everyone I'm Charles Hodgkinson chief executive officer of Iowa HK I wanted to make a brief statement today about some of the events that have transpired over the last 24 hours so in the beginning three years ago IOH Kay took a contract to work on the cardinal project what are our goals while working on the cardinal project was a separation and balance of powers so traditionally when cryptocurrency is launched there is a central foundation and that foundation is responsible for issuing a token for community management exchange listing the construction of the cryptocurrency and business development as well as encouraging people to build on top of the protocol the problem with this approach is that there's just simply too much power and responsibility in one entity and there is a natural organizational resistance towards the centralization in other words for the sake of expediency or for the sake of progress or competitiveness there's a tendency just to keep things in their centralized format to move as quickly as possible so while scoping out the project one of our requests and requirements was a separation of concerns and balancing of power I which Kay is a technology in science and engineering company we wanted to take over the components involving the peer review the research and development as well as the actual construction of Cardinal this was an enormous ly complicated process and task and there are natural checks and balances on the science side the peer review process and on the engineering side things like third-party code reviews for example with Cadell ski or through any other firm in addition to open source contributions of the project and code review a mergo took upon itself to handle the venture capital and business development side of Cardinal so basically their responsibility was to worry about how are we going to get partnerships and alliances and people to build on top of the protocol and how do we make sure that those partnerships and alliances or as meaningful as possible to encourage the growth of the ecosystem but then there was a gap in the middle which was things like who is going to worry about creation of meetup groups and making sure that the community has timely and accurate information things like procuring the trademarks things like regulatory outreach for example a large percentage of the initial ADA distribution was in Japan and getting listed on the Japanese exchange seems to require a great degree of regulatory lobbying and pushing so this was the duty of the Cardinal foundation amongst others to lead the card Auto Foundation Michael Parsons was selected as a chairman to the custodian in a sense his responsibility was to construct a board hire an executive director and then served mostly as a kind of a community ambassador not in an operational role after the foundation was formally established in Switzerland in 2016 mr. Parsons has sat in that role for quite a bit of time and the board has diminished now to two people chairman Parsons and a legally required Swiss citizen in this case it's Pascal Schmidt Pascal is a good guy and we like him unfortunately we haven't seen any diversity in that board we've seen evidence of nepotism and that Bruce's son in law's doing work there his wife is doing work Julie million and we haven't really seen the foundation execute on many of its core responsibilities and duties now we wanted to be a good citizen and we figured that maybe they just needed a bit more time and maybe they just needed a bit more breathing space and room to learn how to manage a community effectively and eventually construct a diverse and transparent board as the months came by and our relationship continued to strain it became very clear to Iowa CH K and a mergo that were probably not going to effectively work with the foundation the way it's structured so what we decided to do was to gradually take upon ourselves more Norfolk Foundation's duties I which K and americo started hiring some community development people a mergo for example recently hired Sebastian and Jane Wilde and others in our team have been working very hard at trying to bridge that gap I which K person have been attending meetup groups and I personally have traveled extensively to attempt to assure the community that things are okay and to educate them about the Cardinal protocol personally I've gone to over 27 countries this year in addition to my normal responsibilities as CEO of IO HK things came to a head when it became clear to us that were probably not going to get board diversity ever at the moment with Michael Parsons as chairman of the foundation and also things came to a head when it became clear to us that the foundation doesn't seem to have with its current leadership any desire to meaningfully invest and its core responsibilities and duties in addition we questioned many of their current funding allocations the FP complete audit for example the other is the large research program our understanding is in the millions of dollars if it's paid to conclusion to Zn for the distributive futures program which seems to have limited commercial value to cardenal and there seems to be absolutely no plan for commercialization of any of this technology every one of these dollars competes for other in our view better ways of allocating we expressed these concerns numerous times we express concerns about the lack of transparency in board diversity numerous times some cases written some cases orally and it's reached the point where we just don't want to fight about it anymore and the reality is that since the very beginning Cardno has always been a federated ecosystem and it does not require a foundation to be successful just like Bitcoin didn't need the Bitcoin foundation for it to reach its levels of success Cardno no more needs a Cardno foundation and so as a consequence we've decided to just move without them so what this effectively means is that I which can emerge Oh will be taking on all of the responsibilities that the Cardno foundation is was historically tasked with and since we've been doing many of these things already and we're hiring people to do these things we will probably not have much disruption if any in our current roadmap we still fully anticipate shellye to ship as we've stated early next year we still fully anticipate the methodologies and processes that we selected using formal methods to continue to move along we still have a tenth rolodex of people who want to build on the protocol and are very excited about our technology I and if anything by bringing community management were tightly into a mergo and I HK it probably will allow us to better carry out our mission in addition it probably will accelerate