And of course, you got Nicholas saying, "Hey, I think we're live." Completely impromptu, unscheduled. I had no idea. I wasn't expecting a response, but man, here we go. You shocked the hell out of me, Charles. Welcome.
Well, it's good to be on. I know governance is one of our favorite topics, and we've been talking about it for a while. I've made four videos on the need for Discord. What's really interesting is there's kind of like parallel conversations going on. There's this straw man conversation where certain people, like Adam Dean or Andrew or Nicholas from the foundation, are attacking a straw man that doesn't exist. It's not anywhere in my proposals or any of these types of things. Then there's the actual thing I'm saying. I figured it'd be good to talk a little bit through an interview and try to explain to people what's actually being proposed, so they have a better understanding of it. I don't want them to get caught up in the straw man because the other stuff is just not factually accurate. It's not materially true. This is not a power grab; there's no attempt to centralize anything. Centralization has absolutely nothing to do with this right now. I'm trying really hard to focus on the actual conversation and the actual debate. I just don't want these people to come in and poison the sentiment when it's a complete lie. There's no centralization occurring here.
For the last two years, you and I have been involved in governance. You're a DREP, and we work with all the DREPs and the constitutional committee. What we've noticed is three things have happened in the ecosystem, and they're very problematic. First, there's an enormous amount of fatigue among all the people participating in governance. Those who are actually doing things, whether it's delivering or voting, are saying the same thing: we're getting burned out. You see people like Pete leaving, Cash was going to leave, and a lot of people are stepping away. Jenny just announced on Cardano over coffee that she's taking a break because it's just really hard. Every time you make a decision, you're criticized for it, you get paid nothing for it, and usually, there's no cover; there's no political party to support you, no strategy to cover you. It's a politics of destruction.
The second thing is we haven't been able to coordinate on a coherent strategy and get people to unify behind it. That's why you have 600 million ADA for the NCL, and everybody wants a pony. We want five independent implementations of Cardano. We want Pragma and Intersect and the CF. We want a summit in Singapore, but then also we want to do this Rare Evo thing where people go around and talk about it. We want to market Cardano, but nobody's going to coordinate on that. We want to fund ventures on Cardano, so we'll fund a VC, but then we also want to fund something else. That's an indication that no one's in charge. There's no strategy, no attempt to consolidate and say what's on the table and what's not.
Third, we lost our funding organizations. Catalyst was an alternative funding organization that created a separate decision structure and outlet for people to regularly get funding. In the absence of that, everybody's bumrushed the treasury and is using it as a piggy bank. The problem is that without good funding organizations, a lot of people started going out of business. Tap Tools went out of business, JPEG Store went out of business, and there's a lot of DeFi that might be about three to six months away from kicking the bucket. So I said, look, we need to take a step back and ask the root cause: why is governance so fatiguing for everybody? The reason is that we're currently doing it as a performative art. We're broadcasting to Twitter, and everybody is peacocking. You see this in modern politics; when Democrats or Republicans do things, they go and yell at people and grandstand. It's like, yeah, but what have you achieved? What have you accomplished? How do we hold you accountable? You're just saying you hate the Republicans or you hate the Democrats, but you're not really doing anything. Governance has become performative because the channels we're broadcasting into for governance are performative channels.
First, they're uncurated, so anything goes. Second, we don't know who's an ADA holder and who isn't. Third, there are bots and hostile communities in there. Fourth, the name of the game is basically to be a critic and tear people down rather than to be accountable to an outcome or production. Everybody is out for themselves. When you have a performative channel, the only people who really like that are narcissists, sociopaths, entertainers, and influencers. Actual introverted people who want to accomplish things and build things, who are subject to nuance and complex thought, always fail. You have a death of expertise; you have a limited set of people, and the people you do get are carnival barkers instead of actual doers inside the system. That's why it's been so hard to fund things that we all agree are necessary, like the sovereign wealth fund or other things that everybody acknowledges we need to grow the ecosystem.
Second, there's no structuring mechanism to actually converge to a yes or no. We did this with the constitutional convention. There was a very deliberate and considered way: 50 countries were involved, 1,800 people participated, and then they came down to Argentina to sign it. It was a complicated thing, but it went through a series of gate conditions to get to a constitution as minimum viable governance. People had to disagree and commit; there was a process to do that. There's no parallel right now for getting to a strategy, getting to growth, or getting a budget for Cardano. So, it's chaos, and everything's problematic there.
