Hi, this is Charles Hoskinson broadcasting live from warm, sunny Colorado. Always warm, always sunny—sometimes Colorado. Although, this will be the last year in Colorado; I think I’m moving up to Wyoming full-time at some point here soon.
I wanted to make a video to congratulate a hard-fought and well-earned campaign and victory for three absolutely phenomenal groups of people who ran for the Interim Constitutional Committee. As many of you know, we are moving as quickly as possible as an ecosystem towards the Age of Vol. The Age of Vol means that everything about Cardano is controlled by both on-chain and off-chain processes, but ultimately by you, the people in the Cardano ecosystem. One of the most important roles is the Constitutional Committee, which is a hybrid of a Supreme Court and a Senate. Their job is to work with the Delegated Stakeholders whom you select to help usher along changes to the network and assess whether they make sense from the perspective of both the Cardano Constitution and their own judgment.
Over the last two years, we’ve had many conversations about how to build this ecosystem, with more than 25 workshops around the world to discuss CIP-1694. The first stage in turning on the government is to elect members of the government. An election was held for a temporary group, an Interim Constitutional Committee, with three seats being opened up for the community to run and take over to begin the process of training and transitioning, with the anticipation of adopting and ratifying a new constitution towards the end of this year and perhaps the first half of next year, depending upon how quickly things move along. This Interim Committee will then be replaced by a final Constitutional Committee, perhaps with similar members, but that’s your choice. Everything moving forward will be an election from here on out.
This is the first time ever that the ecosystem as a whole had an opportunity to flex its voting muscles. People got to campaign and run for various roles of significance and prominence in this ecosystem, and I couldn't be prouder of how things were conducted. Twenty-one candidates from across the world ran, many representing coalitions. In fact, groupings won the three victors according to the votes that were tallied and audited from Somon Da with help from Pi from Sunday Swap, the Cardano Atlantic Council, Cardano Japan, and the Eastern Cardano Council.
The Cardano Atlantic Council is comprised of Adam Dean—good to see you again, Adam, look forward to working with you—Beatrix, Ania, Mike Warin, Jennifer Brdo, Iago Nunes, and of course, Richard McCracken. I apologize if I’ve mispronounced your last name; I tend to do that from time to time. Then, in terms of Cardano Japan, we have Shira Yun, Shuk Wakuda, Rena Uishi, and Hiiki Takashi. It’s late at night. And of course, from the Eastern Cardano Council, we have Joe Alum, Mark Buers from Australia, Oscar Hong from South Korea, Phil Lewis from Australia, Huan from Vietnam, and Yuki Oishi from Japan. We have people from the United States, Norway, Canada, Brazil, Japan, New Zealand, Australia, South Korea, and Vietnam representing the set.
What’s so cool is that it was a very close election, especially with the Eastern Cardano Council. Some individual candidates, in particular Mario from Argentina, came within two million votes of winning. Of the 455 million ADA that was cast, which is truly extraordinary, it was just a little bit of a hair. So, everybody who ran, whether they won or lost, has a place in the governance of Cardano, and these names will come up again. As more seats open up, I wouldn’t be surprised to see them fill them very quickly, especially next year as all seats are up for election.
Now, many procedural things have to happen moving forward. In particular, the people have been invited to come to a Constitutional Committee training workshop here in Colorado. The goal of this workshop will be to help everybody get the right infrastructure, knowledge, and procedures in order to begin fulfilling their duties as Constitutional Committee members. There are going to be a lot of horizontal discussions about how people want to work together. There are four institutions: the Cardano Foundation, EMURGO, and Input Output. There are three community roles. All seven of us as institutions have to work together and talk to each other on a regular basis. The Constitution doesn’t cover a prescription for how to do so; rather, it’s up to the Constitutional Committee at their discretion to decide how to interface with the institutions and each other, the channels of communication, the frequency of communication, and how to broadcast decisions they make. These are the things that will establish precedents that shall live on for years to decades to come in our ecosystem.
I’m incredibly excited to see where that goes and to discuss this in July with the Constitutional Committee elect members after they take office. There are many things that are going to be happening this year. Almost immediately after taking office, they don’t get to enjoy the honeymoon because there’s already a hard fork in the plan. Should Chang take effect, Chang Plus One is expected to be initiated 90 days thereafter, turning on the second part of the Cardano government, namely the Delegated Stakeholders. We anticipate dozens, if not hundreds, of Delegated Stakeholders to register and compete with each other for your voice in order to represent the will of the Cardano ecosystem. Already, many projects I’ve discussed this with are intending to run as Delegated Stakeholders, register them, and encourage the people that work with them and for them to delegate their voice there.
