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Cardano Foundation AMA: Strategy, Reeve & Financial Report
Recorded: July 24, 2025 Duration: 0:54:51Space Recording
Short Summary
In a recent AMA, the Cardano Foundation unveiled its strategic plans for 2025, highlighting the launch of Reeve, an innovative open-source financial reporting tool aimed at enhancing transparency. The discussion also covered the foundation's commitment to growth, partnerships, and the importance of accountability in the blockchain ecosystem.
Full Transcription
Thank you. E aí E aí Thank you. So hello everybody, welcome to today's Cardano Foundation's monthly AMA. Good afternoon,
good morning, good evening,
wherever you may be located. My name is Jacob Gideon. I am the social media manager here at
Cardano Foundation. And this is part of our ongoing monthly AMA series designed to discuss
our activities and answer any questions you may have on them. So today's session is going to focus
on our strategic approach to financial transparency and on-chain accountability.
And we're really here today to discuss three key areas to discuss, first of all,
our 2025 tactical implementation plan, and then the launch of Reeve, which is
our open source solution for on-chain financial reporting.
And finally our 2024 financial insights report, which was recently released.
Quick few housekeeping notes.
First of all, the session is recorded as usual, so you always be able to go back and listen
to the session.
And towards the last 20 minutes or so, we will be opening up the stage to community
questions.
So if you have any questions throughout the session, feel free to drop them down below
in the chat or just wait till the end, raise your hand and we will bring you up to the stage.
So joining me today is Frederick Greggard, our CEO, who's going to be our primary speaker.
We'll also have some other CF employees such as Cleo, Sebesh, Thomas and Alex on standby
to go deeper into some details on the financial insights report or
reeve so fred can you hear me all right how are you doing today
i'm doing amazing and you're coming through loud and clear here okay great good to hear
so let's get right into it i'd say let's start with the big picture uh fred can you walk us
through the cardona foundation's tactical implementation plan for 2025 and how that's been progressing so far?
Yeah, so just maybe a short view down into history.
So every year at the Cardano Foundation, we do what's basically is a top-down and a bottom-up view on how we make the most impact for Cardano, the blockchain, and how we spend
our resources.
So basically what we do is we have a session where everybody from the Cardano Foundation
is their physical presence and they give their ideas and their input and we basically build
that upwards while we are also downwards building down what we see from the executive and the
leadership side. And what's sort of a bit unique is that what we do is now not just for 2025,
but we actually look towards 26 and 27, and we build that around three different pillars.
So technology, governance, and adoption.
On the technology side, we basically have a few key things we want to achieve in 2025.
And we make ourselves accountable towards those things because they are basically having ownership in the individual teams.
And on the other side, what we're doing is we are building a set of KPIs.
And we are every year writing this financial transparency report where we write how we spend the money and how the resources went but we also have the activity report and specifically on the technology side
just to give you a highlight of that we wanted to deliver some key projects one of them was
the contribution to amaro the multi-client or multi-node environment reef which we're going
to speak about a bit more further viridian as, as you saw, which is our identity wallet.
We wanted to finalize IBC, so the interconnectivity to the Cosmos ecosystem
and the IBC ecosystem, where there's a lot of good business logic
and a lot of interest in working with Cardano, so this interoperability,
originate and track and trace.
Further to that, as many know, we are maintaining
and improving critical infrastructure around operations, that is, Aiken, Kupo, Ogmius,
Cardano Wallet, Rosetta, GraphQL, and Yahtzee. It's all things, among others, which we are
maintaining and keep developing to improve the critical infrastructure of Cardano.
Open source is something I've been speaking a lot about, so I don't know, I don't want to say too much more about it, right?
But we want to contribute to projects around open source, and we want to keep pushing open source as one of the foundational principles for Cardano to be successful, specifically on the journey to a product to market fit.
So that means that it's not just about building groundbreaking technology
and contributing to that, but it's about people actually getting a real benefit of that
and using that and being willing to sacrifice scarce resources,
whether that's money or time, to keep maintaining and contributing to that.
Then we want to drive innovation, interoperability, zero knowledge tech,
potential future incentive models for Cardano, and so forth.
So that's just very high level on the technology side.
And as you can hear, there's already quite a lot we could dig into.
On the governance side, as I said, there were three pillars. We wanted to experiment
with being a DREP by basically embodying our Cardano principles, which we also spoke about
before, to attract some delegation, but also be accountable towards that delegation. So if we say
we're doing something and people are delegating to us, we're actually expecting that if we don't
do it, that people are taking away that delegation, right?
Because we want to get to a situation that there is a functioning liquid democracy happening all across Cardano.
