PRD and the Lies of Process

Opening on February 4 2025 and addressing people in Wyoming, he shares a tweet claiming Cardano has not deployed a solution meeting the freeze-and-seize criteria of the stable token process.

People crowing that a critic was right ignore lies of omission: the programmable tokens standard was proposed January 19 2023 and implementing it took about two weeks, as demoed at the University of Wyoming.

Ledger types: fixed-function chains like XRP and NXT that bake in every capability, versus fully programmable ones like Ethereum and Cardano where you write a contract for any feature.

Every asset on Ethereum is really an ERC20 smart contract, and standards like CIP 113 specify how to implement real world asset support on Cardano, so unsupported features just need a contract.

Defines a product requirements document as the artifact communicating what a product must do, and says they were promised the requirements would be open and known ahead of time.

Had they been told freeze-and-seize was a hardline kill condition, they would have implemented it in two weeks, because the PRD was supposed to be published with a period to read it and demo capabilities.

Asks what freeze-and-seize even means: government freezing, a third party seizing, Circle-style, or a central bank, all of which must be defined precisely in a product requirements document.

Compares an undefined freeze-and-seize requirement to specifying a vehicle must have an engine without saying motorcycle, go-kart, or semi, which is exactly what a PRD is meant to pin down.

Instead they hid the PRD, kept the kill criteria secret, qualified vendors themselves, then gave under five days to respond with no demo, no window, and no appeals process.

Challenges commission figures to tell Wyoming lawmakers with a straight face that disqualifying vendors by hiding requirements, then self-assessing capabilities, is a fair process.

Cardano has freeze-and-seize on-chain in a smart contract today, that it is not a feature anyone advertises front and center, and that they effectively called the University of Wyoming a liar.

Ethereum has no native freeze-and-seize and Stellar inherited it from XRP, which they disqualified, so no publicly accessible PRD was ever released for a 30, 60, or 90 day review.

Charges that the technology from the company the decision-maker used to work at qualified while others were excluded, including Algorand, Hedera Hashgraph, and XRP, which have the capability natively.

The COO read a letter implying Cardano would lack the capability for a long window, while omitting that they never told ICP, XRP, or the Bitcoin ecosystem, keeping it all private.

Attacks the token's lack of a USP: no yield, deployed on ecosystems that do not need it, against Tether making 13 billion and Circle nearly the same, on a 5.8 million dollar budget.

The result is effectively a CBDC on a non-private chain like Ethereum, giving the government panopticon transparency over holders, with civil asset forfeiture able to seize on a suspicious transaction.

Cites a University of Wyoming report from January 31 concluding the token is more likely than not to lose money out of the treasury, calling 5.8 million far too little to run a stablecoin ecosystem.

Withholding the requirements so a former employer could win costs every Wyoming taxpayer money, and when it fails the Freedom Caucus will question all the crypto laws passed over six years.

Lays out how it should work: publish a product requirements document, tell people what success means, give due time to read it, and let every vendor build a product against it.

Uses his Gillette construction company as an analogy: pre-qualifying concrete vendors by their websites, then picking the boss's old firm while rejecting one that just poured 50,000 cubic yards, like XRP.

Calls on Senator Chris Rothfuss directly to explain how this was fair, and advises any government wanting crypto to state what it wants openly on GitHub and let a public conversation happen.

Open procurement with a demo window reveals who is credible and quick, and this stablecoin could have let any ecosystem like Coinbase with Rosetta issue natively and break the Circle cartel.

It could have been the first stablecoin on Bitcoin with privacy features, but freeze-and-seize is a federal requirement, so a currency meant to defy the feds over the Speedy Bank fight hands control back to them.

Asks why Wyoming did not simply white-label Circle, split the t-bill revenue, and get Circle to seed billions in liquidity, a deal Circle would have taken in a heartbeat at no taxpayer cost.

