why he was my chief operating officer when I was the CEO of Ethereum. I met the guy on the first day and said, "You have to be the number two," because he got it. He understood utility and experiences.
I remember I was there in April 2014 when he was in Toronto, drinking his Starbucks with a little MacBook on his lap, writing the business plan for ConsenSys. He had it all figured out. He said, "Look, Gavin, Jeff, and Vitalik are I people. They're awesome I people. They're going to give me the best I. But they're not U people or E people. I'm going to build this thing to launch a thousand ships and incubate a bunch of Us. I'm going to invest in a collection of Es to make it work." You know what his E was? MetaMask. There you go—40 million users. How about that? It's not rocket science.
It's the same with Solana. Anatoly is an I person, while Lilly is a U and E person. They built that ecosystem together. When you talk about different personas, there's the retail user, the developer, and the institution.
What about the developer? What is their experience? Where do they live? Who's holding the hackathons for Cardano?
We were playing with the house's money there, and it would have been a perpetual endowment to the ecosystem to donate ADA every single year. It could pay for itself in about seven to ten years with that money. So, align your incentives properly and create alignment across what the USPs of the product are. My argument is that we do privacy better than anybody else, and we do Bitcoin DeFi better than anybody else. That is a differentiating function and feature you're not going to see in Swellana, Solana, or Ethereum. So let's go do that and win. By the way, the TAM there is larger than Ethereum and Solana combined. That feels good to me. That's pretty good.
With privacy, we're looking at the entire institutional space, which is a $10 trillion market—larger than every cryptocurrency combined times five in the current setup. That feels pretty good to me too. These are sufficiently large markets to say Cardano has something special. On the infrastructure side, we're going to have Leios and Hydra growing. That's good. We will be able to keep up with the demand by solving the blockchain trilemma. Congratulations, we have that. Are we done? No, we have to focus on the experiential side. It has to be a 360 experience. We need people to talk about it and compensate them fairly. We have to be in the right places to discuss it, on the right podcasts, and actually represent the brand.
We need a good onboarding experience. We must take care of our wallets in the ecosystem and get people excited about it. If we have a good experience, a good onboarding strategy, and effective on-ramps and off-ramps, and we talk about it in the right places, people will get excited. You know what happens then? The MAUs grow, the TVL grows, transactions increase, and revenue shifts from negative to positive. This creates a lot of buy demand for ADA, which then goes into the treasury. You get more than what you put in.
So stop complaining about the core entities. Stop having this learned helplessness and stop criticizing everything. If you want to win, vote to win. It's that simple. What I've been doing is building my way up the stack—trying to make infrastructure cheaper, more diversified, and more standardized. Project Catalyst, the node workshops, and getting the Cardano units in the right place are all part of this. This is the last year where we have expensive infrastructure. Moving forward, we can live within these envelopes, and most of these projects are going to work very well, but they won't constitute the majority of the Cardano budget. The majority has to be heavy investments in utility and experiences. Leaders are going to have to step up.
Intersect provides a members-based organization where people can have a vote, and many of these things can be embedded within it. The Pentad creates a delegated executive function, and based on how much you're willing to delegate, it can centralize some of this power somewhere to execute quickly. But that means they have delegated authority, which means they can deploy. If you have a mindset that no one is allowed to make money, we will lose. If you think every decision has to be reviewed by the entire community, we will lose. If you believe we shouldn't spend any ADA right now because the price is low, we will lose.
Where's Algorand? Where's Tezos? Where's EOS? Where are all these projects that used to be above us in the top ten on CoinMarketCap? Are they doing well? There's no reason for ADA to go up, but there are many reasons for ADA to go down if the Cardano ecosystem freezes all spending and is unwilling to invest in itself. If we're willing to invest in ourselves and focus on our USPs, grow our KOL base, our ambassador base, and be in the right places and conversations, showcasing that we have access to TAMs much larger than Ethereum and Solana, there are many reasons for Cardano to go up. If we invest in things that create buy demand for ADA, there are many reasons for Cardano to go up.
