Well, one thing that you guys have going on right now is the Vasil hardfork.
And this is kind of ongoing.
It's in process.
What is that going to do for the Cardano ecosystem?
Well, there's some cleanup.
There's some new features and capabilities.
And then there's some performance improvements.
So any good hardfork, it should be enough of a change to justify the effort,
but not too much of a change to dramatically compromise the ecosystem
or radically change it so much that people don't know what's going on.
So Plutus came out in September with the Alonzo hardfork.
And that allowed people to start writing and deploying smart contracts.
Now that there's about 9 months of that,
a lot of organizations, trade organizations, have formed
and so the dApp ecosystem like the Cardano DeFi Alliance and others,
and they wrote a laundry list of things
that they felt were necessary improvements for Cardano.
And they're now reflected in CIPs,
Cardano Improvement Proposals.
CIP-31, 32, 33 and other things like SECP-256k1 support, and so forth.
And so part of that is the improvement.
And so, there, it makes it easier to write dApps.
More scalable dApps,
less resource costs for dApps,
and just better development experience overall for Plutus developers.
And it's going to make it easier to build a DEX.
It's going to make it easier to build an oracle, and so forth.
Then in terms of performance, pipelining is coming.
And, you know, it's not a radically new concept.
Pipelining is done in computer processors and GPUs,
but that will allow us to get a multiple of current performance inside the system.
So all these new dApps that come, the system can keep up with those dApps.
And then some housecleaning,
like the deep parameters being removed and a litany of other little things.
And so it's just constant evolution of the protocol.
And some plumbing for much more significant changes like input endorsers
and some governance stuff and sidechains, and so forth.
So it's been a lot of work.
We've been working on Vasil as--
us plus 15 other development companies over the last 6 months.
And also this is the first time where more than half of the changes are CIPs
- that have been ratified by the community. - Yeah.
So it's a very, very good milestone in that respect.
And it'll come out soon.
And it's just like any other hardfork in that respect,
like Alonzo, the ones before it.
So the end user won't notice much.
It's just things are better, faster and cheaper.
The people who are really going to notice a difference
are going to be dApp developers in the Cardano ecosystem
because they now have new capabilities like reference inputs
- and reference scripts and these types of things. - Yeah.
And it's going to make it easier to write dApps and easier to maintain dApps
- because you get rid of a lot of code. - Yeah.
So when Cardano went through the last hardfork and smart contracts were available,
I was highly critical of the first couple months there.
There was a lot of congestion issues.
And, you know, I support your project and have for a long time,
but I was very critical of that because, to me, the roadmap,
you know, everything so far had been lined up,
there were some delays,
but everything had been pretty smooth.
However, over time,
those congestion issues have subsided and things are running very well now.
And I'm very happy about that.
But I just want to know, like, from your perspective,
are you happy with the launch?
And are you happy with where the Cardano ecosystem and dApps are right now?
Well, you know, it's always hard when you have a massive major upgrade.
For example, when we went from Byron to Shelley,
huge upgrade,
and there was 11 months of hard work that went into trying to make that
as smooth and manageable as possible,
but there's still situation where the ITN members had to roll over and become stake pools.
And there was about two, three months of just really big discomfort in that transition,
but we got it done and now everything's running beautifully and smoothly.
And we have the highest delegation rate of any proof-of-stake, over 70%.
The case of Alonzo,
there was over four years of development of the extended UTXO model in Plutus.
And there, that was being built by a parallel team with the main team,
because Goguen was being built in parallel with Shelley.
And it was bound to have a hell of a lot of growing pains.
And there were some missteps,
like the PAB could have been done a little differently.
And, frankly, we needed to have reference inputs and these other things for certain dApps.
That's fine.
But, you know, that's why you have a cleanup hardfork.
And that's really what Vasil is about.
It's adding a lot of things that we would have loved to have had in September.
- But you only learn in hindsight. - Yeah.
As a result of it being out there and having a dApp ecosystem.
Now, if you look at just improvements,
SundaeSwap, when it first came out, some people were waiting 3-5 days
- for that queue to clear. - Yeah.
Now, it's 21 seconds.
- That's great. - Somebody got something in 21.
So that's 5 days to 21 seconds.
- It's not bad. It's a big improvement. - A little bit of improvement.
And there's a second generation technology like WingRiders and other things that have come
that are consistently very good.
So it just takes time to build an ecosystem.
And, you know, people, they tend to have a short-term memory.
