Treasury Questions

Shares a viewer's two questions: who owns the products and services paid for by the treasury, whether the broader community of ADA holders, Intersect, or another entity, and where the path to sustainability is.

Says who owns treasury output has never been fully answered in crypto: in the Genesis days no one did since everything was open-sourced grants, but now there is a trust on behalf of ADA holders.

Frames three ownership models: no one, the old age of Catalyst grants where IP was not recovered; everyone, a special purpose vehicle that holds and monetizes IP back to the treasury; or you decide, a loan or paid company.

Uses Circle as an example: much code is written for Circle to operate on Cardano while Circle preserves that integration's intellectual property, just as a Catalyst grantee can keep its IP.

Illustrates a special purpose entity: convert 300 million ADA into a yield-bearing portfolio returning around 10 percent, buy yield in ADA back to the treasury or let it accumulate into a sovereign wealth fund.

DReps and the constitutional committee decide who owns what, since a budget is a set of asks paired with oversight and consequences, like funding post-quantum science with peer review and formal methods.

Each funded item can be Apache open source owned by everyone, proprietary held by a special purpose vehicle for the ecosystem, or given to some third party, and the budget is a composition of these ask-and-consequence pairs.

Recommends an intermediate binding entity like the Dev Foundation controlled by Intersect to broker IP transfer, since it is more straightforward than a smart contract for turning over and open-sourcing a company's work.

A smart contract has no legal character or agency, so a bilateral agreement between two entities is far cleaner for enforcing the wishes of the budget.

Answers the sustainability question with three long-term paths, the first being a huge volume of transaction fees, which he finds unappealing since the goal is to keep making fees cheaper.

The second path is Cardano as an AVS system where newly launched tokens pay inflation and fees to ADA holders and SPOs, a strong step forward since there is always something new to launch.

The third path is converting the treasury's roughly 1.5 billion ADA, worth 4.5 billion at the all-time high, into a sovereign wealth fund like Abu Dhabi's 1.7 trillion, Norway's, or Alaska's 140 billion.

Expects a blend of all three, with falling inflation, rising fees, the partner chains model's revenue streams, and a sovereign wealth fund that could create constant ADA purchase demand while keeping ADA deflationary.

Without tooting his own horn, he took Cardano from a 70 million dollar project nobody cared about in Japan to a 30 billion ecosystem with a 1.5 billion ADA sovereign wealth fund, debt-free and in surplus.

Cardano has been turned over entirely to ADA holders and he is tired of Intersect being cast as a boogeyman, insisting DReps are elected by holders' participation, not an unelected cabal, and their job under ZIP 1694 is to converge to a budget.

Holders have agency for the first time and advises joining a members-based organization for adult conversations instead of Twitter, then points to roadmap items like Midgard for data availability and optimistic rollups.

Leios makes Cardano as fast as Solana without the centralization, Bitcoin DeFi opens the largest crypto market, and partner chains give builders multiple revenue models so ADA stays deflationary.

Warns a deeply cut budget makes the roadmap impossible and he will not work for free on a failed initiative, and pleads against a life of constant suspicion toward people who wrote 240 papers and millions of lines of code.

It takes real guts for a founder to hand an ecosystem over, unlike other founders who claim decentralization but keep governance keys, foundations holding the money, and dev orgs controlled by one or two people.

Handing over means they might ruin it like George Lucas felt about Star Wars, or do something magical he never conceived, like Denis Villeneuve with Blade Runner.

Says whether people are collaborative depends on whether you assume they are evil or good, and while you can hold the genuinely dishonest accountable, understand you then lose access to them.

Cites Argentina as the example: a constitutional convention that brought money, an office since 2016, and eight to nine years of investment, chosen over Uruguay, Chile, Paraguay, or Brazil.

Handlers and their friends shut him out of the changing Argentine political environment, and a tattooed scam-artist kid convinced the president to do something very stupid that blew up.

Himself as fiercely competitive, waking at 5am, in hundreds of meetings a week and traveling constantly, hating to lose and hating even more not getting a chance to participate.

Says that is why the Wyoming stablecoin mattered, as 30,000 blockchains were excluded with a pen stroke, and says he enjoys competing against real rivals like Dominic Williams and Vitalik, especially when he wins.

There is no real competition with LIBRA because it is a Ponzi scheme and a crime, like Bernie Madoff, Enron, BitConnect, OneCoin, or Theranos, that preys on people's ignorance to extract wealth.

The hardest part of the budget process is people treating Cardano like LIBRA when it did not earn that, and pleads to get past the noise and the systemic lack of empathy for people who make mistakes.

