Hi, this is Charles Hoskinson broadcasting live from warm, sunny Colorado. Always warm, always sunny, sometimes Colorado, sometimes Wyoming. I'm back in the office after a lovely dinner last night with Congressman Crank down in the Springs. We were talking to all those Congress critters and having a great time learning about their needs and discussing cryptocurrency business.
Now that I'm back here, I wanted to announce something that you guys can work on throughout the year, and we’ll have some prizes come Rare Evo. I got to thinking about what would be the ultimate dashboard to track for the Cardano ecosystem. You know, we have things like Aus Stats, for example, which has a dashboard that talks about price, market cap, pools with stake, circulating supply, total stake, transactions per epoch, and various other metrics.
If we drill in a little bit, we see some D statistics, like 834 of them, and the number of delegators, among other things. We also have UTXO stats, which are loading now. Tap Tools discusses all the various tokens and what’s going on in Cardano land. So, you can see UTXO shows the blocks in real-time, with stats right here to discover interesting transactions, blocks, and the mempool.
However, what we don’t have is a dashboard that encompasses everything we consider part of the ecosystem—some KPIs. Now that there’s decentralized governance, there’s a natural question of what we should track. I have a list of things we could consider: TVL, DII TVL, transactions, active addresses, code commits, GitHub commits, DApps, DApp volume, contracts, community governance statistics, decentralization, consensus, and blockchain size.
For context, Cardano is about 186 gigabytes in size, Bitcoin is about 640 gigabytes, and Solana, for comparison, is 300 terabytes if not larger. In fact, the active state of Solana is 200 gigabytes, which costs about $225,000 a month to run a Solana node. How much does it cost to run a stake pool per month in Cardano? There are thousands of different ways to analyze Cardano as an ecosystem.
The point is, we absolutely need to come together as an ecosystem to develop one dashboard that we consider to be the mother of all dashboards for core KPIs of the Cardano ecosystem. Why? Because your Congress critters, your DS, and constitutional committee members are accountable for making those dashboard numbers go up, making things look better inside the ecosystem. If we don’t measure it, how can we know that things are improving? If we don’t measure it, how can we know what is relevant to our roadmap and budget?
For example, we could track TPS, which is kind of hard to measure, but we could say that the mad dash towards Laos will improve the situation by this rough order of magnitude. We could track budget outflow and say we think this will improve TVL. We could track stablecoin TVL and say that this budget action with the treasury will improve the amount of stablecoin in circulation on Cardano. If you track it, then you can improve it.
Here’s my announcement: I would like for the ecosystem to come together and create a whole bunch of demos of candidate dashboards. Find the data sources and elaborate on the story of how difficult it was to aggregate the data and what could make it easier. We’ll have a contest at Rare Evo with a prize for the winner. We’ll put all the details together and figure out what’s appropriate, but it will probably be in the five-figure to six-figure range. We just have to finalize the terms and conditions.
It would be great to have teams of people think about this problem and bring it together. I suspect people in the analytics business, like Zerberus and Ada Stats, will take a crack at it. The goal would be for this to become the canonical tracking dashboard of ecosystem metrics that we all agree on as an ecosystem. Then, you can hold your DS accountable for it and hold all the institutions that are making things better accountable as well.
This leads to a very fact-based, KPI-driven pursuit. Another advantage is that when we talk about marketing Cardano, when you talk about quarter-after-quarter progress, you can refer to a dashboard. When people say we’re a ghost chain with no DApps and we’ve achieved nothing, you can show quarter-after-quarter improvement of core KPIs. You can take them on a journey and ask if these things matter to them. If they say yes, you can point out that they’re improving quarter after quarter, moving in the right direction, and that we seem to be a healthy, vibrant, growing project.
