The community wants to know S2 Ep1 - The ACE Alliance: Elected Members in the “Hot Seat”
Hello. How’s it going? Hello. Good morning, Adam and Cardano. Yeah. So, okay. Is Nico going to join us or let’s start? Yeah, I believe so. No, Nico should be here soon, I imagine. I put the message in our chat, so he should be here soon. I’m not sure if anyone else will be able to join. I know that Sam is in another meeting. He said he’ll try to join once that other meeting is over if it gets over in time.
Okay then. So till you join let’s give introduction about ACE Alliance that I was able to gather. So ACE Alliance is made up of five people from the community: Adam Rush who is a speaker, also a member of Intersect board and parameter committee member; Nicola Cernney from Cardano Foundation governance lead; Samuel Leathers who is a technical security at Intersect and also part of IOG; Hosky, a DREP and also one of the biggest voice of Cardano; and we also have Ken. Oh, we have Hosky in the listener. Let’s invite him. And we have also Ken who is a community member and a fellow member of—he was also a constitutional candidate delegate to Argentina if I’m not wrong—and this is—these are the five people who compromise the ACE Alliance who are the elected constitutional committee. They have till today cast 26 votes. They were elected by 75 DREPs who overall held 1.63 billion ADA. ACE Alliance average response time, that is voting time, is 26.4 days. The term started on Epoch 581 and it will expire on Epoch 726. Okay, we have Nico plus and Adam also.
Yeah, and I see Hosky is there in the listeners as well. I’m not sure if he’s able to take mic or not. Would love to have him up here too if he’s able to. Yeah, I have sent him an invitation. Okay. Okay. Good to see everyone here and that’s the general data I was able to gather about ACE Alliance from governance to Citas because that’s the only tool that was able to show all the comprehensive data of ACE Alliance and other CC. Okay. So let’s start first question. How has the term till now been as a CC, right? Can you share your experience a bit?
Yeah, sure. I guess I’ll kick things off and then turn it over to Nico and anyone else. So yeah, so I guess to start, being a part of the constitutional committee has been maybe a bit more challenging than expected. We’ve mostly had this experience before on other consortiums. I started out as part of the Intersect consortium for the interim CC. But then when I was elected to be a member of the board of directors for Intersect, I actually dropped off of a voting role of that group because I wanted to make sure that it had independence to vote in that position. But you know, sort of now that we’re in the era of having the fully elected CC and having to sort things out ourselves, just it feels like every day brings a new challenge of having to sort through things and you know make a close read of the text. Make sure that we coordinate among ourselves. Bring the knowledge together and then also sort of take that to the other members of the CC in a decentralized way so that we can come to an agreement. For the most part it’s very rewarding. You know I feel like we’re making a difference by putting out really good rationale and trying to let people know the way that we see the constitution and the reasoning why we believe that things are either constitutional or unconstitutional so that it can set precedent for the future. But you know it does take quite a bit of time and a lot of negotiation at times and it’s all part of the process.
Okay, so that’s a perspective from one of the CC members, Adam. Nico. Yeah, thank you. And first of all, appreciate you Gintama for hosting this session. From my perspective, being a CC member is a—it’s a tough job. Let’s just put it like that. I mean, why is it tough, right? It’s not just because there’s a lot of governance actions that you need to vote on, but especially what we saw last year around the holiday break around Christmas is that all of a sudden everyone, since the interim period is about to end, just tried to get in their proposals to sort of use up the remaining net change limits. So that was kind of really tough because I don’t have yet a family but a lot of the members in ACE they have kids and so it is tough to manage all of that. One of the things where I believe we benefit a lot of being a consortium is that we can share the load, right? We can sort of assign different members to review governance actions and then of course discuss them. And probably you will ask us anyway how we’re doing things internally, our processes and things like that. But this was something that was a bit unexpected for me like how high the volume of governance action is. And then still with the new constitution, one thing that is very clear—even though we’re all aiming for as much certainty as possible, there are still these edge cases that are not explicitly explained in the constitution where it really depends how the different CC members interpret the constitution. And that is—yeah, if there’s one thing that I would hope for that we could do better not just as ACE Alliance—is just to have not more alignment with the different constitutional committee members but that we’re starting to talk more with each other in the different consortiums, right? It doesn’t—we don’t need to agree on everything. I think everyone should have their own opinions, but to sort of at least have some level of communication because that pretty much broke down after the interim constitutional committee.
