Transcription
Up in Gillette, Wyoming. Actually, at the clinic, it's a beautiful clinic. If you're ever in Gillette, drop by the clinic. You'll love it. We actually have a Vivariam coming in. We'll have the only poison dart frogs, I think, in the entire state. Uh, there are no zoos in Wyoming because of weird old laws and history stuff.
Uh, I want to make a quick video before I fly to San Diego to do stem cell stuff from regenerative medicine stuff with Dr. Harmon, uh, to talk a little bit about, uh, where we're at, proposal pipeline, and just some things to remind people.
Uh, so, uh, nine proposals, we're doing XASE for each one. Uh, we're systematically walking through there's website. What's nice is there's kind of a coalition accountable party, uh, for each of these proposals, and we believe in them. We think it's a car. You know, it's kind of silly to say, "Let's build the engine, let's build the transmission," but let's not build the tires. It's like it's a system. If you don't put all the pieces together, it's really hard to have the car go anywhere. And maybe you can find a way to build a car with maybe eight of the nine pieces, but if you start cutting them out, it's a really bad experience overall.
Uh, X is always challenging. You know, I left it for a bit, came back, and we were trying to build an AI avatar. We're still working on it. It's called Project Nyx, and we've made some great progress with it. Challenges: the end-user license agreement forbids me from turning over the complete AI without labeling the account as a bot, and if it's labeled as a bot, then it automatically, uh, downgrades me in the algorithm, so many of the posts you'll never see.
Uh, the other thing is the Iran war broke out, and X is really the only place to get real-time news that's not going through a propaganda filter. Uh, so it's a little challenging because there's stuff in there that I'm trying to figure out how to replicate. Uh, but I've been exploring using, um, Open Claw via my fork of it called Logan, uh, to facilitate some of that. So hopefully it can get off sooner rather than later.
Uh, but, uh, it's not reality. X is filled with a lot of people who bark really, really loud, and that's fine. Where it becomes problematic is when they utilize the platform to attempt to attack volunteers or people they get a small stipend and allege that they're bots sold and paid for to support input-output. That's never okay, and it's damaging to our ability to build effective, positive, happy communities.
You know, the thing is that Midnight is real fun because it's young, it's new, not a lot of drama has happened. And when you go to the Discord and you attend the Nightstream whiteboard sessions and you talk to people, there's a lot of optimism, hope, and positivity. And these ambassadors come from many different walks of life and many different chains. Some come from Solana, some come from Avalanche. We even have some XRP people there. And we leave at the door preconceived notions and, uh, the fights of the past and just have a reset. And one of the most important rules of being there is be nice to each other and no drama.
It's not really fun when certain members of the Cardano community, because of competitive reasons, decide to start attacking and victimizing people who, for the most part, aren't paid anything, or if they're given a small monthly stipend, certainly not enough to move the needle one way or the other. And they do this because they're falling apart. Their commercial progress is not where it needs to be. And they view things that we do as a direct competitor and realize that it's probably a better value proposition in the future. And it's shameful and sad that certain members of the community decide to go down that road.
Governance has been exceedingly hard for Cardano, and it's created derangements and divisions, uh, that really are not only unnecessary, uh, but they're so counterproductive, they make people want to quit Cardano altogether. I'm definitely not a perfect person, and you can make a very, very long list of things that 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 10 years into trying to make this ecosystem grow, thrive, and evolve. And over the last few years, we have become a tremendously collaborative company.
Now, this required a lot of hard work, cultural changes, and actually letting some people go. The people we let go, some of them accepted it, understood it. Others became brutal and bitter adversaries of the company and carried grudges and continue to carry them today. And that was a reality we just had to accept. But we accepted it because the greater good of Cardano as a whole is that if we become collaborative and we bring lots of people in and we work with those people, uh, then they can grow, thrive, and eventually become leaders in their own right. In other words, it is a necessary thing to do to decentralize the ecosystem as a whole and bring new blood, new leadership in, so that Cardano continues to grow and thrive. And more importantly, you get differences of opinion becoming pragmatic compromises that make the protocol stronger overall.