If they say no, you’re not number one and therefore you’re bad, you can argue that the trends are looking good. If you extrapolate over time, we will eventually beat the competition. This helps determine whether there’s good faith but ignorance versus shilling without good faith in the argument. They may also disagree on the KPIs we set, but at least we understand each other. For example, if the only KPI they care about is price and the price has been flat, but all the other statistics are looking amazing, they may think Cardano has made no progress. If that’s their only KPI that matters, we can at least understand each other instead of accusing one another of being bad people.
We need to agree on a common reference frame for everyone involved. This way, we can have a community-wide conversation about what is required to improve each of these KPIs. We have internal ones that we track, and the roadmap proposed with Intersect and IO will improve the state of affairs. I tend to think about three categories: does it make your life easier as a user, does it make a DApp developer’s life easier, and does it improve liquidity, interconnectivity, and the overall standing of Cardano?
For instance, Laos makes everyone’s life better and creates a more attractive development platform, hitting all three categories. It provides faster finality, a higher TPS rate, and cleans up a lot of garbage along the way, making it easier to integrate with the chain. When you look at other things like programming language improvements, they may not matter for the end user, but they are crucial for the DApp developer who has to spend considerable time and money managing those aspects.
For example, AEN massively improved the state of affairs for many people in the ecosystem, making it a good investment with a high return for the ecosystem as a whole. It also allowed Plutus to slowly evolve into a high-assurance language, enabling people to differentiate what they need and when they need it.
Wallet improvements fall into the first category: does it make the user’s life easier? Things like EIP-30, the new multisig standard we’re working on, and various other enhancements make wallets easier to work with and use. These improvements make Cardano more fluid and ultimately provide a better experience for users.
I’d like to combine these categories with a KPI dashboard and ask how we can objectively improve each of those areas. We can bring specialists in to have that conversation. This is how decentralized governance works; we have to bring the community together to discuss what matters to us and what we will broadcast to the rest of the world.
Wouldn’t it be awesome if politicians did this? In the United States or Europe, they often say the opposition party is pure evil, a reincarnation of Hitler, and if you elect them, they will destroy everything. The other side claims the opposition is literally Joseph Stalin, and if you put them in power, they will form gulags and murder you. While it’s clear they don’t like each other, at the end of the day, what are the KPIs of America?
When was the last time a politician came and said, "This is where education sits, and here’s our plan to improve it"? Or, "This is where our national debt sits, and here’s our plan to reduce it"? They never have a KPI-driven conversation because if they did, they’d be held accountable. You could come back to them next quarter and say, "You promised we’d go from number 40 to number 35," and they’d respond with excuses.
That’s why we need to come together as an ecosystem. If we want extreme accountability in the leadership of the protocol, we have to orient the leadership in certain ways. Not everyone is good at everything, as we saw with Sebastian from DC Spark. He abstained from the Constitution vote and explained that there are things he is a domain expert in and others he is not. For those he doesn’t know well, he abstains, but for the things he knows, he makes strong, passionate decisions.
Similarly, when you look at a KPI set, there will be people who are experts in one or two areas, perhaps more, but not all of them. This allows them to focus and help guide a strategy for that particular aspect while working with their colleagues to create a more holistic strategy across the board.
I think the time has come for Project One Page. We can all come together as an ecosystem. I encourage DS and people in the statistics business to start talking to each other. IO is always available to brainstorm. People outside the ecosystem can join in if they want to win some prize money. We’ll let it run until Rare Evo, where we can have a vigorous demo day. People can showcase their one-pager, build a little website, and present all the stuff. Dummy data is fine, but you have to at least have the categories right.
The hope is that we get to something that the ecosystem as a whole really likes and enjoys, and that will become the canonical set of statistics. In every interview I do, I’ll bring up that one-pager. I might even replace one of the boards in my office with a big monitor that has a permanent real-time tracking of that dashboard.
This is Cardano in a nutshell: the one-pager. You have governance, TVL, staking, block size, state size of the chain, transaction volume, the number of chain transactions, maybe meaningful transactions, the decentralization index, and all kinds of metrics floating around. We can consolidate these metrics as an ecosystem and then discuss how to win.
Thanks, everybody. Cheers!
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