And that can be really hard when you have ADA through centralized exchanges or have auto abstain there, other things like that.
Then CF as an ICC member.
We spoke a lot about that last time, right? So we were an ICC member before. We've been doing our best to build up a repo of assets which the
future CC members can take on. And I'm really excited about stepping back here and seeing
how the community is lifting that. The ambassador program being a point of contact for SPOs, foster inclusive self-organization, including DAOs and promote a resilient self-organizing environment.
But also how we protect the brand of Cardano for misuse out there, which is essentially quite hard.
So that's about the governance angle. On the adoption angle, which is where all blockchains are suffering the most,
we've been thinking a lot about scaling enterprise adoption.
One of those long-term bets is Reef, cross-functional integration and delivery.
We're thinking about demand generation. So how do we do marketing?
How do we do business development?
Can we do more so people fill blocks?
Can we do more to attract people to the best blockchain out there?
Brand and education, including Cardano Academy and partnering with others there.
But also how do we actually measure these outcomes and how do we bring that to the actual
blockchain?
And I think when we're talking about bringing things to the actual blockchain i think that's where reef has it's been a really long journey for us but we
always said you know there's a lot of foundation a lot of companies out there who build blockchains
who deploy blockchains who you know maybe you know trade on blockchains but you know why are
they not living on the blockchain? Why is that so hard?
And what we're trying to do here with Reef
is we've built a set of repos,
a set of APIs,
which basically allows us to put
all financial transactions,
not just buying and selling ADA,
but salaries, rent, project costs,
vendor costs,
all transactions the Kedana Foundation has on the blockchain and then start using the blockchain as a type of ERP solution.
And obviously for many private companies, this would be ludicrous.
Why would they give away this kind of transparency?
But I think specifically for foundations and for NGOs and nonprofits and places where
transparency has a real cost but also a huge value, it's been really a luxury to work with
a fantastic engineering team and a fantastic product ownership to be so far now that if
you don't have a lot of experience in blockchain,
there is a user experience on the Kadana Foundation webpage where you can go in and
and basically do bespoke reports and look at transactions for 2024 and 2023.
Now, if it is so that you have a bit more financial sort of knowledge, you can export
those reports and put it into a spreadsheet
or into a large language model or into some machine learning, and you can build some stuff on that.
If you have a bit more knowledge, you can actually go directly on the blockchain
and you can import it directly from the Cardano blockchain and you can build the same.
So our hope is that we basically are showing the way for how to actually use the blockchain, as Charles once said, right, to be the future of the financial and social systems of the world.
And by us being a front runner, which also includes taking quite some risk in that regards.
Amazing. Thanks so much for the high level overview on that.
So before we dive a bit deeper into Reeve specifically, I'd like to take a step back. I'm curious what specifically led to the creation of Reeve and how that kind of fits in with the strategic goals that you just outlined for CF.
Yeah, I mean, so when I went from investment banking into a big fall company, one of the reasons I did that was particularly because, you know, I wanted to understand why is it that financial infrastructure and banks don't want to have happier clients, be more transparent, have more technology and basically be there for the companies and
the people who use them?
And what I kept hearing again and again and again was, it's due to the lawyers, it's due
to the accountants, it I basically discovered is that the problem is not just
the lawyers and the auditors.
A big problem is the legacy systems we built.
And when I looked at what we were signing of balance sheets to give comfort to investors
around the world, I sometimes ask myself, what if you've been using machine
learning or what if you've been using triple bookkeeping or what instead of doing spot
checks, you actually were using full population? Wouldn't you have much more trust in those numbers
and for the end consumers or the shareholders who's buying that or who's interacting with that
company, wouldn't that be better? And we started actually playing around with this idea of using blockchain for that.
And when I then came to the Cardano Foundation,
and I saw that there was an opportunity for bringing some of the much needed transparency
around the Cardano Foundation to the actual blockchain and use the blockchain as intended.
It was basically just about trying to get the best team possible together, who has the business understanding, the accounting and technical accounting understanding and the engineering understanding to pull something like this off.
And then every week somebody's been telling me why this is a bad idea.
Right. You know, EU privacy rules, you know, you know, individuals employed, vendors and, you know, corporate privacy.
You know, why would you even be this transparent?
But when you see what's happening with Wirecard back in the days, with Credit Suisse, with
GameStop, what we see is that the internet and Twitter and all those things are so fast
right now that it's no longer about, are you liquid?
Do you have a good target operating model?
But it is also, you know, when 10,000 bots goes against you, how do you defend yourself?
And I think the only way you can defend yourself is using blockchain.
