Maintaining a Neutral Stance—The Role of the Foundation as Cardano Grows
The Cardano ecosystem is evolving. In the last few weeks, you may have noticed the cascade of new activity, startups, tokens, and non-fungible tokens that have arrived almost overnight to the Cardano ecosystem.
With this rapid expansion of our ecosystem comes huge opportunities, but also some degree of risk. While we expect that the vast majority of projects entering our ecosystem will have genuine intentions and solid use cases, occasionally bad actors do also take advantage of rapid blockchain community growth for their own means.
Here, we want to quickly revisit the role of the Cardano Foundation, and what stance we take on projects building on Cardano. We will explore what it means to take a neutral approach, what our occasional official partners do look like, and what it might mean when we aren’t vocal about a particular project.
A Neutral Approach
In the absence of an official memorandum of understanding (MOU) or official partnership in the case of the Cardano Foundation working with a project, our general stance on new entrants to the ecosystem is to remain neutral.
In practice, this means that we won’t publicly voice our support for a particular project, even if it is legitimate and well-intentioned. This is necessary to maintain parity between projects entering our ecosystem. Imagine, for instance, if there are two projects building on Cardano. One receives endorsement from the Cardano Foundation, while the other, for reasons such as visibility or timing, does not. This would be highly unfair. It’s for this reason that our stance is to remain neutral.
That said, if we think a project is definitely dangerous, fraudulent, or seeks to exploit Cardano users , we will of course raise the alarm within our community and the potential users of the project.
Does the Cardano Foundation ever endorse projects?
Occasionally, the Cardano Foundation may enter into a strategic partnership or sign a MOU with certain key projects and companies that we feel bring value to our ecosystem. One such example is our work with ScanTrust, who we felt brought great value to our existing work in the supply chain tracking area.
However, this does not intrinsically mean that these projects are somehow better or superior to other projects in our ecosystem. Instead, it simply means that the Cardano Foundation has identified synergies where value can be added through a partnership with the project in question.
Does silence from the Cardano Foundation mean a project is risky?
Absolutely not. Just because we cannot endorse or work with every project that enters the Cardano ecosystem, does not mean that there are inherent risks associated with that project.
As the Cardano ecosystem grows, there are bound to be many thousands of new and innovative applications, enterprises, and startups exploring our blockchain—just like in other blockchain ecosystems. While the Cardano Foundation will support Cardano’s growth through the maintenance of opt-in projects and token registries, we expect it will quickly reach a point where we do not have the capacity to formally endorse each new project entering our ecosystem.
Instead, we recommend each of our community members to do their own due diligence on Cardano-based projects. Please do not be disheartened or take it as a sign that a project is risky if you reach out to a Cardano Foundation member or Community Manager and you do not receive a response—we are simply regulated by Swiss law and unable to show bias towards projects in any form.
To conclude, let’s reflect on why we need this article at all. The Cardano ecosystem is growing at an exponential rate, and we are attracting a huge number of projects to our ecosystem! It is a truly exciting time to be part of the Cardano community, thank you all for joining us on this journey.
Any questions? Let us know in the comments below!