Hello everyone, this is Charles Hoskinson broadcasting from England. It's about 1:00 in the morning here, and I'm about to head home to Colorado. I've been on the road for a while; I was at Consensus in Miami, then Salt in Bermuda, and now I'm here in London to conduct workshops and strategize for the second half of the year.
As you know, we're currently in treasury season, and it's been a challenging one. Many people have had to make profound sacrifices. Last year, we received about 98 million in funding, but this year we're asking for about 52 million. With that funding, we've had to make some very difficult cuts. Good people have had to go, engineers have been let go, and community teams have been liquidated—both familiar faces and new ones.
However, the spine and backbone of what makes Cardano Cardano has always been, and will always be, the fact that we're the science coin. We're the research coin. Over the last 10 years, hundreds of millions of dollars have been spent, and countless researchers have been involved in building the largest research group in the world for cryptocurrencies. We have solved some of the hardest problems in computer science and applied those solutions to the Cardano ecosystem.
We were the first group to publish a probably secure proof of stake protocol paper. We were the first to conceive of and figure out how to productize at scale extended UTXO. We were the first to figure out how to productize and scale concepts like color coins. We were able to secure side chains on Bitcoin. With Pogen, we're going to be the first group to fully realize the BitVM promise of mirrored Bitcoin that is both tax neutral and non-custodial, relying solely on the security of proof of work from the Bitcoin network to add DeFi to Bitcoin through networks like Cardano. These are just a few of the countless innovations this group has produced, achieving citation counts typically seen throughout the careers of famous scientists over four or five decades of publications. We've accomplished this in less than one decade.
The sun never sleeps on the Cardano research groups. They range from the Tokyo Institute of Technology to Stanford, the University of Connecticut, the University of Wyoming, the University of Edinburgh, the University of Athens, and many places in between. There isn't a single scientist we can't reach out to in cryptography, programming language theory, or distributed systems who won't take our call. They will respond because of the merits of the group we've built.
When you ask people in the Cardano ecosystem or outside of it about the core USPs of Cardano, "Cardano is the science coin" will appear somewhere in the word cloud. We earned that distinction. It's one of the reasons why, in 2021, Cardano achieved a valuation four times larger than Honda, making it the largest cryptocurrency to come out of Japan and the third largest in the entire world. This was no small achievement, and it would have never happened without the spine of Cardano—our science.
The reason I'm making this video is that I've noticed a disturbing trend where a lot of people, including some D reps, are voting against funding our research group. I thought for sure that of all the proposals, this one was self-evident. I've seen various reasons cited, like we should just break it apart and pick and choose. So, I asked the D reps, which scientist would you like me to fire? Manuel Chakravarty, the inventor of extended UTXO? Or perhaps Phil Wadler, the creator of Haskell, who led to the creation of Plutus? Maybe our chief scientist, Aggelos Kiayias, or Peter Gaži, the creator of Ouroboros Praos? Or Christian Badertscher, the creator of Ouroboros Genesis? Or Matthias Fitzi, the creator of parallel chains and the one who did most of the heavy lifting for Ouroboros Leios?
Should we let go of our zero-knowledge experts, the ones we recruited from Microsoft, like Markov Kolweiss, a Gödel Prize winner? Should we dismiss the creator of BitVM, who is now working at our lab? If not people, perhaps institutions. Which institutions would you like to shut down? And because you're so qualified, which research agendas do you feel are unnecessary?
Ask yourself a meta question: If you're a world expert in an industry where dozens of blockchains have billion-plus dollar treasuries and are looking for scientists, why would you tolerate being told you're no longer necessary, that you should work for free, or that you should take a massive pay cut? Solana has had a lot of problems with their networking stack and consensus protocol. They're wealthy, so what did they do? They hired Roger Wattenhofer, an incredibly smart Swiss researcher and world expert. I think they would love to have a few of the names I've just listed to help them transition from an engineering protocol to a rigorous science protocol.