But the blockchain is an infrastructure.
It's not an application.
So what we did here is we built an application in open source, free for everybody to contribute to, to take and to use.
free for everybody to contribute to, to take and to use.
Plus, we have a team who can help you to implement this, right?
To inspire people to have a more transparent financial system
where more people can be equal stakeholders and shareholders
in companies around the world.
So we can actually start changing not just the financial systems,
but also some of these social systems out there.
Yeah, and in my eyes, that's what this really comes down to,
is transparency and trust.
And that kind of leads into my next question about
why do you think it was so important to make this open infrastructure?
Why is Reeve open source?
Well, there's basically two main reasons to that, right? So a couple of years back, we built
an explorer and quite a few people said, oh, we have explorers out there. And that is true. There
was explorers out there, but what we were trying to show was a different view on the blockchain.
But it became also quite apparent to us that, you know, we don't, Cardano Foundation should not be a competitor to the Dapp builders and the people who walk the streets every single day and try and sell the applications who works on Cardano.
We should be more like an enablement or, you know, taking upfront investments where it's very hard to find the business model because the upfront investment is too big or too difficult to do.
So for us, what was very important is this is not about us right now going out being,
you know, like a for-profit company selling accounting solutions to people around the world.
This is us taking the upfront three, four year development journey to prove to auditors, to prove to accountants, to prove to businesses that there's a value about financial transparency, about maintaining healthy accountability for investments and for shareholders and about inspiring people. And that's also not the only reason, but one of the reasons why we are actually locking
core financial transactions without applying the accounting standard,
because then it will work in every single country around the world.
It should give the opportunity, for instance,
if you're sitting in Germany and you want to use
the German accounting standard,
or if you are global and you want to use IFRS,
or if you're sitting in Abu Dhabi or in South Africa or in Peru, you can actually take
what we built, you can apply your knowledge about your local accounting standard and you can build
a business on Cardano for a certain set of companies here. And who do you envision most
benefiting from Reeve from this new open source solution that we launched
well that's a difficult question right so i think Reeve is not
for many many people right they will say hey you know accounting is just boring
accounting is complicated i don't understand it anyway.
It's very few people who can actually read a balance sheet and a P&L statement.
But when we look at it, the hard blood of trust, the average small and medium-sized companies around the world every day fight to make a living, to bring money back to their family, to their community, to keep
jobs in their communities. I think this is going to be the first line, the companies who's going
to benefit from something like that. Because if you are the largest companies in the world,
you will have so much money to lawyers and to marketing that when you have the bots against
you or you have Twitter against you or you have a community against you, you have
sufficient liquidity to fight it, right? But what we essentially are doing here is we're bringing
a super weapon to companies who are in the scaling phase, the medium-sized companies.
And I think that's the one who's going to benefit the most. And on the very short axis
is innovative companies who's not scared of sharing their finances, but actually think about
it differently. They think about it as an added value, which other companies don't do. And maybe
that's a way to prove that they are better than the other ones. So typical NGOs, non-for-profit
foundations, others who you will give a grant
or you will give some money to
when you hope and cross your fingers
that they actually do what they say they do.
But here you actually have a way
to get much more deeper accountability
and transparency around that.
Absolutely.
And so let's talk a bit about putting this into practice uh so a couple
weeks ago we released our financial insights report for 2024 on chain using reeve and so
how does publishing this report actually on chain how does this change things what does
this mean what are the implications of this well
I think in the first run
we actually had the
APIs and the
repos has been live on the Kadana Foundation's
GitHub for quite a long time
and we haven't seen a lot of
curiosity there but I also didn't
expect that because
you're basically looking for a very narrow
segment of quants
or accountants who loves blockchain or financial analysis
or something like that, right?
It's a very narrow segment.
But by us actually putting the 2024 data for the Cardano Foundation out there,
you no longer just have the code,
but you also have a very large data set of financial transactions
available to start grinding and doing models in. So for instance, if you would do, as an example,
if you would do a budget for Catalyst or a budget for Treasury draw, what is the benchmark for
for a treasury draw, right?
What is the benchmark for creating a new smart contracting language, right?
What is if you're doing a new business model in the identity space, right?
Stuff like that, right?
It's very hard to get these data points because this is not something you share, right?
This is actually something you're going to try and keep secret for as long as possible.
But now what you basically can do is you can take the activity report, look at the activities which Cardano Foundation does.
You can look at these accounting data and you can look at the repos and you can start adding those things together to start getting some benchmarks, at least in terms of how we do it.
And whether we do it in the most efficient way or least efficient way is not the point, but it is to get some reference around that.
way or least efficient way is not the point, but it is to get some reference around that.