Right. So, yes, sorry. So, okay, just to continue with what Nico was saying in regards to and Adam, you know it’s been an interesting experience. This is my technically second time on a constitutional committee. I was part of the interim constitutional committee before through Intersect. So I’ve been around for a while when it comes to the CC and you know like Nico said it’s very time-consuming. Some of us have families, large families by most definitions. So you know it is a balancing act from corporate jobs to family life to Cardano to governance. Mind you, you know we are donating our time in order to do this which a lot of us do not mind. I think we in the past have gone with others to request for some sort of compensation and that got denied. Even through that though we continue to serve the community. Why? Because we care. It’s not a fun job. It’s not something that when you vote on something that somebody doesn’t agree with, they usually come right after you. But you know, I think a lot of us are very willing to do the work because again, we care about this community. We care about the ecosystem. Most of us have been here since the beginning and I think most of us will continue to be here for many years to come. It’s a privilege to be part of the ECC. It’s a privilege to be elected. It’s a privilege that the community put their trust in us and you know we want to make sure that as we do go through these actions—governance actions that we have to evaluate—that we take as much time as is needed. You know some people may say that you guys take too long. Well you know we take as long as necessary to ensure that we are upholding the constitution like we said we would.
Okay. So our friends from CC, they’re putting their work out for us to move the governance forward and keep the chain going and they are giving time, energy, effort which we cannot see sometimes, right? Because it is easy—I won’t say it is easy to criticize because no one wants to be on the bad end with anyone, right—so it’s not that easy to criticize, but someone needs to criticize and everyone thinks, “Okay, you guys need to just vote,” right? Somebody just ends with that but they don’t know that how much difficult it is to first read the old constitution and then the current constitution when you are in term, right? It changes and then you need to look into it again, right? So it’s a lot of work that cannot be seen sometimes and we do need to appreciate that raising questions as a community is our right and that’s fine, but also we should appreciate the work they put into it when they are at the elected part of a constitution committee.
Now let’s move on to questions that I have prepared. The first question that came to me personally was I see a lot of conflict of interest here because Adam is from Intersect board, Nico is from Cardano Foundation governance lead also committee of Civics committee lead, and Samuel is from IOG. Hosky is a DREP with a lot of delegation to him. How do you justify this conflict of interest when you see proposals coming out and you vote on them, right? Do you just look at the constitutionality and then end it there or do you also get some pressure from the participating entity of whichever part you are that, “Hey, you need to vote yes” or “You need to look at it more easily or flexibly and be more easy-going with the proposal”? Do you guys have such things in your mind or do you get some messages from them when you are voting?
Yeah, that’s a really—yeah, thank you. That’s a really great question. I would say we’re pretty lucky that I don’t feel like we’ve ever been in a situation where we have received pressure from any of the organizations that we work with or worked for to vote one way or another, or at least if any of the others of them have received such pressure they haven’t told me about it. We do have a conflict of interest agreement among ourselves that if there’s anything that would pertain to the role we have within the organizations we work with, we will abstain. So you’ll notice that sometimes our rationale will say that there’s been an abstention, particularly with things for Cardano Foundation like when Nico has done a constitutional assessment for governance action that Cardano Foundation puts out as their governance lead. He’ll abstain, and so if we have a discussion about things maybe he will contribute to that and tell us factual details but he won’t vote on it and he won’t try to lobby us for it. Or I will abstain on things sometimes if they’re too closely related to Intersect. For me as a board member of Intersect it’s a little easier because I have an oversight role within Intersect as well. But then that means that if we have something that we rule as unconstitutional as a CC member, I might have to then go to the Intersect board and say, “Hey, full disclosure for my Intersect board position, I might have some bias here, so I might have to—there might be a situation where on the Intersect board I might have to abstain from something.” So I think it’s just mostly about making sure that you’re forthright about what you’re doing, what your different hats are, and you’re honest about what it is. There’s no such thing as an unbiased opinion. Everybody brings their own experiences and ways of thinking to the situation. The only thing you can do is be honest about it and try to remove your influence when you realize that it would be too close when necessary. That’s kind of what we tried to do.
Okay. Nico. Yeah, thank you. And I can only just reiterate what Adam said, right? So the way we handle these scenarios, especially with governance actions, for example, that originate, at least in my case, I can give this concrete example of the current treasury withdrawal that was submitted by the Foundation and Emurgo for the summit. I excuse myself from this discussion within ACE Alliance when we talk about the constitutionality. So I don’t participate in that and in our internal voting it is then signaled in the metadata when we cast our vote that I abstain and the same applied with the Orion fund where it was CF also submitting the governance action and for other scenarios like that. So when it comes to my job as a constitutional committee member I would probably be able or at least you know that’s what I tell myself that I would be able to give a neutral opinion about the constitutionality of any governance action. It’s still right this perception of you work—you’re an employee of the CF and now you need to judge a proposal from the CF. The best approach here, at least in my capacity as a member of ACE, is just to abstain on it because otherwise people could question my integrity and this is also how everyone else is handling it. Yeah.