My whole idea is to create a place that can be decentralized or centralized. The place doesn't matter, but it should be a bespoke space, like a surgical theater for surgery or a library for reading, whose only purpose is for ADA holders to be part of and have scoped, focused conversations subject to a rigid code of conduct. You're not there to litigate and attack people you don't like. You're not there to ask for transparency and grandstand. You're there to do a job, and we have an area for talking. Right now, we need a consensus on what it means to grow Cardano. Once we do that, we come to a consensus, and that consensus becomes the opinion of the government. Then you can vote for it via the DREPs as an up or down vote. Once you've decided on growth, you can determine who the best people are to facilitate that and how to build a governance structure to execute it. Once you've decided that, those people would work with the structure to create an annual strategy and an annual budget. The budget would be once a year, with two parts: the FO part and the execution part. The execution part is to execute the strategy of Cardano, and the FO is for alternative funding organizations to fund people like the DREPs, like Catalyst, and like a sovereign wealth fund that are specially purposed with different decision logic. This way, the DREPs don't get inundated and bombarded with a thousand funding requests every day, creating permanent enemies every time they vote no on a funding request.
Instead, you have a budget; it's an annual negotiation indexed against the strategy, which is indexed against growth KPIs that you can measure. The people responsible for curating this would be part of the executive function of the system, and there's some democratic process to establish that, decided by participation in this channel. Now, you have to give teeth because we tried to do this for two years. One of the things I said is it has to be mandatory for people to get money, and how do I enforce that? I have no power to enforce it other than becoming a DREP and telling people I'm going to vote no on anything that comes from people who don't participate in the conversation. I think it's a pretty reasonable ask, and that's democratic consent. It's not Charles Hoskinson deciding. Every person who delegates to me follows that opinion because that's my number one thing as a DREP. I have to structure and order things, and we have to get people into one place to talk about it. I can't have people in 38 places talking about it, grandstanding in broadcast channels for their popularity and appeal. We need to actually come in and have a conversation about how we're going to solve the problem. If people don't want to participate, that's fine, but then I've lost confidence in their ability to be good actors in the ecosystem. As a DREP, if I don't have confidence in a person, I have every right to vote no on their proposals because I don't think they're good actors. I'm not telling them what to say in the channel. I'm not telling them what opinions to have. I'm not telling them they have to vote a certain way or support a particular agenda. I'm saying you need to be there, and you need to show up if you expect to receive money from the ecosystem as a whole. If you're unwilling and unable to do that, let's find another person who can do the same job as you but is also willing to contribute.
Otherwise, you have these voluntary committees that no one shows up to, and 1% of people speak for the other 99%. They become agenda-based or company-based, steering everything so their company always wins or their agenda always wins, as opposed to what's good for Cardano. We've had two years to build this channel. The CF has failed. Intersect has failed. Pragma has failed. Twitter has failed. We have yet to construct it. Why? Because there's no teeth behind the channel. There's no consequence for not participating. You can always get your own thing. You just go straight to Twitter and say, "I deserve to be funded. I'm not really sure how this connects to the growth of Cardano or the broader ecosystem. I'm just going to make the case that my thing matters, and anybody who votes against me is evil and the enemy." Then we're going to play politics and popularity behind the scenes, and a small group of gatekeepers with enough voting power get to decide what's up and down. You horse trade with them, and then the thing comes out. There's no transparency there; it's not a public process. People complain about these people having so much power, and it's performative. They don't actually want to solve the issue at all.
I feel like I'm at church. You're preaching, and it's all true. That's been my lived experience. Now you're on the DREP side, so I'd love to hear your lived experience over the last two years and the stuff you've run into.
Well, you know, I feel like Pete said a lot of it himself. Even though I felt bad that he was pulling away, I'm hoping to do some things to get him and others back involved. It has been very difficult in the sense that you do get swarmed across all social media channels, email, and Telegram, with everybody really trying to push you for votes. When you vote, if they don't like the way you voted, they're like, "Oh, I really wish you could take another look because my grandmother's dying." You know what I mean? It's just a lot of that, and then you don't hear from anybody again until the next voting rounds or whatever. You definitely feel like you're being played, manipulated, and used. It feels like somebody picked you up on the side of the street, forced you to do some things, and then kicked you out of the car. That's kind of what it feels like. I understand why some of these people are down and out about it.