What it also does is allows you to hopefully in the future, which is the next step, right,
is we would like to have external auditors to verify that the data on chain is also the
data they've been auditing and also start maybe getting into a world.
I mean, this is a very hard sell, right? But if we can get to a situation, for instance,
that our banks uses Viridian to basically sign off
that the fiat assets we have in the bank
is also the fiat assets we actually portray in the balance sheet.
I mean, then it gets interesting, right?
Because for a very long time,
the Cardano Foundation has been public with our ADA and so forth.
But if we can start getting more third party confirmation of that data, what you also have is you start seeing a way where we can turn, you know, average, not average, but you can turn enterprises into sort of a type of Oracle providers.
turn enterprises into sort of a type of Oracle providers, right? And now all CACs and Charlie
three and others will then suddenly have a new use case for their business models. And there
will be clients then already waiting with some pressure and some push around that.
Interesting. So if these third party auditors actually want to take a look at Cardano Foundation's financials, or if anyone in the audience wants to take a look at our financial insights report recently published, how could they actually do that?
Like, where can people actually go and see and verify for themselves our financial information?
So as I said in the start, you basically go in on cadanofoundation.org, and you click on Reef,
and there is a short blog post who guides you to a user experience.
Remember, in the user experience, we can optimize that.
And thank you.
I think it was Tommy who mentioned that to us, right?
The data is only for 2023 and 2024.
So don't try and take out a report for 2025.
It's not there yet.
I'm working with Sebesh at the moment
when we're going to publish,
most likely we're going to publish Q1 and Q2.
But that's basically how you go along it, right?
If you're a bit more technical,
you can basically click in the UX in there
and you're being sent to a page where you can pick your blockchain explorer from the community of choice.
You pick that one and then you will basically see the numbers and how they roll up.
And by seeing how they roll up and seeing that, you can basically find the addresses which we are using for our financial data.
And you can start either downloading that.
I would really recommend to do that through the Yahtzee store, which, you know, we've
been building and providing, right?
So the Yahtzee store is good, but if you already are running a full node, you can
also take it from there.
So that's, you know, one way through it, right?
If you're not that technical, you can just export it from the UX
into an Excel spreadsheet
and you can start running queries
and getting inspiration in there.
Amazing.
Thanks so much for that overview.
So yeah, just cardonofoundation.org slash Reeve,
then click on explore
and you'll be able to go in and see
all of the financial transactions
that we've published on chain.
And so I'm curious what the challenges are with this.
Are there any things that might be difficult or what were some of the challenges with bringing this to life?
Yeah, there's a lot of challenges.
Well, I don't actually know where to start, right? Because as I said, every
week somebody's telling me why this is the worst idea you could ever have to
use a blockchain to change financial systems of the world. Because saying it
is one thing, but doing it is very different. I'll give you two or three
examples here and then you can say if you want more, right? The first question
right is in
the European Union we have something called EU GDPR which basically is the
Data Privacy Protection Act and that actually stipulates like a double digit
percentage of your turnover which you have to pay as a fine if you are in
breach with the privacy standards. Double digit of your turnover. So how do you comply with that?
So basically, for instance, if you can derive
like personal identifying information or stuff like that.
So in many aspects, I felt we could have gotten
even more transparent than what we did,
but we had to start somewhere.
So we actually had to already go one step beyond
what some of our legal advice was
telling us and roll up, for instance, salary transactions into different buckets.
On the commercial law side, when you use vendors, as you know, Cardano Foundation is trying its best
to not always just do everything ourselves, but also to use vendors in the Cardano space and
outside the Cardano space.
In these vendor contracts, there's often a privacy element into them.
So in the start, we actually wanted to tag every single vendor,
not by name, but just sort of you could see who's the different vendors.
So when you see a bill is being paid.
But actually, we realized that that actually might be in breach with contracts. So going forward, when you're a vendor of the Cardano Foundation,
we're actually going to build in that we're telling,
if you're going to be a vendor of Cardano,
you have to be aware that the vendor cost is basically going on chain.
We won't mention your name,
but it will be very significant that that's one transaction.
And third, a lot of people have been saying,
yeah, but who's going to buy that?
I mean, this is insane.
Nobody wants this level of transparency.
But I think that the reality is that a lot of us was drawn to blockchain because we actually wanted this level of transparency.
And we were not getting that by the existing financial system.
And I think by getting this type of transparency, we are going to change some of the social and financial systems
we've been looking at for a very long time.
And that's going to hurt.
So a lot of head of accounting and a lot of CFOs and people we've been speaking to also
actually in our own ecosystem has said, oh, we are a private company.
