Vote on Treasury Withdrawal: IO: Cardano Upgrades

I am voting YES on the governance action with hash 73e171a4c0730b4b59ecae271ab89f12a9d56360b02920e1f95107dbdc1d6762#1.

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

Justification

While I would normally penalize this proposal for being an omnibus proposal, the three initiatives are synergistic, and bundling them reduces risk and saves on costs.

Overall, the three workstreams provide intense value:

• Account Address Enhancement allows for richer, more flexible dApp designs that address deep usability concerns within Cardano. Beyond just the stated use case, dApp developers will likely find many creative use cases for this upgrade.
• Enabling a multi-asset treasury would also unlock more flexible and sustainable asset management models for dReps. I will add that I expect this to include not just the ability for the treasury to hold these funds, but extensions to enable smart contracts controlled by DReps. My vote is contingent on that clarification.
• Native babel fees support, built on top of the DMQ and Nested Transactions work being delivered under last years budget, is a natural extension. While many user-land solutions have been built, the reason they’ve seen no adoption is because without tight integration into all aspects of the node and downstream tooling, the adoption curve becomes too difficult to surmount. Similarly, ledger integration is neccesary to keep the platform neutral, rather than a solution built by (and thus paying fees to) any one particular third party.

I think IO is currently in the best position to deliver this, in conjunction with the third parties mentioned in the proposal, given their history of node development. That being said, the timelines for delivery on past projects has left something to be desired. As a software engineer myself, I’m the first one to give timeline slippages the benefit of the doubt, but I believe IO and the larger Cardano community have built up a culture of decision paralysis, rather than a culture of delivery. I hope to see this improve, and my evaluation of IO’s proposals next year will be benchmarked around how successful they’ve been in overcoming these long timelines. We’ve invested heavily in high assurance engineering, it’s time for that to start paying dividends.