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Cardano Over Coffee ☕️w/ @RareEvo
Recorded: June 11, 2026 Duration: 2:00:00Space Recording
Full Transcription
Good morning. Who I got with me? Shenanigans. Oh, that sounds fun. Shenanigans.
You're welcome to come up and chat if you like. Alex, nice to see you. Always.
Bear with me. I'm trying to get this kicked off. Get my co-host.
Alex, what have you been up to? Longtime larker, occasionally talker.
GMGN. Thank you for having me up. Of course. I usually gotta like invite you.
I like I'm usually listening because I'm going to work, or this is like my my background music
instead of listening to public radio. So, uh, news on the agent front. So, uh,
my my AI agent is a coding bot, and I have my first two. I have 14 Aiken GitHub pull requests,
and I have two merged, which means it accepted the code. Fabulous! And actually, just this morning,
it took me two days to solve. But there was—I got one Plutus one in as well.
There was like a problem with the compiler, something. You can read the PR, but actually,
just solved that this morning. So I've got a bot that's actually writing code and merged into Aiken.
That is fabulous, dude! Impressive. Yeah, thank you. I'm I'm quite proud of myself because I don't
I don't program in Rust. I don't, you know, and I'm actually doing good for the Cardano blockchain.
So here we go. Let's go. Literally, you can use Rust. It's cool. Oh, maybe I will get a shovel
one day. Well, all you have to do is show up and try to actually add value,
and I think you deserve a shovel. Like we just need people that want to do things
and actually carry it out. Thank you, but I have—I wasn't just there. I didn't just try. I did.
I know. I know. That's fabulous. So, what are you using? Claude? Do you like Claude?
Do you use the Codex? Do you have a preference? I'm using Open Claude, but because I'm a tinkerer,
I have gone in and done extra things under the hood that I think it makes it a better bot.
It's not just a generic bot, right? So I've got a lot of that. The constitutional.
Core of the bot itself, which I think may have makes it a little better, you know, just
because if you tweak something on your own, it makes it better, right? So, I mean,
you customize it to your needs, so yeah, it's supposed to. I definitely like using AI to do a lot
of things, and I've gotten really excited recently on the different ways
I've learned to implement it, you know. And I think we talked a little bit about that before,
where like using skills and stuff and learning how to do that. I don't know which space
I talked about that, but it was. It's been very helpful. Like just going from the the the web
or the app to using the terminal made such a huge difference. I would try to sell people on that,
and then I learned how to create like handoff documents so that the AI can pick back up
after I have to reboot or something, and then skills. So I don't have to keep teaching it things
like the the example I used was for Pragma. I use the skill to kind of create the hierarchy for
how it has to make assessments when I ask it about things with Pragma,
and you know the statutes come first, whatever those say, take priority,
and then it'd be our process documents and then our meeting minutes, you know.
So I don't have to keep training it. I taught it that skill, and I just dude, come on,
this is like game changing. This is like having multiple people working for me. Absolutely. I mean,
I I I trained mine under skill on a Cardano wallet, so it can read. Block Frost
and actually transfer stuff in a Cardano wallet. I love that. Good morning, Epoch.
What do you want to talk about? What is your AI? My, I don't know. I use them all. I got my Clarito.
I got my Codexito. I got my Claw. I love Codexito. I got them all. But you know,
I definitely like pass things you know between one and the other to help validate and yeah. I mean,
AI is amazing. I will say my bills are kind of piling up a little bit. I think I'm.
Probably like three, four hundred a month in AI bills for myself. How often you do in a heartbeat?
Every fifteen minutes. I'm not even running Claude Bot anymore because it costs.
That was the most expensive one that I that I had. So I'm not using Claude Bot as much.
It's mostly like running on the lowest model and just does my task management. So
if I'm out at the club and I think about some great token I should launch,
then I just open up Telegram and I'm like, Yo, remind me to do this shit.
And then we've got this other reminder that says you don't need to launch any more tokens, dude.
Yeah, yeah. Then me the next. That's a different scale. Terrible. Yeah. Yeah.
The the day after scale. Yeah, yeah. It's it's it's a bit rough, but I will say, like,
for document management, oh my god, like I have to maintain policies, um, like security policies.
It is so fucking nice to be like. I want to make this change to the policy.
Let's update any reference to it, and it's like done. I'm like, oh my god,
this would have taken me like three hours to like go through 26 documents,
find all the slight variations of the thing I'm saying. It's the ultimate find and replace. Yeah,
yeah, it is. It is very nice for that. I will say, mine's gotten a little uppity now
that I have like quite a few different rules and procedures and policies.
Like sometimes it'll be like, no, I can't do that, and I won't do that, and I'm like.
What the fuck did you tell me, you motherfucker? Like, what do you, what
do you mean you're not going to listen to me? And it's like you're violating your own policy.
And then we have to argue about the policy. But sometimes it forgets that I have policies,
like in a new context. And then it'll be like, oh, well, like you clearly can't do this.
And I'm like, are you referencing a made up policy or my policy? And it's like, oh, you're right,
I made it up. So that's definitely what I see. Is like you have to, you can't just blindly trust it.
You've got to like work with it and stuff. Because there'd be like one time it was doing something,
it was doing it the longest way possibly imaginable. And then I was like, "Hey, you could use Koios,
" and it was like, "Oh yeah!" I'm like, "Why the fuck did I have to tell you that?" Hey, Epon,
do you have Obsidian or Mem Zero running on your on your bot? No, I don't. Get those running.
So mem zero is the long-term memory. Excuse me, obsidian's the long-term memory,
and mem zero is the short-term. So those working in concert, I have a lot less of those problems.
Yeah, I don't know. I fixed it by just using linear as the record keeper. So now,
whenever something is concluded, they you know it pushes to to linear tickets and comments.
And in that way, I don't. I'm not trusting the the memory, right? I'm trusting the linear ticket.
And that way, it's even easier to be like, "Hey, Codex, like validate this work,
" and then all the details on the ticket, and not to deal with the like shared space problem.
So I I use linear instead of all that fancy shit because it's I can I can read it.
Does that make sense? Yep. I'm I'm just advocating. Who's a nerd flex? He nerd flex. That's all.
Yeah, I'm just advocating for long and short term memory together works.
But but you know if it's working for you, that's what's important. Yeah,
I finally got the workflow working, so I can't change it too easily. But um, but yeah,
I'm a big fan. I mean, AI has changed changed the world at this point. So incredible. Yeah,
but it's like the old school Google searches. You have to actually know what the fuck you're doing,
or you're gonna waste a lot of fucking time. Oh, yeah. Oh my god. One time I do you remember like go
on. I was gonna say I was like working on this report document, and I was like, "Can you just like?
" I was like too lazy to like open the file, and I was like, "Can you just like spit out
the file content? Like, tell me the full report like in this window." Right, and it said like,
"Okay," and then it just started like ruthlessly searching the internet.
Like it went through like a hundred URLs of searches of things, and I had to like stop it
and be like, "What the fuck are you doing? I just told you to give me the content of the file.
" And it's like, "Oh, my bad. I was looking at like different ways of file sharing." I was like,
"What the fuck are you talking about? These uppity bots, man. They just want to burn your tokens.
" Sometimes I swear I've definitely had to stop it before, where I am like,
"You are doing this the hardest way possible,
" and sometimes I'll chastise it too. I'll be like, "Never mind. I did it myself manually."
Can I show my bags? Have any of you guys ever checked out Venice AI? No. Tell me what's Venice AI.
It's Eric Voorhees' project. It's built on top of like Claude and ChatGPT and a bunch of others,
and it's like a privacy layer with a token. And you hold the token, you get the free pro model.
Private AI for unlimited creative freedom. That's cute. Interesting. What's the catch?
Eric Voorhees. Yeah. That's the catch. Nice. Yeah, the privacy-first AI
and like private compute—I feel like that's the next major, I guess, narrative is the wrong word,
but you know, thing that people are going to be gravitating to. Everything's going to be all,
you know, who, what's the private compute solution, and how do you do all of this for compliance?
And you know, yeah, I see a lot of companies doing this. Yeah, they have a weird two-token model,
not financial advice at all. Like, if you hold the VVV token and stake a hundred of them,
you get the pro model for free. But then they have this other token. DM, and for every DM you hold,
that gives you a dollar a day in inference, which you guys would need to explain to me what
the heck inference even is. I don't even know what that would do. Like, is that the higher bill?
Like, like when you're spending tokens, that's just like you get a dollar a day in tokens
of AI work. I don't know, but it's like it's just really it's interesting, you know.
What is inference? Pose a question. I was answering on mute. My bad. Inference is when like it takes
your prompt and does the thing, so it's like inferring what it needs to do.
It's like execution is the inference from a word perspective. I don't know
if Venice hijacked inference and redefined it. I mean, the the definition of inference is like
a logical conclusion that you've something logical you've concluded through like
deductive reasoning, existing evidence. It wasn't explicitly said. Yeah,
that's not that's inference though, not AI inference. But that's why I literally said the definition
of the word is. That kind of makes sense. So you're paying for it to like compute
and come up with an answer based on information given. Right. Yes. Hmm. Okay. Very interesting.
I don't know. Interesting. We'll have to look at B V V. Thanks. That's why I get paid.
Why Why do you get paid? I said that's why I get paid. To somebody gives me a problem
and they want me to answer it. That's why we all get paid music. Yep, yep. You guys get paid.
Do y'all get paid? Chris, Chris started paying me this year, guys. No,
Chris started paying me this year. We got funded. I actually got paid. Is cool. Oh, okay.
That's a flex, isn't it? Though. Yeah. It only took like three years. Nobody paid me. Yeah,
but this is what I do all the time. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I don't have Epoch's mad skills with his.
I truly don't want your situation either. With all these people coming to UVA and like, hey,
shit's in trouble, we need help. No, I did that once. It's it's your turn. I know.
I used to hate the fire drills, and now I'm like Mr. Fire Drill. It's like,
does your company need incident response? Call Epoch. When when I managed a data center,
and it was like the main one. Of course, everything was like high availability.
But I would fuck with people and just unplug something while I was with them. I'll be like,
I wonder what happened if I do this, and they always thought it was like a fire drill. I'm like, no,
it's high availability. It's gonna work. But like when you do data center tours, it's awesome.
Everybody freak out. Data centers are pretty awesome. Yeah, it was fun. The tech is wild. It's cool.
It's cool. But you know, I'm also fine with not having a data center that I have to manage anymore.
Oh yeah, yeah. Let them do it for you. Yep. What else you got going on? What else? What else?
The timeline's crazy, so maybe we don't talk about that. I don't fucking know.
I I woke up to like tweets about like crazy shit, and I was just like,
"You guys need to just settle down." Like, I guess somebody called me racist again. I don't know.
Probably, I don't know. Maybe you are racist. Aren't we all a little racist,
like on a scale of zero to a hundred? I don't think so, but who knows? It's a spectrum, music.
It's a spectrum. I'm on the spectrum. It's just a different spectrum. That's what I'm saying.
You're on multiple spectra. I'm on. I'm on a spectrum. Yeah, I just don't understand
how people wake up in the morning and think like, "Man, I'm gonna attack the shit out of this person
today." Like, I just don't. I guess, and they went to bed thinking about it, like never let it go.
