Hey, this is Charles Hoskinson broadcasting live from warm, sunny Colorado. Always warm, always sunny, sometimes Colorado. Today is a great day; it is January 29th, 2025. How about that? We survived. We're here, and guess what? We are in the plummet era. How about that? Volatility has fully and finally arrived. I am proud of so many people. It has been such a long journey and an emotional journey over the last ten years of my life. I flew to Japan in February of 2015; that was when we first started talking about Cardano. It's been basically ten years—give it a week or two, and we'll roll over that.
Now, ten years later, in 2025, we are the largest decentralized cryptocurrency government in the world. So many people, so many different ideas, and so many things are happening. It's just an amazing thing when you think about it. First and foremost, congratulations to the brave stake pool operator who mined the block in the plummet: Mr. Barry from Barry Pool. There it is, look at that!
We've been asked, "What's next for Cardano?" Well, we wrote a blog post, and this is the first roadmap instead of the roadmap. Amazing how changing an article changes the meaning so much. A roadmap is the perspective of a firm on where we should go and what we should do. We work very closely with the Product Committee of Intersect, the Technical Steering Committee, and other people. We talked a little bit about where we should go and what we should do moving forward. But you know what? That's a roadmap. It's not the roadmap until who decides? Well, you decide.
You have three big things before you: the Constitution, the budget, and the roadmap. So you have something philosophical. The Constitutional Convention came together; a whole bunch of people had a deep and detailed conversation about what fundamental rights should be for Cardano users. That Constitution was ratified at the convention with 95% support. Guess what? It's not your Constitution yet; you have to decide if you want it to be.
In a very short period of time, that Constitution will go on-chain for a vote, and the plummet fork enables that to happen. We have a fully functional tripartite government, which means we can now vote on new constitutions. That's one of the very first fights. Not too far behind it is the Cardano budget. That's a practical conversation, and a budget will be proposed through Intersect to the community for discussion. The Delegated Stakeholders (DS) will look at it, and I have no doubt other competing budgets will also be proposed. Those budgets will go against each other, and horse trading will happen. The DS and the Constitutional Committee members will figure out how to merge them in some way, and the best one will win. A budget will become the budget, and a constitution will become the Constitution.
Finally, a roadmap. When we look at where we want to go and what we want to do, that proposed roadmap could become the roadmap, or something else could happen. These are three big decisions that will be made over the next 90 to 120 days by your elected representatives, the DS and the Constitutional Committee members. As many of you know, we've been gradually taking a step back from all governance, and now our last official capacity is as interim Constitutional Committee members, which will come to an end this year. That formality will be over, and the entire Constitutional Committee will be rotated out if a proposed constitution becomes the Constitution by elected roles. That's the last milestone.
But we're here. We have a fully functional tripartite government made up of the people, and that government will be able to address the most complicated questions, from protocol parameters to the use of the treasury, which is $1.5 billion worth of ADA, to the Constitution, to the roadmap, and where we go from here. You all have the best government ever built, the newest government ever built for the cryptocurrency space. I'm proud of you. It's pretty remarkable when you think about it.
I'd like to thank all the people who participated over the last two years to get us here. Everyone from Jared Cordon to Sam Leathers, Phil Kant, Duncan Coots. There are so many names within our company and outside of our company, like TS Ben from the Cardano Foundation, and dozens of others in the community. People like Rick McCracken, Andrew Westberg, Lloyd, Adam Rush, Adam Dean—critics and allies alike—all of you made it better. I'm going to forget names; even if I had a list, I couldn't read them all because the reality is this is the product of thousands of people who came together, country after country, place after place.
What wasn't seen are the sleepless nights, the hard work, the 1:00 AM editing of documents, getting ready for the meeting the next day, small fights, large fights, finding consensus, finding peace, translating documents into Korean, Spanish, Japanese, and Chinese. That's pretty cool when you think about it.
With the Edinburgh Decentralization Index, if we were to measure Cardano now, Cardano is, from the EDI, the most decentralized cryptocurrency project in the world, even more so than Bitcoin. We're there. It's pretty remarkable when you think about it. It blows me away. We started as a dream in Japan in February 2015, and ten years later, we are here. We did it as a community, and we're going to make some good decisions.
