Birds

Opens April 27th 2021 from Colorado themed around birds, showing a turaco common across central Africa and Ethiopia, recalling entering the continent four years ago and navigating a serpentine business culture.

Africa is not a monolith but many ancient nations from Chad to South Africa, Rwanda, and Ethiopia with traditions predating European civilization, so patience was a virtue and the company made a long-arc investment.

Announces the signed Ethiopia Ministry of Education deal covering 5 million people, now in execution with over 30 local hires, covered by the New York Times and City AM, delayed from February when outside parties gave a second look before signing April 2nd.

Frames a pan-African view from Tanzania to Ethiopia scaling rapidly over 24 to 36 months with new classes and relationships, hoping the Ghanaian developer class becomes core cryptocurrency developers.

He would love the Ghana class to build a Bitcoin full node as unfinished business bringing Bitcoin interoperability to Cardano, and to base his game company's core developers in Africa, ideally Nigeria.

Praises the raw humanity and warmth of the continent, mentions interviewing Dynal Patel from Zambia the day before, and recalls Namibia's ancient welwitschia plants and red sands.

Recalls Ethiopia's ancient Christian traditions, describing Lalibela's churches carved from single stone like Minecraft and aided by angels in local myth, and a fifth-century sky shrine carved on a 50-centimeter ledge above an 800-meter drop.

Africa struggles because of systems not its people, and the company is not in the product business but the systems business, praising John O'Connor for closing the toughest negotiation of his career for Prism in Ethiopia.

Compares his current Fortune 500 multi-party negotiation as bush league next to Ethiopia, explaining the real business is a new way for people to communicate, trade, and consent to the allocation of power and resources.

Turns cynical on his own country, citing 13 years watching politics from Ron Paul through the Obama, Trump, and current administrations convince him the US government serves only a small cohort of special interests.

For the first time in his adult life poverty rose consistently over four years and literacy fell, with dollar weakness showing in Colorado rent doubling from 800 to 2000 dollars while being told inflation is 2 to 3 percent, a tax on the poor.

As a young wealthy man he could retire but chooses to spend his youth changing systems through economic competition, not the ballot box, since newspapers only abandoned their model when the internet forced them.

Argues nation states change only when forced, and the Soviet Union fell not by a great war but by economic misconduct and incompetence, so America will change through economic order not gun or ballot.

Believes changing Africa will change the world by installing bottom-up systems that give people control over identity, expression, and payment systems, expanding from millions to tens of millions to everyone.

The decentralized ID is a gateway into Cardano and the whole industry that will grow to represent financial history, reputation, payments, and voter registration, inevitable now that it is in people's hands.

Predicts wherever freedom, self-determination, and liberty live the human spirit and innovation rise, and over 50 to 100 years Africa will become one of the wealthiest continents and the days of Mansa Musa will return.

Laughs at current DeFi not because the projects or teams are bad but because they lack real markets, since no one in America, Germany, or France wakes up wanting a car loan on a peer-to-peer lending network.

Argues people adopt systems out of necessity not novelty, so those with no credit access will take their first loan from a peer-to-peer marketplace denominated in crypto, and Africa will have an M-Pesa moment for DeFi within five to ten years.

Ethereum's DeFi projects are open source so their value is not the tech or a vanity network effect but the hundreds of millions of coming users, like how the largest taxi company owns no taxis and the largest hotel company no real estate.

Predicts the largest lending operation will be a protocol not a bank, driven by natural demand, spawning revolutionary new stablecoins with novel monetary policies beyond a simple dollar peg, spreading worldwide.

Legacy finance will spring a thousand leaks as denied borrowers switch to new systems, which is his life's work and why he rails against patents, proprietary technology, consortia, and federations when they touch money and voice.

He is proud of the announcements and the upcoming Africa special, a beacon that the company is open for business, reaffirming faith in Cardano's world-class technology stack, researchers, and engineers.

With this one deal closed Cardano is now one of the most-used blockchains by population with 5 million new customers, with more of that scale to follow creating Plutus and Prism pioneers who build businesses.

Promotes the Africa special airing later, thanking his company despite being a legendarily hard boss, saying no one truly disappointed him even through bugs and delays.

Defends the company against an industry that trivializes its work, calling solving proof of stake a scientific query on the level of a mathematics Millennium Prize problem that reshapes an academic field.

Engineers built a completely new model of smart contracts they feel is right only to be told they are incompetent and behind, yet return with fire plus 1500 Plutus Pioneers to support and better documentation to write.

The engineers persist because they see the faces of users who are not the privileged but people begging for new systems, and they built Catalyst, a funding engine with over half a billion dollars ready to build the next Microsoft, Facebook, or Google.

Thanks the community for saintly patience enduring cult accusations and slander while building space buds and applications and bringing over 30000 people to Catalyst.

He has received handwritten letters from prison, from hundred-year-olds, and from five-year-olds worldwide, and that technologists, doctors, truck drivers, and accountants are all equal in Cardano.

Closes that the birds have landed with more to come, framing the Africa special as a milestone before the next one, the launch of Alonzo, and thanking the community as family whose shared moments mean more than anything he will ever do.