But if you tell me, "Let's just wait for the price of ADA to be better," here's what's going to happen: it won't be better. It'll go from 10 to 15 to 25 to 30 to 40 on CoinMarketCap. It'll go from 25 cents to 10 cents to 5 cents. Is it easier to fund the ecosystem at 5-cent ADA or 25-cent ADA? It was a lot easier to fund the ecosystem at 83-cent ADA, and many of you listening were on the other side saying, "We shouldn't spend so much right now. Let's wait for the price to go up." Had you listened to me and we did the sovereign wealth fund, we would currently have had $100 million worth of ADA liquidated, which, by the way, could have been done in a day or less at those market prices without influencing the price at all.
People listened to Ada whale instead. You know what we got? We got 25-cent ADA and no sovereign wealth fund, and we still don't have that USDCX ADA pair. Maybe the foundation will sell some Bitcoin to create that as they promised. We'll see. Guys, it's a decentralized ecosystem. I'm not in charge. This is my opinion about what needs to be done, validated by the fact that I'm actively building Midnight. Having been the person who built Cardano, along with partners, and got it up to $100 billion, maybe I have a little credibility in this. I never had total authority. There were three founding entities: Emergo was supposed to be our consensus, and the foundation was supposed to be the Ethereum foundation. Whether they measured up or not, it's not productive to harp on the past, but this is where we're at today.
We have to make some decisions as an ecosystem as we look to the 2026 budget. Where do we want to be? What I'm painting for you is a framework to think about this. If you want to fund something, it has to be holistic. We can't just do UI anymore. I agree, but we can't look at it from a predatory perspective where they can't make any money if they receive money from the treasury. It has to be win-win. We make money if they make money, and thus we want them to make a lot of money.
On the east side, we can't abandon the people who wake up every day and support us, or else the only people talking about us are those saying negative things about us 24/7. "Ghost chain, dead chain, no users, failed coin, dead coin"—again and again. Why would you build on Cardano? We shouldn't be surprised that that's the narrative when the people over here don't have anything. When you attack them for talking about other chains because those chains are paying them, you say, "How dare you not have loyalty to Cardano?" Well, what are we paying them? We're willing to pay developers, but when people represent us and acquire users for us, we're unwilling to pay them. Does that make any sense to you?
We need to be E people, U people, and I people. We have to get our heads out of the past and stop making everything a referendum on being right. Yes, winners and losers have to be picked, and going down this road, we have to be willing to have the fight and the courage to do so. How do you pick winners and losers? Is it based on friendship? No, you create objective criteria. You look at the founding team, the revenue plan, the progress they've made, their legacy, and many different factors. You can have an adult conversation about what inclusion and exclusion criteria are. If it's objective, fair, transparent, and public, then people can't complain too much. They say, "Look, I didn't measure up."
It's like the Olympics. If you're swimming, I can see who came in first, second, third, and fourth. Why does the fourth-place person complain about the medal? We can all see it. We have the video and the clock; it's objective. So, create objective criteria for this entire process. Part of the criteria is also the willingness to concede. You're not just saying, "Here's some money." You're saying if you're going to get this investment, there has to be new oversight, alignment, and a willingness to upgrade and connect to various things. Maybe people are willing; maybe they're not. If they're not willing, they go it alone.
It's a decentralized open ecosystem. They could achieve great success, but it means that the ecosystem as a whole won't be holding their token, so ADA holders will have an incentive to vote on their competitors. Does Ethereum need to do this? No. Does Bitcoin need to do this? No. Why? Because they already have a strong ecosystem. It's okay to be honest about that. There are things they won, but it doesn't mean they're going to win forever. Microsoft won the operating system war in the 1990s, had over 90% share, won the browser space, and Internet Explorer at one time had over 90% share. MySpace was the largest social network, and Yahoo was the largest search engine. eBay was the largest online marketplace. Does that mean they won forever? No.
The thing about technology is that as the ecosystem changes, you don't lose; you just lose your turn. Everything resets, and you have another turn. There's a big inflection point with chain abstraction. Now, solvers are doing settlement on multiple systems, and other things are waking up, like Bitcoin, which previously were not factors. The strongest TVL growth will come from that side of the aisle. If we play it smart, two to three years down the road, we could match or exceed the TVL, MAUs, and transactions of these other chains, as we saw Solana do as they grew. They could flip Ethereum at their current rate of growth.
