Partnerships

On December 22 2024, wrapping a long year before a Darkness Retreat and hinted South America plans, he responds to his friend Rick McCracken, whose opinion he values.

Reads Rick's tweet asking why, if Charles, Tamara Haasen, and Fred cannot build a lasting relationship between IOHK and the Cardano Foundation inside the ecosystem, anyone should expect them to partner outside it.

Says this could have been a private call but Rick made it public, and explains the three-year fight is a fundamental philosophical difference: IO believes the Foundation should be community-led, which it has publicly said it will never be.

The deeper issue is 600 million dollars of the community's money that he believes was not appropriately spent and sits in an organization the community cannot control, calling the inference about external partnerships absurd.

Some fights are worth having because that war chest is controlled by people unaccountable to the community, with no recourse to fire anyone if they make bad decisions.

Asks why call it a community organization when the community has no say, noting the Foundation now plans to vote against the budget and built its own Pragma instead of getting Circle, CNT liquidity, or Token2049 sponsorships.

Lists the Polkadot, Algorand, and Hedera Hashgraph deals coming in 2025, exchange relationships, and Midnight's 95 partnerships already in progress, asking whether any of it is blocked by the IO-Foundation dispute.

Says if a 600 million dollar fight is not worth having, nothing is, and tells Rick he was not at the Constitutional Convention to see the Foundation react with anger when it passed, rushing the stage and pushing a tweet about not supporting it.

Only after public controversy did the Foundation claim it always meant to support the constitution, and praises the frustration of uncompensated workshop runners who went to Buenos Aires and Nairobi to make it work.

It is tiring after three years and that Rick, as a Guardian of Cardano, saw it firsthand, questioning why the closed CF matter now becomes a claim that the ecosystem cannot make partnerships.

Asks why stay in an abusive relationship where people are nice to your face but plot behind your back, and invites people to ask rank-and-file IO staff like Jar, Tamara, Joel Telpner, Michael Madoff, and Daniela who lived it.

Healthy relationships require throwing away unhealthy ones, that the Foundation is now a lost cause he has moved on from, and he only hopes it does not interfere with the government turning on.

The ecosystem has never had better partnership opportunities, with great tech, a real shot at being Bitcoin's DeFi layer, and a presence at Bitcoin 2025, Token2049, Blockchain Paris, Consensus 2025, and a fast-growing multi-chain RareEvo.

Praises a growing meme coin ecosystem including Snek and Hosky, a strong DeFi ecosystem gaining TVL, good developer experience with Aiken and Plutus, and Plutus V4 improving on the ZK-enabling V3.

Midgard, Gummiworm, and zkFold are entering the innovation process to be hyper-accelerated, and cites meetings with Microsoft Azure's Confidential Computing Consortium, real-USD players, Flare, MultiverseX, and Hedera Hashgraph.

Asks whether all those partners are really refusing because the Foundation and IO disagree, saying 2025 must be a new year free of pettiness, since there is no team Hoskinson or team Foundation, only philosophical disagreements.

With Intersect, Pragma, and an on-chain government and treasury, IO is just one company with its own trajectory, and it is self-destructive to claim two entities disagreeing means the whole project can do nothing.

Compares it to claiming America can do nothing because Democrats and Republicans disagree, arguing getting along is not a prerequisite for progress since the hard fork is coming and decisions must be made.

The duty of constitutional committee members is to spotlight on-chain governance, and welcomes anyone filing a resolution of discontent against IO and CF to prove the on-chain system is above everyone.

Builders there are no teams and they need not choose him or Fred, promising that if they build he will fight to get them treasury funding, get exchanges to list CNTs, and route his partnerships to them.

He does not care if a builder is friends with the Foundation, left Avalanche, or was a Solana meme coiner, only whether they use Cardano, build something open-source and real, and grow the ecosystem rather than a shameless cash grab.

Cites Endmaker and Patrick as the model, who have good relationships with both the Foundation and IO, voted no on the constitution yet remain friends and delegates, because they create real value for the ecosystem.

