Vote on Treasury Withdrawal - IO - Consensus Initiative

I am voting YES on the governance action with hash 73e171a4c0730b4b59ecae271ab89f12a9d56360b02920e1f95107dbdc1d6762#2.

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

Justification

While Sundae Labs has been a consultant on Leios R&D work in the past, we have no ongoing consulting work, nor do we currently have the Haskell expertise required to deliver on this directly. Therefore, I do not forsee a direct conflict of interest.

I am voting yes on this, as I believe the capacity increase represented by Leios is essential, not just for ultimate sustainability of the protocol, but for the economic relevance of Cardano as a platform.

That being said, I have a severe criticism of this proposal in line with something I’ve been saying for over a year now.

Simply building increased capacity is wholly insufficient if nobody uses that capacity. We cannot simply take a “build it and they will come” appraoch to the delivery of Leios. This will shift the burden for demonstrating that value to already starved and resource constrained product focused organizations building on Cardano.

This proposal is severely lacking a clear, concrete, and budgeted line or plan for driving adoption of the chain in light of the improved capabilities.

IO is largely a technical organization, and so I recognize that their strengths may not be in business development or marketing. Other founding entities were supposed to carry that burden and (without arguing about specifics) have only done so to limited success.

However, that is exactly why IO needs to be clear about what their plan is for manifesting that expertise.

The request for funds here, and the steep allocation to developer resources, without so much as a “In conjunction with organization X”, or “by hiring consulting firm Y” to address this is a major and concerning oversight.

IO doesn’t need to be the entity, themselves, that is attracting businesses to build on Cardano in the wake of Leios; but in order to justify such a steep spend, they must have the mentality and plan to find the people who will:

• Run Hackathons or large scale stress test events to demonstrate capacity
• Secure MOU’s from businesses who have previously been skeptical or unable to build on Cardano
• Offer small grants or technical consulting to businesses interested in trying the waters

And other such efforts.

I’m voting yes on this proposal because at the end of the day this is a correctable oversight, but the success of this initiative will ultimately be entirely contingent on this missing component. If there is any flexibility when drafting the legal contracts with Intersect for oversight of the funds, I strongly encourage reallocating a portion of funds to this half of the problem space, rather than expecting or hoping that others will solve it independently.