Okay. Before I come to Hosky, I just want to say that you are a DREP also, Hosky. So you have to also vote on the action after—you have to vote on the constitutionality while you have to vote as a DREP also. How do you handle this? How are you responsible to the community as a CC and to your delegators as a DREP? Does your ‘no’ vote or ‘yes’ vote make the vote as a CC member or a DREP vice-versa interchangeable? Yeah. Go ahead, Hosky.
Yeah. So it’s actually—I would dare say that if there are no conflicts of interest within people in CC’s, they likely aren’t involved enough in the community to begin with because a lot of the people that may have conflict of interest to me just signifies that they are heavily involved in the governance of this chain—or not the governance, sorry, on the chain itself. So I would say show me somebody that has no conflict of interest and that’s somebody that likely isn’t very involved in the community to begin with. So you know the—I think what Nico and Adam said, it’s very simple: when there is a conflict of interest, disclose it, abstain from voting. Now on the DREP and CC side, that’s the beauty of this, right? Like I’ve actually taken stances before—I can’t remember them off the top of my head—where we voted on something as either constitutional or unconstitutional. And as a DREP, I have a platform that I run on that the people that have delegated to me are aware of. And if an action goes against that platform, to me, that’s all that matters. Whether it’s constitutional or unconstitutional, it doesn’t mean that because I vote as a CC member as something being constitutional that I’m going to support it. Or if it’s unconstitutional that I’m not going to support it. Every single action that comes across from a DREP perspective is going to be weighed on the Cardano first principles that I’ve adopted as my platform as a DREP. It doesn’t matter what it is. I’ve voted on stuff as constitutional in the past and I’ve also voted abstain or no on them as a DREP because it did not line up with the platform that I set forth. So yeah, I think Adam wants to add.
Yeah. Oh, yeah. Thank you. I’ll just add to that. I have a DREP certificate because I do privately vote with some of my own stake. I have these—that certificate only has my own wallets delegated to it. Nobody else’s. And so I’m not a public DREP. I’m only privately voting for myself. And I’ve done the same thing as Hosky has where I have ruled things constitutional or unconstitutional, put in that vote with the ACE Alliance, but then even if we rule something unconstitutional, we’ve said to the community before, you can still vote that you approve it as DREPs if you want to sort of send the signal that you want this sort of idea to come back in a more constitutional way. So that’s the beauty of our system and the way we have our breakdown.
Okay. So we were able to know how they handled their conflict of interest as a board member, as governance lead and as DREP, and how they approach the governance action and how they decide upon it. You know that led me to something that I wanted to know more is that your meetings where you discuss these things—those are for me valuable knowledge spots, valuable insights from you guys who are elected CC members because you involve yourself deeply with governance. You guys decide on these actions and it’s very sad to say that sometimes we only see the end result that is your vote rationale. If somewhere we would have your meeting minutes or something of the like where you find some interesting point from some of your committee members raised about certain constitutional points that you would like the community to know about—those insights that you can share with the community. It can enrich the knowledge of the people across the community so that we have a better understanding about how to move forward and how these things can enact. Because I feel that a lot of all the CC’s, they vote and give the rationale, we just see the end result but sometimes when we don’t see the process and the discussions, I think we are missing out a lot of knowledge that can be shared and it can improve overall governance information gap that we have regarding the constitution. I’m seeing Adam’s hand. Is your hand up, Adam? My hand wasn’t up. I will give a response to that and then I’ll let others—I know that these spaces are glitchy sometimes.
I guess my response to that is meeting things like meeting minutes are very much a double-edged sword. We’re very intentional about trying to put everything that we believe needs to be stated about the group decision within our rationale because we don’t want people to feel like they can’t speak freely within our group when we’re discussing things and floating ideas that they might change their mind about. It’s so easy for people to jump on each other within the social media space and say, “Well, you said this one time, you did that one time. This past action completely defines you,” and then from then on out, people turn that into some sort of a firestorm over a minute detail. And so when we release a rationale, that rationale tries to encapsulate what we believe is the most pertinent governance issue. Now I do have a personal goal of starting to—I want to start writing more about what I think about things sort of like maybe concurring opinions to our group. That’s something that hopefully I can do this summer as I wrap up my classes that I’m teaching. That’s just kind of the way we go in order to make sure that we can have free discussion within our group and then try to put everything within our rationale.
