Marketing and Adoption

Opens May 7th 2020 late at night from Colorado with new Hunter Douglas blinds, prompted by a Telegram user who kept asking what the project will do about marketing and adoption.

The majority who ask only want the token price to go up, and there is nothing he or IOHK will do for them since they are engineers and scientists whose job is building great technology.

The minority genuinely wonder why these systems matter versus a database, putting the burden on the industry to show unique socially beneficial value, not money laundering or evading capital controls.

Says if systems gain adoption the governing tokens naturally appreciate by supply and demand as a happy after-effect, not the intent, like a beautiful park drawing crowds and a well-placed hot dog stand.

The philosophical core of the industry is brokering trust among people who do not trust each other, with the covid crisis the clearest example where failing to cooperate means people die.

Nation-state divides like China versus the world, a fracturing EU, and Sweden not locking down disrupt PPE supply chains and research, and existential risks like AI and bioengineered diseases need regulation without a bureaucratic Leviathan that leads to social credit.

US governors face a no-win open-or-not choice blamed for every death, showing the need for direct referenda no established democracy can run, while voting legitimacy is at an all-time low with hackable machines and lost paper ballots.

Even mailing 1200 dollar stimulus checks was hard, with bills proposing a blockchain-based digital dollar from the Federal Reserve, so actors either entrust a centralized oligarchy to broker trust or use the industry's native technology.

More Fortune 500 companies build blockchain systems yearly, mostly federated but also permissionless, like Mercedes-Benz issuing securities on Ethereum and Walmart mandating Hyperledger Fabric across its supply chain.

Hundreds of pilots run from academic credential verification to voter registration, but he is most excited about agricultural technology since the UN estimates 260 million people falling into acute starvation, where even 5 percent dying is twice the Holocaust from sheer inefficiency.

Gives fertilizer vouchers to African farmers as an example, paired with education, crop rotation, irrigation, and shared mechanization to move from subsistence to real income.

The same federated tools that distribute vouchers can build an identity system giving economic agency to millions of farmers.

Identity enables reputation systems, micro-marketplaces, better price discovery, and collective crop decisions negotiated without any central authority or government participation.

Fertilizer vouchers with high repayment could yield 15 to 25 percent returns, tranched into sovereign-guaranteed assets with low default risk like the FDIC, so in a negative-rate era greed would pour billions into microcredit, the largest wealth transfer from developed to developing world, investment not charity.

Globalization forces policymakers to change, since Starbucks buying only Fair Trade sustainable coffee means farmers who cannot prove it lose access to the largest buyers and get less money.

Only 2 percent of Ethiopia's smallholder farmers have cell phones, so the poorest must upgrade fastest yet are least able to adopt legacy systems, which is the industry's greatest opportunity.

He ignores beating Tezos or Ethereum and their 25 billion dollar caps from rich Californians, playing a different game for the have-nots by targeting the three billion unbanked, with company staff in Africa for years, an office in Addis Ababa, and a director of African operations across two dozen countries.

The company trained African developers and he may open a game studio in Rwanda, since Ethiopia has 70 percent under 30 and internet-enabled, inspiring locals to solve local problems via public-private partnerships, grants, and the Treasury.

Recalls George Peabody having to do business from England amid US skepticism, only for the US to become the most powerful economy 50 years later, since the powerful today may not be powerful tomorrow.

Predicts a pan-African currency within 30 years like the euro, likely the first pan-currency crypto that could live on Cardano, giving a TCP/IP-scale network effect for over a billion people plus new DeFi securities, stock markets, and insurance.

Calls it the work of a lifetime over decades with regressions from coups, collapsing economies, and tyranny, setbacks to tolerate like those who saw the promise of 19th-century America and reaped the windfall.

Adoption will not come from a marketing firm, a video, a press release, or the Joe Rogan Experience, but from millions waking up daily to work toward a better future, and the key is growing that army with strong principles.

Incentives drive people in, not to be good but to get rich, build a business, or survive, since even volunteers like pre-med students have ulterior motives, and the greatest systems harness self-interest as an invisible hand.

Broad adoption comes from principles, peer review, decentralized protocol design in the Academy, the Treasury replenishing funding, and real use cases in Georgia, Southeast Asia, and Africa with trained ambassadors.

Recalls the Ron Paul campaign 13 years ago growing from thousands to two million on three pillars, humble foreign policy, sound money, and choose liberty, but lacking a vehicle to execute, and says the blockchain industry is that vehicle.

He ignores competitors chasing market cap and DeFi developers because they miss the philosophical core, noting Bitcoin, the least advanced technology, is still king from a dogged focus on principles despite settling in an hour and using more energy than Switzerland while Cardano settles in seconds on 10 kilowatts.

Cardano must stay true to its founding principles of sound money, liberty, and a better society without social credit to reach that trust and eventually exceed Bitcoin, with new websites, documentation, and programs coming via IOHK, the Foundation, and Emurgo, closing that Shelley is coming soon.