Winners and losers all get shaken up like a snow globe. The winners are defined by strategy and how interlocking these components are. Does the infrastructure help or hinder the utilities and experiences? Do the utilities showcase the infrastructure? Do the experiences make it easy or hard to use the dApps? Is it expensive or cheap to operate the system? You can go down the line; they're all interconnected. The people who win have the combined experience. That's how it works, and it's how it's always worked in technology. Those experiences change over time.
The best on Windows won in 1998. The best on Windows loses in 2026. It's seldom the platform anyone cares about anymore; it's usually the iPhone or an Android device. That's how much things have changed. We have to think this way as an ecosystem. There are many great people here: Phil, Pi, Sebastian, and hundreds of amazing people in this ecosystem building great things every single day. They're young, passionate, fired up, and most importantly, they're scrappy and cheap. Everything in Ethereum and Solana land is measured in tens of millions to hundreds of millions of dollars. Our people measure things in five figures and six figures.
Despite the fact those other guys are spending a lot more, they're not getting a hundred to a thousand times more than us. Success, unfortunately, breeds sloth. That's our opportunity to not only catch up but to surpass if we choose. We have to ask ourselves about those experiences, utilities, and what's remaining for infrastructure. There has to be a willingness for everybody to cooperate. People just rush the treasury proposal by proposal, and they value their independence. I fully appreciate that, but as a voter, you have to understand it's hard to create a consolidated strategy as an ecosystem. If you're competing against people with an all-of-ecosystem strategy versus a fragmented strategy, unless you're already the market leader, it's hard to win.
When we did the Pentad and signed that deal with Circle, from when the USDCX contract was signed to when it was integrated and running on our network, it took 84 days. That's the power of one voice, one strategy, one approach. Four years of decentralized bickering and back and forth about who's going to do what, where, and how. But when we signed it as the Pentad, it took 84 days. That's the power of bringing people together.
There are many people who say it's impossible to work with me and that I'm not collaborative or cooperative. Let me tell you something: when I want to get something done and bring people together, I'm one of the most collaborative and cooperative people in the world. You don't have to take my word for it; I'm going to show you something. I live in the state of Wyoming, and I decided, because I run a clinic there, that we need to memorialize into Wyoming law a bill that provides protections to physicians to offer stem cells to people.
Right now, the FDA in the United States is draconian and doesn't want anyone to use stem cells. People are going to Mexico, Costa Rica, Roatan, and Thailand to get stem cells. You have special forces operators, police officers, firefighters, sports stars, UFC stars—all of whom have injuries as a result of their work and can't get help in America. So they have to roll the dice with who knows what, hoping to fix their medical problems. This is your stem cells extracted from your body, and they're just hoping to get that done.
We said this makes no sense at all. This is the United States of America; we have the best scientists and are supposed to have the best healthcare. Why do people have to leave the country to get treatment? This is controversial; it's not a simple thing. You're talking about a medical procedure, liability protections for physicians, bypassing the FDA, and allowing people to have FDA approval to give stem cells with indemnity.
So we built a coalition, talked to the state medical board, talked to Democrats, talked to Republicans. When you look at the status, it passed 9 to 0, 31 to 0, 59 to 0. Despite living in an age of Trump, Obama, and Biden, where politics are brutally partisan, and Democrats and Republicans hate each other to the extent they call each other pure evil, this bill passed unanimously. Every Democrat and every Republican voted for it, and the governor signed it—the same governor with whom I had a disagreement about the Wyoming stable token.
How did we do it if we're not collaborative? How did we get Democrats, Republicans, and the governor to come together on not a small bill? Look at this: physicians have indemnity. The medical board can't take their license away for giving stem cells. Montana tried to do this with a lesser version of this bill, and it failed to pass. This is the direct result of a year-long collaborative process where many stakeholders came together, listened, and worked to get things done.