People ask, "What happens if one of the core entities votes against the budget?" It might happen. Well, guess what? This government isn't very good if it can't survive one of the core entities. What happens if we can't converge on the first vote for the budget, the Constitution, or if we have trouble converging on a roadmap? You know what? People get tired of dissent; they'll figure it out. They'll have workshops, they'll have conventions, and they'll get it done one way or another.
We have good roots, all kinds of good techniques and processes to communicate with each other, with strong institutions like Intersect and Pragma. We have a lot of great training. A lot of people had to grow, evolve, and learn to become more reasonable and understand that they had to learn to listen and talk to each other. We have enough for a minimum viable government. The road ahead is not going to be easy, but I can promise you that the road ahead will be meaningful. Everything we do from here on out will be the product of a considered and deliberate process and the consensus of the government.
Ethereum can't say that. They really can't. Not when the founder says, "I can fire anybody at the foundation who disagrees with me, and I'll decide where we go from here." They say, "Well, they're not in charge." Well, they have all the money; they still have the lion's share of the dev support, and everybody looks to them for leadership. The temptation of centralization is always there because if somebody built it, they're the most qualified person in the beginning to speak for it. The problem is if they stick around too long, they get stale. They start making bad decisions; they miss things.
It wasn't too long ago that Bill Gates was one of the greatest businessmen of his generation, leading Microsoft to a $600 billion valuation at a time when companies barely scratched $10 billion. He was so powerful that he had 95% of the market. They considered him to be the greatest businessman of his era. Fast forward ten years later, he was one of the big contributors to Microsoft missing search, mobile computing, and social networks. Microsoft could have had Google, Facebook, and the iPhone. Uncle Bill got it wrong.
How can you be so brilliant and so bad in the same sentence? It's because time moves on, assumptions move on, changes happen, and just because you founded it doesn't mean you're necessarily the best person to keep running it. The wisest businessmen know when they need to ask for help and when they need to bring a broader group of people in, and when the skill sets they have are no longer relevant for the ecosystem they're in.
I realized that no matter how brilliant I could be, input-output pushes for the other core entities. Cryptocurrencies have to be free; cryptocurrencies have to be decentralized; they have to belong to the people. From the very beginning, in the design of Cardano, the intention always was, the promise always was, that we would get to this day. It was promises made, promises delivered. Cardano is the most decentralized cryptocurrency and will forever remain the most decentralized cryptocurrency.
Every investment we make moving forward, I'm going to push for, and a lot of people in the ecosystem are going to push for, to continue that and to make it better. Whether it be the adoption of Minotaur and multi-resource consensus, so we have more balance in the control of the consensus of the ledger, or more nuanced voting systems like quadratic voting and ways to represent things like one person, one vote instead of just one ADA, one vote. There are a lot of things ahead of us.
As we escape minimum viable governance and move on through the power of innovation and through the wisdom of listening to not just the people in our own ecosystem but watching what the rest of the industry does, we will continue improving, and we will be the strongest cryptocurrency in the world. It's going to take some time, but we're going to get there.
You know what? We're the good guys. We never forgot where we came from. We never got tempted by Wall Street. We never got tempted by all the things that picked off the rest of the gang. We realized that we're descendants of the cypherpunk movement, and we didn't throw them away because they were politically inconvenient or had committed a character flaw. As an ecosystem, we recognize that humans deserve to be free, and this technology today proved that there wasn't a single government in the world that passed a law to make Cardano what Cardano is.
There wasn't a single committee, powerful Fortune 500 companies, or a cabal of billionaires descending upon Davos that said, "This is Cardano, and that's what we're betting on." It was you, the people who came together and made it happen. You, the people who came together, put your time, your effort, your ideas into it. That's where the difference comes.
The difference between a million and ten million is just time, and the difference between ten million and a hundred million is just time too. So we have to keep the faith and keep pushing forward. We're still going to work on Cardano. I have a whole Cardano business unit now that I carved out in Input Output Group. It's got great leadership. I'm involved with it every day, talking to the people every day.
The roadmap we proposed through Intersect and worked with Intersect on is a reflection of what that group feels is the appropriate step forward. Should it be ratified, that group will be fully engaged. Should it not be ratified, we'll see depending upon the roadmap because we might not have the skills to pursue the ones that are. It's your decision of what to do with that.
