Hi, this is Charles Hoskinson broadcasting live from warm, sunny Colorado. Always warm, always sunny, sometimes Colorado. Today is June 15, 2026, and this is part three of the Discord series. This time, I remembered to click the button to share the screen. I usually don't pay attention to live chat, and people were calling me, saying, "Charles, you're not sharing the screen." I'm like, "Oh man, it is not my year."
So, where we left off is we discussed the necessity of building a Discord. I want to go into some of the details of what a Discord must functionally do and the stages of how we get there. Currently, we're in stage one. Let me tap. There we go. We're in stage one, which is basically the ideation stage. Right now, there's a working group at Input Output and some select others, and we're discussing where we want to go, what we want to do, and we're really establishing the purpose. We're also establishing what's called the RACI of the initiative and getting the right staffing in place.
We have to get some moderators and some other things. RACI stands for Responsible, Accountable, Consulted, and Informed. These are foundational elements that need to come into play. We've already loosely established the purpose of this Discord; it's a dedicated space for governance conversations. We want to pull governance out of unmoderated channels and get it into a dedicated space to start giving it some properties.
So, here's what happens: you have a group of people come together discussing a collection of options, and right now it's unformed because most governance conversations are unformed in the beginning. Here's a crazy thought: all this type of stuff happens, and then you have a hostile actor inside the governance conversation. Let's say one of the actors—I'll call him Charles—says, "Hey, we need to print some more ADA." I'm not saying to do this. [Expletive] you, Twitter. [Expletive] you, social media. Go [expletive] yourself. You're pathetic. Not saying to do this. Don't misquote my video. This is just an example. The fact that I even have to do these disclaimers is extraordinary.
But let's say, "Okay, let's issue some more ADA." They say, "Issue more ADA." Like, "Let's go print another 5 billion as an example for X, Y, and Z." This is a super controversial idea and should only be done under very dire circumstances, if not at all. While this is being discussed, one person says, "Okay, I'm so against that. Here's what I'm going to do: I'm going to take this and leak it to X." Then they say, "Charles said, 'Let's do that.'" All of a sudden, headlines come in, and you have thousands of people commenting, saying, "How could you say that?"
We can never have an unformed idea because this person, anytime anything controversial is said, claims it's already been decided by a cabal of people moving to initiate this thing. We have to stop this evil cabal the minute anything is said. That's where we're at in modern dialogue. At the very least, you have to have some concept of Chatham House rules for these unformed conversations.
Chatham House rules were established in 1927 in London and state that participants are free to use the information from a discussion, but you can't reveal the identity or affiliation of the speakers. The goal is to avoid attribution from one party to another. Does it have any credibility if it wasn't Charles who said it? If some random person said it, nobody would care. There'd be no scandal. This actor knows that because a prominent person said something controversial, it will create headlines and drama, and they purposely do that.
If you have some sort of enforcement mechanism of Chatham House rules, it starts chipping away at this particular problem. Governance requires you to have the ability to have a conversation with some concept of confidentiality or at least no attribution of the people who are speaking. This can be accomplished with zero-knowledge technology. You can have Discord as a bucket that contains the pool of people.
When you have a governance conversation event, you'll create a space where people can prove they are part of the governance Discord, but their identities are anonymous. This enforces those rule sets because this conversation could be leaked, but you cannot be leaked with attribution. You don't know who's been talking about it. This prevents retaliation of ideas and mitigates this attack vector.
You can have many different events, and during those events, various things are discussed. The order and process of the discussion also matter, and this comes a lot from the Holacracy world, where they have this idea of governance circles. You want a conversation where the people talking are goal-oriented and domain experts in that area.
If you have a statistically significant group of people, you'll have representative circles of different domain experts. When you call these governance events, you can sample and have the circles be tied to the area of expertise, resulting in fairly good representative conversations. One part is how to construct a system where you have some sort of house rules of confidentiality, and then how to ensure the people inside that conversation have domain expertise.
You also need a facilitator. You need someone to push the conversation along and create goal orientation. Before you even spawn off a governance conversation, there is a pre-conversation. The pre-conversation involves determining what type of information is needed to have the conversation, what personas are needed, and the ideal outcome.
If you can't find a human facilitator, increasingly, we're developing the ability to have an AI-oriented facilitator. Even if you can find a human facilitator, it's always useful to have an AI-oriented facilitator because this programs the AI to understand the definition of success. We don't have a conversation unless we know where we want to go with it.
