Hi everybody, this is Charles Hoskinson broadcasting live from warm, sunny Colorado. Today is April 7th, 2023. It's a good day; it's Good Friday, and I hope everyone has a great Easter weekend.
I just wanted to make a quick video to talk a little bit about a CoinTelegraph article that came out, which is very perplexing to me. CoinTelegraph reached out to us; they wanted to do a long-form interview. I took the time to give the interviewer more than an hour, but we only got halfway through before his connection died. It was kind of a bizarre interview, and I wanted to elaborate a bit more on it.
We talked about a range of topics, but the headline of the interview is "We Bet on the Wrong Technology," which is absolutely unfair. It shows the quality of media in the cryptocurrency space and the people who purvey it. We didn't bet on the wrong technology with Cardano. The context behind the statement involves a historical discussion of how the project evolved. It's true that the original codebase with Byron had to be rewritten; we called it the Byron reboot. The original team that did that is no longer here, and that code is no longer here. However, the consequences of that rewrite set the project behind by about 15 months.
Extended UTXO, Ouroboros, Hydra, Mithril, and the sidechains model we’ve chosen to pursue, as well as the governance model we’re working on and the use of formal methods, were not wrong decisions. In fact, the industry is validating that these are the right decisions, especially with the movement towards Layer Twos and off-chain solutions, for which extended UTXO is much better than the account-based model. The fact that Ethereum is struggling to move towards liquid non-custodial staking, which we natively bet on, further supports this.
There were additional comments on Haskell. At the time we chose to use it as a language, it was a bit too rough around the edges to be a commercial language. We, as an ecosystem, had to work hard to vastly improve the quality of Haskell to get it to a point where we could use it in production, especially in a cross-platform application. That said, recent conversations with members of the executive branch of the United States, who are dealing with cybersecurity, as well as other industry professionals, show that the desire for verification and certification of smart contracts has become one of the biggest hot-button topics. Effectively, CertiK raised money at a billion-dollar-plus valuation to pursue the verification of smart contracts, which means the bets we made about how to write smart contracts seem to have leapfrogged the industry.
Yet, none of that nuance appears in the article, and I thought it was very unfair to say that we just bet wrong. It brings you back to where the media is at; they’re never going to be fair to Cardano, and they’re never going to give this ecosystem its due. Every step of the way, we’ve been on the right side of history. This ecosystem stayed away from the Lunas, the Celsius, and the FTXs, while the founders of those organizations were having lovely interviews with certain journalists who shall not be named, who love writing books and getting glowing praise. No one seemed to go after them; quite the opposite, they wrote articles about how these people were going to be the future.
Meanwhile, Cardano was demonized as, at best, a scientific project with no commercial value that would never get anywhere, and at worst, one of the longest-running scams in crypto. Lo and behold, those ventures aren’t here anymore. Did we ever get an apology from the crypto media people who praised them? No, not once. They just pretended like they never said it and moved on.
There was a huge appetite for systems that have a great Layer Two and sidechain view. There’s a great appetite for liquid non-custodial staking and for smart contract verification, of which the design decisions of Cardano, made years ago, put us as one of the best-in-class ecosystems for that, validated by over 165 academic papers. Think about that—165 plus. It’s an amazing amount of work, and there continues to be more every single day, with many more opportunities for us as an ecosystem to leapfrog the competition. Nothing is going to get settled for years to come; we’re in the running on everything from identity to interoperability to scalability and other concerns.
Now, we do have challenges along the way, and if we were given a do-over, there would have been very different tactical and strategic decisions about the rollout of the ecosystem. But for the most part, we’ve always been a top 10 concern. We’ve always been known for having one of the strongest, if not the strongest, communities in the cryptocurrency space, and we’ve always been known for our integrity-first principles approach.
For some reason, the crypto media continues to mislead people and write articles that are not fair or use sensational headlines that have no purpose or place. So, we’ve had to create our own media. We’ve had to create our own sources of information direct to the consumer through YouTube, Twitter Spaces, infographics, and all kinds of things just to break the matrix and get outside of this filter, which seems to be set repeatedly on diminishing our project. I don’t know why; I don’t know what the incentive is. Maybe it’s because venture capitalists don’t own anything in it, and as a result, they don’t profit too much if Cardano grows as an ecosystem.