A Wyoming neighbor bothers him but they still return each other's stray cattle, and you learn to love people even when you dislike them, something lost in social media and political discourse.

Trump claiming Ukraine started the war is a straight-up lie, since Russia massed forces and invaded, and he was near the border in Kharkiv soon after, talking to fleeing refugees.

Disagreeing with Trump does not make him a Kamala Harris voter, and that Zelensky also looks like a dictator for suspending elections and arresting opponents and critical press.

Argues the US held elections in 1944 during World War II and in 1864 during the Civil War when the head of the Union Army ran against Abraham Lincoln, so refusing elections means no democratic mandate.

He reasons case by case rather than following Fox News or MSNBC propaganda, admits when he is completely wrong, and changes his mind with new data in an era that no longer allows it.

Mocks the inability to admit mistakes with covfefe, the Four Seasons Total Landscaping venue mix-up in Pennsylvania, and Kamala Harris turning down Joe Rogan then blaming him.

Admits many Cardano mistakes, calling entering Ethiopia a mistake in hindsight covered in a blog post, though it taught a lot, produced good software, and involved Hyperledger.

Rebuts claims that they lied about Ethiopia, saying they had a lawful contract the government never paid, missed meetings, then committed human rights violations against Tigray and ghosted them.

He flew into Addis Ababa while the TPLF was 100 miles away setting up artillery, just to resign the unpaid deal, and that team is now in Kenya and Uganda building RealFi, a better product.

He is as frustrated about Circle as anyone, so he tries different strategies: talking to the real-USD players, building USDM and USDA, and that WST did not work out.

He wants a stablecoin to lend at 18 percent returns with a 2 percent non-performing loan rate and bring it to retail in the wallet, which means working with regulatory working groups, senators, and congressmen.

A relentless day across Argentina, journalists, and Wyoming, and rejects the claim that his PAC is bribing the state, saying he is reforming procurement because a process that pre-qualifies friends is broken.

Recounts pouring a three-million-pound concrete roof at his Gillette clinic in 20-below weather, which required building and heating a 60,000-square-foot tent, while trolls call him names on Twitter.

Juggles a Wheatland restaurant with parking and asbestos problems, then a Microsoft quantum computing breakthrough whose Nature paper he must dissect for a quantum strategy, plus synthetic biology news coming in 2025.

He finds a Cardano component in everything to bring value, liquidity, and users, but it wears thin when people accuse him of being there to steal or grab power, telling the trolls off after ten years.

It would have been two weeks of easy work to just state what IO needs and walk away, but that would leave behind good people with no microphone, no followers, and no marketing team who are loyal to the ecosystem.

Wyoming procurement will change through an election and his campaigning, and that in Argentina the government has no power since it was the people, one in seven now in crypto, not the state, who drove adoption.

The Africa mistake was fixed by pivoting to RealFi, and praises Lace's new leadership and frequent releases, calling himself the first founder to use Twitter as a wallet database.

As a crypto CEO with millions wanting good regulation and a willing government, people should let them cook and make crypto regulation bipartisan and durable instead of calling everything Hitler.

Argues crypto is neutral technology like the internet, serving the president and the pope the same, so anyone who believes in equality would want it everywhere unless they have been propagandized.

The right to have principles too: good cryptos serve people while bad ones exist only to enrich founders at retail's expense, and LIBRA and the Melania and Trump coins should never have happened.

He does not care about the consequences of saying such things because he has integrity and beliefs, and will never polish himself up in a suit to say the safe thing PR people advise.

His life's work is building things meant to last, which is why he spent two years building a governance system, and that unlike others he has been very rich and very poor and would live the same either way.

Reflecting on mortality through the Simpsons' Troy McClure and the late Phil Hartman, he says obsessing over an imaginary piece of paper called money seems unreal when 100 percent of people will die.

He focuses on utility and loves experiences: game development and showing people the unknown, like exploring four-dimensional non-Euclidean hyperbolic spaces on a computer.

Recalls the elation of seeing Avatar in 3D and says building things that make people say wow is why he founded a company that makes glowing plants to one day light up whole cities.

Cardano's nuts and bolts came from that same inspiration and are for the community, who are so trusted they have been given the power to burn the monument down, as the next ten years force a reset.

Concepts of a good life, wealth, status, and being human are evaporating as reality and fantasy blur, pointing to Microsoft inventing a new state of matter to program reality, on a Thursday.

With AGI and ASI scarily close, neither Fox News nor CNN will tell you what to do, and everyone has been stained by mass-media propaganda that needs deprogramming and detoxing.

Closes that despite ingrained biases he believes humanity is on the right path, since blockchain returns people to a shared truth and AI can be a counterbalance, and he loves everyone, even the people he hates.