Everybody has to demonstrate that they have the requisite information, and then we determine what personas need to be in that conversation. You spin it out, have an anonymity layer, and that same anonymity layer allows you to vote on decisions. There are many open-source voting frameworks that can be ported to Midnight and then used in Cardano. For example, Semaphore is one. It's already in V4 and is an anonymous voting system in the Ethereum ecosystem. I think it would work much better on Midnight than it would on Ethereum.
So, what are we trying to do? We're trying to create a dedicated space for governance conversations, avoid attack vectors, and ensure these are productive conversations that are worthwhile for people's time. But how do you get a reasonable level of participation? This is where you put teeth into it.
As all of this builds, you create a political party. There have been a lot of questions about whether I should become a DREP. I said I'd only do it if there was a political party. One of the conditions of the political party is that we will automatically vote no on all funding proposals unless they join and participate in the governance Discord. That's an example of how you create teeth. You gain political power that effectively stops all funding of projects unless they join the structure.
You have to create teeth in these types of things because if you don't, no one participates, no one joins, and no one is part of the conversation. If you're to receive public funds from Cardano to better Cardano and grow Cardano, then you need to be part of the process of accountability. We're all fine with audit and oversight, but we say they have absolutely no duty to grow the ecosystem in any shape, form, or function.
Don't you think some of these governance conversations are about which DApps we should prioritize? Don't you think some of these conversations will be about our infrastructure strategy and other things? We're not here to talk about the weather. This process is about discussing the budget of Cardano as a whole, the strategy of Cardano as a whole, and the verticals of Cardano as a whole. Otherwise, why bother? It's just activity therapy.
You want it to be a real thing with real teeth. You want a structure where everybody values this as a medium, and the structure has to be oriented in a way where real conversations can happen. For real conversations to occur, people cannot be attacked for sharing their opinions. You need to have a baseline of rules. The conversations must be sorted and ordered so that everyone enters with a reasonable level of information.
It's clear who should be there and what you want to get out of it. You have mechanisms to decide, and there are many different voting tools you can use. Once that's all established, there should be some form of output. There should be a regularly reported output, a broadcast medium method to social media, and some sort of regular newsletter or journal or event log. As events are being broadcasted, the output of the conversations should be shared so people can see what happened.
There are many things you can use to token-gate a community, which is very common in the Ethereum ecosystem. For example, you have tools like Collab Land, and I assume there's probably some Cardano equivalent. The idea is to establish that every single person is a member of your community by verifying they hold your token. We can build an equivalent for Cardano quickly, although it would be interesting to see if we can achieve some interoperability.
Every time you look at these things, something that bothers me is when you see chains and integrations, they have 40, and it's never us. That's a problem in Cardano. We need to fix that; it's one of our strategies. There are tools that exist that allow you to do these types of things. You can guarantee that every person in the Discord is an actual ADA holder, and you can create a merit-based system as well.
There's the stick, but then the incentives are you can give NFT badges and other mechanisms as rewards for service inside the system. You can create teeth that say political parties won't get funded unless they participate in this, and you can create mechanisms to incentivize participation as merit on the other side.
Everyone here is bound by a code of conduct. It's a tightly regulated channel, a collection of great tools built to spawn dedicated conversation areas. Conversations are highly structured, similar to how the Holacratic world structures them. There's a pre-conversation, a conversation, and then a post-conversation. The post-conversation records and you have a broadcast concept, allowing for some auditability. You essentially create a governance knowledge graph.
Structuring all of this allows us to create a single source of truth for an AI, which can become a public good. You can create a Cardano LLM, a tuned open model that serves as an expert system. This expert system will have perfect knowledge of all governance conversations and the state of those conversations. It can be integrated into every wallet and all the social infrastructure of Cardano, making it easy for people to create accountability and say, "Okay, where are things at?"
Here's the thing about Chatham House rules: you are afforded the ability to stay anonymous and attribution-free with your opinion, but you don't have to; you can dox yourself. Part of the post-conversation is that people can stay private or go public inside the structure. These are some of the social elements involved.
You can also bring in outside knowledge and people, such as consultants and professional negotiators. Those negotiators can help structure things in a way that establishes goals, so we can reach a consensus. The personas are a subset of personal goals. Proof of participation can be anchored in. If DREPs are participating, they can prove that they participated in this type of system.
