hi everyone this is charles hoskinson broadcasting live from warm sunny colorado always warm always sunny sometimes colorado today is march 31st it is a special day it's a special epic we have now entered the full orborus prowse era of shelley we were in the hybrid era we were running both obft and we were running prows and epic by epic you guys saw the system get gradually more decentralized and now 100 of all block production is done by stake pools run by you the community it's an amazing accomplishment it's an amazing feat the beginnings of war bors were in 2015 and uh and it was really a long arc research agenda that was trying to determine the perfect engine for a cryptocurrency for a blockchain uh and a lot of thought went into it we looked at proof of work we looked at all the proof of stakes that had been brought to market from what happened with peercoin and we looked at nxt uh there were certainly a huge amount of open questions and the orabor's agenda while it took several years one of the hardest parts in practice of getting these protocols out there is getting the right distribution is getting the right source of randomness is getting the right community and assuming that thousands of technical operators will just show up and run the system uh that's an enormous assumption and very few people would feel super comfortable five years ago six years ago thinking that you could get there and it would be seamless and easy and what's happened since july of last year has been absolutely astounding and this is a great moment and achievement for each and every one of you the stake pool pioneers those who participated in the incentivized test net the people who built businesses and advertise those businesses small and large the people who delegated over 70 plus percent of all of the ada in circulation is delegated at the moment to different pool operators and every day blocks are made there's 120 hours in an epic and it's filled with thousands and thousands and thousands of slots and those slots meet blocks and those blocks are now made one hundred percent by you the community no backup no fail-safe or uh any of these things now there's a lot of work to do to finish the road to decentralization and some of that is infrastructural and some of that is social but by all means this was the big one uh this means there's no training wheels anymore there's no fallback anymore there's no like group of people that are here watching this is it the whole network is in completely in the hands of the stake pool operators and those operators have shown over the last six months that they can do as good or in many cases a better job than the bft nodes and that's incredibly encouraging people had to work hard for this moment they had to read formal specifications they had to read game theoretic papers they had to learn how knicks works they had to actually configure pools and sometimes misconfigure they had to know what kes is key evolving signatures how about that and have an opinion about all these things they form telegram groups they form slack channels they form discords they formed mailing lists they uh came to us hundreds of times asking questions and each and every time they rose to the occasion and they demonstrated that cardano not only has a right to exist but they demonstrated that cardano needs to be the most decentralized ecosystem around you even formed advocacy groups to fight for your view of what decentralization ought to be so this is a day of celebration and it's a day of reflection it's a day as we look to the future to take account of the things that now must happen peer-to-peer is the next major milestone we already have a pretty distributed network but there are some last things that we have to do we have to turn on that peer-to-peer governor and we have scaled up resources and simulations and testing to make sure that we can do that in the next quarter and at that point all infrastructure is decentralized so there really is no custodial role there really is no one floating around anymore we're better than bitcoin in every measurable sense but there's still a lingering question about governance and this is a question about social dynamics so it's apt at the same day that d equals zero is the day that we had the catalyst five town hall we've grown from less than 50 community members participating in discussions about governance to almost 20 000 participating on a regular basis voting on a regular basis fund 4 for example our largest fund yet has 233 proposals the coming fund 5 will probably have twice as many and millions of dollars at stake this is more than just a treasury this is building an expert class this is building a mechanism for discussion and debate and we obsidian and other firms are working tirelessly to link this off chain system to the on-chain update system that we built with ibm research and guard time through the horizons 2020 project years ago the end result will be that the cip process the hard fork combinator and the update protocols will end up becoming a matter of public debate and a matter that goes beyond a federation of core developers like it is in the bitcoin world in the ethereum world and other things to a truly decentralized government and my belief is that the social dynamics are evolving in a way that that's government will have the wisdom foresight and collective intelligence necessary to navigate the great challenges that are coming to the cryptocurrency space for example as quantum computers wake up and they begin actually running general purpose computing they will become a threat to cryptography and as a consequence they are a threat to classical cryptocurrencies we have some ideas as a company and as academics about how to combat that threat but it requires the collective intelligence of a marketplace of ideas and a tireless community to transform those ideas into protocols and reality that actually run in your daedalus wallet or your roy wallet or the other wallets in the ecosystem and that's one of dozens of major decisions that are coming in the next few years that we as an ecosystem must rise to the occasion to combat so as we say goodbye to the great decentralization of infrastructure which over time will continue to get more and more decentralized and better and better protocols iteratively will be brought in we say hello to the great challenge of the decentralization of governance which no cryptocurrency has yet fully achieved and i believe we are best positioned to combat and best position to win good fortune in the wars to come and enjoying the fruits and spoils of the wars behind us thank you all for being part of this movement it was a small thing it really was years ago when we first started in february of 2015 i never for a moment imagined we could make so much amazing progress and most importantly that i'd have the opportunity to meet so many amazing people cardano is more than code it's more than papers it's more than heartless soulless automatons and programs and protocols cardano is people and not just a few hundreds of thousands of active people perhaps millions hard to quantify at this point because there's so many languages so many cultures so many countries represented each and every one of you listening is a member of this from those in turkey and iran and dubai and saudi arabia and israel to those in nigeria to those in kenya to those in ethiopia to those in chile and argentina and brazil to those in mongolia and china and japan and south korea and russia germany france italy the uk norway countries that my ancestors called home countries i've visited countries i haven't visited places i've always wanted to go we even have cardano community members in antarctica at the research stations there and right here in colorado warm and sunny there's a lot of fans i run into these days and up in rough and rugged wyoming the blocks that are being made some of them are by a stake pool operated by members of the university of wyoming the first academic institution in the world to run a stake pool for any cryptocurrency and that trend is going to continue and this protocol has become a family and you're all part of that family it's as much yours as it is mine or anyone else's now because in a sense we have achieved true decentralization the dream won't die and all the elements are here for us to live quite a long time and for us to rise to the challenges that come and today march 31st 2021 our d day i firmly believe that our best days are indeed ahead of us and i firmly believe that we will continue growing at the pace we've grown before and this movement will eventually become the financial operating system of the world and that will enable countries individuals the rich and the poor to work together to actually create a world where it's fair a world where we get to do things in a transparent accountable way as opposed to an opaque corrupt way a world where the least amongst us have access to the same services as the best the wealthiest the most powerful you're all contributing to this in your own way it could be as little as selling a t-shirt creating a sticker sending a letter of support to as complex as building the d5 applications millions of people will use in the years to come and every single thing in between all we had to do was just push that first domino tagline of my company is cascading disruption it's not really a hard concept somebody has to light the fuse and if you follow it long enough you get to the dynamite and that's what we did together as one community and today is a day we can all take reflection to that we can wake up tomorrow with our hearts in the right place our minds thinking hard and roll up our sleeves and continue the work there are many years to come and as i've mentioned i'm a pretty young guy the best years of my life i'm going to spend working here doing these things and i cannot wait to see what you build with me as my partner and my friend until next time thank you so much enjoy this day and the next major thing is going to be alonzo cheers
