In a keynote entitled ‘After Voltaire: The Next Evolution of Cardano’, Cardano founder Charles Hoskinson said: revealed an ambitious roadmap that will enable the blockchain ecosystem to run a nation-state by 2030. Hoskinson sees this nation-state as a substantial entity, potentially serving tens of millions of people.
We as an ecosystem have to make a decision. Do we want to be timid and just chase our stories and focus on small concerns, or do we want to be bold and change the world? There’s no reason why we can’t do that for the first time in human history. (…) We have to decide what to do with it and how far we want to go with it. I believe that by 2030 we can rule a nation-state on Cardano, and not a small one, one with tens of millions of people,” the Cardano founder claimed.
How Cardano can govern a nation state
Hoskinson reflected on Cardano’s journey over the past seven years and highlighted the transformative impact of the project. “We went from a whiteboard like this to something that has changed the lives of countless thousands of people,” he stated. After traveling to 74 countries and speaking to tens of thousands of people, he noted that many have expressed how their lives have been changed by being part of the Cardano community.
A central theme of Hoskinson’s speech was the power of governance within the chain and collaboration between communities. He emphasized that the coming on-chain governance system “is not just a mechanism to make a decision; it is a matter of bringing people together to make the right decisions.” This system aims to involve the community in shaping the future of Cardano hundreds of workshops scheduled for next year to discuss marketing, branding and system growth.
Hoskinson also emphasized the central role of the Cardano Constitutionmade ‘by and for the people’, in which human rights are central. “We must provide some protection for our data and our privacy, our freedom of association, trade and expression,” he asserted. The Constitution seeks to ensure that the ecosystem’s original intentions are preserved, especially in a landscape of declining trust in unelected entities.
The roadmap includes the launch of major projects such as Midnightwhich is expected to attract millions of new users to the ecosystem. Hoskinson believes such initiatives will catalyze the development of dozens of other important projects in various domains, further expanding the Cardano community.
In addressing the broader implications of Cardano’s evolution, Hoskinson drew parallels with historical revolutions that have reshaped social structures. “Just as the American Revolution fundamentally changed the world’s social contract (…) we can have another revolution to take back our digital lives,” he proclaimed. He criticized the dominance of multibillion-dollar corporations that exert significant control over individual lives, and advocated a future in which power is decentralized and returned to the people.
Hoskinson also emphasized unity within the blockchain industry against centralization. “Everyone in the blockchain industry is the same because we are all trying to fight the same thing: centralization,” he said. He called for an end to divisive narratives and urged cooperation to avoid a “terrible 2030 future” dominated by centralized control.
Concluding his keynote, Hoskinson expressed optimism about the future of the Cardano ecosystem. “We’ve built a group of people that can do just about anything and we now have the resources as an ecosystem to do that. And we also have an engine that is going faster and faster. We just have to have the will to coordinate and prove that we are the ones who have to do this and we have to realize that.”
At the time of writing, ADA was trading at $0.34.
Featured image from YouTube, chart from TradingView.com