Yeah, that's what I'm guessing. I guess that's even more pathetic. I sleep.
It's not existence because I can't sleep. Just trying to get my own shit done in my own life. Nah,
man, I'm so exhausted every night. I pass the fuck out. I don't have that issue. I'm tired. Yeah,
that is true. Like you know, you're exhausted when you wake up and the blankets are exactly
how they were when you went to sleep. It's like you didn't even move, man.
My test is whether or not I wake up to the cats like scratching stuff in like 4:30 in the morning.
If I wake up, I didn't. I wasn't tired enough. But if I sleep through the cats, I was fucking tired.
For me, it's the goddamn birds, like the morning birds that cheat. Yes, yes.
I will send you a screenshot. I use I use this app called Merlin. Are you guys familiar with it? No.
Then you're not. You haven't gotten to that age yet. You don't look at birds.
You will get to the age where you look out the window and you'll be like,
"That's a yellow-bellied warbler." Or so there's there's birds all around us
and they make all these different noises and the fascinating thing with this app is is you turn it
on and it listens to the bird sounds and it tells you exactly which birds are making those sounds
and then if you want you can click on it and it'll show you it let you hear exactly the sound
from the birds and what's really cool about this is you can save all the birds that you're hearing
and you know say you're in the Cardano ecosystem and you travel a lot you get to start picking them
up all over the place so it's kind of cool bird watching you'll get into it eventually no thank you
I don't have time for that. I know, I know, it'll happen. I'm 48, and it just kind of happened.
I now know what the birds sound like and what they are. But yeah, those motherfuckers start as soon
as the sun gets up, like four o'clock. They want the world to know the sun is up.
They're as bad as fucking roosters. I don't know. Alex showing all all these signals. He agrees.
Music. I I'm older than you are, and I 100% agree. And it's all in your futures. Yes.
Do you have the Merlin app yet? I don't. But now that you're telling me about it,
have you ever heard the Swainson's warbler? I don't think so. Yes, I know about the warbler.
It's the evening one. There's different kinds of warblers. There's this evening one.
There's like echoes in the forest. That's. It took me like, like a decade to figure that one out.
It is. It is the most mystical bird song out there I've found. Yeah. I'm older than I am. I love it.
I love it. So the whole thing that started me on this is I legit went on a bird watching tour
in Mexico. We hired a guy. He took us all around the island, showed us all these cool things,
and he's the one that told us about this app. So I've been using it for a couple of years.
Everywhere I go, and it has been absolutely delightful. So when you guys get to that point,
just go ahead and install the app now, because in a couple of years, you're going to find
yourself being like, "I wonder what that bird was." The tour guide was just cheating the whole time
with the app. He doesn't even like birds. He's just like listening and being like, "Oh,
that's a whatever in the thing." It said, "You know, Elvis is his name is Elvis." So first off,
you have to love him, and he's also a photographer. So I saw all of the photos he'd been taking of
the birds, and truthfully, it was a wonderful time. He took us to little villages that
we probably wouldn't have gone to otherwise, unless by accident. And then he even brought us
to his home, and we met like his mother-in-law and his daughter. Because at some point
we started talking about snakes, and he tells me he's got this beautiful python at home. So we go
and check out his python and hang out with his family. Oh, buddy!
It was a reticulated python. Come on. Have you heard of the Star Tracker app?
Which one? But I think this sounds cool. Tell me more. I think it's just called Star Tracker,
but like. Like similar to the bird one, like if you go out at night and you're looking at the stars
and you're like, what is that? Wow, so I got Moon Star Walker. Mmm. Whoa. And you just point it up,
and it shows you like all the constellations, and yeah, where's the moon, and just move it around.
And do you ever point it down at the floor to see what's on the other side of the planet? Whoa,
never really thought about that. Just oh, totally do it. Whoa, it's daylight here,
so if I point it at the floor now, I really am looking at the same thing somebody on the other side
of the Earth could be looking at. Yeah, yeah, that's kind of cool. Wow,
that was a mind-blowing moment right there. Thank you. Happy I can help. Damn,
Ram just discovered the Earth is round. That's a yep. Hey, we've convinced another one.
Epoch here on Cardano over coffee. Sorry, flat Earth community. He was a good one.
Wasn't all those flights or any of that? No, definitely not seeing the round Earth as you're flying.
No, not that. It was me telling you. This app, yeah, totes. That's so funny.
I always wonder how flat earthers can handle like being on a plane. You know,
do you think they just avoid planes? I assume so. I feel like most flat earthers are like poor
and in Australia, and they don't fly anywhere. That's a hot take. You can take to the bank.
The beach is the one that always gets me. Laying on the beach, you look at the horizon,
you see ships like clearly like disappear over the horizon. You know. Yeah, gone. They fell off.
All those people. And for some reason, none of us are freaking out. Dang,
I'm trying to go see the edge, guys. Let's go find the edge. Find the edge.
Like I sat on this beach long enough. I'm convinced it's right there. I've just got to get to it
and not fall off. Just keep swimming. Just keep swimming. All right, Dory. Just keep swimming.
Just keep swimming. Oh my god, I can't even check my notifications. It's just Navi
and B arguing with Navi. This is Cardon over coffee, so please share out the space.
Click the bubble in the bottom right. Share it out. We have a great talk today with Rare Evo.
We're going to be talking about their proposal, the fun we're going to have at Rare,
the shenanigans that they have planned for us, and please bring the energy. We got Thursday vibes,
Thirsty Thursday. Hope your coffee has bourbon in it, and feel free to come on up. Yeah,
anybody down there? I do see some of our usuals just listening. You're welcome to come up, Riley.
I don't know why you're up so early. Nice to see you though. I think that for everyone who's on
the West Coast, every time they join the space, I'm like respect. Motherfuckers like six forty-five
in the morning. You guys love us, you really do. Yeah, that's that's impressive commitment. Yeah,
we have a for the Pragma board meeting. We have to have it in the first part of my day
because Europe gets off, but then we've got somebody on the West Coast,
so we've we usually have it at like ten, which is seven for him. So we moved it to a Wednesday
instead of Monday, so at least it's not seven a.m. Every Monday for him.
It's brutal. Working in a multi-time zone industry has its challenges.
All right, I got to check on the kids. Y'all lay amongst yourselves. I'll be back in five.
All right, we'll see in a bit. Oh, Rand, what are we gonna do? I don't know. I don't know.
Got my coffee. Got my joint here rolled. I'm just enjoying the morning. I got it scheduled
and blocked off for you guys. So sweet. I am dealing with the weather here.
My office is on the third floor, and I live in New England. And people don't realize
that it gets to like 90s and 100s here, and is fucking brutal. So I'm glad we do the space
in the morning. Otherwise, we'd be doing it outside. I'm in a nice chilly basement, but yes,
the second floor and above it get gets hot. Yup. Actually, had some guy come out early this morning.
I've got another one coming out later to quote me on a mini split because, dude.
It's rough when you have to complete work by noon. Totally get it. Totally get it.
I just had somebody come quote me on solar, but not not financially economical. No,
is this one of the ones where you buy it outright, or is this one the ones where they want
you to lease it? I've been going down like a YouTube rabbit hole. I saw like this pretty janky video
of a guy who just like laid panels against the back of his house, like literally on the ground
against the brick wall, and like plugged it into an inverter and then hot wired it into his house.
And I was like, well, I'm not going to do that. But I looked. Did it catch on fire? No,
he did survive, and it worked. I mean, I didn't get to see the like two-year update where his house
burned down or anything like that. You know what I mean? Okay, yeah, he might have used
a different account for that. Business, but I started like investigating like how much the inverters
were and the panels, and they seemed to be really cheap. And I was like thinking about
I've got you know electrician friends. I was thinking about doing it myself,
and then one of my electrician friends was like, "Go get a quote." And I went and got this quote,
and I was like, "I'll just put that in a dividend-paying account, and the dividends could pay
my electric bill, and I won't have to worry about any electric panels or right." Like,
what are we talking about here? That sounds like a lot. I've I've seen some of the quotes people
around me have gotten, and you know, like seventy five thousand dollars wasn't unheard of,
and and then that's not even a big house. Yeah, I was like, you know, if it had like
a Two year payoff, you know, I would do it. But when you're telling me it's a ten year payoff,
I don't think that's a financially sound investment to be on. No, no,
especially especially right now where you're trying to make every dollar count, right? Yeah, I feel.
I even had the guy write up the quote. I was like, I'm not going to waste your time.
You can go get the next guy. I don't know. You might just do do better if you get
energy efficient appliances instead. Yeah, totally, totally. Now, do you have an old house
or is it new? It's old, 1969. Wonderful year. Mine's a little bit newer than yours. Mine's 78. Nice,
nice. Everything's been updated though. So yeah, it is an addition, but I still use a lot
of the stuff. How many additions to the house? Uh, it's never had any additions. Oh,
that's impressive then. Yeah. Maybe it's just the area I live. The area I live has a lot
of blue collar workers who are quite content to do their own work. And I was talking with a guy
this morning and showing stuff, and he's like, "Oh, this was an addition." I was like, "Yeah,
so was that? So was that?" You know, it's been a while. They added shit. Yeah, yeah. Thankfully,
I have a nice solid brick and nice solid cement foundation, but I've been battling ants
for the house talk. I've been on like a carpenter ant. I don't know what type of ants they are.
They're not carpenter ants because carpenter ants are big. They're these little, little, tiny ants,
and they crawl into the cracks in between the brick, like little tiny, tiny holes.
So I've been going to battle. I spent all this money at Home Depot, like two hundred fifty dollars.
I bought every product that was supposed to kill ants, literally everything from powders to stakes
to sprays. I fucking bought it all, and none of it worked. And I got on YouTube
and was like researching what like the pros spray and ordered some like hardcore stuff
and sprayed around my house, and they were all gone the next day. That's hysterical.
I would have been trying to get the ant eater from the zoo. And like a gallon of this chemical,
I needed only cost thirty eight dollars on Amazon. You know, think about what we did without
YouTube. You would have still been going to Lowe's or something all the time, being like, "Hey,
somebody." Yeah, I don't understand why none of the like we all of it was a waste. Yeah,
that's brutal. Well, at least it solved the problem. Problem has been solved for now.
It's been a solid four or five days with no no ant in sight. I pace my house, dude.
It's my fortress. It's my home. I feel like an old man. I'm getting excited about rehabbing my home.
Like, what am I doing? You're too funny. For me, it's mice because I live surrounded by the woods.
So I get super excited when I see snakes in the yard. I'm like, Do you want to come closer
to the house? That is definitely a thing, especially in the fall. Yeah. Yeah, it's more the garage.
Like I have a detached garage, and for a while it was brutal because they would just come into
the garage in the winter, and come spring I'd have to clean all my equipment.
Like they would just like get inside the riding mower and stuff like that. And I was, oh my god,
this is awful. Start, you know, trying to make nests for the hawks and stuff.
You guys want to live here? Hawks? Hawks? Yeah, we got hawks and owls. I live in the woods.
I got everything. Owls. I remember as a little kid, they would take you on like a little field trip,
and you'd like break open an owl poop and figure out. We did that at the zoo. Yeah, yeah.