So don't tell me I can't work with people or collaborate. This is the most partisan time in the history of the United States since 1860 with the Civil War, and yet we could get Republicans to work together and vote together because they're adults. You start with the end goal. You say, "Look, if this bill passes, all that business in Central America, Asia, and other places comes to the state of Wyoming. It's going to heal people and help people. For the greater good, set your differences aside. Let's figure out how to build an industry for the state of Wyoming."
It's the same for Cardano. Yes, we're partisan. Big pay—I like the kid—but sometimes he puts his foot in his mouth. "Cardano's going to die. Midnight is the only hope, and that scares me!" Then he plays the victim. Why does everybody attack me? Because it's self-inflicted, you jackass. I'll call you out on it because I do it too sometimes. A thief knows a thief.
You have all these people who say that, but on the other hand, they were in the trenches for years and made a lot of good content for Cardano. So why do we let the fact that sometimes people put their foot in their mouth, myself included, get in the way of the fact that these people are useful for the ecosystem and contribute to it? Take a reset. Calm down, take a reset, and realize that we can come together. If not for everything, then for the big things.
I had to do that with the Pentad. I was pretty upset about the ADA voucher. So upset that an organization in the Pentad, fully aware that we didn't steal any money, stayed silent to get some brownie points. I was furious about that. I took my case to you guys, and you know what you told me? Shut up. Work together. We have to work together.
And we did. We signed a bill. In 84 days, we have Circle on the Cardano ecosystem. Everyone said, "Oh, USDCX, it's the team from Circle." You know what, Phil? You figured out how to make it just as good, if not better. That's what you do when you work together, and that's what we have to do as an ecosystem. They can't do this in Ethereum or Bitcoin; they don't have the governance tools for it. It's too big for this type of unity. They can't, and thus that's our advantage. That's how we catch up and leapfrog the current state of affairs to win.
We're going to win on technology: liquid non-custodial staking, extended UTXO, solving the blockchain trilemma. We're leapfrogged ahead of them, but that's only an 18 to 36-month differentiator, and then everyone else can beg, borrow, and steal it because it's all open. So then we have to win on utility and experience. How we do that is by unifying, showing that unity, having one voice, one approach, and creating financial alignment.
If every single ADA holder has alignment with the index and the experience side, using it creates demand for ADA. That's a win-win. Midnight is aligned with you. Half the supply was distributed to Cardano holders, and stake pool operators will make a revenue stream from it. There's no closer alignment for that. Whether you love it or hate it, Midnight's going to make you money if you're in the Cardano ecosystem. So guess what? You're going to start loving it. That's just how it works.
We need to create a similar alignment for the dApp and DeFi ecosystem of Cardano. Otherwise, here's what they do: when they don't get what they want, they take their toys and say, "Well, you know, chain abstraction. We've always been a little multi-chain. Yeah, we like Cardano, but to get listed, we have to move over here and move our liquidity and user base over there." We own 30% of their tokens, and governance only has about 10 or 15% participation. We simply vote that they can never do that, right?
The index creates alignment and governance oversight. Ride or die, they live here. We paid for that privilege. If we didn't pay for it, why would they have that loyalty? It's an honest question. So we can win, but we have to be adults. We have to be collaborative
So, that's my video about it, about an hour long. As I said, internally we're churning the wheels. JJ, Dave De Ninno, Jerry Moroney, and many others are coming together. We're going to start calling people up, saying, "Hey, let's talk about an index. Let's talk about inclusion and exclusion. How do we figure this out and put it all together?" The usual suspects will start writing smart contracts, and then we'll go to the other pentad members and ask, "For round two, do you want to do this? How do we do it a little differently?"
We also need to figure out the E side and get some people involved in that. Once we put it all together, we’ll say, "Let's get this done quickly and decisively, locking in the value so that volatility doesn't hurt us." If it works, we create a floor, and the revenue starts buying up ADA, allowing the index to grow over time and return what it took, plus, plus, plus.
Then we've made a bold, broad signal to the rest of the cryptocurrency space: "Cardano is open for business, and the Cardano ecosystem is going to win. Now is a good time to come in." That's what we told them. That's my belief and how I think we need to get things done this year. Everything else will get done. Layos will get done. Diversity will get done. It's not an infrastructure game anymore; it's a utility and experience game.
All right, thanks, everyone.
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