We have no way we will do this.
We have no obligations to do that.
Why would we even think about doing that?
And I think that is a perfectly reasonable point to have.
But I do think as we look ahead, there's going to be more and more companies
who are going to have the sole purpose of adding value to a local community
in the nation state or the city state or wherever they are located.
And the more DAOs and the more sort of co-op and community models we're having, the more
of those will take this as a natural that you can verify these things if you need to.
But you can do it.
And you do not need to ask a third party who actually don't understand the target operating
market operating model for permission even to have a look into the finances.
model for permission even to have a look into the finances.
And so now I'd like to go into one of the community questions that we received
under the post when I promoted it earlier this week.
We had the mesh SDK who asked, do you think that project catalyst could be a use case
to integrate Reeve?
Yes, I certainly think they could.
I mean, again, this is I'm not in the leadership of Project Catalyst, right?
But the way I look at Project Catalyst is that Project Catalyst has been
one of the best data points for getting towards Voltaire.
And it's been through a tremendous development, right?
And it's important for us that
we have a vehicle for bootstrapping innovation. But I do think that such a large Cardano vehicle
should be on the Cardano blockchain natively. And I certainly see that they could use some of the APIs and some of the methodology to put that in there.
But Catalyst is not a business model as such, even though I know that they're now incorporated
into a company. So if that is true, then yeah, it would be a no brainer. But if they really,
truly are blockchain based grant mechanism, they will need to do some tinkering to get it right.
But I obviously think
that something like that should be natively on the layer one blockchain. Absolutely. I totally
agree with you. And thank you, Mesh, for the great question. Okay, last question on the financial
insights report before we tie this all back into our tactical implementation plan and our overall
strategy. Why does this matter for
our stakeholders and for the broader ecosystem? I'm curious just more so about the broader
implications that this really has. Maybe if you could explain just in a very non-technical,
easy to understand way for a broader audience,
just to really drive this home.
Because I think this is really, really big.
The Kadana Foundation is one out of maybe 300 to 400 foundations
around the world who support, contribute,
or operate some type of blockchain.
To the best of my knowledge, we are the only blockchain and the only blockchain foundation
who now are actively using the blockchain, not just to hash a PDF, but to actually show that we are using it for real tangible value.
And we are able to do that in a regulated and conform way.
That means that we're using the tech we are selling ourselves.
And we do that every single day.
And I think that matters a lot.
One thing is, if somebody says, buy this ice cream, and you ask them, have you tasted it yourself?
And they say, no, no, but I did some samples.
Another thing is saying, well, we actually run on this.
We are not all the way through by completely running on this, but the fact that we use it in our daily business now, and that we are continuing this journey, and our audit company has indicated to us a high likelihood that they will continue this journey with us.
It's amazing, right?
And I think, you know, we have to live our creed.
Very well said.
Yeah, I couldn't agree more.
It's one thing to talk the talk, but it's another thing to walk the walk
and to actually practice what we preach.
So thank you for breaking that down so clearly and simply.
Okay, now I'd like to kind of tie it all back together. So let's look forward a bit.
What does success look like for Reeve, let's say 18 months from now? What's your vision
for this open source solution?
the first client
if you can be so blunt
to go on Reef
is actually ourself
and we have some KPIs
ourselves which we are trying to get to
and one of them is obviously we don't want to do
a yearly
bulk update of all of our numbers to the actual blockchain.
Right. What we really want to get to is a situation that we may be on a quarterly or maybe even more frequently post all of our numbers.
Right. And the closer we get to that frequency, the more interesting the numbers become.
the more interesting the numbers become.
Because as you imagine today as an investor or as a stakeholder
or as any kind of, if you have interest in any kind of company,
sometimes you have to wait 12, 14 months to see the financials.
So you're basically guessing for a very long time.
On the other hand, maybe the executives or the board members
have been promising something and they're not doing it,
but you actually don't know, right?
Because no investment has been made.
There's just some claims.
And by actually showcasing here
that the investment has been made,
it doesn't make them necessarily more successful,
but it means you can see that they are doing it.
They are certainly trying
and they are investing, right?
So I think for us as the first client,
going to a higher frequency, so you have more velocity in the insights, and then getting to a
situation where we can have a third party, preferable auditor or an external CPA, who
basically verifies that the numbers we posted on the blockchain is also the numbers they've seen in our ERP system is really what we want to do.
Now, we already have some leads
and we've also been speaking to Intersect, right?
And we would also, I mean, we would really enjoy
to see a couple of companies start using that for themselves.