Like, for example, when the iPhone came out,
it didn't have 3G and it didn't have an app store.
Right.
- No one remembers that! You know? - Exactly.
"Oh, it always had an app store." "No, actually, it didn't."
- And, you know, there was growing pains in the ecosystem. - Yeah.
And once it came, it's, you know, that's fine.
So I think the next few updates to Cardano are all about that, you know.
Much more performance,
much better development experience.
And what's so cool about it is that there's kind of a community-driven effort
to build great tools like TxPipe and others,
where these are just community curated.
They've come out of nowhere.
And people are starting to use and adopt them.
And they're starting to solve their own problems.
And that's exactly what you'd like to see in a healthy ecosystem.
You don't want a situation where you have a top-down authority that mandates and says,
"You must use this tool. You must do this thing."
We have dozens of community tools that have come out of many of the different projects.
And people are doing some surprising things like in the NFT issuance.
- The batching and the other things, you know. - Yeah.
So many NFTs have been issued. Over 5 million.
They, out of necessity, had to figure out, "How do we do that in an efficient way?"
To reduce bloat and other things.
The advantage we had though with the Alonzo launch is that we demonstrated
that Cardano can operate for extended periods of time under extreme load.
- Yeah. - People tend to forget that.
You know, when your network is at 95%, if you're the Solana, you collapse.
- You know-- - You just take a timeout.
- You just pause, you know? - Yeah, you know.
That's it!
That thing happens.
But when you're Cardano, 95% load,
- it's okay! - Yeah.
You know, you don't have lost gas fees and all these other problems.
The network just chugs away and it does its thing.
And that's a testament to the good design of the consensus protocol,
the network stack and, you know, these other things.
And so while it was a little frustrating
because you didn't get the great user experience and quality of experience during that period,
it was a great acid test to demonstrate that Cardano was resilient under heavy load
and it's going to continue performing.
So I'm very happy about that, about that outcome.
I mean, am I happy overall?
Of course, I want things to be better, faster and cheaper
and they have the best development experience
- and everybody in the world using it. - Yeah.
But let's be honest here.
It's like we went from nothing to 1,000 dApps under construction
- in less than 9 months. - Yeah.
- That's not bad growth! - No.
- You know? For any reasonable ecosystem. - Especially bear market too right now.
Yeah, in a bear market.
It took three years for Ethereum to get to that stage.
And we did it 9 months.
Come on, guys!
It's--
Let's be real about this.
By every reasonable growth metric,
from user adoption, wallet creation, transaction volume, GitHub commits,
delegation, voting,
we're usually in the top 5 of the entire industry.
And we've consistently been there.
And month after month, the growth continues to come.
- 700,000 people now signed up for the Reddit. - Wow!
You know, it's pretty incredible when you see the overall population that's there.
And that's just amongst English language.
Look at all the other jurisdictions we're in,
Japan and South Korea, all throughout Africa and other places.
So it's getting where it needs to go.
And it's very exciting to see that the pieces are coming together.
There's a lot of things near horizon that need to be cleaned up.
For example, the open source project needs to be more formalized.
Right now, it's very informal.
So we need to set up a members-based organization for all these dev companies to contribute.
There needs to be a lot more funding of community tools.
Some will come from grants.
Some will come from Catalyst funding.
And then there needs to be some standardization of like the dev experience,
and especially on testing.
So when you go from a private to a public testnet to mainnet,
there needs to be a gradual curve there instead of having it break every time you move.
- But those are growing pains of an emerging ecosystem. - Yeah.
And, you know, Vasil will make a big step for it but by no means is it the only step.
There's a lot of room for improvement.
That's exciting.
You know, to look that you guys went as far in 9 months
as Ethereum, it took that three years.
One question-- you did mention Africa.
It seemed like in 2021, every week, we're getting a new story
how Cardano was involved with something happening in Africa.
- Is that still going on in the background right now? - Oh, yeah.
We haven't had a lot of stories around that.
What is the status of Cardano in Africa?
Well, I mean, we call it RealFi.
- So that's DeFi that enters the real marketplace with real users. - Yeah. I like that.
You know, so there's DeFi where there's the kid in their basement in New Jersey
and they're yield farming and, you know, they're hopeful that they become a winner.
Or maybe they work at McDonald's.
- You know, it's the meme, right? - You can do both.
You can do both. You can try.
Get the tattoos and--
It's a good meme.
But the real fight is like, okay, I live in Kenya and I want to get a loan.
And if I go through a microfinance institution, I pay 85%.
