Hello everyone, today is February 4th, 2025. I'm making a video that a bunch of people are going to watch, especially people in Wyoming. We know who you are. So, let’s talk a little bit about product requirement documents and a particular video. Hopefully, you guys can see it and hear it. I’m going to go ahead and share my screen.
Cardano has not yet deployed a solution that meets the specific criteria of freezing and seizing solutions set forth by J. I’ll include a link there for that particular tweet, which comes from a two-hour session. Some people are tweeting about this, saying, "Oh, you see? Mr. Paulo was right." Well, all things considered, there are lies of omission. The standard for this has been proposed since January 19th, 2023. That’s the standard for programmable tokens, and all it really requires is implementation. The implementation for this took about two weeks, which is what was demonstrated at the University of Wyoming.
There’s a very natural question to ask: why, in November of 2024, didn’t we have the smart contract ready to go? The people who are involved in this who are not blockchain-native, I’ll forgive them for not understanding. But for people who come from our industry, shame on them for how they’ve handled this entire process.
First and foremost, you have ledgers that either have fixed functions, meaning that everything they can do is basically built into the ledger. Then you have a gray area of pseudo-fixed functions, such as XRP and NXT, which were very popular from about 2013 to 2015. Finally, you have fully programmable assets like Ethereum and Cardano. Every time you issue an asset on Ethereum, you are not issuing an asset; you have an ERC20 smart contract. If there’s something that Ethereum does not support, you don’t say it does not support it; you say, "Well, I have to write the contract to meet that specification." You can do the same for Cardano.
When you look at things like SIP 113 and others, there are other standards as well that specify ideas on how to implement real-world asset support on the system. So then the question is, how do we know how to satisfy your criteria for what you want to do? For every product, we write what’s called a PRD. Let’s look at that together.
A product requirements document is an artifact used in the product development process to communicate what capabilities must be included in a product release to the development and testing teams. It contains a collection of objectives and goals, features, user experience flows, design notes, system and operational environments, assumptions, constraints, and dependencies.
What we were told for a really long time by many people involved in this process was that it would be an open process, and we would know ahead of time what the product requirements would be. We had standards, but we had no reason to implement a smart contract in the system that has freezing and seizing. You saw with the demo at the University of Wyoming that it only took about two weeks to do that. If we were told ahead of time that this was going to be a kill condition, a hardline product requirement, a must-have, was anybody informed? We could have implemented that very simply.
We were told that a PRD would be published, that it would be an open document, and everyone would be able to see it. There would be a period of time for us to read it and do a demo to demonstrate the capabilities of Cardano. It would be open for everybody to demonstrate those capabilities to then qualify against a PRD. Because how can you know what freezing and seizing actually means? Does "freeze and seize" mean the government freezes? Does it mean a third party seizes? Does it mean that the seizing is done by private industry? Who is the freezing and seizing agent, and under what circumstances can freezing and seizing happen?
Does it mean it’s like Circle freezing and seizing? Does it mean like a central bank’s freezing and seizing? You have to define that as a product requirement in your PRD. So how can you say, if you’re replying in a legally admissible document, that you support a feature when it’s not even clear what that feature means? It’s beholden to the person asking to write in a product requirements document what is required. It’s up to that person to say, "This is what freezing and seizing means to me."
This type of actor, under these types of circumstances, can click a button, and this is what the button looks like, and this is how they click it. This is the infrastructure they run on, and within this period of time, it should be frozen. We should be able to seize under these conditions. Where does it go? Does it go back to the person freezing it? Does it go to a third party?
Saying "freeze and seize" is like saying the vehicle must have an engine. Okay, what type of engine? A motorcycle engine? A go-kart engine? A semi engine? What are you doing with the vehicle? Is the vehicle carrying large cargo? Is it an 18-wheeler? Is it a tractor? Is it just personal transport? What’s the fuel efficiency? What’s the maintenance cycle? Now you’re getting into the product requirements document.
So when you’re told, "Well, it’s going to be public," and then once we know that we have standards and it’s a smart contract system, which they all know, then you can write a smart contract to demonstrate that you satisfy those criteria. But instead, here’s what they did: they hid the PRD. They didn’t say what was going to be kill criteria or not, and then they went ahead and decided to qualify people themselves. After the fact, they said, "You have less than five days to respond. Do you have this capability that we’ve just disqualified you for?"
We said, "Well, we’d have to spin up an engineering team. We’d have to get people to look at it. We’d have to even understand what you want. Can we do a demo?" No, there’s no time. There’s no window of time. There’s no appeals process. You have no opportunity. We’re not going to even discuss it. And that’s a fair process? Chris, to quote you in the media, that’s a fair process?