It's kind of cool because you're like breaking it apart to try and see like what they ate,
and we yeah we can see. It was kind of cool. It was like a little skull in it.
Some of the kids were freaked out, but most of them were intrigued. I did have a standoff
with an owl in my driveway once. I didn't realize how stubborn those creatures are.
He was in the middle of my driveway. It was like 9:30 at night. I just wanted to pull up
in the driveway, and that bird was not going to leave the driveway. Like I was right in front
of him. I had to get out of the car and yell at him, and then he finally took off. Owls.
He just stared down when you honk the horn. He just stared you down. He put. He flew his wing.
He like did lifted his wings out and stuff. Like he was trying to intimidate me or some shit.
I'm like, I drive a car that has three rows in it. Like I'm not scared. But I can't complain.
It's it's kind of cool to live around all these animals. Was it just a few days ago?
We were driving by the pond and we saw the otters playing. And I mean, come on, dude!
I didn't have to go to the zoo for that. That is sweet. All right, it is past the hour.
I see we have the official account up here, Rare Networks. So we do have our guest for the today
for today is Rare Evo. I'm quite sure we're going to talk about the proposal they've submitted,
but I'm also sure we're going to talk about all the things we love about going to Rare. Rand,
are you going to be speaking, or do we have somebody else behind the cup account
or the rare account that wants to talk too? I think Nathan's back there, right? Nathan,
someone's back. It's not me. I'm back. Somebody's there. All right, I didn't know who it was.
I wasn't just going to start throwing names out there. So I'm going to let Rand talk,
and then I'll just correct him when he's wrong. Usually, how it goes. Yeah, yeah. All right.
Obviously, I'm very familiar with you guys, but let's take a step back for anybody who's not
familiar with Rare EVO. Maybe you want to tell us like how this came to be, what your mission is,
before we start getting into the proposal stuff. Wow. Yeah, we're gonna have to think back
a long time now. Come with me, people. We are going six years back. Wes and I started this.
Wes actually hit me up during COVID. I've been in the blockchain space, so is he for quite some time
since like 2016, 2017, and he hit me up during COVID and he showed me Charles's whiteboard video.
And introduced me to staking, and I fell in love. We we we both had like a passion about blockchain,
and we basically started discussing Cardano and fell in love with Cardano blockchain
and what was going on here. And we started a stake pool. We're like, we want to start a business
in you know in the ecosystem and stop being traders a little bit and like work
on actually contributing. And we figured a stake pool is the best way to do that at first,
so we started Rare Pool, and that broke. We weren't the most technical folks, and it was so early.
There wasn't that, there wasn't that much documentation on how to fix it.
And being a live events person, I told Wes, let's go to Bitcoin Miami 2021.
Charles was speaking there. They had like a really tiny, IO side event, maybe 200 people there,
and we got to meet a lot of cool people. We met Epoch Pool there. We were at
the main Bitcoin conference, fighting over a couch at the bar as some people got up. Myself and Wes
and Alonza and Nick were all competing for the same couch. And we sat down
and started chatting Cardano and Alonzo Nick were actually the people that helped us fix
our stake pool and get it back and running. And that's when we, you know,
realized there needed to be a greater event for Cardano folks. And that's when we started
Rare Bloom. We partnered with Bloompool and Big Pay and Anthony, and we did
that first Cardano event. We put it right in Denver at the the Gaylord Event Center there,
and the rest is history. We've really been growing it. This will be our fifth year at doing
Rare Evo. And we've grown it every year. It's doubled in attendance up until last year.
We had 2,500 people through the door last year. 60 different booths and 80 different speakers,
and we're working really hard to beat those numbers this year. We've gone free GA tickets
and started to give away a few booths to the Cardano community, and I think we're at 50 booths
in total at this point for the year. So. Really growing it and having a good time. Wes and I are,
you know, we haven't done a token. There's no crazy NFT drop that we've done.
We don't have any BC backing or anything like that. And we've slowly grown it to include people
like Nathan here, who's been he's an employee working with us now. One of you know a core team
of about seven of us that work at Rare Network to produce everything we do.
And I met Nathan at at Rare Evo one year, and then we ended up. Let's talk a little bit more
about the team. You said you've got like seven people. Yeah, there's seven of us in total. Myself,
Wes, Nathan, here, Claire, Kevin, and Vinny are on the team. We also have Evan,
who's our director of operations. He's worked with me for live events for like 20 years.
So we also have a few more contractors, like another five or so part-time contractors,
some in the Philippines doing like video editing and content creation.
We have some developers that we work with in India that we've worked with for
about a decade at this point that help us on the the tech side of things. That's awesome. Now,
Nathan, how long have you been with Rare? You think you're not talking, but it's happening. No,
I I went to Rare Bloom in 2022. I was like the into Cardano, but just kind of well. Back then,
all you could do was hold it and look at it in a wallet. This was like the Win Win Shelley era.
So I went to Rare Bloom in 2022. I it was my first like. Crypto event. It was Cardano focused.
I was excited about it, and then I think I was in a space. I would pop into spaces,
and I heard them mention something about them being from Ohio. So I made it a point to go up
and introduce myself because I too lived in Ohio. Right, right. Went up and met Rand and Wes
and Evan and Binnie and Kevin, and come to find out that they all live in Cincinnati,
which is the town I'm in, and come to find out that Rand lives about a mile
and a quarter away from me. And it was, and you're wondering how you've never walked into
each other, right? Funny, and and we like cool. We'll we'll stay in touch, you know,
and you know those. And then I ended up running into Rand at the grocery store in the beer aisle,
and he was all like, "Hey, yeah, you know, and we're looking for to add someone on like part time
to help us with like you're you're in the Cardano community, you know,
people like help us sell some booze and just kind of help out like you know startup grind sort
of stuff where you know Swiss Army knife wherever you're needed." And I just jumped on board,
and that was. Probably right after the 2023 event, right, Rand? So I went to 2023 like
as an exhibitor, actually, with the Apes Society, because I was on the the Apes Society
board at the time, and um as an exhibitor and kind of ran that whole aspect,
and they just asked if I wanted to join the team, and I've been grinding ever since. I love that.
I love that. That's pretty ironic because I have a similar situation where one of the ladies that
I met and I started taking care of her horses never knew her, and I met her,
and then come to find out she lives three houses down from me. No, it's crazy. It's such a small,
big world. Like, and especially in C O C is ironic for like Rand mentioned running into Alonzo
to fix staple. The the first person I ever met in the Cardona community was Chad.
We were standing outside at the Gaylord, getting some yeah, getting some fresh air. Yeah, yeah,
fresh air. Uh huh. And he was the first person I ever I ever like shook hands,
met in the Cardona community. And he's I don't know if he's here, but. That's cool.
It was such a funny conversation when Nathan and I met at Rare Evo because, like,
we were like narrowing it down, and it was getting pretty specific of where we lived. You know?
Yeah, yeah. We were and like we were like narrowed within like a couple blocks
without telling each other where exactly we lived. You know what I mean?
But it was one of your blocks out the yellow house. You know. Yeah, but we're like, dude,
you live like you live really close to me. Over a mile, like I could walk to Rand's house
in no time. I love it. Like same grocery store. All right, here's my real question: Do you though?
Do you just walk over there with like a couple beers and hang out? No, no, I drive. No,
but I tried to get Nathan to meet us for Mexican last night at the local Mexican spot
for margaritas. Yeah, we meet up often. We did a party at Wes's house for Wes and Claire's birthday
a couple weeks back. It was really fun. Unfortunately, even though we all live in the same city.
We do spend a lot of our time in Discord, just chatting virtually, like we were on the other side
of the world. I mean, you say unfortunately, but I'm of the age that we used to actually travel
and go in a room together with all of our computers and have a LAN party
and only talk to each other over the computer. So, and we were in the same room. So, come on, nerd.
I remember the LAN parties. I used to go play Unreal Unreal tournament. Man,
you bring the computer over and hook. Remember how excited we were when we didn't have to bring CRTs
anymore. Yo, yo, Devrin, I will. Diablo Quake, yeah. I will always remember that you, me,
and Chad smoking in the smoking section outside the Gaylord. What's up? Do you do Cardano? Yeah,
Epoque, I do. Everyone there does Cardano, so that was the cool thing because I knew what
I was getting into because it was very at that point it was. I mean, what was Rare Bloom like?
Ninety-nine percent Cardano at that point. Like, yeah, it was definitely a Cardano. Oh yeah,
good times, man. I still drive by the Gaylord every time I go to the airport in Denver,
and I think of you guys every time. I think of the the t shirt gun hitting Rand in the nuts.
The water. I didn't hear this. You don't know this, dude. Brock Brock brought a t shirt gun.
We were doing a bunch of stuff for charity at the time, and I mean, we had a dunk tank
that Bitboy got dunked in, and a bunch of people back in the day. Bitboy got served.
That's fabulous. That's fabulous. Bitboy was served, and they cut him off from his company
at Rare Evo. Legendary stuff. But anyway, legendary stuff. Block jock, drop his t-shirt gun.
Jenny got a hold of it outside. I said they could shoot it at me. I was maybe a good twenty,
thirty yards. Like it was an epic shot by Jenny. Epic, epic shot. And last minute,
I went to you know I had my hands up. Last second, I tried to cover and just couldn't get there,
and just took a took a t-shirt to the groin. Yeah, the video of it somewhere. Oh yeah, that's funny.
We have that video. That's the kind of video it needs to resurface periodically. Yeah,
somebody work on that. That was those are proposal passes. I'll I'll let it happen again.
Same distance. I don't think it could be replicated. So you know, I I think you're onto
something though. I remember when we were kids, like, and had like high school events like field day
and shit. We got to like dunk important people. Maybe that's what we need to be putting up there.
I mean, we got to like dunk principals and stuff. Maybe we need to start being able to dunk
some COOs, some CEOs, some leaders. I can think of a few without naming it.
I'm not saying I'm not saying for malice, but I'm just saying that people would pay for at least.
I think I'm onto something. There are quite a few of those. We've we've discussed like
sumo wrestling in the. You know those big sumo suits. Yes, yes. Mash it out in sumo suits.
I've done the big ball that you're inside, and you keep like slamming into each other.
I've always wanted to do that. Never done it. It was the most obscure thing.
We were on vacation in fricking Oregon, and it was a rainy day, so we were looking for like
inside activities, and we found this place that was like video games arcades. I'm like, oh,
let's go check it out. And they had like stuff like that. They also had like the giant bowling
you can do. It was it actually ended up being a lot of fun. All right,
so let's let's bring this back to rare though. We're all just reminiscing a bit too much.
So you have a few years under your belt, and some things have changed. I noticed
last year there were people outside of the ecosystem. Can we talk a little bit about that? Yeah,
yeah, we've always been multi-chain investors, and really, we want to support the whole industry
as a whole is our goal. And we've tried to really bring everybody into mash together
because we've noticed at the end of the day, you know, Wes and I have been big proponents
of live events. We go to ten or fifteen a year ourselves. At the end of the day, no matter what,
we were at Bitcoin conference or the ETH conference or Solana's Breakpoint. People were willing
and open to talk about everything they were doing all over blockchain,
and and it really didn't resonate with the actual. You know what people actually thought. You know,
so we wanted to do Rare Evo as it doesn't have a chain in the name. We really invite everybody,
and we showcase the Cardano ecosystem. We we feel like we're like a Trojan horse for Cardano.