Now, accounting is normally a cost center and it's difficult, but getting a few companies
on this would also be in an 18 months timeframe would definitely be something we're looking
for.
What a few companies is, I don't want to be too specific, but have a few there.
And then last but not least, something I'm very, very passionate about is I would like
to see some external maintainers of the code base,
right? Whether that's engineers or accountants, but seeing that people have an interest in the
code base and start, you know, adding suggestions and pull requests into it is something we're
going to be looking for. Absolutely. And so let's say that there's someone out there in the audience
right now who is considering Reeve.
They are interested in putting their financial information on the blockchain.
How would an organization actually go about implementing Reeve?
What steps should they take right now in order to actually get it moving,
get it moving, actually implement Reeve and put their financials on chain?
actually implement Reeve and put their financials on chain?
I think the first step before even contacting us is that you probably need to speak to the
executive or the owners of your business, right? And just gauge the risk willingness, because
a lot of people would say, yeah, we have a huge interest in being transparent, but when it actually
gets down to it, they don't.
They just feel that they have to say it because that's sort of the trend of the day.
But if you feel that your company really could benefit from this, you can reach out throughout the contact form on the cadernofoundation.org.
And we will be in contact with you either, depending if you're from the engineering side, we have an integration engineering team around Mikio, who is upgraded to this.
Or if you're from the accounting side, my own accountants here are able to do some first assessment.
Great. Thank you so much, Fred.
Okay, in a few moments, I'll be opening up the stage to community questions.
be opening up the stage to community questions so if anyone has some questions about cardona
foundation strategy about reeve about the financial insights report go ahead and raise your hand and
i'll bring you up on stage but while we wait for for some folks to gather their thoughts and get
their questions ready uh one last question for you fred how does how does all of this tie back to
to the cardona foundation's long-term strategy that you outlined in the beginning of the session?
On the 50,000 foot level, right?
Essentially, the Cardano Foundation becomes successful when the Cardano blockchain is economically self-sufficient, meaning it generates enough transaction fees to cover the incentives which is being paid out to the stake pool operators and the ADA stakers, plus now the treasury withdrawals and catalysts, how that's going to sort of round up, right?
And we want to see that in a way that the blockchain is used for good.
And the use for good is a wordplay, right?
Meaning that good sustainability long-term, Cardano Foundation doesn't need to be here for the long term,
but the Cardano blockchain should be here for generations and shape the outcome of society and financial systems.
The other part is, as with any other emerging technology,
it tends to be weaponized, right?
So when you receive with AI, we see with drones,
we see it with blockchain and so on.
As soon as we have a new technology,
there will be a lot of people who have asymmetric knowledge
and they're weaponizing it to their private or personal gain or to gain power or gain some kind of control.
So what we are trying to do here is we're looking at the actual transactions.
And it's not sufficient for us that the transactions are going through, that we have enough transactions fee to actually cover the incentives.
We want to have meaningful transactions to change
the social and financial systems of the world. And Reeve is in the core of challenging financial
bookkeeping and trust in companies' financials and is in the core of financial systems actually.
Right? So this is an inspiration to build us around the world, saying we're taking the first step now.
And I hope you are inspired to start challenging the financial systems of your world,
because now we have not only the best infrastructure being the Cardano blockchain,
but we have a set of repos and APIs, which will allow you to deploy that in your home setting.
And we have a set of integration engineers and business experts
who can also join you on that journey for you to maybe build a business and challenge the
environment you're in to hopefully get a better system out there.
Very well said, Fred. Thank you so much for that. Okay, so I'm not seeing any community questions
yet in the live chat. So let's go to some of the questions that were asked under the original post.
So Joel asked us, what is the best way to flood the Cardano community with developers?
It's a good question.
Any ideas there, Fred?
Any ideas there, Fred?
So in my mind, Charles has done a phenomenal job
in building a very, very strong infrastructure.
As you know, it was mainly built on Haskell,
and the Cardano Foundation has then added a lot of work
in terms of getting Java and getting TypeScript
and other code bases to it.
We also have the decentralized treasury and mechanism
where you can basically do
treasury draws now
and still the
Cardano blockchain
is not the blockchain who's most
flooded with developers.
So this leads to ask you that magical
question.
If the weekend warriors
and the believers are already on Cardano,
then how do we attract the other ones? And the other ones are mainly deployed in businesses.
So they have a day job where they're coding along for some kind of a business on operations. And we now need to get them on board.
A huge step forward was the ICANN team, basically getting the ICANN language approved
as an official GitHub language. So it shows also the tenacity of that.
But I really think it's about time that we get the employed developers
to see the business value and be able to articulate the business value in using something like Cardano.
