Happy Christmas Eve

Opens Christmas Eve December 24th 2021, reflecting on the year with family coming in from Wyoming for Christmas Day.

Recaps the year: crypto markets came alive, the NFT revolution, DeFi going from 10 to 100 billion market cap, 10.5 billion in losses from scams, and continued COVID madness.

He opened the Hoskinson Center for Formal Mathematics at Carnegie Mellon, went on the Lex Fridman podcast, and grew Cardano's awareness, with 120,000 attending the Cardano Summit.

Admits his 2020 prediction was wrong both ways, with over two million assets issued instead of hundreds but fewer dapps since Goguen took longer.

127 projects are actively coding with 20 to 30 launching within 90 days, backed by a developer Discord over 10,000 and the Plutus Pioneers program on a planned two-month cadence.

2022 will form a formal open-source project structure like Hyperledger to Linux, novating over the three custodial companies of the Foundation, Ergo, and IO plus himself, as a remodel punch list.

Plutus needs three CIPs plus pipelining and input endorsers, with peer-to-peer being tested by stake pool operators and node 1.33 cutting Daedalus sync time by 50 percent.

Having achieved correctness they now move to performance tuning with Galois taking over Haskell libraries, plus Mithril for light clients and Hydra coming in 2022.

Publications are hitting in February via the Eurocrypt, Crypto, and CCS venues, with about two million people and a growing velocity of scale through Catalyst.

Recalls his 2014 TED Talk mission, saying the crazy books written about him reflect their authors, while he told the community honestly they would build a financial operating system with peer review.

He is most excited about the Possession relationship, aiming for an end-to-end microfinance transaction in the second half of 2022 with blockchain identity, a credit score, and a stablecoin on Cardano rails for a person in Kenya.

Microfinance interest rates are 35 to 80 percent with 40 percent defaults, while Possession does 3 percent monthly with a 2 percent NPL rate, and greed will compel involvement once the spigot turns on.

RealFi circumvents Africa's predatory banking system permissionlessly and opens conversations about identity, credit scores, and spreading it across Nigeria, Ghana, Rwanda, and Uganda.

Prism, light wallets, Mithril, Hydra, pipelining, and input endorsers are all in place, built on the Africa tour of six countries in four weeks amid coups, civil war, disease, and food poisoning.

The heroes on the ground legitimized not just Cardano and DeFi but the whole industry, which wrote a big check with its two-trillion-dollar valuation but delivered million-dollar rock pictures, buzzwords, restarted centralized networks, and billions in losses from a first-is-better-than-best mentality, an uncashed check Cardano will cash.

Who wins does not matter because humanity wins, the rally cry being to do better and not cynically accept mediocrity, evil, hypocrisy, or the status quo, since everything around you is consent-based even when consent is coerced through fear.

COVID taught that humanity can build structure upon structure of deception and gave everyone some trauma, showing how bad things can get.

Cautions that 2022 will test the industry's success since succeeding changes humanity's power structures, drawing misinformation from a legacy system and Congress that calls crypto only money laundering and child pornography while never mentioning it casts three billion people into poverty and lets the wealthy work with the criminals they claim to fight.

Institutions built on a hollow house of cards need only a little push, which is what the industry is collectively doing, as the infrastructure bill showed how one senator can push harm through.

There is a good reason Satoshi left, since a leader lets critics centralize attacks by personifying the effort like attacking the Pope to attack Catholicism, whereas a faceless project forces them to argue against liberty, equality, and hundreds of peer-reviewed papers, so they resort to demonizing.

Almost 15 companies work on Cardano and the sun never sets on it, needing hundreds then thousands plus universities and nation states, but never a Hoskinson-in-an-ivory-tower mentality.

He will endow more institutions for Cardano and cut checks of tens of millions, but urges everyone to give a push: assign an engineer, build a project, or teach, like his Bitcoin class named after Peter Sellers' Dr. Strangelove.

He burnt his ships long ago and is committed with a 600-person company and partners like dcSpark, Tweag, Well-Typed, Runtime Verification, and QVIC, even taking a week to meditate in the mountains.

He is reinvigorated by the 127 projects launching, each caring about the protocol and vision, some growing as large as his company, which is real decentralization.

Mocks critics babbling about first-mover advantage and burning tokens, noting all tokens are distributed so burning would mean stealing, and that success requires inclusivity, debate, and solid foundations where the rug is not pulled.

The 127 project founders will need marketing, technology, strategy, and emotional support as they face criticism, ridicule, and broken timelines, so include them in your well-wishes.

Getting started with Cardano is easy through Catalyst and IdeaScale, and that it is bizarre Silicon Valley VCs have not heard of it, amazed to find real unpaid people when shown.

2022 will be the best and toughest year with hits from unpredictable places, but they are one family who have seen the promised land, wishing everyone a merry Christmas and to ask what push they can make.