Yeah, and that's why I'm trying to change the process. It's not as simple as just creating a Discord. If you create a Discord with no structure and no technology behind it, then you just have another channel for people to perform in and grandstand. You need, it's like a surgical theater. That's why I like using that analogy. Everybody kind of gets that if you're in a surgical theater, there's a purpose there. It's not there to talk about therapy with your ex-wife or custody issues. It's not there to say who you're voting for in office. You're doing surgery. Everything there is connected to an outcome. People come in, we do a job, we finish the job as best we can and as safely as we can, then we get out, we clean up the room, and we do it again. We don't have a heterotopia for that purpose for governance. Right now, we have organizations, but even joining the organization means you're endorsing it and becoming part of it. Some people, for whatever reason, say, "Well, Intersect is bad, and we don't want to join it." If all the conversations we're having there are exclusionary, then how do we have a proper discussion in a broadcast channel? I come up with an idea, and it's unformed. I say, "Let's discuss this idea." Well, if we're on Twitter, you know what happens? People just take the idea and say, "That's what Charles wants to do. It's absolute. He's pushing for it. Anyone who opposes him is wrong. See how evil and bad Charles is."
This Discord debate, I'm saying we need this thing, and all of a sudden, all these people who know better are coming in with knee-jerk reactions saying, "It's a dictatorship. It's ego. It's narcissism. It's centralizing the community. It's a hostile takeover of the community." They haven't even listened to anything we've said or proposed. We haven't put a formal proposal forward; we're brainstorming with the community. This proves the need for governance because if we had a channel like this, it wouldn't be on Twitter, and we wouldn't have a video like this. We would go into that channel and say, "Guys, we need to create something like this for the following reasons, and this is why we're failing." Everybody would say, "Okay, well, here are some properties that matter, and here's what I'm concerned about, and here are the checks and balances we need to have."
Then you have people like Blockj come in and allege, "Oh, is Charles really going to be held by the code of conduct?" Well, of course. And who are the moderators? Why are you asking these questions? The first set should be the business and technical requirements of how we put these things together. How do you do the token gating? What type of technology do we use? What has already been built, like Guild XYZ and these other frameworks in the Ethereum ecosystem? What are the privacy requirements? If we're going to have Chatham House rules, I can't trust people not to leak things. You need to have anonymous conversations. You have verified people talking to each other, but you don't know if it's Jason or Charles; you just know they're verified. When you're having the discussion, you can't attribute it and say this idea came from this person or that person. There's technology to do this, and there's technology for anonymous voting, like Semaphore and Mackie. These technologies can easily be ported to Cardano and Midnight to facilitate these types of things.
Now we're just gathering information, putting all these ideas into one place. I've already written about 14,000 words of pros about various governance techniques and things we need to think about, and we're going to create a working group. We'll run it through the pentad at least, Mergo, and Input Output. I think we can intersect with it, and then we'll open up a beta channel for it and invite a lot of the early DREPs and other people to beta test these ideas. Then we'll hold a hackathon to build the remaining technology. Once it's active, the condition to join is you follow the code of conduct and you have ADA. There will be topics we talk about, and the number one topic to me is growth—getting the right KPIs and defining what that means. Then we have a target, and we can ratify that in the preamble of a new constitution. We say, "Okay, what is the governance structure required to achieve this?" Not, "We need more marketing," or "We need this," or "We need that." What does that even mean? What are we going to market? Laos? Our TPS rate? Hydra? This thing or that thing?
Write that down for you sometime. Ideas. Exactly right. There are a lot of qualified people who have great ideas about these things, and we have absolutely no consensus on it. The first step on growth is to say if you join Cardano, this is our goal, and come back in five years; we want to be here, and this is the consequence of us winning. That becomes a unified message and a unifying message for all the things we do. We can always ask how this budget and strategy achieve these growth metrics, and then we can debate whether that's a good use of funds or not. It solves everything because you don't have these isolated conversations. Should we have a conference in Singapore or not? I don't know; what's the strategy behind it? Should we spend money on Rare Evo, going to different places and representing Cardano? I don't know; what's the strategy behind it? Should we put a bunch of money into Hydra or Midgard or try to invest in some commercial ventures on Cardano? I don't know; what's the strategy behind it? Where does it go? Who's accountable for it? Who executes it? What do I get in five years if I do this? That's why you start with growth because then you have a baseline. When you create a strategy, you're asking a very fundamental question.
