My stance has always been consistent. You will never beat Apple, JPMorgan, Sony or Coinbase at building a well marketed and integrated corporate blockchain. But an open decentralised digital economy ran by the people of the world? That’s something *they* can’t compete against

Managing a $1.6B Treasury without rock-solid transparency and real-time communications? Not on our watch... Coming Soon - the SyncAI Governance Hub will revolutionize communications and empower stronger connections and decision-making between dReps, SPOs, founding entities and delegators. What pain points do you currently see within the Governance landscape that you'd like to see addressed? Drop your thoughts 👇

Drep pay is turning out to be the first truly contentious issue in Cardano governance. Quick thought on it, and please keep in mind there’s not really a right or wrong here, it’s just my opinion and proponents also deserve to be heard. I’m also always open to learning new perspectives. First I think it’s important to stress that we don’t know exactly how being a DRep is going to play out. Will we have a one vote a month type of situation or a ten votes a day kind of one? Even in the middle ground of that (say, a few votes a month) being a DRep can take on different levels of intensity. Registering took me one minute, voting on the constitution took me an hour of reading and cross checking some things with a gen AI model, and 5 minutes of voting and keying in a brief rationale. I find the idea of being paid for this slightly comical. But I already knew the gist of it. You can question if I should instead have locked myself up in a room for half a day to scrutinise every letter of the doc, and involved a lawyer for advice, I suppose. Future proposals may be much more complex or much simpler. Am I really the right person to technically gauge whether implementation A or B of Leios should be forked? Probably not, but I’d try to grasp it to the best of my abilities and let myself be led by community tech experts. We as a community have sufficient know how to, on aggregate, get to the right decisions, and everyone must vote with full integrity or lose delegation. That’s sort of the core idea of governance to me. Not to build a bureaucracy that spends all day doing intellectual mental gymnastics. There’s also the community engagement. For those who don’t already have a presence on here, you need to market yourself and connect with delegators. All time consuming, I get that. Now here’s the thing. I see governance as something people who already have a vested interest in the success of Cardano - whether professionally, as investment or otherwise - do for it, as a sort of community service. It’s an honour to serve as a drep, not a job. It can be a networking tool or a profile builder for others, so there can be indirect benefits (“hey people if you want to support my drep work, use my app or stake with me”) which serve as an incentive for new people to build out their drep, but largely it should imo be an unpaid effort. If you’re a 5% shareholder in Apple and you turn up to vote at its annual meeting, you don’t afterwards send a bill to the CEO for your time spent. You do it because you think it’s in your self interest to guide the firm in the right direction. Now I think there are two tricky parts to this. Number one is - you likely can’t organise a protocol based on volunteers alone. So you also need a sort of permanent smaller group of paid experts close to the tech and devs, that guide upgrades, make recommendations, steer things. They won’t always get their way, as they will need to convince hundreds of DReps representing the community. This is effectively what Intersect etc are trying to do. Yes, payment for a small dedicated group like that makes total sense to me. The other tricky aspect is that you get people who are essentially non-technical, and look at Cardano as something they’d like to be full time employed by. I think for some the DRep seems the logical route for this. This should be applauded, however I think they are looking in the wrong place. Yes, we definitely want such kind of dedication to Cardano and to support it. But I think it must come from economic contributions elsewhere. Run a pool, create a dapp, a tool, a service, media, make art…. Then on top, be a drep to give back to Cardano and further build your profile. I don’t think the idea was ever to create a permanent professional political class here, and I think paying ourselves when the protocol obviously still has so many hurdles to overcome, is not the way. Better fund the builders and otherwise economically active contributors.