I'm up in Gillette, Wyoming, actually, at a beautiful clinic. If you're ever in Gillette, drop by the clinic; you'll love it. We actually have a vivarium coming in, and we'll have the only poison dart frogs in the entire state. There are no zoos in Wyoming due to some weird old laws and historical reasons.
I wanted to make a quick video before I fly to San Diego to do stem cell work with Dr. Harmon, to talk a little bit about where we're at with the proposal pipeline and remind people of some things. We have nine proposals we're working on, each with a specific focus. We're systematically walking through them. What's nice is that there’s a coalition accountable for each of these proposals, and we believe in them. It’s a bit silly to say, "Let's build the engine, let's build the transmission, but let's not build the tires." It's a system; if you don't put all the pieces together, it's really hard to make the car go anywhere. You might find a way to build the car with eight of the nine pieces, but if you start cutting them out, it leads to a bad experience overall.
X is always challenging. I left it for a bit, came back, and we were trying to build an AI avatar called Project Nix. We've made some great progress, but the end user license agreement forbids me from turning over to a complete AI without labeling the account as a bot. If it's labeled as a bot, it automatically downgrades me in the algorithm, so many of the posts you'll never see.
The other thing is that the Iran war broke out, and X is really the only place to get real-time views that aren't going through a propaganda filter. It's a bit challenging because there’s stuff in there that I'm trying to figure out how to replicate. I've been exploring using OpenClaw via my fork of it called Logan to facilitate some of that, so hopefully, it can get off the ground sooner rather than later. But X is filled with a lot of people who bark really loudly, and that's fine. Where it becomes problematic is when they use the platform to attack volunteers or people who receive a small stipend, alleging that they're bots sold and paid for as support. That's never okay and damages our ability to build effective, positive communities.
Midnight is really fun because it's young and new; not a lot of drama has happened. When you go to the Discord and attend the night stream whiteboard sessions and talk to people, there's a lot of optimism, hope, and positivity. These ambassadors come from many different walks of life and various chains—some from Solana, some from Avalanche, and even some XRP people. We leave preconceived notions and past fights at the door and just have a reset. One of the most important rules is to be nice to each other and avoid drama.
It's not fun when certain members of the Cardano community, for competitive reasons, decide to attack and victimized people who, for the most part, aren't paid anything or, if they are, it's certainly not enough to make a difference. They do this because they're falling apart; their commercial progress isn't where it needs to be, and they view what we do as direct competition, realizing that it's probably a better value proposition in the future. It's shameful and sad that some members of the community choose to go down that road.
Governance has been exceedingly hard for Cardano, creating derangements and divisions that are not only unnecessary but also counterproductive, making people want to quit Cardano altogether. I'm definitely not a perfect person, and you can make a very long list of things you don't like about me. But one thing you can't doubt is my passion and desire to see Cardano succeed. Cardano is my life's work, and I've put an enormous amount of effort over the last ten years into trying to make this ecosystem grow, thrive, and evolve.
Over the last few years, we have become a tremendously collaborative company. This required a lot of hard work, cultural changes, and actually letting some people go. Some of the people we let go accepted it and understood it, while others became brutal and bitter adversaries of the company, carrying grudges that continue to this day. That was a reality we had to accept. We accepted it because the greater good of Cardano is that if we become collaborative and bring in lots of people, they can grow, thrive, and eventually become leaders in their own right.
In other words, it is necessary to decentralize the ecosystem as a whole and bring in new blood and new leadership so that Cardano continues to grow and thrive. More importantly, differences of opinion can lead to pragmatic compromises that make the protocol stronger overall. You see that with Project Catalyst, the node diversity workshop, the creation of Intersect, and our ability to work with people we disagree with. For example, with the pentad, where we've had strong structural grievances, we've been able to come together for the greater good of the ecosystem.
Some people simply can't accept this or find it inconvenient to acknowledge these data points, preferring to label everyone who works with us as owned, corrupted, or captured. Typically, this is because they are either economically incentivized to say this or are fundamentally immature, living in a world where everything is black and white, and everyone is an adversary. Cardano cannot succeed if it's just the Input Output show; there's a responsible and systematic way to diversify everything in it. I believe we've made more progress than any other cryptocurrency in the entire space in the last three years to facilitate that decentralization.
Everywhere you look, you have multiple flavors, not just vanilla. There is a commitment in this ecosystem to decentralize and offer people many options. In some cases, this hurts us because it's hard to ensure that all options are good. If you have ten average things instead of one good thing, you get judged as average, even though the totality of the work is exceptional. For example, the developer documentation is trying to create one source of truth for onboarding people and bringing a coalition of different actors together to facilitate that.
We have a great developer experience, and AI knows where to look to find code because that's where all the engineers are. There's some foresight in what we do. My long-term goal is to ensure that, no matter what, Cardano remains and continues to grow as the most decentralized cryptocurrency. Every single decision I make is controversial, and that's just the reality of things. Catalyst needed a transition, so we transitioned it to the best-funded and most capable entity. Even though we've had historic disagreements, we did so with community consent because we felt it could be better suited there than with us.