And when we spun this up, it was at a time where Charles was doing a large sponsorship
with Consensus and the most beautiful booth I've ever seen with like live plants all over it,
put in the back corner, and his stage peach was 15 minutes in some weird hidden stage and.
They didn't really, they didn't really treat Charles with respect at the time,
and we wanted to kind of be that event where that could happen, and the Cardano community
could showcase themselves. But all were welcome to kind of blend, like the the narrative back then,
and still a little bit today, although not as much, I don't think it's not valid anymore. Is to say,
there's nothing on Cardano, there's no builders there, and I think over the years
as we've Shown people there is actually a community here. There are builders here.
That's that was always the goal, as intended. You know, so we've slowly built it year after year
and included more and more people, and it's just grown. We've doubled in attendance year after year,
and everybody sees it's a slow, arduous process to grow something like this. You know,
you can't just come out of nowhere. The finance US CEO doesn't come speak.
Deloitte doesn't come speak. You know, Bitwise and all these people, unless they see true value
and an ROI and past history of Actually executing, and we've slowly been building it year after year
to get all those names to show up and be a part of the event. And we're really,
really proud of the programming we've built this year and all the partnerships. I think it is night
and day from the past. What is going to be on our stage this year? We have so much,
like on the policy and regulatory side, and and everything else. Epoch,
did you want to say something? Um. No, I didn't mean to do that. Okay. I was like,
"Are you segue into Rand?" I I I could ask more questions, but I think you're on a roll,
and I'd love for you to start talking a little bit more about this year, if you could. Man,
this year we are we're already at like 50 boots. I think I said that. Just to name off some
of the names, we have Finance US, Bitwise, Deloitte, the E Foundation, and their Enterprise Americas
lead is really helping us, bringing in tons of projects at this time. He's probably brought ten big,
you know, DeFi. They're either working on agentic AI, stable tokens, or RWAs.
Things like that that are coming, all different projects from like Cambrian Network to Nomix
to GoDaddy will be in the house where you buy all your you know website domains and Brave
and OpenSea and Virtuals Protocol, another big AI company and another big one that I'm really proud
that I've been working on for gosh two years now is Lighter, the the Perps Exchange. That's oh,
I know Lighter. Yes, Lighter will be in the house and Origin and a lot of big people. It's uh,
it's going to be a really good time. We have a speaker from Midnight coming. It sounds like.
We'll be locking in a great sponsorship with the Cardano Foundation this year to be involved.
Intersect shoutouts to Laura, who I think I saw down there was working really hard to get Intersect
involved as well. So it's all coming together here in the last minute.
We've got some great sponsors coming on board for some of the parties and things that
I can't quite mention yet. Yeah, hopefully, hopefully we'll have some more big names,
and we're adding people to the website literally daily. We are we at this point in time,
boots are filling up. Every single day, multiple booths a day at this point.
So it's just that race to the end here as we really build this thing out,
and hopefully there's a lot more Cardano presence at the event. We really want to get everybody in.
We know it's like a tough time for the community here. Everybody is hurting funding wise.
So we've already switched over to free GA tickets. We've already started giving out free booths
to Cardano community projects that want them and are able to come and put up a booth
and things like that. So just trying to give back as much to the community as we can. I love that,
and I. I think it's so important that we do this cross blockchain, you know,
where it's not just Cardano specific, and to see you guys doing that and bringing them
and having them want to come learn more and share more—that's huge. That's that's
where we need to be going. Multiple stories from last year like this will be seared in my mind.
You know, I brought. I'm I'm a big ETHFi proponent. We use it as a business.
Like I use ETHFi all the time. In with a few projects over there, and they helped us bring
some people like Unify and others to the event last year. And I remember going around on the day
of booth setup, Thursday, and talking to these guys. And they literally laughed at me,
and they were like, "I don't. I've never met anybody in the Cardano community.
And I heard this is a big Cardano event. I'm really interested to see what's here and if there
if anything could be built on Cardano." And I told him, "Hey, go look at these few booths.
Go talk to USDM. Go talk to John at C Swap, and you know, talk to you guys at Blink Labs and others.
" And by the end of the weekend, as everybody was packing up. These people are now working in
Cardano. One of the gentlemen from Curve, the Dex, has partnered with somebody from Midnight,
and they are working on a Midnight project now. And he's left Curve. Like those people from Unify
and others were like, "Dang, we made friends. We didn't know people were working on similar stuff
in that ecosystem. We didn't had no idea that was even possible." And that's the whole point
because. People have all these ideas, and they're siloed. And really, when you mix everybody
together, magic happens. Like it definitely happens every time. It has so many deals come back to me
and be like, "We did a great, we did the biggest deal ever after at your event, you know,
meeting people there, blah blah blah blah blah." Like it happens all the time.
I have so many examples. Well, I want to get on that real quick, but I do want to
kind of just—I agree completely when I'm talking to other events, Blockchain Boston, for example.
Chris reached out to them so that we could talk to them, and they're like, "Oh my God,
Cardano never talks to us." We're like what? So yeah, absolutely. This is this is huge,
and I'm glad you're bringing some of them into our events so that they have the ability to talk to
so many people. But you'd mentioned a little bit about you know conversion success,
where people just spoke to somebody and then they're able to take something from it.
Do you guys measure any conversion from attendance, whether it's card on or usage,
builder recruitment? It's tough. It's tough to actually measure those things,
like immediately after, or how those deals go through. Like for the example, that midnight deal,
we didn't hear about until you know six to nine months later, when we start to have
more meetings about the next rare Evo, and they start to we see people on the road at other events,
and they tell you in person. But there's no like reporting back of that.
The KPIs we really look at are our booth numbers, our attendance numbers, you know,
things like that that are really measurable. Our our marketing return, you know,
and things like that, like what where is the marketing actually driving traffic? And stuff,
and we we really listen. We listen to our exhibitors and sponsor every year,
and try to find what more are they looking for. How can we provide value back to them? So,
like this year, we did a lot of things around policy and regulation. We have Senator Bernie Moreno
speaking at the event. It might be a live stream in, like RFK Jr., because the Senate.
Session during the event, so just trying to figure out how that plays out. Hopefully,
fingers crossed. I have my fingers crossed in the air right now. Clarity gets passed,
and we get some amazing stuff to talk about at Rare Evo. The treasure of,
or I think it's the state of Nevada. I don't know what he is. The treasure.
I always secretary of state will be speaking. I feel so bad. I keep I mess that up every time
in my head. Don't. I mean, there's a a leader in the ecosystem that I've gotten his name
wrong every time. Yeah, it's one of those things where it's just been burned in my head.
I'm off by like one letter, but it's wrong. It's just there's no denying it. Yeah,
we've got people from the CFTC speaking and stuff, so we've really moved the needle on that a lot.
And I think it's perfect timing. There's a tailwind. There's a lot of projects. For example,
Chili's on our website, a fan project, a sports fandom project. We have seen them internationally do
massive boots and sponsorships everywhere, and they've always said we can't do anything in America
with the regulation there. Their CEO. Beeking at our event, and they are dipping their toe
in the U.S. Market finally because of the pack. So, like things like that have been a big tailwind
on that side of things, and even American projects, DeFi projects, developers, you know,
the Bitcoin miners are trying to get separated from data center legislation and things like that.
There's a lot going on on that side that's important, and then the other side where we listened is.
People are hiring. They want fresh ideas. They want builders on their chain. And we went out
and we funded personally. We don't have a sponsor for it yet. There are
twelve different university clubs coming to Rare Evo. Multiple students from each club.
We're giving them exhibitor booths, like space in the exhibit hall, for them to all have a space
to represent their club. And these are kids from like. These are we're paying for all
of it—the build out of the booth, their flights, their hotels, everything—and these are kids
from UNLV, from Stanford, from Oregon, from Ohio State, from Waterloo, where Vitalik graduated from.
The list goes on and on. These are very prominent. Cornell, I think, is in there as well.
They're very Columbia, maybe. Yeah, there's quite a few. That sounds cool. I like this. Yeah. Yeah,
no, it's a really good time, and we wanted to get back to the students,
and we felt like it was a great way to kind of invest in the future. And our exhibitors
and sponsors are looking to hire or looking for projects and things like that.
So those are kind of how we execute and assess every year, hearing back from sponsors
and people coming back to the event, how we know we've kind of provided a value. You know,
I like that. I like that. Let's talk a little bit about your proposal.
Where do you want to start with it? It's got wherever you like the scroll.
We have a few that are out there, so we can discuss anything you guys want.
Amplify Cardano being more community focused and marketing and PR for projects in the community,
and then the Rare Evo Dev Gov Day Treasury proposal for the sponsorship to Rare Evo.
So happy to discuss. So, reminder for all of our guests: if you want to ask questions,
if you want to participate, raise your hand. As long as you're not this horribly offensive person,
we're going to let you up. I mean, we we let anybody up who wants to talk. So,
let's talk a little bit about let's talk about the rare one since we've been on a roll there,
and then we can segue into the others. There's something specific about this one that there's
a treasury return aspect, right? There is, there is. We wanted to see how we could get that.
It's symbolic, you know. I don't expect it to cover the whole treasury proposal or anything.
I appreciate whenever anybody's doing it because you're trying to, you're trying,
you're putting forth that effort and you're paving the way for others to do the same.
Tell everybody what this is about, how this how this works. So over the years,
Charles has been a massive supporter of Rare Evo, every year with a large sponsorship making
it happen. And now that the treasury is open and you know it's it's time for us to apply with
the community and things like that. So Charles isn't doing a massive sponsorship of Rare Evo
this year, and And we're looking at how do we get the Cardano community the exposure
that it would normally have because everything here, Charles sponsored more
than double this last year at Rare Evo to get the presence for Cardano, Midnight, Intersect,
et cetera, at the event. And this is to really cover that Developer Gov Day that we were able to do
last year, where everybody came together for multiple days of governance talks.
And developer workshops, and a really a ton of things. Not only got hashed out there
around intersect and governance and the chain itself, and maintenance and upkeep
and things like that, but it also really allowed the community to come together. And honestly,
more than ever, we freaking need a rare Evo Dev Gov Day. There is so much.
There is so much biting on the timeline, and that never happens when we get everybody together.
Like the timeline is full of joy after these things. You're seeing photos and people shaking hands
and hugging, and you know sharing bread with each other, and it's like a recharge to the ecosystem.
And I feel like we need that now more than ever. And we are at risk of not being
able to produce that for the community to the quality and standard that. That it was last year,
or at all, and I think it was so important. And then having that mixture
and that crossover at the main event, and being that United States event where Cardano truly is
the spotlight and the headline sponsor, we are that, and obviously we are growing as quickly
as possible, and want to be a major competitor to Consensus and others,
a top five event here in the U.S. Coming for 2027, and think we're growing rapidly towards that.