How do I want to use the system? I want to use it for three things. First, I want to establish what the growth metrics are for Cardano. We don't have a good definition of growth, and we're allowing ragebait Twitter podcasters and others to define that for us. We can't market if we don't have a baseline here because when we market, the number one thing you market is where you want to go and what you're maximizing.
If I'm a Cardano community member in 5, 10, or 15 years, what are you aspiring to become? This definition has to be in the preamble of the constitution; it's our highest law. The second thing is we have to establish an executive function, which also has to be in the constitution along with other roles. This plus this is Constitution V2, the next major version. In the preamble, we outline how we want to grow and the structures accountable for doing that.
Third, we want to establish a strategy, accountability, and a budget to do that. Here, I want to introduce the concept of FOs. We used to have this and lost it. Catalyst had an FO. The reason is that I want to move to one withdrawal per year from the treasury. That one withdrawal is basically the budget, and there's going to be a dedicated wedge for FOs, which have a separate budget process specific to those funding organizations.
It can be a Catalyst-like process or a dedicated grant agency. You have endorsed this idea implicitly. Do you know which one? It's the Orion Fund. You said, "All right, we're going to take a chunk of our ADA and put it into a funding organization for a special purpose." The sovereign wealth fund is another idea for that.
Why is this relevant? Because as a DREP, you have a single decision to make per year: one debate, not 45 debates. You can spend an entire month discussing it. There's a campaign season; the people propose it, put it all together, and there's a debate. If it gets rejected, it goes back to them to propose an alternate. That's how every nation-state operates; every major organization operates this way.
Instead, we have direct democracy, and anybody can propose anything at any time. We have over 600 million ADA in proposals, and every time something gets voted down, it creates an enemy. If you propose something and a DREP votes against you, now they're enemies, creating an adversarial, toxic hellscape of a culture. If you have an omnibus, you could still have different decision mechanisms and propose different funding organizations, allowing you to create bespoke funding rules that differ from an up-and-down vote of a DREP.
There are all kinds of checks and balances that could be installed inside of this. Now, already there are people listening who have completely shut off. Their blood is starting to boil, and they have decided that all of this is wrong and evil because they've heard one thing they want to misunderstand. Just like the other day on Reddit, someone said, "Oh, well, Charles said he built Cardano because he wanted to be liked." I never said that. They didn't even understand what I was saying.
Why do they do that? Because this is not the appropriate medium for a discussion about how to build something like this. This is the medium for it. That's the whole purpose of the medium. There are a thousand discussions and checks and balances on how that can be done. What people who don't like me do is take the worst possible interpretation of what I've said and immediately go to Twitter to complain about it.
You can't get anywhere with that because then you have to fight them not about what I said, but about their straw man. That's what you're fighting. You're not fighting the real thing. I don't agree with this because Charles just said he wants total control over where all the money goes. Where in any of this did I say I want total control over that? That's not what I said, but that's what they'll say.
Then everyone starts saying, "Well, that's not right. I reject Charles's proposal because I don't think he should have total control." Did you listen to anything I just said over the last 27 minutes? That's the problem with using a broadcast medium to discuss these types of things. It doesn't work. It can't work by construction. This is built for rage, algorithms, clickbait, and winners and losers. Nothing in this structure says that anyone has to lose.
You can exit out of it where 90% of the people are happy and think they've gained something from participating in the process. Over here, by its construction, it's win or lose with spectators, thousands of eyes looking and cheering on a fight. You getting it yet? This is why it doesn't work. Anyone against this process is proposing that we just keep doing this.
I've waited for over two years for a counterproposal. I'd like to use it. Do you think I want to sit down and build this whole thing from the ground up and spend the time, effort, and money yet again? No, but I know it's necessary. This is required to save Cardano because without this, we will die. We're killing ourselves right now. We don't have a common source of truth. If your version of growth is different from someone else's, no matter how much money we spend or what strategy we follow, if we're following the wrong version of growth, you will always say we failed.
We have to create consensus on this. Once you have consensus, we must acknowledge we don't have all the roles and structures in place yet. We have to create some legitimacy, and after that, we can come up with a strategy, accountability, and a budget. A lot of people are saying, "Let's market Cardano." I said, "What are we marketing?" We don't have consensus over what to talk about.