The other thing is you use AI to keep you honest. These models are so sophisticated now; you can come in and say, "Okay, first, is it constitutional? Second, what level of confidence do you have in the strategy?" That becomes public record, and everybody can see it. We can invest in getting good infrastructure to tell us that on a pretty regular basis, which massively reduces the cognitive load for participation. When you go to the DREPs, you already have the plan, the strategy, the actors, and the omnibus. It's an up or down vote, and there's negotiation. If they vote no, there's a renegotiation, and then you get to a yes. Once you get to a yes, you have a direction for this whole thing. If you want more decentralization and diversity, put funding organizations inside the budget with different decision structures, like Catalyst, and build better versions of that. Then you have a separate mechanism, curated or uncurated, to distribute funds. But you can't go directly to the DREPs every single time you want money. It doesn't work. The DREPs aren't qualified for the vast majority of the questions they're being asked. They don't have the time, and they don't have the expertise.
It's true. It's very true. I mean, I've talked about this many times and said, myself included, that we're just not qualified to be as deep into the situation as we're requested to be. That's a part of what I think can frustrate people.
Yeah, and that's why you need more governance artifacts. You want to have delegated authority where, for certain topics or areas, you delegate your voice to domain experts. That's what they do in the legislative branch of the United States. They have committees. They can discuss these things; maybe they don't
Where are we at in CoinMarketCap? Where are we in TVL? What about transaction volume and monthly active users? How do we compare in developers to where we were two years ago, three years ago, four years ago? We're not where we need to be. We're not making forward progress. The opinion in the industry is very negative about Cardano, and the ecosystem is losing its people. A lot of people are retiring. This is unhealthy. I'm the kind of guy who calls a spade a spade. I have to be honest with people. Some say, "Oh, shut up. That'll hurt the price of ADA." I'll tell you what will hurt the price of ADA more: ignoring it.
It's like having cancer and saying, "I just don't want to go to the doctor because I don't want that diagnosis." It's not going to make the cancer go away. I still want to make sure that it's fair because I think you're taking a lot of what's happening in terms of sentiment upon yourself. I can see that a lot of times when you're speaking, you feel like the target of a lot of it. But the reality is the market. In a way, you're the scapegoat used to absorb a lot of the frustrations the majority of people feel in the ecosystem, which is ultimately guided by bots, paid narratives, and the issues we've been dealing with since literally day one in 2017.
I remember when it all started then, and it has perpetuated through all these years. Now, because of the way this market cycle ended up, I believe there is a transition out of traditional finance into blockchain rails for everything. A lot of this is controlled by institutional interests that are starting to gather and accumulate. Everybody knows that the fight is on because decisions are being made behind closed doors. They're planting seeds of discontent and discord, no pun intended. It's manipulating some people in really weird ways who don't seem to understand what is actually happening.
I agree that there are changes that should be made and that we need to address these things. But I also believe that even though this governance system is still very much brand new, if we put it into perspective, we're going to have growing pains. We're going to have concerns and questions from people who feel overwhelmed. These are all issues that will be addressed in various ways moving forward. It's not the end of the world. The public discourse associated with this is ultimately being led by negative sentiment, controlled narratives, bots, trolls, and haters.
Bringing all of that together, it's not just one little thing; it's all of the negativity converging in public discourse that's creating the overall crashing mix in the market. I guess all I'm saying is that it frustrates me because I see you taking the brunt of a lot of the negativity. I understand it; I get it on my channel, I get it everywhere. Dan Gardell, we all get it. But it's just one of those things where you know what's happening. I look at it like, "Just brush it off."
There are fair criticisms, you know, things I should be held accountable for. If I said we were going to ship something and we don't, that's fine. But there's also unfair criticism. I believe there's paid opposition. There's a person running around the ecosystem who, after 11 years of never caring about it, suddenly shows up and starts filing FOIA requests on the old Cardano Foundation, going through 400 hours of transcripts of me, looking for a scandal. It's a rehash of the ADA voucher. I don't see how an outside party with no financial interest or knowledge of the ecosystem stumbles in and gets this interested without someone encouraging them to do that.
The ADA voucher scandal is like the standard. You make a heinous accusation, syndicate it in the media, and the only way to respond is with a thorough audit. The audit costs millions of dollars, and when it's done and exonerates you, no one publishes the exoneration. They just move on to the next allegation. You kind of feel like Trump sometimes. The difference is that here, they're relitigating the same thing from 11 years ago, the founding of Cardano. It was a sale into Japan, with no U.S. participation, marketing materials in Japanese, priced in yen, and yen converted to Bitcoin.
The token generating event entity then set up the ecosystem and gave development contracts and donations to the CF, Emergo, and Input Output. This is all known; it's in the audit report. Our compensation was about $36 million worth of Bitcoin and a few million worth of ADA. With that, we've constructed a $6 billion ecosystem, which at its all-time high was worth four times as much as Honda. What I'm being told is that we want unlimited scrutiny over every single distribution of funds as if we're a public company.