certain plans for example we need to start getting towards the Cardinal improvement proposal process we need to start having meaningful discussions about when and how we're going to roll out a Treasury system for Cardinal as well as blockchain based governance and now that we're more directly focused on this instead of relying upon the foundation to eventually initiate some sort of process I think that sooner than we'd expect in our roadmap that we can actually begin seeing these projects and processes roll out now we did lose some resources as the money put into the foundation is unfortunately inaccessible to the community but the good news is that we did gain some extra money thanks to the appreciation of Bitcoin and so as a consequence we are fully funded to handle these additional services and tasks that we didn't anticipate so we believe that the best days of Cardno are ahead of us and we also believe that while this disruption is unpleasant and we hope that wiser minds prevail and eventually mr. Parsons steps aside and allows a proper board of directors to be appointed and allows the foundation to resume its role and becoming an effective member of this community in the interim it will not disrupt cardano's ability to succeed in market furthermore it's not going to disrupt normal operations the network is still strong we're going to wake up every day and still write code a mergo awakes up every day and still finds new opportunities and what's really amazing to me is the strength of our community as a whole for example I was in South Korea and one of the most rewarding moments of my life was when these two Korean people came up to me a couple they couldn't have been more than 25 or 26 and they had this lovely six-month-old daughter and they said you'll never guess what we named her and I said what and they said ADA we have a lot of great fans and they really have huge hearts and it's really exciting to see what they've been able to deliver and contribute to our ecosystem so as a consequence that's not going to stop or change it's not like tasers or other situations where this would in some way inhibit our ability to execute because the foundation is not in control of aya which case funding nor mirko's we've already been paid in full for the services rendered and to be rendered as a consequence they're not in the position to veto or stop us from moving unilaterally in different directions nor can they mandate how the protocol will be developed or how funds will be spent on the development of the protocol thus were okay and the community's okay we'd also like to thank the guardians of Cardinal they recently released a letter just a few hours ago it outlines some of their independent investigative journalism that they've done and concerns that they have and they're not going to go away if anything their movements going to grow and I really look forward to seeing them in person and from the conference's to the meetup groups and getting good advice from them about how we should approach governance in the future the reality is all crypto currencies regardless of where they come from whether they come from a strong centralized foundation or an organic movement distributed from proof-of-work like Bitcoin do eventually require some form of governance to decide how to spend funds available and where to go for example when to fork how to fork what technology to adopt now we as an ecosystem are no different and to be frank this is probably one of our first and won't be our last governance major milestones it's not when everybody agrees and everything is going great when you're tested it's when you have disagreements and is how you're able to overcome those disagreements and move forward from those disagreements and at the moment you have two of the three parties in a position where they feel that the other party really isn't doing their job and what was really amazing is that the community itself came together and formed autonomously its own grew to point that out and that we decided that it was good to make an open statement as well and support and say that we hear you we acknowledge you and we feel your pain and if this is the Cardinal community moving forward I really do believe that we have a chance to become one of the strongest if not the strongest communities and crypto currencies on market and I really do feel we have a chance to deliver on our vision and our dream so that's all I have to say things are ok I'm ok cardano's ok IOH kay is not going anywhere we're gonna be here for quite some time we'll be spending a bit more money on our side to compensate for the things that haven't happened we've already hired one new person his name is Robin and he starts November 1st he's an open source director he'll be responsible for drafting our initial version of the Cardinal improvement proposal process as well as handling software versioning and figuring out a way to move us from you track and to get issues and get the project into more of an open source foundation we're going to be accelerating our spending on Treasury research as well as accelerating our spending on Dow research so that we can begin constructing a completely new foundation and one that you guys will be able to participate in we're also gonna hire some Community Managers as is a mergo and they've already begun that process with Nia taki over in Japan and we'll also start taking on some of the law and policy and lobbying research that the foundation was responsible for so we'll look for some sto and ICO partners to better understand how those will be done on our platform we'll start working with some research centers throughout the world and make some announcements at some point you know it's a big expense for us but it's ok we believe in Cardno and we want this project to succeed as does Amer go I'd like to thank Ken Kodama and man-meat Singh and the others at Amer go for their patience and understanding and support throughout this entire process and again I'd like to thank the community for their incredible support and patience throughout this process and overall I think things are going to be just fine so don't worry nothing materially has changed today as from yesterday things are about the same which kind of airing our grievances and honor the great Festivus and tomorrow is going to be a better day and the day after will be better so I'm heading to Canada on Sunday to go to CCS it's a major cryptographic conference where or Boris was accepted for Boris Genesis and I'll go ahead and do an AMA while I'm there so keep your questions in the in the reddit and we'll definitely circle back to that in the meantime thanks for your time and I'll see you guys soon Cheers