Or my daughter is in London to send money home
and 15% just to move the money, Western Union, these types of things.
RealFi is about saying,
"Well, how do we do those types of things, but we do it in a peer-to-peer way?"
No intermediaries,
and it's basically providing financial services to the unbanked in that respect.
So that's always been my vision for the use of cryptocurrencies,
one world market where everybody's treated equally and fairly.
And that's a big part of why Cardano exists.
So we're in Kenya, and we're working with partners like Pezesha.
We're in Ethiopia. We're working with Ministry of Education there.
And we're in Zanzibar working with partners like World Mobile to build an ISP.
But really you can group RealFi into three categories.
So there's RealFi infrastructure.
And that's the basic physical infrastructure that you need to even do any of this.
So that's energy.
That's telecommunications.
And that's computing.
So you need phones.
You need power.
And you need cell phone towers.
You need these types of things.
Some countries, that's already there.
Like Kenya. Great.
Other countries like Burundi, only 2.5% of the country has reliable computing.
Only 11% has power.
So, how the hell do you go sell a cryptocurrency if you're missing, you know, that stuff?
How do you sell an ecosystem if you're missing that underlying stuff?
The second layer is RealFi core.
And there, that's three things.
You're talking about identity.
You're talking about compliance.
And then you're talking about reputation and credit worthiness.
So identity is just, who are you?
Compliance is, how do I know the things you're saying are true?
And the reputation, the value judgments we make.
Are you credible?
Can I give you a loan?
These types of things.
And then RealFi,
the top layer is RealFi application.
So that's where you're talking about peer-to-peer lending.
That's where you're talking about decentralized exchanges
and these types of things.
- You kind of need the bottom two to get there. - Right.
Because you can't do lending unless you know who the people are.
And they have to be credible, and so forth.
So we have a lot of plans and relationships and ongoing projects,
like in Ethiopia, we're doing the RealFi core experiments.
And that's with the Ministry of Education getting 5 million kids onboarded.
And then the extension of that will be something called the African Credential Alliance,
where we take some of these concepts and we try to make it Pan-African
and spread it throughout.
In Kenya, we have like the Pezesha relationship.
We're doing microfinance.
And we're trying to figure out how to do a peer-to-peer lending product with them.
And then in Zanzibar,
World Mobile is working on decentralized telecommunication infrastructure.
So all three layers were competing and doing things.
And we've gone to many different jurisdictions.
Last year, I was in Burundi.
We met with the president there.
And there, that's very foundational stuff.
Other places like Ethiopia, Kenya are different marketplaces.
So it's a long arc.
It takes years to do things.
It might be easier to create liquidity in certain places,
but in general, you have to be in it for the long horizon.
But it gives a guiding purpose to the stuff that we construct.
You know, it says we're building this for a reason.
We're building this for the 3 billion people who need these capabilities,
not, you know, just to compete with Ethereum or Bitcoin.
So oftentimes, when people say,
"How will you compete with coin X or coin Y?"
I was like, "Well, they're playing a different game."
You know, my whole goal is to create a system
where the billions of people around the world who don't have something get something.
Those people aren't on Ethereum.
- Those people aren't on Bitcoin. - Right.
Even if they wanted to be, there's no point for them to be.
There's no economic agency for them to do that.
So a lot of the capabilities of Cardano were built in that particular direction.
It just so happens that if it works for the poorest people in the world,
it's probably going to be the cheapest, fastest, best solution for everybody else!
Absolutely.
So it'll happen to synergistically win the DeFi war in that space.
And there's certainly people who fight like hell for that,
like the WingRiders and the MELDs and the Occams and the Liqwids
and the SundaeSwaps and the others in the Cardano ecosystem.
- So those 1,000+ ventures will fight that fight and get adoption. - Yeah.
IO, my company, we fight a lot for the developing world.
And we've been there for years.
- We've been in Africa since 2016. - Yeah.
It's been a long haul.
And there's been a lot of ups and downs.
Ethiopia, a bloody civil war broke out while we were rolling out,
- but we still are doing it during that conflict. - Yeah.
And we're still maintaining it.
And that's something that is just a mark of pride.
- Okay. So let's do some rapid fire questions here. - Okay.
Basically, what I'm going to do is I'm going to throw something out
- and just give me a couple sentences on your thoughts on it. - Sure.
The Cynthia Lummis bill?
Good but incomplete.
Okay. Alright.
Mental health of someone that gets trolled all the time on social media?