Regardless of that outcome, I also want to spend my time now building on Cardano, not just building Cardano. Building on Cardano to me means making Lace the best wallet in the world. Building on Cardano to me means making real finance a reality for the two billion to three billion people who are underbanked or unbanked and getting them banked, as we've said so many times. That's John O'Connor's mission too.
Building on Cardano means we need to get that partner chain ecosystem going, get Midnight out this year, and get it in the hands of 135 million people. Building on Cardano means we can bring brand new experiences that have never been seen before in the entire world, like Quantum HOSY, into the fray and change things for the GameFi metaverse and Mean Point World. These are things that we're committed to at Input Output, and we know how to do them.
We have killer teams; we got great CEOs in these ventures, and they're fired up. They're hungry, and they want to win. Their success translates to tons of new use cases, new capabilities, and millions of new users in the Cardano ecosystem as a whole. That's what building on Cardano means. It's my life's work. We're going to keep the faith and keep going.
Bitcoin DeFi is another one I care so much about. I started in the space with Bitcoin, and the reason we left—all of us, Vitalik, myself, and so many others—is because we just couldn't get what we wanted out of Bitcoin. We wanted to build useful things, and Bitcoin for a long time stayed just a store of value and a transaction system.
Well, here's what happened: Bitcoin evolved and embraced Taproot, and people who kept that faith spent a long time building a lot of really interesting things, whether they be channel factories or BitVMs, you name it. They started working on it, and now we're at a point where Bitcoin has a brain. Bitcoin can talk to other cryptocurrencies, and I would like to be the first to truly awaken the sleeping giant that is Bitcoin and allow it to enter the DeFi space. For Bitcoin to have a DeFi mode, click toggle, and you're there.
That's going to be a big mission this year. It's personal for me because it's where I would have started had we had those abilities many years ago. It's the best chance to carry through the mission of the cryptocurrency space, and I frankly do feel that Cardano can have an outsized role in that because much of our technology was derived from ideas from the Bitcoin space, whether it be UTXO or color coins. We started there, even with Ouroboros, the proof-of-stake version of proof-of-work.
It's very different from these BFT-style proof-of-stake systems that Vitalik likes and others. We're a spiritual successor, as ZGO and others, in many ways, of the Bitcoin revolution. It's about time we come home and show all the things we've learned, all the cool things we've built and acquired. I can't wait to be part of that as well.
That's what building on Cardano means to me. A lot of different bets. We've kept the mission of banking the unbanked. We've kept the desire to make Cardano a peninsula instead of an island—still special and magical but connected to a larger whole. We really do want to see Cardano thrive.
The roadmap we presented has the best bet to be truly scalable while preserving the integrity and decentralization of the system and taking advantage of who we are. We just got to keep growing. But you know what? The people I have to convince are the people in charge. Who are those people? They're the DS and the Constitutional Committee.
I can't wait to meet all of you. Some of you I know; some of you I don't. I'll talk to all of you in the coming weeks and months. We'll be having a lot of calls, doing a lot of presentations, making a lot of pitches. At the end of the day, you, the people, get to decide by the click of a button what you want and where you want to go.
I'd like to congratulate all of you on being the first cryptocurrency since Bitcoin to truly escape its founder. Congratulations on that! But unlike Bitcoin, I didn't have to disappear. I got to stay, and that's the privilege of a lifetime. Believe me, I love all of you. I really do. I love what we've created here. I love this environment, I love this culture, and I love where we're going.
I think our best days are absolutely ahead of us. It's just going to take some patience and some time, but you know what? We got it. We're there, and there's plenty of young blood. We're going to get it done.
So, a lot of work to do tomorrow, but today, let's all revel in the fact that we survived yet another hard fork. Cardano continues to be running seven days a week, 24 hours a day, for the last seven going on eight years. Each and every one of us got something special today. For me, I got a long-deserved break. For you, you got the most powerful blockchain government in the world.
But guess what? Tomorrow, we all wake up the same. We're all the same now, and we all get to enjoy the fruits of those labors as we plan out the future. We got a lot of work to do to get this world to a better place, but we're the good guys, so we're going to get it done, and we're going to win. Thank you.
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