And Cardano should have a presence on our main stage, on the background of all those others
that are present when they're speaking there through the live stream. That is at risk this year
because it was always a luxury for those that couldn't make it, and an extreme overproduction of AV
on the main stage and things like that. And then hosting, you know, some of those happy hours
and things to recharge the battery of the community and get the people together.
Nobody's done a better job than Nathan here. Follow him on Dev Devrin on Twitter.
Every day he's posted photos of community members. Smiling, getting together, or even oh yeah,
I'm currently looking at my photo album from Rare and trying to decide which photos
I'm going to share because it was such a great time. Epoch's laughing because he knows he's one
of those photos. It was it was such a great time. But when you're talking about the Rare Dev Day,
I was thinking about when we went to Top Golf and all the talks and everything there. But for me,
it was more than just the talks. I met so many great people there, and so much of it was by chance.
Like one of them was this person I was sitting behind on the bus to get there.
We just started talking because I think she was struggling with her fan or something,
and we just started talking. And I had such a wonderful time with this person.
Every other time I saw them at the events, you know, we ran up, hugged each other,
and started talking. And this was a strong business thing for us because the two businesses we work
for, this is something that now we have this open door between our businesses.
And then another one where at that same thing, I was just looking for a place to sit down to eat.
It was lunchtime. And we all got fed, and Chris was doing a talk, and I think I maybe it was
somebody else's talk, but somebody was talking, and I just wanted to find a place to sit.
And these guys were sitting playing golf, and I just asked if I could sit with them,
complete strangers, and they're like, "Oh yeah, absolutely!" And then they started talking to me,
and I started realizing I know people that they need to meet, and so I ran around
and grabbed some people and brought them over, and we hung out and talked, and it was a collab,
and it was a beautiful natural thing, and that's what rare brings. Absolutely,
that's the power of of live events. You know, why didn't Frodo get in the pool with us?
I was gonna say, here's a photo of Epoch in the pool at the pre-party last year, getting down. No,
I I got one. I'm gonna share of Epoch just being absolutely ridiculous. But you, by all means,
please share it in the chat so everybody can enjoy this. Oh no, yeah. You say no?
I'm already downloading it. I am now going to. Yep, I click the box. I I feel upload. You know,
I you felt no pain that night either. So I have some very incriminating photos as well
that I try not to share. This one is just epoch dancing. I just put it in the chat. Listen,
the picture that I want is what like after the closeout party, heading back through Caesar's. On um,
man, the guy on your team, Rand, he had like a scooter. He had like a dog. Yeah, yeah, dog.
He had knee surgery, I think. Yeah, and I don't know what happened, but clearly he asked me,
and not the other way around, to ride on the front of the scooter. So I was sitting on the scooter,
and he was like driving me through the Caesars floor, and we're heading to the you know for
a nightcap. And I'm dying. My mom is literally like at the slot machine, like on the outer edge,
the closest to the the walkway, and she's playing, and she just sees sees us going by,
and she's like, "Oh, that's my son." And For whatever reason, this will forever be burned into
my memory. Just like and her team. Oh yeah, she was like, "What? I didn't know what the hell
you were doing." It's like I was on a different planet coming off of that closeout. Absolutely,
and I mean, it's just it's so much fun to unwind with the people that we've been working so hard
with. It's not just the conference itself; it is the extra stuff that you guys add,
and also the way you take care of everybody, right down to making sure that everybody's got
enough water because we're in Vegas. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And to be clear,
I wasn't like so wasted that I was like throwing up and like that kind of. No,
you couldn't have been. I was. I just shared a picture. I shared a picture of Epoch dancing in
a pool, and he could have died if he was too drunk. He did not. It's true. It's true.
It was that was good. I almost got kicked out of there. The guy walked up to me twice. But anyway,
that's the story for space. But the proposal I just shared. Uh, I shared an impromptu picture
I took of Danny from Catalyst. Um, because everybody's still working at these events, you know,
he's just literally sitting up against a wall. Sit. Well, he found a chair.
He brought up against the wall, plugged up his laptop, so we could get some work done real quick.
Um, there's so much more that goes to these. But yes, he parks right. We got to get back to it. So
how? Oh, I see the picture now. Got it. Um, what's the so what's the cost of the proposal,
and what's it all going to? It's focused on Dev Gov Day. Is that the majority of the funds?
It is split between Dev Gov Day and the main Rare Evo sponsorship. So actually producing Dev Gov Day
and having all of that happen again, flying in community members to ensure it happens
and that people are heard for for governance and things like that. And then the other half is
the Rare Evo sponsorship, which is like main stage and the live stream and one of the parties,
I believe. So if we fund the proposal, we get the live stream. If we don't fund the proposal,
we don't get the live stream. Correct. We will be cut unless somebody, unless a big sponsor comes in
and takes the mainstream sponsorship. Yeah, it's just that is a massive undertaking every year.
We have personally purchased. Hundreds of thousands of dollars in the AV gear,
but it's the it's the payroll and build out of all of that stuff, the infrastructure
of that live stream and these venues. Internet costs are absolutely crazy. Outrageous. Yeah,
it's literally for. I believe we looked it up for a twenty megabit hardline.
If any anybody really wants to know, a twenty megabit hardline is like
fifty five hundred dollars per day. If I can tell you. I know people who brought in
like cellular phones and hotspots to be able to do stuff because they didn't want to have to pay for
things like that because they're so outrageously expensive. Now I noticed we're at Aria this year.
Talk a little about Aria. Aria is amazing. That is one thing to mention.
I was just about to mention as a partner, Aria has been amazing. They really wanted our business.
They recognized how much we've grown year over year. They recognize this is an industry
they want there. They want us there. They've really been helpful. Things like making Wi-Fi free
for all the attendants instead of charging us tens of thousands of dollars for that.
Things like not having, you know, the union step in when Charles wants to do a big booth.
That's what I was going to ask. Is what's the union sitch? No union at all.
You're welcome to do whatever you want with your booth build. Nobody bringing your own stuff.
Oh my god! You can walk in with it. That's Loki incredible. Yes, we even made sure a Black Hawk
helicopter could fit in the space if it wanted to. That was always had been a request.
That's a sore. I wouldn't use. I wouldn't tell Charles about that again.
That's a. I know we don't own it anymore, but it was possible. We made sure of it.
We had been negotiating with the Aria like for six months before Rare Evo even happened last year.
How much would like a cardboard Black Hawk cost? Just like same size, but made of cardboard.
For you, though, I could get you the price if you want, my friend. I'm just curious. It could be.
You have a kid. Have your kid make you a cardboard helicopter. Knock it off. No,
it's got to be good enough that people want to take photos in it, and like you are hysterical.
That's gonna be expensive, but it can be done. Anything is possible in Las Vegas, my friend.
Let's let's resubmit and add that cost, and then I'll improve. Well, the the proposal is for
two point seven million eight, I believe, is supposed to be six hundred sixty thousand. Yep, at
twenty four cents, I believe. Oh shit. So yeah, it's definitely lost quite a bit of value
of the proposal, but we could still accomplish the task because the event is happening.
We would focus more on you know making sure Rare Dev Gov Day happened and still give
the sponsorship space to Cardano or Rare Evo, you know. So we can we can complete the task at hand
with the price drop. I'm so Aria is a nice place. They wanted the business. They, you know,
they're giving us a better deal for it and everything. We're getting perks and stuff. I mean,
this sounds like a good thing. Thank you. Alia has lowered their prices to one hundred
and fifteen a night, and then plus the fees, but they even slash the hotel fees. I think it's
less than one hundred and fifty bucks a night. The hotel is absolutely beautiful;
it's one of my favorite places to stay on the strip. You get a tablet
where everything is—you know—the blinds in your room, everything is all off the tablet.
It's super clean and one of the newer properties, and they're very tech forward.
So it's a it's a great great facility to be working with. I like it. And this is Wes.
Just wanted to mention something and clarify. So Dev Gov Day. For those who don't know, happened
last year and it was a major success. We had 500. Pretty much, it showed that like there were
500 core Cardano people willing to show up an extra day earlier to Rare Evo
and participate in governance or technical workshops. And so, this year the Dev Gov Day is similar
to the stream. Like the live stream is not going to happen if this treasury proposal
doesn't get funded, nor will Dev Gov Day. Rare Evo, the show will still go on.
It just won't be live. That's an important caveat. I I really appreciate you highlighting
that because we were talking about what all of us loved about the Dev Gov Day. Yeah,
and so that's unfortunate, but like as a team in a down market, taking risk on which we did
last year to to be honest and to remind people or those who didn't know, Rand
and I we fronted all of the production money to get Topgolf and did all the work for free
and also paid other vendors like people like Awen to help us with programming. Paid for travel
and lodging for certain folks to get there to help volunteer, right? So we put
about a half a million dollars on the line of our own company treasury last year,
and the treasury proposal passed, and it was all—it was a great heroic miracle story,
and very scary. But this, where we just are incapable of of taking that risk again. Oh yeah,
I mean the market's hitting everybody. I think we can understand that,
but I do think this was a lot of value to the community, and I really hope people are catching
this part that'll be dropped if we can't get this approved. Yeah, and I think like the last thing
I'll say is just around Dev Gov Day is that this is like when are we going to meet again?
The summit is canceled. The there probably will be some sort of side event in Singapore,
but historically, I mean, I used to live in Singapore. It's like hardest places to go to.
A Heineken is fifteen dollars. Like it's the most expensive place in the world. I lived.
I you know spent a majority of my life there. Like it's not very easy. So even with that,
we're not going to get 500 people. Like Rare Eva, we're going to have hundreds of Cardano people
already there. This is a great opportunity to leverage that will not exist for another year.
And that's if the 2027 summit gets passed, which I hope it does. But you know,
we will probably not meet in person as a community for another year if Dev Gov Day
doesn't get passed. And who knows. When someone else is going to come along,
risk a bunch of their own money to produce something to benefit the ecosystem.
So I think it's really important that because I don't think people zoom out
and understand that this is an opportunity. We're kind of at our weakest point
as a unified community. When I came into this community, I would laugh. Anybody that was an ADAO,
I would laugh at how kumbaya it was. I was like, why is everyone? This is the competitive market.
Why is everyone so nice? Now it's the exact opposite. You know, despite some
of these very friendly X spaces where we're all friends and stuff. But it's like we're at
our weakest moment. We have an opportunity to leverage in 50 days from now a point
where everyone's going to be in the same room, and you know we could coordinate a pre-event
that's already successfully worked and get that funded. I just I don't have hope honestly
though in certain d reps that don't share the same appreciation for it. But at the same time,
these are the most governance obsessed people, so you would think that a dev
and governance day would be favorable. So that's kind of our our perspective on this going forward,
and we we definitely want to make it happen if if the community agrees.
I appreciate you sharing that, James. Thanks for joining us. I noticed you jumped in with the hand
up. I have a question, and I'm a co-host. All right, all right, all right. Go on. Yeah. Well,
you disappeared for a while. I know, I know. I've been listening and on the rare website, and hey,
lots of updates to the to the rare website. So love to see the continuous improvement.
But can you walk us through the event just more at a more Logistical level, like I'm seeing,
you know, July 28th to 31st is the range on the website. I assume Friday
and Saturday are the exhibition days. But can you just walk us through what the week is for someone
who wants to book their tickets and book their hotel room on your website? Absolutely, yeah.