Then you’re going to read a letter because we have to reply. Yes, by the strict letter of the law, by this process, we didn’t have a capability. But in two weeks' time, we could. So you’re going to look at the lawmakers in the state of Wyoming with a straight face and say it’s okay to disqualify vendors by hiding your product requirements document and not letting them know ahead of time what is a requirement and what’s not a requirement? By assessing yourself what’s real and what’s not real, and what capability systems have, by implying that Cardano doesn’t have a capability and can’t have a capability within the time you’re launching?
Is it launched yet? Have you shipped out RFPs yet? We have this capability now, today, because now we know what the criteria is. Now we know you didn’t tell us beforehand, but now we know because you judged us on it. Unless you’re saying the University of Wyoming is a liar, which is what you said in your tweet, we have on-chain today in a smart contract freezing and seizing. If you had told us beforehand, a team would have spun up, and we would have implemented the standard right here, and it would have been done.
Maybe, just maybe, that’s not a feature you advertise front and center on every website in cryptocurrency. And you damn well know that. Where’s the native freezing and seizing capabilities of Ethereum? It doesn’t have them. It’s a smart contract. Where’s the native freezing and seizing capabilities of the other six that you selected? That’s out of Stellar, which, by the way, they inherited from XRP, which you disqualified. You didn’t include it.
So where was the publicly accessible PRD document so we could all look at it and understand if this is something we could even bid on or not? Did you publish it beforehand? Did you give 30 days of public review, 60 days of public review, 90 days of public review? No, you decided it in a subcommittee meeting not open to the public, then decided to be judge, jury, and executioner. And lo and behold, the technology from the company that you used to work at qualifies, and everybody else’s doesn’t seem to, including people who have this capability natively, like Alaran, for example, and Hedera Hashgraph, for example, and XRP for example. And you say it’s a fair process.
Then what you do is read a letter from my Chief Operating Officer saying, "Oh, they admitted to it themselves; they didn’t have this capability." Of course, we’ve given five days’ notice. A smart contract is not yet deployed. But what you were implying to the lawmakers in a dishonest way was that for a long window of time, Cardano will not have this capability, and thus they’re not qualified for the first round.
What you omitted is you didn’t tell anybody. You didn’t tell ICP. You didn’t tell XRP. You didn’t tell anybody from the Bitcoin ecosystem. You kept it private. You kept it inside the guts. That’s what you did. I have seen a lot of things in my life, but this one just takes the cake. It absolutely takes the cake. You have no clue what you’re doing. No clue. You will fail, and you’ll be your smug little smile. I saw you attend the University of Wyoming event, just sitting in the back smirking the entire time, texting your friends.
But you’re going to get murdered by the stablecoin industry. Tether made $13 billion last year. You have a $5.8 million budget. Circle made basically the same. And you’re just going to walk in and compete? What’s the USP? Are you paying a yield? No. What ecosystems are you deployed on? The ones that need it, that actually could give you stablecoin liquidity? No, the ones that don’t need it, the ones your old boss worked at.
Every time you want a modification, you’ve got to go to lawmakers. It’s going to get more and more difficult. At the end of the day, you’re sitting on a CBDC in Wyoming, and the people are going to know about that because freezing and seizing, on a system like Ethereum with no native privacy, means you’re controlling a product that the government has a panopticon-like transparency on every single thing people do. All those residency requirements and KYC requirements for users of Wyoming stablecoin—you are using a CBDC. That’s what your executive directors created for you.
You don’t like it? Well, they can seize your assets. They made that very clear that that’s a hardline requirement. So if you hold Wyoming stablecoin, know that everything you buy is monitored and tracked. At any given time, civil asset forfeiture can just seize it. Suspicious transaction? Prove me wrong. Where’s the PRD? Under what circumstances are you going to use this freezing and seizing capability? What’s the oversight mechanism? Who’s in charge of that?
Seems to me like that’s going to be the federal government coming in, and somehow people are going to say, "You know what? That’s what I want to sign up for. I’m going to go mint a lot of that." I can trust that with their $5.8 million that’s been allocated. We’re all going to just get great partnerships in this entire thing. It’s just going to work beautifully. It’s a waste of taxpayer money, which is why the University of Wyoming, on January 30th, wrote a report saying it’s more likely than not going to be a loser. It’s going to lose money out of the treasury. As the code is written by people in Singapore and people abroad, people in New York and California, if they even bid on this thing, my God, only 5.
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