Many people disagree with that decision or think it won't result in what the community needs, and that's fair; it's perfectly reasonable to disagree. It's also true that many of the things we currently work on need to be transitioned to proper open-source projects, like Plutus Core and Hydra, as well as the Haskell node itself. There's a process and a path to facilitate that. Much of the funding this year is about that. It's not just about building new features or finishing old work; it's also about a philosophy of how to move things in the right direction so that everything is sustainable, resilient, and decentralized.
The things we commercialize and work on, we share the wealth. That's not just a statement; it's an objective reality. When you saw Midnight, even though it would have been much easier to launch from a different ecosystem with a different distribution, Cardano received half of the supply. That was due to legacy and respect for the people I've become friends with in the ecosystem. For future partner chain projects, we expect similar results. The tokenomics may be different, but we're never going to forget Cardano.
From time to time, we also ask the community to get some skin in the game for these things, and that's what we're doing here. There's something truly extraordinary about this model. If we can get five or ten partner chains to be successful on Cardano, as an ADA holder, in addition to ADA for staking rewards, you'll get five to ten other tokens of great value. There is no other cryptocurrency currently on the market, from Bitcoin on down, that has that kind of value proposition.
When people ask, "What's on Cardano?" If there are five or ten multi-billion dollar projects that are thriving and have multi-chain appeal, you can simply list them. Just like Steven Spielberg's CV, you can say Jurassic Park, E.T., Jaws, and people will respond, "Oh, yeah, I watched all those. He's a good director." You have to have brand names to create familiarity and allow people to make quick judgments about whether something is still relevant, thriving, and has the right to exist.
The success of Midnight and the successors of Midnight, the partner chains that come after it, will be the single biggest marketing vanguard and customer adoption we have available to us. I believe that in 2016, when I wrote "Why Cardano," which you can still find online, I clearly articulated that Cardano was a multi-layered system: one core layer, Cardano SL, for security and truth, and tokens can be issued, and then computation layers to facilitate blockchain services to the industry, referred to as Cardano CL at the time in the paper. Midnight is a realization of that intention from ten years ago—not a new thing, not a pivot, not an abandonment, but a realization of a ten-year vision.
Two things have to be true: one, we plan in decades, and two, I do what I say I'm going to do. It would have been very easy ten years ago to write some stuff down and then, as markets change, pivot and walk away from a planned and committed strategy. Instead, every step of the way, I tried to find a way to make it work. That's who I am—one of the most consistent, disciplined, and relentless people in this industry. I keep going, I keep taking the hits, even when I don't have to, and we fight for sustainable, fair, and reciprocal relationships.
In some cases, funding isn't even about getting the money; it's about acknowledging an appropriate relationship. If we do work, we should be paid for that work. There are some out there on X who subscribe to the notion that all pulls from the treasury should be loans. Tell me, what's the commercial model of the Cardano core node or the Haskell framework? Excuse me, the Hydra framework. What's the core model of that? Should I put a toll on every transaction, with some of it going to me? It's open-source software with no commercial model. How would a loan be appropriate for these types of things? It makes no sense, but they say it because they haven't really thought it through and are just upset and angry that ADA used to be a dollar ten at the turn of 2024 to 2025, and now it's at twenty-five cents. They want someone to blame.
We accept that we're going to take the majority of that blame. Fair or unfair, we're the largest entity in the ecosystem and the one that's been around the longest. So, every time the markets go up or down, we get praised or blamed accordingly, regardless of our particular involvement or lack thereof. And that's okay; it is what it is. The dogs bark, and the caravan moves on. The whole point of delegating governance is that brighter minds and wiser minds can prevail.
In the coming weeks and months, hard decisions have to be made about where we go, what we do, and how we get there. We have laid out a vision in consultation with months of discussions with people at IOG, Plutus, the Cardano Foundation, Emurgo, and many builders in the space about their concerns and how to resolve them. We've also tried to make this vision as economically efficient as possible. The proposals we've put out in the last few months are half the price of the treasury draw that IOG put out last year.
This has resulted in us having to change some things. We've had to let people go at IOG, consolidate departments, and restructure things. I've had to say goodbye to some friends who have worked with me for years. But that's just the reality of a downturn in the market. You can't get everything; you have to cut the fat. It would be unfair for me to complain about this because every project in the space is suffering the same. We just saw JPEG Store announce that they're shutting down. It is what it is, and you have to adapt and survive in these new environments.
The fact that we've been able to find a path to do more with substantially less is a major improvement for the ecosystem as a whole, and we'll continue this optimization as aggressively as possible. For some, that's not enough, and they have this unrealistic expectation that everything should be free. For others, they'll recognize deep down that we're trying. We're all trying, and while there is no certainty, there is at least some camaraderie in the attempt to try.
