Closing Things Off

On December 19 2024, six days from Christmas, he says 2024 turned governance on paper into governance reality, and December's deep governance conversations flowed out of the Constitutional Convention.

Twitter misses nuance and cites Rick McCracken's poll on drama, insisting there is no drama on his side, just information about a fight that started in 2021 and was deferred until governance.

Reiterates that saying the Swiss government replaced the Cardano Foundation board is factually accurate, recounting how founder Michael Parsons moved it from the Isle of Man Digital Asset Foundation to Switzerland before doing things that made people uncomfortable.

After the Guardians of Cardano pressured Parsons out, an interim board of two Swiss members plus Tamara Haasen, Nico, and Mani found Switzerland unfit, since the Swiss foundation structure Luca Müller of MME Partners devised for the Ethereum Foundation in 2014 was never meant for crypto.

The structure, regulated by ESA and built for a founder's art collection, was never members-based, and regulators never caught up, unlike Abu Dhabi and Wyoming which wrote DLT foundation laws, so they planned to move the entity and restart it.

The board's minority tried to liquidate the majority, a lawsuit followed, the Federal Court ruled for the majority, and ESA's appointed administrator Daniel Lao told the board to appoint a compromise board or face receivership, producing the 2021 board.

Argues that amounts to the Swiss government appointing the board, since the court-winning majority wanted to move jurisdiction and restart as a members-based organization, which Intersect later prototyped but the administrator's compromise board prevented.

It is a fight now because it was pointless in 2021 and because the Foundation, aligned on the Voltaire transition, led a neutral-org effort at Westminster Colorado that hired Dirk and the Linux Foundation but wanted businesses, not the ADA token, in charge and barred his participation.

IO and Emurgo then built Intersect over a year, but the Foundation demanded an eight-figure sum, refused to match IO's contribution or even the mid-six-figure University of Wyoming amount, and quietly built Pragma while negotiating.

He is on good terms with Pragma members Blink Labs, TxPipe, and dcSpark, and met TxPipe's Santiago in Argentina to set up an interoperability working group on formal specs and a test suite, with no adversarial behavior.

He was refused membership in Pragma despite contributing to Aiken and Dolos, calling it the No Homers Club, but stresses the real issue is not their independence, it is the lack of oversight, which is bad governance since the Foundation was meant to be a community asset.

A board should have an escape mechanism to liquidate if it acts egregiously, but the Foundation's structure makes it impossible to elect or fire a board member even though it controls hundreds of millions of dollars.

Complaints about Circle not happening or weak liquidity support are really complaints about having no say, and that on-chain governance is now, so the community learns this as the Foundation becomes an active governance participant.

The Foundation is in Catalyst, has DReps, and will vote on the constitution and budget, and that his three years of dealing with it were unpleasant, agreeable to his face while strange things happened behind the back, like its own constitution a week early.

IO will step back and focus on things needing no permission, like a call with the Flare CEO, Bitcoin working with Cardano for a demo at Bitcoin 2025 in May, and Midnight, the biggest economic event in Cardano's history, airdropping to over 100 million people via its Minotaur-based consensus.

The on-chain budget is where permission is needed, and while it does not matter to him personally, it hugely affects loyal builders who work 80-hour weeks unpaid without fair venture capital, grants, or Catalyst funding.

The Foundation tweeted budget concerns live at the event and told Lloyd and Adam it might not support it, and he fears a no vote on a budget opening over 100 million dollars for loyal builders like TxPipe, utxos, and TapTools.

A community-overseen board could be checked, but the Foundation is like the Supreme Court appointed for life, except it picks its own successors with no requirement that they hold ADA or have built anything on Cardano, and cannot be vetoed.

Depersonalizing it as a governance issue, he says Voltaire has two tasks left, ratifying the community constitution on-chain and starting an annual budget that fairly represents builders and the infrastructure people behind libraries, wallets, and explorers.

Catalyst's feast-or-famine cannot replace an annual budget, and the on-chain treasury should not sit like Smaug on a pile of gold in a competitive industry that must spend to grow, while acknowledging the Foundation does good things and its staff are good people.

He does not blame ESA, a regulator used to art collections and out of its depth with crypto, and that the plan to move the Foundation to a regulator willing to let token holders have a say was stopped, so his job now is simply to inform.

He will keep building on Cardano, which has never been healthier, still top ten with one of the most loyal communities in crypto rivaled only by Bitcoin, despite a dysfunctional foundation and chronic underfunding.

He has the luxury of honesty even though it makes him look adversarial and feeds a PR narrative that he cannot work with people, but he will keep beating the drum that a self-perpetuating unaccountable board is an original sin until corrected.

The Swiss lie by omission, and asks what stops the Foundation from granting its funds over time to a members-based Pragma for community control, arguing if ESA blocks it they concede the jurisdiction prevents good governance.

Even a perfect board cannot guarantee its successors, and the Swiss regulator would default to legacy financial rules, noting FINMA thinks more about this than ESA but has no say, like the CFTC regulating pharmaceuticals.

His role now is growing the ecosystem, and that Midnight, beyond the glacier drop, is an asset issued on Cardano rather than ADA, so it shares every builder's lived experience with exchanges, custodians, and wallet support.

He will spend over 2 million dollars of his own money in 2025 on integrations with custodians, wallets, and platforms rather than asking the treasury, doing the same for conferences because it helps the ecosystem.

Good governance means being able to make a video like this without fear and treating the community as equals rather than children, since every ADA holder's voice matters as much as his.

Suggests the community take care of loyal builders through the 2025 budget so they stop worrying about rent, after which the collective can reset relationships with a16z, the VC class, and the media despite justified bitterness.

Cites the Wyoming stablecoin commission where an executive director told lawmakers Cardano is centralized and lacks freeze-and-seize, though Unbox and others have it natively, then picked his own ecosystem and omitted Bitcoin, XRP, and Cardano.

Legacy finance lets banks make the rules and now big crypto players with network effects do the same, but the answer is not bitterness, it is winning through fair competition by shipping Ouroboros Leios, Midgard, and Gummiworm.

Cardano will connect to the excluded XRP and Bitcoin communities as their DeFi layer for mutual benefit, and the summed market caps dwarf the pretenders, a fight winnable through on-chain government, DReps, and committed delegates.

As founder he made mistakes in the design and staffing of institutions that cannot always be corrected, and if given a do-over the roadmap and structure would differ, wisdom now reflected in Midnight's foundation structure and CIP 1694.

One-token-one-vote is unsustainable long term but a necessary starting point, and internal conversations are underway on more nuanced governance that minimum viable governance is designed to grow into.

Social media he has said his piece and there is no benefit to attacking Foundation members, who rarely attack back publicly but do privately, and calls this the reset now that the community is informed.

Urges the community to participate as the January hard fork turns DReps on, join Intersect, and vote, since a yes or no on the budget matters less than participation now that everyone is armed with the history.

Calls it his last video on the topic and as a courtesy will not answer more media questions that could be used to paint Cardano as dysfunctional, arguing Cardano is the most functional because it alone discusses dramatic things in public.

Other foundations hide things while Cardano's decisions are public, and the community should not miss the opportunity of a large treasury and strong capabilities, with the DReps deciding how hard to push the accelerator.

He thinks the ecosystem should go all in as Intersect's budget proposal will suggest, and regardless IO will finish core protocol Voltaire work, ship Midnight, build Lace, and prioritize Bitcoin interoperability.

IO is inviting Midgard, Gummiworm, SundaeSwap, and zkFold into its innovation group for free to accelerate their software and business readiness, launching the thousand ships that will build a rival ecosystem.