And you see that with Project Blueprint, the no-diversity workshop, the creation of Intersect, the empowerment of Intersect, uh, the growth of the Cardano governance, and our ability to work with people who we disagree with. Um, for example, with the Pentad, where we've had strong grievances, structural grievances, but for the greater good of the ecosystem, we've been able to come together. Some people just simply can't accept this, or it's inconvenient for them to accept these data points, and they'd rather label all the people that work with us to be owned, corrupt, or captured. Again, typically because they are either economically incentivized to say this, or they're just fundamentally immature people that live in a world where everything is black and white, everybody's an adversary.
Cardano cannot succeed if it's just the input-output show, and there's a responsible and systematic way to diversify all things in it. And I think 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. Everywhere you look, there is a commitment in this ecosystem to decentralize and to offer people many options. Now, in some cases, this hurts us because in those options, it's hard to have them all be good. And if you have 10 average things instead of one good thing, then you get judged as average, even though the totality of the work is exceptional. So, 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. So we have a great DevX, and also AI knows where to look to video because that's where all the engineers are at. So there's some prescience in what we do, and my long-term goal is to find a path 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 that it could be better suited there than with us. Many people disagree with that decision or think it will not result in what the community needs. And that's fair, and it's perfectly reasonable to disagree. It's also the fact 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, and 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, but it's also about a philosophy of how do we move things in the right direction so that everything is sustainable, resilient, and decentralized.
The things that we commercialize and work on, we share the wealth. And that's not a statement. That'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, and that was because of the legacy and that's difference and respect to the people that I've become friends with and the ecosystem as a whole and future partner chain projects. We expect similar results. The tokenomics may be different, but we're never going to forget Cardano. Just from time to time, we also ask the community to get some skin in the game for these things. That's what we're doing here.
There's something truly extraordinary about this model. If we can get five or 10 partner chains to be successful on Cardano, as an ADA holder, in addition to ADA for staking rewards, you'll get five to 10 other tokens of great value. There is no other cryptocurrency currently in market from Bitcoin on down that has that kind of value proposition. Also, when people ask what's on Cardano, if there are five or 10 multi-billion dollar projects that are thriving and have a multi-chain appeal, you can just simply list them and just like Steven Spielberg's CV, you just say Jurassic Park and ET, Jaws, and they say, "Oh, yeah, yeah, I watched all those. Yeah, he's a good director." It's some weird obscure French film. I know nothing about him. You have to have brand names to create familiarity and to allow people to make quick judgments about whether something is still relevant, still thriving, and has the right to exist. The success of Midnight and the successors of Midnight, the partner chains that come after it, these are going to be the single biggest marketing vanguard and customer adoption that we have available to us.
And I believe that in 2016, when I wrote "Why Cardano Still Online," you can still Google it. 10 years ago, I wrote that document. Very clearly articulated in it is the fact that Cardano was a multi-layered system: one core layer, Cardano SL, but which security and truth can be, and tokens can be issued, and then computation layers to facilitate blockchain services to the industry as a whole, referred to as Cardano CL at the time. And the paper at night is a realization of that intention from 10 years ago. Not a new thing, not a pivot, not an abandonment, but a realization of a 10-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 10 years ago to write some stuff down and then, as markets change, pivot and basically walk away from a plan and a commitment. 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 is even not about getting the money. It's about an acknowledgment of an appropriate relationship. If we do work, we should be paid for that work. There are some out there on X, because X is not reality, that are even subscribing 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, uh, Hydra framework. What's the core model of that? Should I put a toll in that every time you send a transaction, some of it goes to me? It's open-source software with no commercial model. How would a loan be appropriate for these types of things? Makes no sense. But they say it because they haven't really thought it through, and they're just upset and angry over the fact that ADA used to be $1.10 at the turn of 2024 to 2025, and now it's at 25 cents, and they want someone to blame. We accept that we're going to take the majority of that blame, fair or unfair, largest entity in the ecosystem and the one that's been around the longest. So every time the markets go up, the markets go 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 delegated 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 and what we do and how we get there. We have laid out a vision in consultation with months and months of discussions of people at Intersect, people at Pragma, the Cardano Foundation, Emurgo, and many of the builders in the space about what they're concerned about and trying to figure out how to resolve that. We've also tried to make this vision as economically efficient as possible. The proposals that we've put out over the last nine, uh, over the last few months, these nine proposals are half the price of the treasury draw that Input Output gathered last year. This has resulted in us having to change some things. We've had to let people go at Input Output. We've had to consolidate departments. We've had to restructure things. I've had to say goodbye to some friends that have worked with me and for 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. And 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, for example, announce that they're going to collapse and 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 humanly possible.