And if not them, the Ethereum Foundation. If not them, the people at XRP. If not them, the many other cryptocurrencies. To the D reps who vote no on this proposal, citing that we should break it apart and pick and choose winners and losers while liquidating some of the brightest minds in the world that we've spent a decade aggregating, I ask you: how do we do that without destroying the soul of what makes Cardano Cardano?
If you have delegated to one of these D reps, I highly recommend you reflect on why you chose to delegate to them and if they still accurately represent your voice. I am at a loss for what the value proposition is for Cardano if we lose the soul, the spine, the thing that made Cardano Cardano. We have always been the ecosystem with foresight. We have always started from first principles and done things the right way. We've always worked with the brightest people in the world. If we defund our research group, what we're basically saying is that we're no longer that ecosystem.
So, what do we fall back on? Is it our MAU? Our TVL? Our transaction volume? To a speculator considering where to invest next, what exactly will give them hope that the prospects of Cardano are brighter over the next three to five years if we send them a message that we're no longer doing research? This is our pride and joy—an irreplaceable asset that we earned through ten years of hard work. It's not a commodity; it's not fungible, it's not replaceable, and it's not subject to being nickel-and-dimed. You can't shatter it into a thousand pieces and pick two or three that you think are valuable while pretending the rest doesn't matter.
If you treat these people like commodities, they will leave. They'll go to other ecosystems that have more money and are willing to pay more, with better stability and certainty. People go into academia and seek tenure because they want stability and certainty. They enter these fields to avoid the politics of day-to-day business. They have mostly been isolated from governance controversies, and what they have delivered to us is certainty that we will have 24/7 uptime. Certainty that when our protocols are scrutinized by AI and peer review, hackers won't find clever tricks to break them, destroying all the value in your pocket.
They give us the ability to look to the future and protect ourselves from quantum computing. They allow us to adopt emerging technologies like zero-knowledge proofs and gain new features and capabilities to leapfrog the competition. They are given the freedom and space to dream and are protected as precious assets of the ecosystem. They earned that right because they built the spine of something that was once worth over a hundred billion dollars.
To say to them, "You're no longer necessary," or "Half of you should go," or to have people with no understanding of the research process dictate terms is not sensible. Look at the patent portfolios of Harvard and Stanford and their endowments. It's not sensible. I appreciate that everyone has had to tighten their belts and that we're not where we need to be, but we don't get to where we need to be by destroying the things that we need to earn the future. You can't walk without a spine, and this is, if there is ever a core of Cardano, the core.
So, this is a direct call to all D reps who have yet to vote: please vote for the research proposal. To those who voted no, please change your vote. If you're unwilling to, those who delegated to them should sincerely ask themselves what the consequences would be if the Cardano research group were liquidated. What if the researchers were let go? What if they were assigned to a different ecosystem or left of their own accord because they were no longer viewed as valuable?
You have to honestly ask yourself this. We can't recover this; it's a one-way door. If you lose your best and brightest, we won't get them back. We won't get to say we're sorry. They'll have jobs at competitors, they'll work on new problems, and this part of their career will be closed. The reason they work with us is that we provided them with the freedom of stability and a long-term horizon. I've tried throughout my entire career to create this environment, which is why we established the largest and most prominent group.
If we remove this from them, there's reciprocity in that. They will remove the certainty we have about the future. Of all the proposals, this is the one that, if it fails, creates the most damage. This is the one that sends the clearest signal to the market: Is Cardano still innovating? Is Cardano still open for business? Or is Cardano closing shop? Are we no longer open for business? Are we no longer worthy of being the science coin that knows the future and has new tricks up its sleeve?
Think carefully about this and understand the consequences of that choice. I'm asking all of you to please understand where our value comes from and recognize the people we can't afford to lose as an ecosystem. Please vote for science. Please vote for the research proposal for IOR. It's a necessary foundational proposal that we can't afford to lose. Thank you.
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