Vote on Treasury Withdrawal - IO & Midgard Labs - L2 Scalability Initiative
Vote on Treasury Withdrawal - IO & Midgard Labs - L2 Scalability Initiative
I am voting NO on the governance action with hash 73e171a4c0730b4b59ecae271ab89f12a9d56360b02920e1f95107dbdc1d6762#4.
The metadata for my vote is located here, and this blog serves as a more human-readable form of that justification.
Justification
First, I don’t believe I have a conflict of interest on this proposal. I am not set to receive any funds from the proposal, nor do I consider it a competitor to projects Sundae Labs is building. Some might see Midgard as a competitor to Gummiworm, for example, but neither Philip DiSarro nor I view it that way. In fact, we are working closely together to make sure that Midgard and Gummiworm complement eachother and integrate deeply; and we’re currently working on a version of the SundaeSwap protocol that can be deployed to Midgard.
Given the above, and Sundae Labs history as the first company to successfully execute smart contracts on Hydra; the first company to demo a working application on Hydra; our open source contributions to Hydra; our involvement in the Hydra Doom project; and our role in the Glacier drop, Hydra has a place near and dear to my heart.
Unfortunately, I cannot vote Yes on this proposal. In particular:
- Continuing to invest heavily in Hydra has hit a point of diminishing returns. I believe that Hydra should be supported by and work at the direction of those who are building businesses on top of it. If funding is directed to Hydra, it should be in driving adoption in more businesses, not in continuing to iterate on the core.
- Hydra is not a suitable technology for most forms of DeFi; Despite the branding, for example, “Delta DeFi” is a (fantastic and useful) centralized exchange. By proposing that one of the deliverables here should be a “reference implementation for DeFi”, I fear the proposal fundamentally misunderstands either Hydra or DeFi.
- The proposal is an Omnibus proposal, covering three workstreams that appear to only be tangentially related, in an effort to trade on the recognition and excitement for one to fund the other.
I would be far more supportive of a proposal that focused exclusively on the Data Availability solution hinted at in this proposal. Alternatively, I would support a Hydra specific proposal that focused on finding and supporting business that would be directly suitable for Hydra, such as business-to-business settlement, gaming, point of sale settlement systems via Maravedí, and driving improvements to the Hydra core based on direct engagements with said ventures and their revealed needs.
Ultimately, it’s painful to vote no on this. Hydra has been a key inspiration for much of our ambition, and has the potential to unlock many exciting things for the Cardano ecosystem. However, I must vote my conscience, and after carefully considering this proposal, I believe this would take Hydra in the wrong direction and misallocate public resources.