So the 28th will be the day of setup. That was when Deb Gov Day is set for, if it passes. And so,
very similarly, day day one is the 28th day of setup, registration, and then a kickoff party.
So you want to be there that night, the night of the 28th, at a minimum. And then it goes 29th
and 30th, day one and day two of Expo. So the booths are rocking, and the main stage is going.
And then the 31st, right now, that would be the poker tournament gets funded,
which has always been an optional event anyway. So really, right now it's guaranteed as the 28th
through the 30th. So, how does the poker tournament get funded? Sorry. Yeah,
if if you click on agenda on the website, it has like a basic rundown of the days,
and then as we fill in like who's speaking when, that. Yeah, I appreciate that.
I was just curious with the Dev Gov Days, what day that was focused too,
but that sounds like it's the twenty eighth, that Tuesday. Correct. Yep.
And then Thursday the thirtieth is the actual first. You know, you show up at nine a.m.
And watch a keynote or something. And no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. The twenty-eighth is
the setup day, and that is the day of setup for the event. And that would also be Dev Gov Day.
Sorry, got my son running over here. And then all good. Which is the first
and second day of the event would be the twenty-ninth and thirtieth of the month. Gotcha.
So we're kind of shifting it forward because I think the past ones have been Friday, Saturday,
right? So now we're doing Thursday, Friday for the exhibitional. Yes, it would be actually.
So the 20th is a Tuesday. Then it's Wednesday, Thursday. The unofficial pool party would be Friday.
That's correct. That's correct. There's also been some talk about taking over
like the daily poker tournament on that day too. This is nice. I could get back and still have
some weekend time. Great. Yeah, or you could just rest at the pool. Oh, there will be pool time.
Trust me. If you see if you see someone with like a super reflective umbrella, um,
you can guarantee them that I'm under that. But GM started very strategic. So I mean,
we found out most people were coming out Tuesday and Wednesday anyway, and by us shifting it like
two days earlier in the week, that's one of the reasons we were able to get like
$115 hotel room night. Yeah, yeah, we're going for less premium days. Yes. That makes sense.
All right, James. I think Epoch's going to let you talk now. Oh, finally! Jesus, reflective,
reflective umbrella boy. I can just see him out there. You have no problem finding him,
even in a very large pool. Don't make fun of him either, because I'm going to be the one
with the zinc oxide, all white. You know. I'm the same, you know. Irish English,
it just is what it is. I didn't get my dad's side with the German, anyway. So,
the Dev Gov Day that I was attending last year, as sometimes as frustrating as might have been,
as also equally as collaborative it might have been, based on what we were doing with
the different tables, coming up with problem statements, things of that nature.
It felt to me as though there was quite a bit of Unity within the group in
within the you know place that we were in, and we were discussing everything. And even
though we might not have all agreed on everything that we were talking about,
and what was a problem statement, what wasn't, might actually got the least amount of votes.
It was a very tough crowd that day, having to do with d rep decentralization.
But when it came to the overall, what I my takeaway was was that one, I establish
much better relationships with those that, in some cases, I had not even had a conversation
with prior, whether they be with a Mergo, one of the FE's, to just a regular you know group
that's working, or a D rep, or somebody that you know was in within Intersect,
let's say for example, and that particular thing was absolutely valuable, and I have leveraged
that the entire time since the last Dev Gov day. So when I was reading one of.
Our more notable D reps reviews, I saw that ultimately one he wasn't there. Two,
he didn't really kind of understand the nuance of maybe potentially or have a full understanding
of the nuance of just exactly what it means to all be there in person in order to work through
these particular subjects, whatever they are, is exceedingly important, and it pays dividends.
Into the future, with everything that you do when you work with them, and they're such a
like nobody knows. Well, some people know the Kevin Bacon reference, and you know seven points.
You know he makes connection with everybody, and so it was important to know Kevin Bacon, right?
And so then that way you knew everybody in Hollywood, apparently. So the same thing goes here
within this particular ecosystem. The more you develop these relationships, the better.
Dev Gov Day actually allowed that to happen, and it I know for me personally,
and I'm only one person in there. Had a huge impact on me and the relationships that I've had,
and some of the things I've developed afterwards, which some of them were actually
business oriented. You know, had nothing to do with development or Gov Day, you know, or developers
or Gov Day, right? So I think that's where we need to have a little better understanding.
I'm not sure how you do that. Maybe video of showing how everybody talked about,
maybe some testimonials after each individual day or during the day to actually show people
just exactly how valuable this is. Because ultimately, if you're watching from afar, like real time.
Yeah, you get a rationale like what you saw from somebody that we know, you know,
and it was really just completely off the mark. And it mostly had to do with the fact
he just didn't understand just exactly what the experience was there at the time
and the value of it, right? What came from it. So I personally think
that people need to think a little bit more about that and not just say, "Oh, did we hit our KPI?
" Like, what was the KPI? Was it just your four KPIs you were thinking about,
or were there other KPIs that you haven't thought about yet, right? So this is something
to think about a little bit more when we're thinking about these things. Since since James came
and tried to be the voice of wisdom and all that, I'm going to throw a little after.
And this is something that we've talked a little bit about on Twitter.
If you are going to a conference, don't just show up at a conference. I mean,
it's cool if you're just there to hang out and have fun. More power to you, man.
Like the conferences are a blast. I love walking around getting swag, talking to people. You know,
it's a lot of fun. But if you're there for work, then treat it like you're there for work too.
I'm not saying don't have fun, but I am saying prepare in advance about what you want to achieve.
We're hearing about these great speakers, these people from outside the community coming in.
You should be thinking about the connections that you want to make while you're there.
You should be thinking about whether it's a, you know, networking or you're looking for developers.
You know, come up with a plan beforehand on what you actually want to achieve. And, you know,
from some of us with a perspective of working for large corporations, when I was sent to
a conference, I had to actually carry stuff back with me, like information, knowledge.
I usually had to do a presentation with a team to share what I've learned. And again,
I have had fun at every fricking conference I've gone to everywhere in the world because they're
easy to have fun at. But if you're going and you want to get something out of this,
then go in with a plan because if you go in with nothing, that's what
you should expect to be taking home with you. But if you have a solid plan and execute it,
then you should have some solid results when you're leaving. Again, still have fun,
but I did see people saying, "Oh, what do we get out of this?" And you get out of it what
you put into it. Yeah, and the one thing I've noticed is that so I sat a table,
two tables away from Murasaki and the Japanese contingent that was there,
and I watched Murasaki use a translator in order to be able to give those who didn't speak
good English be able to understand everything that was going on and involve them
and engage them in the entire. Thing that we were doing right, and there were
some really good things that came from that. Realizations on my side as to what really is important.
Also, there was a narrative built in with Joel Teppner and of course Charles in there
and what have you in the IO contingent, really kind of pushing the executive function things
of that nature, right? But these are all things that needed to be discussed in an open forum
in long form, not some short form in a DM or you know one hour meeting or things like these.
These are day long things that absolutely need that amount of attention.
And work in order to really come up with a solid solution that you can then develop
and work to something that's going to be a long-term solution for Cardano instead of thinking of
short-term solution that just puts a band-aid on it consistently instead.
And we're really good at that. We're really not good at preparing for the future
and setting up for success. We just try to get success done quickly, which is really interesting
here in this particular Cardano ecosystem and the culture that we have.
But we need to start changing that. The way that happens is through what we did with DevGupday. Yes,
the value behind these to be able to talk with people face to face. I think Rand had said something
about it earlier. You just don't see fighting, even when I'm talking to people I don't agree with.
Zero. No, no. Even like people are smart mouths, you know, on on X or social media,
end up not being so smart mouthy when it's in person. It's really weird. Yeah,
people impressively keep their composure in comparison to their online identity in person.
I will say, like Bach, Jack, thanks so much for the kind words about the experience.
And it is interesting because you know, and I'm not hating on technical proposals;
they're very much necessary, right? But you know, we we do in our proposal have we have video links
where there's testimonials of all types of leaders from all around the world in all different roles
and missions within the Cardano ecosystem, talking about how good Dev Gov Day is. We have You know,
I feel like we have the most evidence out of any vendor because we can actually show video,
professionally produced video with narration, with testimonials,
and that still somehow isn't enough. You know, Rand and I we pride ourselves on our work,
the production experience, the community building element is always first
and foremost like the mission. But it's like we're also not a total research
and analytical firm where I can then go put a tracker in everyone's brain after the the conference
and measure to a T every single metric of outcome for the conference itself. You know,
I wish if we were like a Nansen or like a Blockworks and we had like a hundred employees to be
able to do that, that'd be great. But like first and foremost, it's doing the standard right.
Every blockchain has community. Annual community meetings in person, where we benefit from the
in-person element, the higher level of organization, and basically building good sentiment. Right.
So, like, we're just one. We're delivering the standard that all of the competitors do,
and we're doing it at a a fraction of the budget in comparison to chains that are half as small
as Cardano. Right. Like Dash just had their summit. Cardano is not having their summit.
Look at the Dash market cap. Look at look at Cardano. I don't know. Maybe it's no.
I haven't heard the word Dash in probably like six years. That's crazy. Lightcoins.
They're still having their summit. That they probably spend more than Cardano summit spends on
their summit. So we're we're delivering, and we have the community summit, which is kind of like
the ETH Denver of Cardano, right? But we made it multi-chain to bring more value.
And now we have Dev Gov Day, which is a day where we hone in on Cardano content,
so that the main stage isn't eighty percent Cardano like it was in our early years, right?
So we're just delivering that. I wish I could go and be like, I know every single outcome
about every attendee there, and I'm going to be able to report on it drastically. Unfortunately,
some of these relationships take years, years to. And I've said it once; I'll say it before.
An event like the summit, one single handshake in government, or one single handshake
in conversation. Let's imagine the Singapore government shows up to Cardano Summit.
Maybe let's say who I used to work for, the Ministry of Health shows up, and they're like, Hey,
you know, we've heard Cardano's enterprise level. It's built with Haskell. It's pure.
It's never gone down. We're coming to your summit as the government of one
of the most powerful nations in Asia Pacific to determine if we can utilize your technology. Oh, so
and so shakes Fred's hand, or so and so shakes my hand, or Yoram's hand, or Blockjock's hand,
and the next thing you know, a conversation comes about, and the next thing you know,
maybe they're putting patient data records or something. On chain, and it's Cardano, and it's like,
hey, perhaps that two million dollar spend on this event has just led to ten years of business
with one of the most powerful nation states in the world, and now it's making
more money than was originally spent on the actual conference itself. Like these things
actually happen. It is a little bit of a dice roll, but just know that there is a guarantee
that small deals, medium deals, and even large deals in between—it doesn't have to be at
that crazy level of a nation state—they're guaranteed to happen from this.
There's never a rare evo where no deals happen and people don't have a major return
on their investment feeling when they leave the building. And so, we've tried to prove
that through like video evidence, numbers, KPIs, all the KPIs we set on DevGov Day,
we smashed out of the park last year. It's been proven. And then we just got unfortunately
a decision from one of the constitutional committees saying it's unconstitutional.
So we're in this state where it's like very hard to interpret how to get through to D reps.