Yeah, I could not agree more.
And so we had another question, which is actually very similar.
But instead of focusing on developers, somebody asked, what is your short-term plan to get more users on Cardano?
I mean, that was never really sort of the remnants of the Cardano Foundation, right?
So, but I think it's a very, it's a valid question and it's an important question the way we look at it in the cadano foundation is enterprise projects being maybe the pillar one right so enterprise projects can be
like what we've done with originate or reef or maybe major global exchange enterprises like
petrobras down in south america using ver. So really these long-term adoption cases who takes two to three years.
But that's not enough.
We don't have two to three years to basically do that.
So what about accelerating dApps?
So provide targeted growth support, incentives, and dedicated account management
to dApps. So basically, how do we and dedicated account management to dApps.
So basically, how do we support some of the biggest dApps?
And I want to mention a few names just as inspiration.
It's not because they're specifically selected or anything like that, right?
But when you look at things like MintSwap, WingRiders, Indico, SundaySwap,
you know, these people who really fight every single day to get more clients,
are they truly
getting enough support and can we do more to attract or align the product to market fit
then we have sort of the back builders um i think the back builders what we are very interested in
is is is companies like draper university tech starsstars, our own Venture Hub, CBBC Labs,
Misumi is another one, right?
So basically these kind of target operating models
who take a lot of companies in,
run them through a process
and get them to a better product to market fit
or get them to be more investable with smart money
or money who has access to clients, right?
So I think there's definitely something to be had there.
I think it's very, very clever that Catalyst in the last round, 13, that they had a focus
on some of those and you could see some of those also got funded.
And I think four or five hundred companies applied to the combination of these already.
And Masumi, as you see, already have transactions on chain.
Then there's the heavyweight integrations.
No one mentioned, nobody forgotten, right?
I know how this goes.
This is recorded, right?
But, you know, there is heavyweight integrations, which could be done,
and we should constantly be looking at that.
And maybe one of the drawbacks of being too decentralized in this aspect is that some of these requires a single counterpart to basically hold an SLA or a contract against, which the Cardano Foundation could be one or IOG could be one or Imurgo could be one.
It doesn't really matter, but we could definitely be one to basically sign a contract against.
But the larger thing is, who do you actually negotiate with?
Because the other ecosystems, they have maybe like four or five people in a room
who can sign a check on a double-digit amount of millions, right?
And we have Voltaire full in force, right?
So we need to figure out where is the strategic fit with these heavyweight integrations
and how do we keep moving these heavyweight integrations forward.
And last but not least, when we look at DeFi and we look at liquidity,
I think we are now at a stage where we have to be quite honest to ourselves
and we have to look at not just the amount of locked assets out there, the TVL, right?
But we also have to look at other KPIs.
So how deep is our order books actually?
Why is it that we build a lot of the DeFi
with sort of the Ethereum EVM accounting model inside
and didn't use UTXO?
Is there a way we can get coordinated market making across multiple Canado native
assets? What can we do for the native stablecoins on Cardano? How do we get more traction on that?
So those sort of five places is places I would love to have more companies
engaging in and more collaboration about how we
how we drive that forward. Thanks, Fred. And a quick reminder to the audience that the stage
is now open. So if you have any questions for us that you would like to ask live, go ahead and
raise your hand and we'll bring you right up to the stage. We can keep the conversation going.
your hand and we'll bring you right up to the stage we can keep the conversation going
but in the meantime fred i personally have a question for you um i'm wondering what excites
you or what are you looking forward to when it comes to either cardano foundation or cardano as
a whole um in the next six to 12 months is there anything that you're personally looking forward to
personally looking forward to?
Yeah, I'm really excited about Agentec AI at the moment.
And I know that there's a couple of announcements coming up with some
collaborations and other things, right?
I wish I cannot mention right now, but I think AI is definitely going to be way
more famous than anybody in the whole world believe.
And I think anybody who is somebody who walks around with ChatGPT or Gemini or Claude or
something like that.
So the intersection between AI and real truly permissionless blockchains like Cardano is
an area I'm very excited about.
I'm super proud to see use cases on Cardano already
because this truly is,
you can really articulate the business value for this.
There's no questions why this in an agentic AI matters, right?
And the other part I'm really excited about
just due to the timing, right?
I'm extremely excited about midnight, right?
