Vote on Daedalus

I am voting NO on the governance action with hash d8de068952df50c862fa1bce9b8180d3387976cbae0fb2c3d9ef84f0faaf64d6#0.

The metadata for my vote is located here, and this blog serves as a more human-readable form of that justification.

Justification

First, I do not believe I have a conflict of interest in voting on this. Sundae Labs has not discussed participating in this contract in any way.

I believe Daedalus is critical infrastructure, and must be maintained through hard forks.

However, we just approved 62 million ADA for Ensurable Systems to perform critical maintenance activities, 13 million ADA to support Cardano upgrades, and 27 million ADA for the various consensus upgrades.

Collectively, that represents 102 million ADA, just over 15 million USD even at the current depressed prices.

While not explicitly stated in any of their proposals remits, the maintenance proposal in particular was sold as broad, general, and flexible to the network needs.

Part of maintaining Cardano, and delivering those upgrades, is ensuring critical infrastructure like Daedalus is brought along for the ride.

I have to vote no on this proposal, not because I don’t believe in the value or the team, but because I feel that this was already paid for, and between the three proposals above, they can find it in the budget to pay the team for these activities.