We have a direct financial relationship with the people who bought ADA on the secondary market, but the only relationship we had was being part of a deal 11 years ago in Japan, and that has been solved and settled. 99.7% of the people that bought got their ADA, and they got it at a price 100 times what they paid for it. The other 0.3% are entitled to a refund until 2028 because they didn't show up to claim their ADA after 11 years.
The ADA voucher program showcased all of that. But now you have people coming in wanting to look at every single expenditure. Anytime they see something they disagree with, they make a news item out of it. Then they make another news item, and another, as if this is public money. No, this was compensation to build something. Does Cardano run today? Is it decentralized today? The very fact that I have to have these types of debates to encourage people to change governance indicates it's a successfully shipped product that runs at scale and has survived for more than eight years of continuous operation, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.
We were compensated to do that. They say, "Well, the ADA went up and the Bitcoin went up." If you have a contractor who says, "Okay, I'll refurbish your home and give you land for this," and then two years down the road, they discover oil on it, now it's worth $2 million. You don't get to go back to that contractor and say, "Well, it turns out the land was worth $2 million, so can you do an extra $1.9 million worth of work for me?" What matters is the value at the time of the contract and the sale because that was the value at risk.
What if we discovered nuclear waste on the land and it became worthless? I don't get to go back and say, "Well, I know I took the land, but now that it's worthless, you have to give me more money." You don't get to go back to old employers and say that the dollars we were paid 10 years ago are worth less or more now, so let's make the difference. I get what you're saying. You have a deal at the time, you take a risk.
There was a high probability because there are over 50 million tokens that have been issued and 18,000 projects. How many have been in the top 10 for more than eight years? Like XRP, Ethereum, Bitcoin—a handful. What's the probability that ADA was supposed to be there and we would have had this astronomical success versus the probability of failure? If you're an objective contractor looking in, you would say, "I'm going to give you these magic tokens, and they're worth this money." You would look at that and say there's absolute certainty 10 years in the future that these things are going to be worth this kind of money.
Then they ask for financial transparency. At the time of launch, we published our addresses and held voluntarily for three years, never touching anything. The problem is that's not the debate. They create a straw man, go at that, and then say he dumped on you guys. Let's get complete transparency and all these types of things. I don't even know what dumping means. If the company reallocates and sells some staking revenue at $1, is that dumping? What happens when it goes up to $3? Do I get the $2 difference now for the whole thing because that other guy could have sold at $3?
So what if 14 people sold between there and then? Is that a dump? Explain this to me. It's not a reasonable or rational thing, but it becomes a narrative. Nothing in that narrative talks about how we're going to grow ADA or how we're going to change and improve the ecosystem. Nothing in that narrative tells an external person they should build their business on Cardano. It's just about something that happened 11 years ago that we don't like, and we want to continue talking about it even though there's no recourse or remediation for it.
We create a scandal for this thing and want to delay and destroy everything else until that scandal is resolved, and then we move on to the next scandal. Why? Because the channel creates this. But that person has no standing in the Cardano ecosystem or connection to it, so they wouldn't be able to go into a governance channel and have that kind of conversation. But they have it on Twitter because that's the channel for it to be.
So why do we have our governance conversation in the same channel that that negativity is in? It makes no sense. True. But I also believe that, to a large extent, especially for people who have been in this ecosystem for a long time, we're kind of just used to the negativity. In that regard, we're used to the constant engagement bait narratives. I've looked up and used Claude to spider out and follow the trails of authors on different media platforms.
The vast majority of them have been major supporters of other chains, whether it's Ethereum, XRP, or Solana. They've basically made their writing career or social engagement career out of supporting one of those while creating narratives that drive engagement. When you have one of the biggest communities in crypto, it's easy; it's fish in a barrel. Just throw out some negativity, and everybody goes to challenge it and argue about it, but it's just driving up engagement for whatever their latest article is.
I think so many of us are just used to it, so we ignore a lot of it now. We have to solve it. The best way to solve it is to create a bespoke communication channel just for a specific purpose—the surgical theater of governance. Have the conversations there. People say, "Well, I don't like the centralization of Discord." Then propose an alternative platform and show us how we build all the tooling for that. If it's reasonable and meets all the business and technical requirements, we can get it in a short order of time, not a two-year R&D project.
The only reason I mentioned Discord is that all the governance and conversations of most token projects on Ethereum and other places usually have some form of Discord to manage that community. It's easy to drop in mods and do these things. It's not a proposal to perpetually and permanently use that. It's more about getting started because we need to have a conversation, and I don't want to wait a year or two while someone builds something somewhere.