He cares not because Cardano lost a deal it was never allowed to bid on, but because he is part of Wyoming and it is not okay to waste his tax money or drag the state's reputation through the dirt.

Warns that if former employees decide contracts, the same corruption follows when Sam Altman sells GPT to the state or Bill Gates builds its energy grid with a molten salt reactor.

Calls the process indefensible and class-action worthy, violating every principle of good procurement and ethics, and rejects being told to be nice and diplomatic about it in Cheyenne.

He lives in Wheatland with his clinic in Gillette, part of the shoot-shovel-and-shut-up Wyoming built by ranchers where a broken commitment once meant someone froze or starved, so he will not be diplomatic.

As a matter of philosophy the state should not build crypto products but white-label them, and if it does build, it must publish requirements and let people satisfy them openly.

Asks what competitive edge a state-built copycat token adds, comparing it to Wyoming building cell phones to fight the iPhone or cars to fight Ford, and notes the federal government is already pro-crypto.

Crypto users care about liquidity, exchange access, listings, and which killer dapps integrate a coin, none of which this project has a strategy for, so it was not thought through.

Asks which Wyoming businesses will actually use it, noting the commercial banks testified against it, and mocks paying high fees through legacy rails when a credit card works for free.

Cites his own record of roughly 340 billion dollars of value creation over a 15-year career to the smirking commissioner, and says Cardano is top ten and will be here and more valuable in 10 to 15 years.

Crypto as a brutal space where the leaders are vicious killers who can call the president, deplatform people from wallets, and delist them from exchanges with no antitrust recourse.

Winners survive bear markets where communities lose 90 to 98 percent and keep the faith, and to beat a 10-year head start you must do genuinely new things or be exceptional at business.

Compares starting this token to fighting Exxon Mobil, Raytheon, Northrop Grumman, Microsoft, or Facebook, where a Palmer Luckey succeeds now and then but betting on it a thousand times means losing.

Even if it succeeds, DOJ freeze requests will pour in when a Cheyenne hotel cleaner sends a dollar coin to family in Mexico and it touches a cartel-linked bar.

A tourist carrying the coin to Vietnam or the IRS demanding a suspected non-payer's full transaction history means handing over a surveillance dashboard, which is what Wyoming signed up for.

Asks whether this honors the cowboy state's be-your-own-bank spirit or just builds a knockoff of the banking system with less access and higher fees.

With 400 to 500 stablecoin competitors coming under federal legislation, people pick the reliable ones like Circle and Tether, and Tether will buy real dollars or a bank to get compliant, like when Poloniex was bought.

To compete you must offer something new, privacy via Midnight, an untouched market like Bitcoin, or yield for KYC-verified Wyoming residents, all of which a demo could have shown.

The state now has to kill and defund the project and start over, wasting 18 months, the governor's earlier veto, and everyone's time, since a tier-one listing fee alone exceeds the annual budget.

Turns to praising Wyoming, recalling his 2021 choice between a Hawaii ranch near where he grew up in Makawao on Maui and the Twin Pine ranch in Wheatland at the same price.

He chose Wyoming despite 40-below winters and 100-mile-an-hour winds because its honest, high-integrity, hardworking people are unlike anywhere else, as he sees at his construction company.

He fights so the corruption and nepotism of his industry do not leak into Wyoming, and offers a real fix: have the Cardano treasury put money and equity into USDM and do native cross-chain swaps.

Every state dollar comes from someone braving a blizzard, a whiteout, or working cattle to pay for hay, so it is not okay to hand it to the wealthiest places in the world to waste.

Vows to fight this for as long as it takes, noting Wyoming's half million people make mass media and Facebook effective, and that people will be furious to learn the state is building a CBDC in name only.

Closes that brighter days are ahead, encourages people to incorporate and build businesses in Wyoming, and stresses this episode is not a representative sample of its people.

Many Wyomingites offered to help after the fiasco and he will activate them county by county, expecting wiser future laws, which is why he is focused on reforming the state's procurement.