Ever declining.
I can relate.
It's tough being polarizing, but--
Which regulatory body should oversee crypto?
Of the ones that we can choose, probably the CFTC is the best option.
But my preference would be creation of new bespoke agencies for it.
I love that. I've said that for a long time.
Total agreement.
Okay. When Ethereum looks over its shoulder,
it sees Cardano.
When Cardano looks over its shoulder, who does it see?
Well, no. When Ethereum looks over its shoulder, it sees Ethereum 2.
Ethereum has to kill itself to survive.
I guess they're not calling it that though, right?
Yeah, that's right.
- Something else. - The Merge. The Merge.
I got criticized over Twitter for that.
Cardano looks over its shoulder, I think it's playing its own game.
I mean, there's going to be the next generation of Cardano, and so forth.
And it's exciting to see what the fourth generation holds.
I know it's going to be multi-resource consensus and quantum resistance
and all kinds of newfangled technology.
But I'm just focused right now on getting this roadmap done.
- You know, because there's so much more work that needs to get done. - Yeah.
I can't wait for the day I ask that question and you give me a project.
Okay.
Last one here.
Thoughts on the Ripple Labs versus SEC case?
You know, that one is more than a few sentences,
but concisely, it's just an example of what happens when you do regulation through enforcement
- instead of legislation, you know? - Absolutely.
You shouldn't have a "Oh, we'll just do a case-by-case thing and go through"
and everybody lives in fear.
You should have clear, understandable standards.
And there should be a clear process for people to adhere and comply with those standards.
For example, the Ethereum crowdsale in Switzerland,
we just asked the Swiss government.
And after a few weeks of haggling, they told us what to do.
And we had a thing and it was over.
The SEC tends not to issue no-action letters in a meaningful way for the industry.
So there's no real good means of interfacing and integrating.
And in the absence of that,
people have different opinions.
And there's winners and losers.
And sometimes people get away with crazy stuff.
Like, I think there were still some structural and terrible problems with what happened with EOS.
- They seem to be able to keep everything that they have. - Yeah.
And then other times people get very harshly punished.
- Like with the Telegram issue. - Absolutely.
- Or, you know, with-- yeah. - LBRY.
And I think it creates perverse incentives inside the marketplace
- and ultimately, regulatory arbitrage, - Yeah.
because it just--
basically, those jobs go to Singapore, and they go elsewhere.
So I don't like the destruction of American jobs,
the inconsistent clarity,
changing administrations having big influence on change of policy.
There should be universal standards.
And there should be universal definitions.
And hopefully, this case resolves in a way that's good for the industry.
- But it's just an indication of what happens in the absence of good leadership. - Yeah.
The legislative branch needs to step up and pass a law.
Absolutely. They always want to put the cart before the horse
- because they're on a big power trip. - Yeah.
- Well-- - And by the way,
you know, speaking of the SEC, I don't fault them in one respect.
It is the case that there are scams.
And it is the case of many problems are occurring.
And people are taking advantage of information asymmetries
and perverse market making, and so forth.
So I understand that they're in a rock and a hard place
because they're operating on an instruction set and DNA
that was ultimately created in the 1930s.
It's ridiculous.
- So they're doing the best with what they have. - Yeah.
But it's not good enough for our industry as a whole.
So there really needs to be an updated monetization law
similar to what happened in 1990s
with things like the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, and so forth.
That updated modernized law to accommodate the fact that new technology had come.
In that case, the internet.
And in our case, we have the financial stem cell.
- Cryptocurrencies. - Yeah.
Where it wakes up on Monday, and it's a currency.
And on Tuesday, it's a security.
- And on Wednesday, it's-- yeah. - It's a digital gold on Wednesday, you know.
- And on the weekends, it's a loyalty point to these types of things. - Yeah.
You know, it's fruity weekends, so.
Well, Charles, thank you so much for doing this interview.
I know that--
I know some people out there give you a hard time,
but you're definitely one of my favorite people in crypto.
Not to kiss up to you, but it's because you're authentic and you're real.
And you're actually out there trying to do really good stuff.
And that's definitely 100%, you know, why I support Cardano.
We'll continue to support it with the work you're doing in Africa
and the philanthropic angle to a lot of different things.
So we're looking forward to seeing this ecosystem develop.
And I know, before, you've said, you know, your competitor is Google.
And I look forward to the day that you got to pass Google.
So thanks a lot.
And if you guys have any comments, make sure to drop those down below in the chat.
Cheers!