An Open Letter to the Cardano Community
Dear Friends and Future Collaborators,
Perhaps like you, I have been a member of the Cardano community since watching Charles Hoskinson’s famous whiteboard video in late 2017.
Perhaps like you, I’ve been looking forward to this week for a long time. And as much as you and I might have enjoyed watching our modest investments in ADA begin work out over the last few months, we recognize that these gains are minor details in a monumentally more important story.
These days, I cannot sleep because of FOMO, but it’s not about missing out on this or that price point. It’s about witnessing history. To witness, in a way that I have no experience, this unprecedented project taking flight and wanting to contribute. And no less, in a moment where pandemic and unrest and disempowerment set the foundations for our daily experience. We recognize the need for change, and want to be able to do more about it.
As it rolls out over the next few months, Cardano is providing all of us with tools for making meaningful change. These tools are so new and so broad in scope that we’re only just beginning to imagine how to use them.
Perhaps like you, I have long recognized that there is so much more to blockchain projects than making a buck, ever since my days of listening to a colleague explain bitcoin mining in the teacher’s room of a New York City high school. On the Cardano Reddit, on the Cardano Forum, on Telegram channels and on crypto Twitter, amidst the ever-present talk of ADA as an investment, one refrain I’ve read often enough is from folks who say they’re not here to make a profit, but to see a vision achieved, to see a world changed. If you’ve ever thought, spoken, or written those words, now is the time to act on them.
Through frequent communication and the recent Cardano Virtual Summit, leaders from Input Output, the Cardano Foundation, and Emurgo have named the goals of pushing power to the margins, of using the blockchain to provide new ways for people to establish a trusted identity and to access financial systems, of creating new options for everyday people. We are learning, together and in real time, what it will look like to achieve these high level goals. Near the end of the summit on July 3, Aparna Jue made the call to action by explaining that decentralization is “a journey, from an adoption standpoint, but just as much from an education standpoint.”
All of this potential starts with us. How will you contribute to guiding the rest of the world on this journey toward education and adoption?
Right now, Cardano is taking crypto mainstream. As members of the community, if we truly believe in this technology, it is our responsibility to realize its potential and to ensure that we include as many people as possible on this journey. As Cardano rolls out, what we as a community choose to make of it, what we choose to share with others, what we choose to emphasize when we talk about it, and how we choose to educate everyone, all the way to the margins, all of this will contribute to historic change.
I am practicing daily how to talk about Cardano with people who have minimal understanding of blockchain and cryptocurrencies. As a thought exercise, I like to fill in these blanks in as many ways as I can:
“Now that ________, we _________.”
I encourage you to do the same. Here are a few examples to get you started, but I know that you’ve got better ideas than me:
Now that we have Cardano, we are ready to push power to the margins.
Now that Shelley is launching, we have access to a decentralized blockchain that solves Bitcoin’s energy consumption problems.
Now that decentralization is possible, we can tell the world!
When you’ve got a few favorites of your own, share them the Cardano community and then with the world. Over the next few weeks, let’s see if we can get #nowthatcardano trending.
Talk to you soon,
James Dunseith
Workshop Maybe
About Workshop Maybe
Workshop Maybe creates open source use cases for Cardano that support all people to imagine new possibilities.
Just like Cardano, Workshop Maybe is just getting started — we’re currently working on some branding assets, talking to colleagues across the globe, and will be sharing content regularly. As Cardano rolls out fully over the next few months, we hope to play a small role in delivering on the mission of pushing power to the margins.
We seek not to prescribe solutions but to support the development of a community. If you believe in the monumental potential of Cardano but are not sure where to start, please reach out — let’s begin to build this open source education network, and discover what we can build now that we’ve got the operating system.