The Constitutional Committee has to decide how it’s going to work with the Delegated Stakeholders and turn on that capability. Furthermore, the Constitutional Committee also has to work with Intersect and discuss how foundational things are going to be done, such as the product backlog, hard fork coordination, as well as things like the annual Cardano budget. As you know, a treasury of over 1.5 billion ADA will be made available as soon as Chang turns on and the Delegated Stakeholders are turned on. There’s a very small window of time to begin a discussion for how a budget ought to be done. The Constitutional Committee members are an essential component of these discussions, by no means the only component, but this is one of the duties and tasks they signed up for: to have an opinion in this respect.
We look forward to working with them and trying to figure this all out together. Many of these tasks and duties are new; it’s the first time they’ve been done in our ecosystem, so precedents have to form, and decisions have to be made during the budget process. Some foundational questions have to be answered, such as should Constitutional Committee members and perhaps some Delegated Stakeholders be offered staff paid for by the budget of Cardano to help them perform their duties? What remuneration is appropriate, and what scale of staff do we see? For example, we see this with congressmen and senators, where they are afforded a staff to help fulfill their duties because of the nature of their responsibilities and the seriousness of them.
This is just one of thousands of questions that are inevitably going to come up over the next 180 days, and we look forward to working with the newly elected Constitutional Committee members to help decide as an ecosystem what makes sense. In addition, another one of the duties of the Constitutional Committee members is to help facilitate the Constitutional Convention that is taking place in Buenos Aires this December. I will be traveling to Argentina and have the opportunity to meet with many government officials and the University of Buenos Aires, which has agreed to host the Constitutional Convention at their School of Law. It’s a beautiful facility and a great location for it, and a good place to write a final constitution prior to going to the Constitutional Convention.
We have to get delegates for it, and how we’re going to do that as an ecosystem is by having more than 50 workshops across the world in 50 different countries. These workshops will elect delegates and alternates, and they will then travel to Argentina to finalize a candidate constitution to be voted on by the government of Cardano. Our hope is that this process can go through efficiently and without friction. Now, it’s everybody’s responsibility and duty. The Constitutional Committee members who have been elected will be pivotal in assisting in this process and representing you and your voice.
The Interim Constitutional Committee is just that: a temporary document with the intention of facilitating the harvesting of the will of the millions who follow the Cardano ecosystem. It is incredibly important that people understand that those documents, while amazing in their own right, are there to temporarily turn things on. It’s only through the consent, will, and brilliance of the millions of people of Cardano that we can ever truly become what we anticipate we ought to be: a digital nation-state. Thus, we need your feedback.
These constitutional workshops that are going to be taking place all throughout the world—from Africa to South America to Asia, North America, and even Australia—in fact, I think we have nine proposed workshops in Africa, just as an example, truly do represent the political and cultural diversity of the world as a whole. The inputs into them will create a new document that is going to be distinctly different from the Interim Constitution. Everything is frankly up for grabs, and within the articles, the structure and form that you have with CIP-1694 could be modified. The composition and election process of the Constitutional Committee will also likely be modified. It could go from seven members to more; they could be static or proportional, staggered terms, the length of terms, and the voting systems used to elect them—everything is actually up for grabs. You, the community, have to make these decisions.
From our part, what we try to do is provide options and trade-offs and let people know what the consequences will be based on our belief with data and historical precedent if one decision is made over another. But ultimately, you, the community, get the final say, and that’s how it should be because that’s real decentralization. It takes an enormous amount of trust and optimism, and more importantly, a fundamental belief in the goodness of people to believe that when you give people the right to have a voice and the mechanisms to have a voice, they’re going to make good decisions. I’ve always believed in the wisdom of the crowds, and I’ve always believed in the greater good if people are trusted. I’m not cynical, and I don’t think for a moment that Cardano is filled with a bunch of passive, disengaged masses that don’t care. Instead, I think it’s the opposite.
Nobody was paid to run for the Constitutional Committee; nobody was told they had to do that. That wasn’t part of a job. They decided to do that; they ran campaigns, they took the time, they learned the issues, and many of these people have invested countless hundreds of hours, if not thousands, over the last few years in trying to make this ecosystem great. They did so because they cared, and they did so because they believe that this is the kind of system that, if embraced and built up, can build a better world. That’s the beginning of a beautiful road forward. If we keep that mentality and will, and we inculcate that into the government that is turning on, I have no doubt that Cardano will forever be the envy of the world and the bulwark of the new economic, political, and social systems of it.
