From “When Shelley” to “Remember Byron?”
Today, for the first time, we woke up with a Cardano era behind us. As our community grows, we’ll be responsible for sharing the history of how we got to now.
Earlier than early adopters, we were pioneers and innovators. We were drawn for the vision, for the potential, for the beautiful mathematics, for the rigor, for the community. We were there for the research: for the winding path toward something secure and sustainable, something resilient, for a future unknown. And yes, alongside all of the above, we saw a token whose value appears, if all goes well, to be greater than its current price.
In the coming weeks, more people will be drawn to Cardano for these reasons and more. Moving forward, these newcomers to the project will hear tales of the Byron era secondhand. What will you tell them?
Soon, we’ll welcome early adopters of this nascent technology. There remains all sorts of innovative, pioneering work to be done. We’ll meet plenty of new community members in the coming weeks, as Shelley takes Cardano mainstream. Early adopters will get to share our anticipation of Goguen and Voltaire, and then they’ll continue to join us as the ecosystem expands with new tools and use cases built upon it.
A chapter concluded yesterday, but we are still so early in this story. Everyone who shows up in August and September still arrives on the ground floor. They may have missed the rollicking research and occasional doubt. They missed some amazing debates and inspiring rallying cries, they missed the ITN and the Shelley Summit.
They haven’t missed any of the story of what Cardano will be.
At Workshop Maybe, we seek to collaborate with anyone who wants to educate others and to tell this story far and wide. As Cardano continues to roll out, we will be there to greet anyone who never wondered “When Shelley?”¹ We want them to ask: “When my community? When my city? When my village? When my main street?”
We are building open source education materials and real-world experiences to accompany the Cardano roadmap and its coming adoption. For people who will never give much thought to k, ρ or τ parameters, we are creating everyday examples of Cardano’s potential, so that they’ll get thinking, “You know, I can see how I this technology could help me with…”
The quiet of the market has been poignant in these first hours since Shelley launched. In the heady days ahead, remember why you came here and where we’re going, and have fun telling the stories.
Footnotes:
[1] Can you feel the nostalgia for those days?