This is why Catalyst never took off the way it needed to. The people running it, myself included, got too addicted to innovation. Instead of using off-the-shelf voting tools and other things, we always wanted to build a better protocol. We built all these protocols, and it took years, but they never ended up being as good as we needed. We were always building the next thing.
We don't want to get stuck in that trap. Start with a minimum viable product that is inclusive and has a strong code of conduct. We can use it to have a real conversation and test it by the growth metrics. Growth metrics have nothing to do with your like or dislike of me. They are objective and measurable. You can look at them 10 years in the future and still say they're relevant.
This depersonalizes the whole conversation and allows us to make forward progress. Once we have that, we can vote for it. If people agree with it, that becomes the only purpose of the Cardano Treasury: to optimize those growth metrics. That's how we're allowed to spend money. It becomes a test, and every person has to make an argument that what they're doing will enhance those metrics.
There are plenty of ways we can do this. You can even use an internal currency in Discord to do this. Give every person a thousand tokens of some governance coin, and then you vote for proposals by sending your tokens to certain proposals. That's how you rank it. The one that comes out number one is first, and then number two is second, and you just keep going until you run out of resources.
This becomes how you decide what's in the omnibus. It's fair because every person got to put their priority. Right now, everybody's saying everything is the first priority. Rank it one to five, one being the highest priority and five being the lowest. You'll see tons of ones and twos and then a five. If everything's a priority, nothing's a priority. Priority means this is the first thing I do.
It's like triage. You can have airway damage and a leg chopped off. They're going to quickly put a tourniquet on your leg but worry about your airway because if you can't breathe, you're dead in a few minutes. Once the tourniquet's on, it's disgusting and bad that you've lost your leg, but you can survive a while. Similarly, when you look at this type of stuff, there has to be a triage, and we have to say what's the highest priority of the ecosystem right now.
For me, it's the loss of our governance class. The process going on for the last two years is killing our ability to have governance. The people participating in governance are disengaged; they don't want to do it anymore. We're losing them, and it's a canary in a coal mine. It's a standing ovation model. You'll have a few, then a few more, and then a lot that just quit and say they don't want to do this anymore. If we lose our governance class, how do we move forward?
What are your thoughts on DREPs getting paid outside of the Treasury? That would be the next thing on an executive function. The problem with DREPs is that anybody can become one, and there's no way to measure real performance. How do you determine a good DREP versus a bad DREP? If you have elected roles, then you could pay for those particular roles. If you add executive functions and new roles and responsibilities into the constitution, you can say if you take certain roles, first you have to get elected to it, but then you're compensated for having that role.
It's much easier to do that, but you need an impeachment process and all these other things. It's not a small overhaul; there's a lot of work to do to get there. But then it's fair because you get reasonable compensation for your time. Is it the best compensation in the world? Probably not. But at least it acknowledges that your time is worth money, and this can become your full-time job if you really want. We can't afford that as an ecosystem, even at these depleted ADA levels.
But we can't just say, "Let's blanket pay DREPs," because there's no difference between a person who creates a DREP script and has AI vote on their behalf, never reads anything, and a person who spends months deeply contemplating, reading every proposal, and calling people. They're both going to be paid the same at the end of the day. That's not a fair compensation system.
I had sent you a link to something earlier that I had just put out for beta review from people. I sent it out to a list of DREPs. It's basically my attempt at creating a solution, even if it's temporary. I don't want to get too deep into it, but ultimately it's the adallobby.com. This empowers DREPs to get involved in a closed circuit environment, kind of a boardroom, where proposal leaders can pay for access to get reviews of their proposals before they're submitted on-chain.
It provides paragraph-by-paragraph feedback with tallies on voting power approving or disapproving sections of the proposal. It's a grand system for facilitating pay for active DREPs while keeping discussions about proposals between DREPs and proposal leaders focused. I'm hoping once everybody's had the chance to go through it, I can get real beta feedback on what everyone likes and doesn't like. Maybe this answers some prayers for some people and can hopefully pull some back in.
In a way, it's similar to your Discord concept for everybody, but this is a little more focused on DREPs who want to be active participants in a boardroom environment with compensation from proposal leaders. That way, anytime someone blows up every DREP on social media, just send them to this website. If you want my attention, if you want to engage me, you do it here because it takes time, and my time is valuable. Hopefully, that starts changing some things for the better.