He will go to the mats against anyone voting no on the 2025 budget, which matters less for core entities charging cost and more for starving builders, since the Foundation called grants ineffective while sitting on community-controlled funds.

The Foundation entered Catalyst to prove low participation and used 180 million ADA to disrupt it, and asks who helps builders reach the next level if not Catalyst, the budget, grants, or venture capital.

The budget must cover builders' annual costs and signal the ecosystem cares, then be invested in liquidity and infrastructure, noting his frustration when a project's website lists Bitcoin, Ethereum, Avalanche, Solana, and Sui logos but omits Cardano or supports only ADA, not CNTs.

Integrations cost money and effort that other ecosystems paid but Cardano did not, and that when he asked the Foundation to dollar-match necessary custodian and wallet integrations for CNTs and Midnight, the answer was always no.

Argues community oversight would change the culture because the highest-visibility people are the builders, like Patrick, who were rejected 15 times raising capital and know exactly where to deploy funds and whom to partner with.

Defends Intersect's bureaucracy as the cost of backfilling years of governance in under a year and bringing a multi-million-person ecosystem together for the first time, where long-silent people vent complaints that slow things down.

Compares it to marriage counseling where the first session is not the best and progress is just letting people vent, after which the ecosystem can agree on basic principles about parameters, the roadmap, and hard forks.

People who hate everything about Cardano should leave rather than stay to complain, like someone bad-mouthing Colorado without moving, and that once the toxic crust departs the productive people remain and bureaucracy fades.

As the longest-serving figure he is imparting wisdom, and his 2025 roadmap needs no permission to build a Bitcoin bridge or launch Midnight, just as builders need no permission to launch MinSwap, SundaeSwap, or Axo.

The hard fork and deploying the budget do need ecosystem permission, and it is paradoxical that people want the Foundation dispute kept private while the budget, hard fork, and roadmap are public, with more dirty laundry coming.

The ability to disagree without breaking up is the strongest answer to why Cardano, proven by listings on 200-plus exchanges, and that unlike Luna and FTX, tested ecosystems learn to lose and show up the next day to win.

Praises XRP's resilience after being excluded, delisted, and sued, calling David Schwartz brilliant and passionate, and says Cardano shares that resilience as does Bitcoin, which early on everyone assumed was illegal drug money.

Traces Bitcoin's arc from worthless Ponzi to 100,000-dollar asset governments consider buying, noting even now Peter Schiff and regulators doubt it, and says greatness comes from resilience after being declared dead 400 times.

The audacity of Cardano is to declare with conviction it will one day run the world without yet knowing how, a certainty grounded in integrity and knowing when to fight and refusing special privileges for any group just because token go up.

Concedes that critics of CIP 1694 had a moral point that one-token-one-vote is unfair, and calls for a balanced system with new voting mechanisms as part of the 2025 budget.

The ecosystem needs quadratic voting and preference ordering where they fit, multi-resource consensus tying votes to more than tokens, and decentralized identity that proves you are a real human without doxxing for one-person-one-vote.

Anyone who declines to partner with a community that never gives up will regret it, like doubting Nvidia or Apple, and that in 2024 Cardano is stronger than ever, having brought many nations' flags to Buenos Aires and aiming for 190.

2025 brings the hard fork, budget, and on-chain constitution, plus the first polyglot ecosystem requiring a Pragma and Intersect working group on formal specs and test suites and hard conversations about relaxing node rigor.

Praises innovations like TxPipe's UTXO RPC for fetching data as a standard to support across all nodes, and says he will spend a million dollars of his own money to finally get all the builders in one place.

He could spend a million dollars at the presidential inauguration with the vice president, Jeff Bezos, and Mark Zuckerberg for photos, or instead bring the whole Cardano ecosystem together at RareEvo to hear what builders need.

He follows his heart over industry advice, which is why Cardano survives, and answers someone asking him to explain the cult: they do the right thing, which is why people love and hate them.

Closes that doing the right thing means uncomfortable conversations and calling out even friends without losing the love, and wishes everyone happy holidays ahead of a wild 2025 of partnerships, chaos, and announcements.