We're here; we want to win. We want to see this ecosystem grow, and we're getting real tired of the noise. We're getting real tired of carnival barkers and vacuous conversations. It has to stop, and we have to stop attacking each other. Where I get most enraged and defensive is often not when people attack me, but when they attack people who don't deserve it—ambassadors, volunteers, open-source contributors. These people are the lifeblood of our ability to grow and thrive. If anyone, I don't care who they are, starts going after them for being passionate and voicing their opinions, it's not appropriate. It's wrong. People who do this are not productive, good members of our community. They will destroy Cardano like a cancer, and no one wants to be in an ecosystem where that's the standard.
I know many of you listening will cite the Cardano whale debate. In the prior video, I told you the real-life consequences of it. We could be up 332% on the sovereign wealth fund if we had simply done something that was common sense. We could have had a debate about it. I would have even been comfortable having an X space about it with Cardano whale, fighting for my position and letting him represent his. There was no debate; he recused himself from any argumentation and left the ecosystem, but not before automatically voting no on every IOG proposal out of principle.
We are now seeing similar behavior from other people. The immune system of a good community is to have the courage to accept that sometimes these people have to go. If you feel I'm one of them, then vote no on all our proposals and let IOG go so you can go it alone. If you feel that I'm part of the solution, vote yes on our proposals, and we'll be here fighting in the trenches, going to conferences, being there for Cardano on national television, and being there for Cardano with world leaders.
I've spent more than ten years of my life on this project. I'm not old, but I'm not young anymore. As I look to the next decade of my life, I'm unwilling to spend that decade if I'm not welcome or if my only purpose is to be a scapegoat for all the ills and sins of others. I'm here to win, and I have to believe there's a path to do that. If we have each other's backs, fight hard, and want to win, and have a good plan and strategy, then I'll stay. If this is just a place for cynical, toxic people to burn each other down the minute they don't get their way and descend into ad hominems, there's no sense in being here.
I'm going on a plane to California soon to talk about a stem cell program. I can spend the next ten years doing that full-time instead of part-time. This paper sitting on my desk describes a patient in China who received induced pluripotent stem cells. She's 28 years old, already had a liver transplant and pancreas transplant, and had severe type 1 diabetes. The stem cell transplant she received not only resolved her diabetes; it completely regenerated her pancreas. She's now living well.
I'm sitting in a clinic that's 70,000 square feet, has 20,000 patients, and dozens of providers and scientists, all on the dawn of the Stem Cell Freedom Act. I can spend my time translating that study in China and doing a clinical trial here to help fix diabetes in America, not to mention the thousands of other diseases. There's an opportunity cost to having these fights day after day, and I find myself asking at times, why am I still here?
If this is a community that has respect, that wants to win, and is willing to invest in itself, I have an answer. If this is a community that praises the people who divide us and burn us to the ground, I don't. That's the harsh truth of it. I'm really tired of my intelligence being attacked, my character and integrity being questioned, and the perpetual bad faith mentality. I'm very tired of my motives being questioned.
There's something called reputation, and after showing up every day for ten years and fighting hard for you on both good and bad days, I should get some form of benefit of the doubt that my intentions are genuine. I appreciate that many people have let you down. I feel deeply let down by this administration. We didn't ask for much; we just asked for some basic decency, and we couldn't even get that. That's fair. But do not allow the fact that other institutions have let you down and the markets are in a bad state to lead you to broadly label everyone as evil, a thief, or someone here to screw you.
I'm sorry; I just don't have time for it. The people I owe don't have time for it. We can do anything. We choose to do the things we do. Midnight is a choice. I choose to wake up and work on genetically engineered plants that glow in the dark. I choose to bring back animals from the dead. I choose to work on stem cells. I choose to do medicine. I choose to be a bison rancher. I enjoy these things; they're fun, interesting, and novel. As you do them, they create jobs, make people happy, improve people's quality of life, and bring joy to the world. Most importantly, they're hard problems, so they never get boring.
Crypto is a hard problem, no doubt about that, but it's become a very toxic one. It's hard to be in this industry when the mainstream has turned us into pariahs. Every conversation with non-crypto people is a reminder of a scam, a rug pull, or a political event. The epic SBF comes up, FTX, Luna, and all these other things. You have to start not from zero, but from negative ten, and earn your way back to zero, proving that you're different.
I've always looked at Cardano as the exception to the rule instead of the rule. We're the ones who keep our principles. We're the ones who actually care about decentralization. We're the ones who started from first principles and fight hard. We've been punished time and again as an ecosystem for adhering to those principles. Other people took huge shortcuts with consensus and didn't care if the network restarted or shut down; they just enjoyed the benefits of TPS. Other people had a very accessible development model and didn't care that there are 80 to 100 million dollars of hacks every day. Most recently, the
1:07:35
26:05
26:19