Meanwhile, over 1,200 Cardano dApps are under construction, more than 100 have launched, and there are eight million assets issued on Cardano. We’ve seen millions of transactions, and the foundation just announced a certification program and an education program. IO continues to do great work, and the community continues to do great work. Wonderful projects like Aiken, TXPipe, Block Frost, and others are out and continue to grow. There’s a lot of great news with SIP 1694, which will harness the power of the community as a whole.
As many of you know, I thought about buying CoinDesk. We had a look at the financials, and I can’t say much about it because I’m under a non-disclosure, but we made a strategic decision to pass. That said, I’m still quite interested in improving the overall quality of media—not just crypto media—because frankly, it’s deplorable. It’s just terrible, and it has to change. There is no incentive for truth, accuracy, or calm reflection on facts; it’s all just sensationalism, rage farming, and division. That’s all they focus on. Everything must be turned into a story about how people don’t like each other.
I’ll never forget the second anniversary of Cardano. Our media director at the time invited some journalists to come with us to Plovdiv, Bulgaria, to plant some trees. We spent hours talking about philosophy, design, engineering, and the vision of where we’d like Cardano to go. The end result of this was the infamous article, "A Soul in Hell: Charles’s War Against Vitalik." I don’t really understand how one could write an article like that, given that the entire point of the trip was to talk about the future of Cardano and had no reference to Ethereum. But that’s what they wanted to write.
This is where we’re at, and it’s not going to change. We’re just going to have to outgrow them all. The reality is that over the next five, ten, or fifteen years, Cardano is going to fade into the backdrop and will be much more defined by the things built on it by you, the ecosystem and community. There are already some amazing projects that you can see every day that are growing rapidly and doing incredible things.
Furthermore, some of the technology of Cardano is really starting to reach maturity to a point where it’s innovating beyond any of the wildest dreams of its authors. Recently, we received good news about Hydra, with preliminary applications reaching mainnet. This means that over the horizon, as we look to the next 12 to 24 months, that tech stack is going to get increasingly more integrated into every single application people build on Cardano where they need that scale. Mithril continues to evolve at a blinding rate, and my hope is to see Mithril-enabled wallets on Cardano on mainnet before the end of the year.
We look to things like the sidechain model of Cardano, which is maturing and evolving thanks to the Midnight Project, World Mobile Project, and others. I think next year will be the best in class for that. In many different directions, whether we talk about recursive SNARKs and zero-knowledge proofs, there are great ideas and solutions. Whether we talk about sidechains, the bridging mechanics for that, or the evolution of the consensus protocol with Ouroboros continuing to grow, we have matured as an ecosystem.
We’re starting to see all of the metrics looking great, whether it be TVL, transaction volume, or the programming paradigm itself really starting to get to that nice maturity. Now, there are several more versions of Plutus that need to come, and there’s a lot more infrastructure that needs to be built. By no means is Cardano a mature ecosystem from the perspective of being easy for everyday developers to use. But let’s be frank about this: very few ecosystems have any semblance of maturity, even Ethereum included, and they continue to be works in progress.
You know, believe that? Then ask yourself, what version of Java was the version that reached perfection and everybody just migrated to it? What version of C# reached perfection and everybody said, "It’s good enough, and we don’t need to make any improvements?" The reality of platform development, tools, and ecosystems is that your work is never done.
However, what defines great ecosystems, platforms, and development kits is when people work together, allowing for emergent value. That’s what we’ve achieved over the last 12 months in particular; so many people have come together within the Cardano development ecosystem, and they are doing very novel and interesting things, writing novel and interesting SIPs, many of which I personally am a huge fan of. For example, SIP-38, this concept of account abstraction, is a pretty good idea. It’ll be really cool to see that in some form in Cardano. There are other SIPs that people have proposed that are really interesting as well.
With SIP 1694, it’s going to unlock the floodgates and enable many of those to get to the next level and receive significant serious development efforts behind them. That is an emergent property; no other ecosystem has it at the scale envisioned by SIP 1694. Again, all of this will be ignored by the crypto media. They’re only going to report on the mistakes we make and the statements we make that seem to be critical of the ecosystem. They will not, under any circumstances, write about the wins.
Thus, it’s incumbent upon us to grow around them, outside of them, and eventually overcome them. And I think we will. So, thank you all for listening. Have a happy Easter, and I always enjoy the food. I hope you do too.
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