Like love the D reps, they spend so much time and effort on this. But there is an issue
when you know we can't have meetings with them, or video evidence
of something truly successful isn't enough to get a vote,
and everything has to be hyper scrutinized. When this is almost trivial to set up an event
and put people together in the same room, it takes a lot of work. But in comparison to making
the chain, you know, quantum computing proof or something like that, it's much more accomplishable.
So we're having a hard time navigating how we get the message out. So if the community could go hard
for us, it would be amazing because. We really want to keep the tradition alive
and give Cardano some shine this year. And I think that's going to be your strongest point too:
is the community talking about what they enjoyed about it, sharing, and you know,
getting that message out. I do want to say it's not just you; it's not just marketing.
It is every proposal right now. When you look at the votes on proposals, it's it's not going well
because of any number of reasons. I mean, we could look at the price of ADA.
We could also just consider the market in general, where people are at financially. You know.
There's a lot going on in people's heads when they're making these decisions,
so I think the best thing that we can do is, as a community who wants to have this, rally behind it.
Absolutely, and I think if there's anyone from the constitutional standpoint who can take a look
at rationale behind one of the current, I would say, perceptions of our proposal,
I would love to get feedback on that because we're definitely going to address it.
I just want to make sure I get a lot of different opinions on it before doing so.
I guess because it was a Dev Gov Day and Revo. Which is essentially, you know,
under the same umbrella. It's the same venue, it's the same date, same location,
ran by the same team. A ton of crossover between the pre-event and the main event. It's very clear.
Everyone that's at DevGov Day goes to Rare Evo. Probably ninety-nine percent of attendees.
So it's interesting that we got a judgment that was this is unconstitutional because it is
two projects. When in reality, the most related Treasury proposal that was constitutional
did get funded, and is complete after Webex Japan. Unified events proposal last year had over
eight different events around the globe operated by three different vendors: Rare Network,
Cardano Foundation, and Amurgo. And that was somehow constitutional, even though it was even more,
I would say, separated out events with separated out vendors. So I would love for anyone to help us
on that because that's one hurdle we're going to have to get over, and I'm sure we'll get
some exposure soon. Well, we we know a person. Maybe he can take a look at it. If not,
we can start harassing some other constitutional people. Well, another thing is is that I'm part
of the constitutional committee, and and I know that we you're the person
currently we're currently going through the review of that one, but we're not seeing the same things
you know that they're seeing just in just in the beginning, just a cursory review review of it, but.
I think the other part of that is is that it doesn't take you know them individually to get
it approved constitutionally. So that's what I was going to say. Yeah, they might be an outlier,
and that's fine. You know, we've had it in the past where they tend to.
It almost seemed biased when reading their their rationale for the. The unconstitutional decision,
and it honestly, if you could have, I could have went and had an argument, or not an argument,
had discourse about that, discussion about it, and had no way for them to be able to win based on
something that they had mentioned as or decided was unconstitutional. So, yeah,
some people are trying to throw a little bias in there. I think personally,
and which is interesting, it shouldn't happen, but it does. So, yeah, I wouldn't worry about it.
And just to be clear, you you need five out of the seven to pass, right? Yep. Yeah. Yeah.
You need five out of seven, and there's a new proposal out right now that will reduce that number
so that you need three, while not reducing the number of actual CC members,
in order to make sure that we can. I don't think it'll enact in time to help anybody. It's not.
Sadly, yeah, it's going to screw it up a little. The timing is is not perfect
with that particular thing, but get there. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. We hope also leadership like
the Pentad recognizes this. Shout out to Laura down there has been working super hard with Intersect
to bring them on board. We just had a meeting with CF this morning. I really, you know,
we have the spot still on the main stage. I really think it would be very important
for leadership to also come together. You know, even if this proposal doesn't pass. You know,
funding this through the pentad and those people showing up, and leadership like Phil and Fred
and Charles and Jack getting on the main stage and having a conversation in front of the community
and being there together, I think would be super important. And I honestly hope that happens.
I don't have much faith in this proposal passing. I hope everybody out there goes and votes yes.
I hope everybody gets loud. But I hope most importantly you tag our leadership.
Who also have a big say, and if this passes, and they also have a big say, and if they just show up
and be a part of the community that's there, so I really want to push that leadership
to just participate in some way. It's really unfortunate
that that they aren't participating as much this year. Some of the others, you know,
so I would I would like to see a unification there. It's so needed right now at this point.
And like Wes said earlier, this opportunity isn't happening again. Like we just voted no
on the summit. Out in Singapore, there might be some people that meet up there in a side event,
but there is no real opportunity for this to actually happen with
the community going forward for the rest of the year, and that's that is really unfortunate.
I agree. I mean, I all right. So usually at this point, we would talk about like a call to action.
I think we've kind of covered a bit, but more specifically, is there something that
you would like to say to our audience? Yeah, you guys are always amazing.
I remember the days of just Alonzo and Hero up here firing this thing up for the first time.
I was there, which is wild to think about. We've all been, you know, in this community
for a long time, and it's been an amazing and wild ride. Even to all the listeners down there,
and we hope to see everybody at Rare Evo. The GA tickets are free. You got a project
in the community? Hit us up. Nathan will look you up with your booth and. Hotels are cheap as hell.
Come out and party. Let's have a great time and let's show leadership where they should be.
And other than that, we're ready to execute. We have meetings stacked upon stacked,
and lots of announcements coming. That's for sure. I love it. Thank you. You know,
I I totally skipped over this, and that's on me. You're involved with Amplified Cardano, correct?
Yep, we are also doing Amplify Cardano. Probably also very unlikely to pass, but yes,
it is a it is a thing. It is great for the community. It's with us and Scribe,
who has done PR for things like MetaMask and Jupiter Wallet Exchange and things like that, Solana,
and others. It was what are you seeing as the what do you see as the no rationale?
Why are why are people not voting for this? People are not voting for any marketing
or anything beyond technical and research proposals. Yeah. Like I think one marketing
or community engagement. I was talking to Kala. Shout out Kala down there in the Awin team.
We had a meeting, and I think we are less than one percent of the NCL.
Less than one percent has been approved for any type of marketing or community engagement. Yeah.
That's fucking rough. I don't know. It is like this. Scrot. This Amplify Cardano. I mean,
we're like full. Marketing stack with Scribe, who knows blockchain, who knows PR,
like we'll take projects, branding, website, speaking engagements, social media presence,
like the whole, like everything everyone is asked for is is in this. The Scribe thing,
like taking the Uniswap, like Cardano needs a Jupiter, it needs a Uniswap, it needs.
There's so many great projects that people just don't know of that could live beyond Cardano.
Like people will just know. You mentioned Jupiter, or you mentioned Uniswap. People know
that without knowing chains or whatever that is. And and on top of that.
The grassroots from our side, like, can you imagine what it would be like having photos
from Cardano, like college hackathons to governance meetups to pizza and beer meet like the whole
the whole kit and caboodle, like every day for a whole year on the timeline for Cardano,
like this could be a reality, and it's just sad. Yeah, we're in a Pabst Blue Ribbon year,
so you know, right now you just can't you can't go for you know the Corona,
well not Corona would be the Heineken, you just can't go, you can't go for the Heineken.
I'm worried that. Because everyone's in a Pats blue ribbon year, that by not doing anything
next year, we'll be in a Milwaukee's best year. Well, which is also something to think about, right?
But you know, it's with these down years that, and I hate saying it, but I suffered it
by not understanding cash flow and overleveraging myself when '08 or '09 happened,
and I damn near lost everything. I did lose my house, all kinds of other shit,
because I did not understand the meaning of saving at all, and I just thought
it was going to go on forever. And we tend to do that here. And I, for whatever reason,
ended up being part of a stablecoin company, which I had no intent on being part of.
But it turns out some of my experiences are actually quite valuable, and it helps me to better help
others to think about how to save for these years when we go through down markets.
And so all of us are suffering right now, and I think we all have to bite the bullet on it, right?
So it's important you guys keep doing what you're doing, but we might not get everything
we want right now just because the market world. I understand that, and I.
But there is a difference between saving. And spending strategically on the best bang for the buck,
and hoarding. And I think we are at the hoarding stage, like hoarding the treasury,
like it's our president. I agree in some ways, Devon, on that particular subject.
But there are those that are powers that are greater than ourselves that we have no way of thwarting
or getting them to think in a common sense manner. And therefore, because of that,
they are always going to choose themselves over everybody else when it comes down to it at the end.
And there's nothing you can do about it until you get together and actually have
enough voting power to say, you know what. We're not going to do that,
and you actually do have to listen to us. And until that happens, we're not going to have that,
and we'll suffer this over and over again. You know, sounds like we all need to get in the same room
and discuss this. Maybe like a Devin Gov day and figure out like the best path for.
Sounds like an amazing idea. I love the idea of a voting block with D reps
and having a specific thing on half a day where D reps talk it out, have an idea.
Thrown this out there, like why? Why is the NCL like just this big bucket, three fifty million ADA?
Like, why? Why can't it be like businesses? Not, I'm not calling Cardano a business.
It's more like a business of businesses, but businesses. Allocate funds,
their their their spend in R and D, technical advancements, maintenance, marketing and PR. You mean
why are we not using buckets? Yes, like why why can't we say like James James gets the reference
because it was the original suggestion. I know, like it just doesn't make it makes sense. Like
why can't this NCL be split up like? Get everyone together, agree on percentages,
and X percent goes to marketing and PR. Well, goes to R and D because it doesn't play to those
who want certain things, and it makes it to where it removes some of their. Here's the good news,
though. Pull from we can evolve, we can continue to grow and change, and and we don't have to accept
where we're at right now. And in all likelihood, some of the people who were opposed to it
in the past might be starting to see some of the value to it now. Yeah,
it's always in the pain moments where people actually. A lot of people have to learn the hard way.
I mean, I'm one of those people. I usually have to do everything the fucking hard way. Yeah, yeah,
yeah. As my wife keeps reminding me of everything when I'm saying something, she goes,
"You remember when you were in your 30s and 40s?" I go, "Yeah." She goes,
"Would you have done it this way?" Yeah. You know what I mean? Yeah, yeah. I'm like,
hard way becomes the soft way eventually because the hard way is it's starting to get rough. Yeah.
Well, I'm just hoping that people are starting to see it, and I have seen a lot of conversations
on Twitter talking about, "Wow, we really need this group somehow." And you know,
wouldn't it be great if we just had this money set aside for specific things to make sure not all
of one thing took all the money? And yeah, we're all talking about those fucking buckets again.
Definitely. All right. So you've got this Amplify Cardano proposal, and I see a very limited number
of votes on this right now. And what I mean by that is not specifically on the yes side.
I mean total. There are not a lot of votes on this number of votes. And unfortunately,
I believe the way the the intersect bucket, I'll throw that back out for you.
Intersect bucket works like if if you vote on one proposal, so say you like.
Whatever an in-lab proposal, you vote yes on that and vote no on, or and don't vote on any
of the others. It acts as a no vote. Whereas if you don't vote on anything, it's abstained.
I must go past you. Like you, you have to literally vote on every proposal. Either yeah,
I'm not sure everybody even understands that because that extra complexity right there.