That is the task, challenge, and reward ahead of us. It’s been the privilege of my lifetime being here for ten years in many different roles and capacities. As I’ve mentioned before during the debates, our service on the Interim Constitutional Committee will end with the new Constitution. I’ve already said that Input Output will not participate as a Delegated Stakeholder or as a Constitutional Committee member. I think it’s best for the ecosystem to take a timeout in that respect. That said, our will to participate in the ecosystem is not only undiminished but growing. We continue to employ hundreds of engineers who build products and code for Cardano. We continue to employ the largest research group in the entire world for cryptocurrency research, spanning from Stanford to Tokyo Tech and many places in between, with over 210 academic papers. They will continue writing academic papers that benefit the Cardano ecosystem, and we can’t wait to bring products like Midnight and Lace and others to market to benefit the Cardano ecosystem, among others, because that’s what we want to do.
I built Cardano because I wanted to have a platform to challenge the economic, political, and social systems of the world and to bank the unbanked. I felt it was a moral imperative that if one had the means to do something, they ought to do something. Now, I’m entering the stage in my career where I finally get to do that, and I get to do that with allies who have the same mindset. By sharing this amazing journey with so many others, it actually makes everything we do better. The reality is, when you look at our product backlogs, when you look at how a budget is done, when you look at how Cardano is going to be marketed, every single one of those artifacts moving forward will have the input of millions of people from more than 100 countries. How can anyone anywhere compete with that?
There are many great companies in this world, from Apple to Microsoft to Google and everything in between—some that have been around for a long time, like ExxonMobil, handed off from one generation to the next. But no company and no country is able to compete with something that has the brilliance of the entire world and the freedom for the world to participate the way that they want to. That’s literally what we are creating here. It may take a little longer to do it the right way, but because it’s been done the right way, we’ve built something that will be here for centuries to come, and you’re all part of that now. Every single person listening to the Cardano ecosystem, there are a lot of challenges up ahead. There are some things that have to be solved.
Studying mathematics throughout my life, I started to fall in love with the idea that we can create rigorous mathematical proofs and models for things. When you know something’s true, you have a certainty about it because you’ve proven it. You have the ability to rigorously argue with people and show step by step a logic that converges to an undeniable and infallible mindset. Politics and social systems will forever lack these properties. Unfortunately, everything from Arrow’s theorem to game theory gives you pretty dreary results. No matter how much academic research we throw at these things, we will never be able to create the perfect formula for perfect governance because, simply put, it doesn’t exist.
So, we have to learn as an ecosystem a new set of skills that peer review and formal methods, frankly speaking, are not going to deliver us. We have to learn how to build great governance systems and be patient enough to allow them to gradually become great. We have to learn that they rely upon great institutions, so we have to hold institutions accountable. For example, with the budget process, not only do we have to build a great budget process, but we have to make sure every single dollar spent in the Cardano budget is just that: it’s a dollar of the Cardano budget; therefore, it is a collective property of the millions of people using the ecosystem.
This Constitutional Committee, among others in the governance capacity, has a moral obligation to make sure that the appropriate audit and oversight, as well as the appropriate dispute resolution mechanisms, are put into the system so that every dollar is well spent. If it wasn’t, there’s a consequence for that. That’s just one of dozens of examples of things that we have to sort out and figure out, and we have to have the patience to accept that it won’t always be perfect. It’s the same with ballot architecture; it’s the same with the way we vote; it’s the same with how inclusive the system is. We have to accept that all governance systems, especially decentralized ones, won’t have everyone participating, and that’s okay. But everybody has to have the right to participate, and if they so choose, no one can stand in their way. Unless and until we’ve delivered a system that has that capability, we have not achieved what we set out to do.
So, the road ahead, as I’ve said before, is going to be challenging. It has a lot of twists and turns, but nothing in life that’s worthwhile is easy. At the end of the day, we have two options: we can either cynically and passively sit in our homes and talk about how the world is falling apart, or we can try to change that world. The power and promise of what we’re doing right here today is that we’re showing every single person that free people can come together and figure out a better way of doing things, whether that be voting with integrity, sound money, or getting along with each other in different ways and being able to reach compromises and make decisions to disagree and commit for the greater good. That’s a very special thing, especially in a world where people aren’t really getting along as much as they should.
That’s what makes every single thing we do worth it, and that’s why I’ve spent the last ten years of my life—not as young as I used to be, the hair is a little whiter, starting to fall out, belly’s a little bigger—that’s okay. That’s why I’ve spent the last ten years chasing this, because I actually think we’re going to win. Honestly, all the things that happened in the last few weeks—from crazy pigs getting crazy valuable, and I guess it’s falling now, to a DDoS attack which wasn’t so successful, to this election—don’t really matter in the grand scheme of things. What matters is the fact that you’re here to experience them with me, and together we’re going to get it done.
So, to my colleagues now in the Constitutional Committee, welcome aboard! We can’t wait to have you here. Pick up a shovel; we’ve got some digging to do. Until next time, everyone, have a wonderful day. Good night.
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