Let's Talk Roadmap and Governance

Opens June 30th 2022 with crypto in a bear market, which he frames as build-a-bear time for getting things done, and lays out Cardano's plan for the rest of the year.

Vasil is underway with the testnet forking to version 1.35.3 around July 3rd running to end of July before mainnet gets it, calling it the most complicated hard fork Cardano has ever done.

Four development tracks run concurrently, the first being Shelley cleanup: partial delegation, proxy keys, peer-to-peer, and Genesis, all quantified known work being finished.

Track two is Goguen, of which Vasil is the first cleanup hard fork adding features, but more remains like better PAB documentation, syntactic sugar, and language optimizations.

Track three is Basho, breaking into side chains and input endorsers; Mithril is under construction on a two-week cadence in sprint seven, and an August paper will explain upgrading OBFT for quorum sampling and bridges.

Side chains, Mithril, and input endorsers plus Hydra are a phenomenal starting point for true scalability: side chains and Mithril are the foundation of interoperability, Hydra is an adapter-accelerator for micro-transactions, and input endorsers remove the consensus bottleneck for high TPS.

Track four is Voltaire; Catalyst is about to surge with a voting center and DReps, and its permissioned side chain needs linking to mainnet, overlapping the Basho agenda.

Protocol governance covers initiating the hard fork combinator, parameter changes, and treasury management, and that Cardano started with a tripartite structure of Emurgo, CF, and IOHK each owning growth, governance, or tech.

Admits the tripartite structure was never perfect, citing the challenging Michael Parsons era at the Cardano Foundation, and that he always wanted a members-based organization to run governance that the Swiss foundation structure did not suit.

After workshops with the CF in 2022 they are moving the bureaucracy from the ephemeral tripartite structure to a merit-based members organization, and that the CF hired Dirk, a Linux Foundation co-founder who worked with Linus Torvalds and deeply understands open source.

Nearly 50 contractors from the CF and IO have worked since February building the org, with a September announcement detailing its governance, technical, growth, and CIP committees that decide roadmap and strategy.

To answer the consent problem, describes a bicameral model where the bureaucracy proposes; after Vasil the next hard fork combinator is likely packaged as an update proposal with a CIP standard.

The proposal goes to ADA holders to vote then the CIP committee signs with update keys, and that a Horizon 2020 paper with the EU explored a fully decentralized update system, making a members org holding m-of-n keys that cannot sign without ADA-holder approval a good halfway house.

Defines a merit-members-based organization as one where you either pay a fee or contribute work or both, letting people in the ecosystem grow into participation.

DReps, SPOs, and dapp developers already embody this, with the ambassador program, over a thousand projects, and three thousand stake pool operators forming overlapping groups invited to join committees.

The hired Dirk ran over 140 Linux Foundation projects from Kubernetes to Node to Hyperledger Fabric and even Ethereum's Besu, bringing organizational wisdom to how Cardano sets up effective committees.

A website for members-org sign-ups launches in July and August, and that he wants more people employed directly by Cardano, noting Sebastien from dcSpark is now a CIP editor funded entirely by the blockchain.

He told Harris at Catalyst he wants three to five more community CIP editors and 10 to 15 full-time engineers paid directly by Cardano as a pillar of Fund 10, funded through Catalyst once bootstrapped.

An enormous amount of learning happened and he would do many things differently as a founder given a do-over, but the seven years of history were necessary to reach this inflection point away from the legacy structure.

Cardano is not controlled by any person or entity and is one of the most decentralized cryptocurrencies, still number one for GitHub commits, with the Vasil push going seamlessly thanks to community collaboration.

Sets decentralization as the project's north star and launches the Edinburgh Decentralization Index at the University of Edinburgh, starting with Bitcoin then Ethereum, so the governance steering committee can set an agenda to improve Cardano's score while balancing resilience, cost, and utility.

Being slow to market with smart contracts meant Cardano missed the DeFi wave and got brutally criticized in 2021, but that caution now looks smart as DeFi markets collapse.

Says Cardano avoided the hacks and design flaws hurting other ecosystems, which have already destroyed Luna and Celsius with more to come, and notes the community-run Rare Bloom event in Colorado could draw one to two thousand people.

A members-based org was the intent five years ago but Chairman Parsons focused on his own needs, and that a resilient ecosystem course-corrected by removing the bad actor so legacy structures can now move over.

Reflects that Cardano went from a 2015 whiteboard idea to a technological leviathan, the moon landing of blockchain, with over a hundred papers and a global movement paying homage to Voltaire and Basho.

Despite hard launches of Shelley and Goguen, builders shipped Cornucopias, WingRiders, MinSwap, MuesliSwap, SundaeSwap, and Liqwid, and that post-Vasil pipelining gives headroom for much more.

Once the foundation is finished he can get to RealFi, his personal mission to bank three billion unbanked people with a financial operating system, though Cardano is an open protocol anyone can use.

Bear markets make everyone more collaborative while bull markets bring poaching, arrogant maximalism, and betrayals, and that through six cycles the one constant is the Cardano community stepping up.