For some, that's not, not enough. And they somehow have this unrealistic expectation that everything should be free. For others, they'll recognize deep down inside, 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 real tired of vacuous conversations. We have to stop, and we have to stop attacking each other.
Where I get most enraged and defensive is often not when people attack me. It's when people attack people who don't deserve to be attacked. 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 just them being passionate, voicing their opinions, it's not appropriate. It's wrong. And the people who do this, they're not productive, good members of our community. They will destroy Cardano like a cancer. And no one wants to be in the 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 currently be up 332% on the sovereign wealth fund if, um, we had just simply done something that was common sense. We could have had a debate about it. I'd have even been comfortable having an X-space about it with Cardano whale and fighting for my position and letting him represent his. There was no debate there. There was a recusal of any argumentation and him just simply leaving the ecosystem, but not before automatically voting no on every IO proposal out of the principle of it. 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 of our proposals and let IO go so you can go it alone. 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 the conferences, being there for Cardano on national television, being there for Cardano with world leaders, being there for Cardano in every medium that matters.
I've spent now, as I've said, more than 10 years of my life on this project. I'm not old. I'm not young anymore. And 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 and we fight hard and we want to win, and we have a good plan and strategy, that'll stay. If all this is is just one place for cynical people, toxic people to burn each other down the minute that they don't get their way and to descend into ad hominem, there's no sense in being here.
I'm going on a plane to California soon, and I'm going to sit down and talk about a stem cell program, and I can spend the next 10 years of my life doing that instead of doing it part-time, do it full-time. This paper is sitting on my desk right here, and this paper describes a patient in China who received induced pluripotent stem cells modified. She's 28 years old, already had a liver transplant and pancreas transplant, and had severe type 1 diabetes, and was dying. The stem cell transplant she received not only resolved her diabetes, it completely regenerated her pancreas. She's now like you and me. Most people listening don't have to take insulin anymore. She went from probably going to die in her 40s and a very poor quality of life to living well. Sitting in a clinic that's 70,000 square feet, has 20,000 patients, dozens of providers and scientists, and 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 and fixing the diabetics of America, not to mention the thousands of other diseases.
There's an opportunity cost to have 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, if this is a community 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 just the harsh truth of it. I'm really tired of my intelligence being attacked, my character and integrity being attacked, and a perpetual bad-faith mentality. I'm very tired of my motives being questioned. I really am. There's something called reputation. And after showing up every day for 10 years and fighting hard for you on the good days and on the bad days, and every single bad day, showing up and being there, at some point I should get some form of benefit of the doubt that at least my intentions are genuine.
I appreciate that a lot of people let you down. I feel deeply let down by this administration. We didn't ask for a lot. 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 then with one broad brush say everyone is evil. Everyone is a thief, and everyone's here to screw you. I'm sorry. I just don't have time for it. The people at IO don't have time for it. We can do anything. We choose to do the things that we do. Midnight, we choose to do. I choose to wake up days and genetically engineer plants and make them glow in the dark. 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 and interesting and novel. And as you do them, they create jobs, make people happy, improve the quality of life of people, bring joy to the world, and most importantly, they're hard problems, so they never get boring.