Are we marketing Laos? Awesome. Why is Laos better? It's not the fastest protocol. It's fast and awesome. It's secure and decentralized. It has to be connected to a growth philosophy. If we say our goal is to solve the blockchain trilemma and accelerate into the blockchain trilemma while preserving decentralization for reasons X, Y, and Z, that's what you market. You have to always come back to a guiding principle, and then you have to have specialized roles with specialized people who can be held accountable.
Accountability means you can fire people. Accountability doesn't mean rampant decentralization where everybody just does whatever they want. No one ever compromises, and they're all just over Twitter doing this. That's not accountability. There's no accountability in ragebait and clickbait. There's no accountability from people tweeting and never giving in to their opinions.
Accountability comes from people making a commitment and honoring that commitment. If they don't, they have to go. You have to have the appropriate structures to set strategies. Now, do you notice something here? Nowhere in any of this did I say "no homers." Nowhere did I say that.
In fact, I think it's worthwhile to show you what "no homers" is. [Shows clip]
"Why don't people like me, Marge?" "Oh, everyone likes you. You're a wonderful person." "Why don't those stupid idiots let me in a crappy club for jerks?" "I'm sure it's nothing personal, Homer." "It is. It's been happening to me all my life." "Hey, Billy. Hey, Joey. Come on in. There's plenty of room. Sorry, not you, Homer." "Why not?" "But you let in Homer Glumplet." "It says no homers. We're allowed to have one."
Nowhere did it say "no homers." Everyone who's an ADA holder is welcome. Everyone's welcome. They're all there. It's not "no
"Let's build a better piece of infrastructure and make it bespoke so it's more inclusive." We will also connect it to a popup subsystem for Cardano, something I've wanted for almost 10 years. Hopefully, one day we can integrate it into Cardano. Worst case scenario, we'll use it at midnight. So that is, in a nutshell, part three. There's been a lot covered in this lecture, and you'll notice there's a bit of trauma here. I'm so used to the predictable responses from people, how they cut up the tapes and take things out of context. The vast majority of people are exhausted. They're just tired. You see it? There are a lot of DREPs starting to retire and leave. Pete left, and other people like Cash wrote a lovely post about his frustrations. We're losing people who care about Cardano. They've invested time, effort, money, and years of their lives, and they feel like they're just being beaten up again and again. Every time anyone tries to broadcast, there's a professional class of people whose only purpose is to disrupt and destroy. They contribute nothing to the conversation—no new ideas, no alternatives—just the message that the person speaking is evil, and they want everyone to know that.
How does that grow your bags? How does that grow the ecosystem? It doesn't do anything. All it does is destroy what we have. They create an us versus them mentality. If a person supports the speaker, they're punished for it. So then it becomes a fight. Even if you agree with what the person is saying, you can't publicly support them because you don't want to be punished. How can you have governance if that's your standard? We're letting a radical minority dominate and control the conversation, holding billions of dollars of assets at the mercy of their radical agenda. Their agenda has no growth or improvement in it. It's simply about burning those they disagree with to the ground.
You have two options: solve the problem or be part of the problem. Inaction is part of the problem. That's why I recommend a political party that votes against any funding proposal that is not part of the solution. I'm not telling you what to think or what positions to hold. But participation is no longer optional. Cardano has to do or die. We have a great group of people, great technology, and the capacity for a great vision. We've demonstrated that in the past, and the rest of the industry is watching. They're asking a fundamental question: Will Cardano get its act together or not?
We can answer that question definitively with a yes, and this is what our growth means. Or we can continue doing what we're doing. Do you think it's working? You're losing your good people, the price is falling, adoption is falling, and all metrics are declining. Good projects are going out of business, like Tap Tools and others. Honestly speaking, is it working?
The chat here proves the point. I've just delivered a 47-minute lecture saying we need to focus on solving the problem. Is he participating? No. He says Charles needs to leave, and then magically everything will get better. Okay, I leave. So where's your conversation going to happen, Chris? Are you going to build it? How are you going to bring people together? How are you going to incentivize people? How are you going to get consensus? How are you going to change the constitution?
You can't just say you're going to do it all your way. You offer nothing to anyone. That voice is holding the whole ecosystem hostage. I'm bringing this up so you can see it. I'm offering you a solution. It's not easy; it requires participation, hard work, and people getting uncomfortable. It requires debate, compromise, reason, and alternative ideas. If structured correctly, there's idea flow. We can use AI to keep us honest and be more inclusive. The only standard is to be an ADA holder and come on in. By doing all of this and putting some incentives in place, we can convert good ideas into actionable ones. Once actionable, we can create accountable parties to get them done.