I applaud any attempt to do this because it creates an aggregating function. You get a group of people in a room, and they start talking to each other. The big issue is that the broadcast channels we're using encourage primadonna syndrome. Everybody has a brand and a reputation, and it's adversarial to everyone else's brand and reputation because it's zero-sum. How much delegation do I have versus this other person?
I'm encouraged to fight everybody and disagree with everyone to assert I'm the smart person or I'm with this power structure. If you get into a different channel where the rules are different, then no one's there to grandstand or broadcast. They're there to actually talk to each other about real problems and how to solve them. We need channels like this. By no means is a governance Discord a panacea that will solve everything; it's the beginning of a conversation.
It's saying, "Okay, let's have a place to start talking about some stuff." There are critical things we need to propose for a new government. Right now, let's create a baseline of those critical things, and the new government then has to make the case that it can solve those things. You don't just build a government and hope for the best. You say, "Why is the government existing?"
The U.S. Constitution was written this way. We had the Articles of Confederation, and nothing was working for anybody. Everybody was really angry with them, so they created the Constitution in response. But there had to be a few years of pain and struggle along the way. Every person who went into the Constitutional Convention had a good idea of those problems because they had felt them and endured them.
Washington, when he was fighting the Revolutionary War, couldn't get people to pay for shoes for his soldiers. He was like, "This is insane. I'm fighting for their independence, and they won't even give me shoes during the winter for my soldiers." There was no coordinating function to get that over the line, and the Articles of Confederation meant nobody had enough power in the structure to make that call.
It's the same situation here. There are a lot of things we all agree we should be doing, but there's no one structure that has the mandate to go and do those things. We
We met with Alpha Growth today, and this is one of their areas of expertise. They work with ecosystems and are collaborating with a pentat on some projects. We're already talking to people and will propose some candidates. The hope is that within two to four weeks, we'll have enough internal work done to open a closed beta. We can then bring in a cohort of DREPs and other participants to discuss it as a larger group. The first step is to get everything operational, and after that, we can roll it out. It will have many features, including security measures, proof of ADA, and AI components.
Participants will sign a code of conduct and receive a participation NFT or something similar, allowing them to engage in a guided, facilitated conversation. I will likely hire neutral facilitators, such as professional negotiators, to help steer the process. This will be our true beta test—the open beta. Within that channel, we should be able to converge on what growth on Cardano means. If we can't do that, then the channel is worthless.
If this works, the next step will be to set up a political party with the goal of creating structures to achieve these metrics. We will register a DREP for it and encourage people to start delegating to it. This creates leverage because I can then say that if you don't join the Discord, there will be consequences, such as voting against your proposals. If I only have 1% delegation, no one cares. But if I have 20-30%, people realize it's unlikely they can get funding without support. Most people will think, "Even though I don't want to, I need to join this to qualify for funding." However, that choice is made by those who delegate to me. By delegating, ADA holders have made a decision. They want this.
Don't tell me that's centralized. They decided because I informed them upfront about my intentions with the political power and the goals of the party. Once we define what growth is, the party's goal will be to improve those metrics through governance changes, executive functions, product development, and other means. The party is open; anyone can join, and other DREPs can aggregate their voting power and consolidate. This coalition can then push for constitutional changes, giving us official positions. Members of the party, alongside competitors, will run for office and get elected. Once elected, they will be accountable for the growth of Cardano, putting together a strategy and budget that must be approved by the legislative branch, subject to constitutional controls by the judicial branch.
Once the budget is approved, we execute it, ensuring transparency through checks and balances in the government. We can see if they achieve what they promised. It seems reasonable to me. If someone has a different idea, now is the time to propose it.
I think it makes total sense. You're basically saying, "Listen, this is my goal. This is my plan. If you agree with me, you can delegate to me and become part of this party." It's not about forcing people to join; it's about presenting what you're doing. If people support it, they increase the party's power, which is rooted in the community's interests. If they don't support it, they can create their own methodology, system, or party to combat it. May the best idea win, just like Democrats versus Republicans.
Why would the party vote for things it's against? If the party has a structure and a way of making decisions, why would it support proposals that don't align with its goals? It wouldn't. If the majority of Cardano holders delegate in a certain way, that reflects the majority's will.
That's why we needed the legislative branch before building a new government branch; we needed a way to gather consent. If I had genesis keys or governance keys and forced this on everyone, there would be no democratic consent. But with a voting system, people must endorse it through a public, transparent on-chain process. That's the reality of it.