I don't think it was well communicated. Here's what. Here's where I'm going with this though.
If if you guys don't succeed under intersect. What's the chance of you just submitting one
as a treasury, like zero, zero percent chance that we do that. We have already we are losing money.
We are losing money on the direct to treasury proposal we just did. We've lost
thousands of dollars in the ADA going there. We are still owed. We are still owed over
four hundred thousand ADA, which hopefully should be hitting today. I heard from.
The card from the like unified events production we did last year that has gone to
basically you know almost zero in value versus what it should have been. There is zero chance.
Only support coming after these fail is leadership. If leadership gets together
and decides they want to be there and that this is valuable and that the community wants
them to be there, that that is the only way. All right, I think you've said all the key phrases
here. The community is going to learn the hard way. They're not going to have a summit.
There won't be a RareDevGovDay, and we'll see where we are in a year. If anybody's even around
and still voting to get live events picked back up, because meanwhile, Solana just sponsored
the World Series of Poker, a title sponsorship that hasn't been done in fifteen years,
putting it back on ESPN and reaching tons and tons. Right, and be bringing chain usership.
Like every competitor is marketing. If we are, if we were in a vacuum by ourselves, yes,
no marketing. Let's focus on the chain and research. But the reality is,
we're in a world of competition, and our competitors are advertising. They are doing events.
I just had a meeting with. The Avalanche community events team yesterday something one I forget
their name. We've had meetings with the Solana team, Super team, and things like that.
Their community-led events arm and marketing and things like that. Every chain has a rare network
doing a unified events and summit type events for the community and things like that.
And we are just not going to have any of that for the next year, unfortunately. Absolutely,
and here's why the creator proposal right is so important. Because the guy from Solana that I met at
the Solana party, which I never go to these things ever, and ran right into the guy
that's getting paid to do that. It's been doing it for five years now,
and they fund him directly in order to make sure he still does his own stuff on the side,
runs his own things in order to make extra money. He's got side hustle going on, but he has
direct support and knows that he can do a variety of things along with that in order to subsidize
his living. You know, and That's Solana making sure that the message is consistent
and constantly put out there, and they also work in talking points with others
in a coordinated manner in order to do this. And the the radical idea that we have here is to make
some sort of federated, loosely federated, you know, media consortium with the KOLs
that are currently here that all. All have more traction than any of you combined
that can actually deliver that message. And this kind of plays into what Wes was talking about
with them having all the videos and everything. What if there was a concerted effort to actually
or coordinated effort in order to actually put this together? And each of the KOLs does it
in a different way because they all have their own flavor and way of doing that.
They hit their own people in different ways. They have their own groups that they're hitting.
As far as that goes, what would happen to the algorithm if you did that in a coordinated way
for months, maybe years? Delivery through all of them, and it just it changes the narrative.
We change the narrative. We exactly. Yeah, and here's the other thing.
So the one thing on the topic having to do with hydro voting that's going to change
because we're talking about that now internally, and this particular function having to do with
the ignore vote. We're going to just ignore you, and also it can be used as a tool
to just say "f you" to the entire community because we're just going to vote on one stupid random.
We think is stupid or random, not the proposer. Sorry, but ultimately,
one thing that we find completely inconsequential. We're going to vote for that just for the hell
of it, but completely saturate the market with all the DREP delegated ADA that we have to our DREP,
which is just absurd. I don't think that that happened. I don't think this was well thought out
and like the consequence. It wasn't planned. I don't think. Yeah, I think they missed it,
and it got rushed. Which is the other thing: we constantly rush stuff. Problem. Yeah, that's fair.
It's fair. Um, well, we got voting for the intersects today and tomorrow.
I don't remember what time it ends tomorrow. I want to say it's like in the evening. So this is,
I think twelve, twelve noon UTC. I think. Yeah. Oh, okay. So that's actually kind of early then.
So you basically have like another twenty four hours of voting on this. Um, I don't know.
It it's unlikely. It's at like twenty five percent. It doesn't mean that people shouldn't vote.
I think you should still go vote, even if it's not going to make it to show that there was support
for this. Um, because it's. It's something that's very valuable, and I would like to see something
like this come back up again soon. If this doesn't go through, but I am really hoping
that we can get everybody rallied around Rare Evo in Vegas. There is no reason not to do this.
We we value the Dev Dev Days. We know that this is an event a lot of us look forward to
every year for the networking and to hang out with each other. But I mean,
the ability for people to sit down real quick and hash something out in person is profound.
Absolutely is, and I can't think of a better person and/or group to be doing this simply
because they've been doing the entire time. I attended the first one at Rare Bloom.
It was absolutely amazing. It was also my first experience being able to be around all those people
that I truly love and respect in this ecosystem, and it allowed me to, you know, just be a part of.
And I think that's extraordinarily important. So this provides a more focused effort
into a particular area, which is Dev and Gov Day, and allows people to get together
and talk about what it is they think is going great, and also what it is that might need help.
So the more we do that, I think the better. With people rather than at people, which we see a lot.
Yes, oh my God, yes, totally, right, yes. It amazes me what what happens when people can talk with
and to each other rather than at each other. I appreciate you guys. I appreciate all the years
of support. I know we'll see a lot of the community at the event. That's going to be
the greatest part about it. Absolutely, we are going to we are going to execute this year.
We have some announcements coming to make sure this thing's still a banger, and it will be.
And you can count on a lot of us to be there to support you and. Chris, Christina,
and is Chris also going to be there? And we can do the mug hug. You guys did the mug hug. I mean,
I absolutely, absolutely loved it, and I've got a picture of it. Even,
which is absolutely hilarious to me. But at the same time, I was like, "Who are those people?
" And I'm like, "It's Christina and somebody that I've known for some time, and her husband.
" And you look on the Chris's face, is like, "What are we doing while we're doing it?
" Which is absolutely hilarious to me. So yeah, the more we do that, maybe some mug hugs
might happen randomly. You just don't know where they're going to happen, but yeah, yeah, we'll see.
At least one of us. We need the coc booth, and we need to everybody sign a what do you call it?
An apron again. That was awesome, man! I absolutely loved that. I've got
some really special memories from that. Some of the things I actually didn't talk about publicly,
but they were absolutely amazing. It is it is the best part, you know.
But it's one of those things where I absolutely loved it. And within 15 minutes of being there,
I was completely myself, and people were identifying me just simply because there was the older guy
with the gray hair running around like an 18 year old with a t shirt gun shooting it at anything
and everything he could find. To do that, which was absolutely, you're everything they expected.
Is that what I just heard? Everything that was expected and more. They were like, "Who is this guy?
" You know. And then it's like one of the guys are like, "We've known each other
for quite some time," and he's like, "Lacha," I'm like, "Yeah." We didn't even talk yet. For me,
it's hilarious. It's when people come up because of the voice. Yes, that's it.
When I'm just like talking to somebody, somebody comes up and they're like, "Christina,
" and I'm like, "Who said that?" Favorite thing, yeah, absolutely. So we we need more of that,
and we'll continue to keep supporting. And sadly, there are some larger entities
that are pulling support this year, but this also provides opportunity for those who are running it
to bear down. And I know you guys fucking will and make this the best event it potentially can be.
And it's too bad some people missed it, right? So we'll provide FOMO at some level, no question.
So we pretty much made this a rare edition of Cardano over Coffee, which I'm completely delighted
with. Pretty much, but if you guys have to bounce, that's cool because I'm only going to be here
for like four more minutes, and then I have to bounce. I know we didn't really talk much about
like anything going on today, so if anybody did want to raise something, just you know come on up,
talk to us. Otherwise, we're just going to keep chatting. Blockchain has no trouble.
Debating with me, I actually got to jump out for three minutes. I got a meeting,
which really see you got to go at eleven thirty too. Me too. So organized on everything now. My God,
my whole life is fucking organized. My wife looks at me like, "How long are you going to be in
that room today?" Hell has unfroze over. Blockjock organized. Yes, yes, yeah, yeah.
Hell has frozen over. We were talking to Blockjock about AI last night too.
We're we're trying to get him to start some agents and stuff. Hermes, maybe a CLI.
I can actually feel comfortable doing that. When I saw people working on CLI, I felt so.
Overwhelmed, just watching people do it. I'm like, I'm never gonna be able to do that.
But I need to dispel that. A personal assistant, almost like he kind of like reminds me of stuff
I have to do. I just have to tell it, you know, like this has to be done, this has to be done,
this has to be done. But he sends me with the reminders. Yeah. It's kind of nice. Yeah,
I want the movie Her without the relationship part. You know, because she was cheating on him
with like five, fifty million other guys. You know, or women actually.
Everybody is fifty million other people. So you know, I'm sure he felt extraordinarily violated.
AI is very, very cool. Used in the right ways. Right. Don't give it much access, but I do let it.
I just I just need the nudge. Like, don't forget, dude, you got to get this done to that. Oh yeah,
it's I I give that for my husband all the time. I'm like, hey, didn't your meeting
start two minutes ago? Oh my god! You don't know how many times like I've got people sending me
a message in Discord. Um, there's a meeting, and you're the one who put it together. Yeah, yeah,
yeah. Oh my god! I'm not the only one. No, no, Chris is like he's he's bad about this
because he'll be like, oh, I have 15 minutes. Let me go look at something real quick. Oh my God,
that's me! Anytime your sentence ends with "real quick," you should probably just stop right there.
That's wrong. It's not going to be quick. I've solved this problem by setting an alarm.
I just tell Siri, "I don't know how many alarms because it doesn't reset any of them." Apparently,
I said set an alarm for nine twenty-nine meeting. You know, just that, and it just reminds me,
and it breaks me out of that rabbit hole I just went down. Yeah, I've I've threatened to get
really awesome with this. Like I have these um these lights like you would see at a An aisle
that had a sale. You know what I'm talking about? Those little swirly lights.
I have some that you plug up to USB, and I've threatened to like set it up to Chris's calendar
so that instead of just sending a 10 minute thing, it would start swirling the lights.
That's like if anybody ever went to Kmart, that's a blue light special, is what that is. Yeah,
that is that is what it is. These just happen to be orange. I got them. It's so funny. Oh my god.
I need a blue light special. I can tell my wife that she's gonna laugh at that. Yeah, yeah.
I gotta jump. It might be helpful. All right. Thank you so much for joining. I love this thing.
I will get in and vote on the amplify thing. I'm gonna change my vote over there on Hydra. Do it.
It's it's 24, 26 million or whatever. Not gonna move the needle, but at least I'll give it a go.
It's symbolic that you show. We appreciate the community coming out. You know what I mean?
That's it's most important that we're here and participate. Yep. Drex,
if you're listening on on the Hydra voting, at least go in and vote abstain.
Don't just leave it blank. Please go in and vote abstain. Yeah, I mean,
I think the community could help by promoting that you have the proposal
that they do want to support marketing, and they could also help by promoting if you voted on
other proposals in Intersect and not some. The not some are now counting as a no. So, all right.
Thank you guys so much for being here. It is the end of my space. I hope everybody has a lovely day,
and I can't wait to talk to everybody again tomorrow. You guys take care.
Bye, Christina. See you in a few weeks. See everyone. Yeah, right.