Crypto is a hard problem. There's no doubt about that. But it's become a very toxic one. And it's hard to be in this industry when the mainstream has turned us into priests. Every conversation with non-crypto people is some reminder of a scam, a rug pull, a political event. The name SBF comes up, FTX, Luna, all these other things. And you have to start not from zero, but from -10 and earn your way back to zero and somehow prove 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. And we've been punished time and again as an ecosystem for adhering to those principles.
Other people took huge shortcuts with consensus, and they didn't care if the network restarted or shut down. They just enjoyed the benefits of the TPS. Other people had a very accessible development model, and they didn't care that there's $80 to $100 million of hacks every day. Most recently, the Kelp DAO hack of $290 million. They just reap the benefits of developer adoption. To quote Brenda Nick, "The bad way is the right way. The wrong way is the right way." But yet, we persevered and stuck together, one big family, and said, "You know what? It's okay because in the long term, we're going to be vindicated." Ethereum cannot kill Cardano, nor can Solana or any other ecosystem. The only thing that can kill Cardano is if we lose faith in each other and the mission and we turn on each other. That's the reality of it.
So, we're going to keep going to work. We're going to keep fighting. And I have every belief that when the cards are on the table, you, the ADA holders, will do what's right, and we'll come together. We'll survive another year, and we're gonna find a way horizontally to thrive. We don't have all the answers, but every year we get more of them. And every year we prove ourselves with liquid non-custodial staking and with Bitcoin DeFi extended UTXO. When we turn on our Layer 2 models, the mass throughput we gain from it will eclipse anything the Lightning community or Plasma community ever conceived of or dreamed. And when we look to the partner chains model, it will give us that vital lifeblood of new projects and new entrants to be able to leapfrog where we're at and get back to where we were.
Sorry that it wasn't perfect, and I'm sorry I didn't have the skills to do everything perfectly. Also sorry that I was bad at structuring things in the early days. Had I done that better, we'd be further along. But remember, I was in my mid-20s, and I didn't go to school for this. There is no college program for what we do. So, I just had to do my best with very little and fight hard for it. And that's what I'm doing today. But this time, not just myself, with a lot of really good people. What stands behind our proposals are a lot of logos that represent wonderful companies, wonderful CEOs, wonderful teams who have suffered with us trying to make payroll every two weeks, good markets, bad markets, and they just want to win, too. So, do understand that's where we're at.
I care about all of you. And I want all of you to live in a better world. I really do. The success of Cardano for me, and things like Midnight for me, isn't that we have a token go up and lots of users. It means the people who use these systems care legitimately about living in a world where they're their own bank. They control their own identity, their own data. They have economic agency, and they can never be deplatformed. If we lose that, no matter how much money you have, where you live, life isn't worth living because you're at the end of the day a slave in golden chains. And at any moment, everything can be taken for you, from you, for any reason. I don't want to live in that world. And we're getting closer and closer to it every single day. It's time for choosing. And protocols like Cardano, protocols like Midnight, the things that come after them like Block Frost with Project Haley, their purpose is to liberate us from that dystopian hellscape that we're currently staring straight at. That's why I'm still here instead of exclusively working on the stem cells and the other things. I will forever believe we have a path to get there if we're unified. If we're divided, I don't believe we can.
So, this is a call for unity and a reminder that X is not reality. Half the voices there are bots, and half the other half the people there, they have no incentive and actually beautiful things. They just want to destroy and tear down. So your voice, your vote, and your support, ultimately the leaders you give it to and the leaders you don't give it to, will determine where we go and what we do. It's not my choice, it's your choice. And the fact that you have that choice already sets Cardano apart and makes it special from every other cryptocurrency. Thank you all for listening. Cheers.