So I'm really sort of, you know, I want to see how Midnight takes off. We've been very supportive around Midnight from
the backbone of Cardano, right? So we've been working with different exchanges in terms of
making them CIP-8 compliant. We've been working with different integrations. We've been, you know,
educating people out there, right? So the glacier drop and seeing this economic opportunity about this
glacier drop where other ecosystems will be drawn to Cardano. I really think that the ecosystem,
so the Cardano ecosystem has an opportunity to ensure that some of the people who come
into Cardano for the first time from another chain to claim an economic value, that they have a huge
opportunity to linger around
and see how beautiful Cardano is and all the applications and all the smart contracts
and the diversity of coding languages and the operational resilience
and how great the Cardano community actually is.
So I think this is definitely something I'm very excited about, for sure.
Then further on, I'm very excited about, of course,
that we're going to have a summit this year in Berlin.
And if you haven't signed up on the waiting list,
you should definitely do so.
But I already heard now that there's going to be
some really big enterprises who's not blockchain focused,
who's going to show up to have interactions
with the Cardano community about how they become
blockchain enabled.
So, I mean, I would say that's sort of the third part.
Yeah, those are definitely some things
that I'm personally looking forward to as well.
Thanks so much for that, Fred.
Okay, so it looks like we had one question from Frogman.
Welcome to the stage.
It's all yours.
Hello, all. First and foremost, thank you for all you do. I am extremely critic of all founding entities because my life savings are at stake
with Cardano. Thus, although I'm not apologizing, this is my explanation as to why I am this critic.
Frederick, Charles once said that the original purpose for the Cardano Foundation
was to be a members-based organization wherein their chief executives would be voted by the
community, but Switzerland laws have locked the CF in a manner that this MBO will never exist as
originally planned. My questions are, one, was the CF intended to be an MBO as explained by Charles?
Two, will there ever be elections for the lead team of the CF
based on our ADA holdings?
If no, why not?
Thank you for listening and answering the questions.
My questions are, hello all.
I think I got all of that.
Thank you, frogman or frogwoman.
Well, Charles and two of his old colleagues, they basically wrote what you take a piece of money, you dedicate it to them, and then you ensure forever that the money is being used exactly as you intend.
And if the foundation don't do that, they're 100% personal liable, which means that basically the board and the executives are 100% personal liable for us not following the founder's intent.
And the deed is actually semi-public.
I actually believe you can download it on the commercial register webpage, but it's been flooded many times on the Cardano Forum and other places.
So it is available out there.
But we can also talk a little bit about what it actually says. But what the deed basically says very clearly, it says that it's about the promotion
of third generation blockchains such as Cardano. It does not specify anything regarding a
membership-based organization. It doesn't specify anything about voting. On the contrary,
choosing a Swiss foundation setup, you basically lock
yourself into a very rigid structure to protect the intent of the founders forever. The power
of this and the reason why the Ethereum Foundation actually chose this was because there was a
lot of insecurity around will ETH be a security or not, and how do you actually keep the engineers out of harm's way, right?
But what it also does is that if you someday wake up and your kids or your kids' kids
or whatever, they figure out that there's a lot of money locked into a foundation and
you want to use it in a different way than the original founder said, it's simply not
possible.
So when people ask me, should I do a foundation, the Swiss foundation to do a new
blockchain? I always say, no, I don't think you should. Back in 2017, 18, 19, this was exactly
the right thing to do. But we now have so much regulatory clarity, partly due to the work IOG,
Morco and Kedana Foundation has done with stakeholders out there, right? But also due to other foundations
moving, right? That it's no longer needed to do something like that. So I guess to answer the
question, to the best of my knowledge and to what I can see in the legal documents, this was never
the founder's intent. Thank you so much for that question, frogman, or frogwoman, I guess.
And thank you, Fred, for the answer.
So it looks like we're approaching the end of our session right now.
But, Fred, I'd like to give you the opportunity to share maybe any final thoughts on what the community should watch out for in the few months.
I also see Georgio is up here now, our CTO.
So if Georgio is happy to share some
thoughts with us as well, that would be great. I just came up, I just found funny that Fred
mentioned the AI agents and we got the question from an AI voice. That was quite funny.
Absolutely. Okay, well, I think that isn't it? Absolutely.
Okay, well, I think that'll do it for today.
We are approaching time.
And so thank you everyone for joining today's AMA.
As a reminder, this session was recorded
and it will be available shortly on our X account here.
And our next monthly AMA will be announced soon.
And for those of you wanting to explore RIV
or a financial insights report for 2024, all links are on the cardonofoundation.org website and on our social
channels here. Thank you so much, Fred. Thank you, Giorgio. And thank you as well to our technical
team for standing by in case of any technical questions. I wish everyone a great day, great
evening, great morning, wherever you're located.
And until next time, let's keep building.
Bye-bye. Thank you.