I'm upset about the straw man arguments because they know there's a significant difference between these two scenarios. They're attacking an idea that isn't being proposed, and they know it can't be proposed because no one has the power to do what I'm arguing. How can I just show up and force people to do it? What power do I have? I haven't even registered a DREP yet.
It's just spin. They take what you've said, spin it to fit a different narrative that benefits their intent, and it becomes a cycle. You have to keep explaining how they're wrong, which is nonsense. It's a distraction. I would just do it and then talk about what's been done, letting everyone decide from there. It's easier to speculate on an idea than to present concrete options.
There needs to be external participation, which is why I'm broadcasting. Our validation will come from the level of support. If we launch a party and less than 1% of people delegate to it, there's obviously no support for this idea. If we launch and get overwhelming support, like 30-40% of all ADA, there's a strong mandate to pursue this. Political power means people know we can veto alternative ideas, forcing them to negotiate and work with us.
You can't get concessions or compromises without representation. If someone shows up in DC and asks for help with problems in Somalia, they might not get involved because there's little political representation. But if a lobby with significant influence comes in, everyone drops everything to help. It's all about political representation and power.
We need to create a basis of consent for the government and leverage it to make change. I'm broadcasting the broad strokes: create consensus on growth, modify our government, legitimize it through a constitution, get that government elected, and hold it accountable for growth. We aim to get back into the top 10 and beyond.
The mechanism will start with a governance Discord. We'll launch new ideas, port some from Ethereum, and get them working on Cardano as quickly as possible. Anyone holding ADA and willing to sign the code of conduct is welcome to participate. Participation will help establish rules and KPIs. Once we reach consensus, we'll start discussing the government. That's stage two.
Once we reach consensus on that, we'll campaign with the political party for a new constitution. When you delegate to us, that's what you're voting for. You can see who's supporting it and who's against it. If the new constitution is updated and modernized, we'll have new roles that will be elected. Some of those roles will likely be compensated, allowing people to focus on the growth of Cardano full-time.
Those elected will be held accountable and must provide transparency to the DREPs and the community. We can assess performance on both macro and micro levels. Some will do a poor job and be impeached or voted out, while others will excel and continue. This is the only way to have a sustainable, stable ecosystem moving forward. None of this is centralized because only ADA holders decide. They delegate authority to these representatives, and the only criteria to run is holding ADA.
You just have to be a citizen of the nation. Maybe all my fans will get what they've been asking for forever. They all say Crow for president. I'll run for DREP president. I don't know what that governing council needs to look like right now; there are many opinions on that, and it's above my current pay grade. I need a deliberative platform for that discussion.
That's why you need a party and a governance channel to decide this. Now is the time. If you have alternative opinions, form your own parties and governance channels within your community. If you become the dominant factor, everyone will migrate there, and we will have to follow those rules and the code of conduct. Just be aware that if you focus on things that don't matter, people will leave because they'll wonder why we're discussing something from 10 years ago that we can't change.
That's why everyone is frustrated with the US government. Instead of focusing on how to improve healthcare, education, and infrastructure, they dwell on past grievances. No matter the outcome, it won't change the things that influence our lives. In fact, it will make things worse because it diverts attention from what matters.
Congress has never worked to the benefit of its constituents. They're paid an insane amount of money and can vote for their own raises. In contrast, DREPs aren't paid anything at all and work on behalf of the people who give us the voting power to make decisions based on proposals. It's the polar opposite.
Maybe if we all got paid well, we could all be corrupt and just vote against everyone like Congress does.
This has been great, and I appreciate you taking the time to discuss all this. I thought about making another broadcast video, but I figured people were getting tired of that. Let's at least have a conversation.
Of course, you're welcome anytime. I'm always here and available. I'm interested in seeing where this goes and how we can support it. I'm excited about everything to come, including Laos, Midnight, and more. There are many more positives than negatives, Charles. Remember that.
You've worked hard, and we're at a place where sentiment is frustrating. The only thing that needs to change is the price going up a little when the market turns, and everyone will be happy again. There will be less discourse outside of the paid narratives and trolls. Don't let this get you down too much. Things are going to get better, and you've got a lot coming soon, so everyone can relax a bit and just take a break.
Thank you.
Thanks, Jason. I'll talk to you soon.
Cheers.
I don't care. It's quite a rough ride, just like life. But I'm kind of patient because only time will tell. It's going to go up, so you better stay calm and grow your coins. Grow your coins. You got to grow your coins. Grow your coins. Grow your coins. You got to grow your coins. Grow your coins. Grow your coins. You got to grow your coins. Grow your coins.
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