That is what's going to solve Cardano. It's the next step in governance. Remember I mentioned recursive governance and minimum viable governance? Version two is this. It's okay that we don't have it yet; we had to start somewhere. A structure like this can be legitimized by a vote of the DREPs and a change in the constitution. Once you have this type of structure, it's reusable. Every year it gets stronger, smarter, and more customized, eventually getting where it needs to go.
What we have right now is an energy vampire. You participate, and your soul gets taken, your time gets taken, your energy gets drained, and you get nothing in return. You need a system that gives you energy and positivity. You need a system where people actually care about solving problems, where there's empathy and understanding. We need to agree on outcomes and actively listen to each other, trying to create common ground.
You can succumb to your demons and be that ragebait person, but then fight me on the ideas. Explain step by step what's wrong with this idea and how it's going to fail. You can't because deep down, you know the ideas are valid. It's your hatred of the founding entities and perceived grievances from the past. I gave you transparency; I spent $2 million on an audit report that exonerated us. It showed that for 10 years, our conduct was good. The response was that the auditors were corrupt instead of addressing the content of the report. Now there are new scandals because you'll never stop; you can't accept that I'm a genuine person who wants to help. You've already made up your mind that Charles is evil, and I recognize that this can never be won.
So my proposal is to move to a channel where the people don't matter, only the outcomes do. Then we can move forward regardless of who participates. If you think I'm doing this to gain power and control, you see how the goalposts move. No matter what is done, the goalposts shift, and the straw man arguments keep coming. We have to get out of this cycle. I'm going to push forward, regardless of how many people come along. If enough join, it will save Cardano; if not, it won't. But I'm at peace because I can say I tried my best.
You wanted me back in the driver's seat. I don't want to be a king or a president, and I don't want to be the face of an ecosystem, but I do need to lead. Leading means bringing people along and including them in the conversation. I cannot allow good people to exit the ecosystem, despite their passion and care. I've watched so many good people leave because the process destroys them.
The first thing we need to do is correct the process of participation and create a space specifically for it. Even if they don't want to be on X or anywhere else, they need a place to contribute. Once we have that process, we can upgrade and enhance the Cardano governance to create an effective structure of executive function. This will allow us to have an accountable group of people to grow Cardano and execute a strategy. Once we have those two things, we have a shot. We might not win, but we will fight hard.
If you agree, great, join. If you don't agree, do something else. My only request is that whatever you do has to be meaningful. Go build your own channel and get people to join it. If it's a good channel, I'll join it. But before you do that, maybe give this a shot and participate. I'm trying here; I really am.
So, it's up to you guys. Again, I'm at peace because I have to try, and this is me trying. I'm back, and it's time to lead again. This is what we're going to do every step of the way. Stage one is underway. Within a few weeks, we'll make substantial progress. Stage two will involve bringing in a closed beta, building a lot of tooling, and integrating great ideas. Then, stage three will open it up to as many people as want to participate. They will have to follow the rules, and many will be banned initially for not doing so, but that's fine. The survivors will share their ideas about growth metrics.
Once we have those, we will move to stage two of that, which will be designing the new governance functions. Those two together will be proposed as a constitutional amendment, and we will form a political party from that. The party's purpose will be to institute those changes and protect the discussion channels. If we can get these political changes through, I have hope that Cardano will reach the next level. Governance will be effective, positive, and we'll have a strong executive function to get us where we need to go.
That's what the next 12 to 24 months will look like. Every step of the way, it's inclusive. People can be part of it; they just have to be willing to participate in the way it needs to be. You have to behave a certain way in a surgical theater or a library for it to work for everyone. I believe reasonable people will give it a shot, and their success will bring more reasonable people in. Then people will say Cardano got its act together and is moving forward, getting things done.
Once we have that structure, I can change how I engage with social media, which will be much healthier, more positive, and easier. For example, if we have well-regulated, well-moderated channels like we do with the midnight Discord, I can take questions from there. They can be great and interesting questions, but we won't take them from the raw internet where there's bad faith behind everything. So that's how it's going to be. If you don't like it, tough. I want to win."
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