Yeah. And just to follow up on that, I mean the discussions we have within our group—there’s definitely a lot of information that is shared, a lot of discussion. I’ve changed my mind a couple times based on evidence presented by other members based on facts in this case. There’s also a lot of bantering that happens on there. So I know Sam’s like, “Why don’t you guys record your sessions?” We’re not going to do that. There’s a lot of stuff and ideally the rationale that we put forth will incorporate all of the discussions that we’ve had. We do usually cover any precedent that has been set that we took into consideration. We really take this seriously. I know this is coming from the Hosky account, right? Talking about taking this seriously, but it is definitely a duty that we don’t take lightly. It’s funny that—trust me, there’s plenty of banter that happens, plenty of non-seriousness that happens during our meetings, but at the end of the day, what matters is the way that we are voting and our rationale. We put the time and effort to present the best rationale to the community.
Okay. Nico. Thank you. Yeah, this is—I completely understand where you’re coming from, right? When it comes to sort of—I think what a lot of people would be really interested in is the thought process behind our rationale. Well, as Adam said and as Hosky said, we put a lot of effort into drafting very informative rationales that sort of make it understand how we derived at the decision. But of course we cannot include—we could potentially write 10-page long rationales where we explain each and every one of our own opinions and then sort of come to a group decision. But this on one hand I think would not be as—first of all I think no one would probably read it. Maybe you would because you are really passionate. But what I think as Adam said would be helpful is if we as not just as ACE Alliance but as the other constitutional committee members would take more of an effort on educating the community about their thought process and how they approach it because that is one thing where we are sort of very inconsistent between CC members and that’s one thing I want to avoid—that we are in ACE Alliance are inconsistent with our rationales. Because we cannot argue from a perspective now in this governance action now we care about the tenets of the Cardano constitution and oh the proposal is in violation of one of our tenets but then in the next proposal we don’t care about it anymore. I saw that that happened with a few other CC members where they fall into this trap of a different approach with different governance actions and yeah this I think we should really avoid.
Yeah and okay before I come to you Adam just one short sentence here: when it comes to sharing knowledge and discussion there’s a lot that can be shared and that’s a lot that cannot be shared also so understanding that. Last short answer from Adam and then we move to the next question. Oh yeah, sorry. My hand’s not intentionally up if it is. I think it’s just a glitch, but I’ll just say I agree with what everyone said and what you—the way you kind of just summarized it, right? We have to pick and we have to be really choosy about what we put in the rationale to both fully explain ourselves but also not go too long.
Okay. Next question that I had was I’ve seen all the average rational voting days of all CC. It always comes about 25-26 days. Some have—I’m not sure how they calculated that part—but some CC had 32 days as the voting average days so why this gap of 26 or 25 days when you vote as a constitutional committee? Well I’ll take this one. It takes time to really discuss and come to an agreement as a group on the constitutionality of an action. We could flip a coin and say it is or it isn’t, but if you want proper results, I think every committee should take as long as necessary to reach an agreement. Again, the CC does not determine whether an action is going to pass. Really, that’s up to the DREPs. We are just guarding the constitutionality of it. DREPs should not look to the CC signaling how they’re voting in order to vote. At that point, you are becoming one body instead of three separate ones and that can be a problem. Why do we take 25-26 days? Because we make sure we take the time to go through every rationale. We discuss every action and we ensure that we vote with consistency not only on the 26 days but also on the rationale that we write. So if you take one day to vote, great. If you take 2 days, a week, two weeks, I think it should not matter. What does matter is the outcome and the contents that you release. Like Nico was mentioning prior, there has been some disconnect with some other CC members where their rationale for a very similar issue changed. I don’t know what their voting cadence is, but I would say take a look at that. Maybe that’s related. It’s actually not good to rush things. And again, we’re going to take as long as necessary. Some actions, because they are resubmissions, can be easier than others because they address what we had already discussed extensively. Some things are brand new and we’ve never seen before, so they take a lot more deliberation. Sometimes our lawyer and us argue for 3 days straight on what we think the wording of our rationale should be. Mind you, we do have a lawyer in our midst. Trust me that is a very difficult thing to deal with because words matter in law and we take everything very seriously. You can ask Adam about the discussions and the length of time it’s taken to get a word changed in our rationale because it can change the meaning completely. So yeah, we are going to take as long as necessary and I see Adam has his hand up.
Yeah. Ken is a lawyer and I’m an academic. So these are two fields that are not known for their brevity or timeliness at times. That being said, we sometimes will know—we’ll see a rationale come up and we have a weekly meeting and we also have a group chat and so something will come up and we’ll say “Hey guys, how does everybody feel?” Just sort of initial smell test. It looks pretty good. It looks like it’s constitutional. We need to dig in more. Everyone’s going to do their research. It looks good though and even once we agree it’s constitutional we still might have another week of sort of going over the draft to make sure that we have all the wording right so we can put down the precedent correctly. Sometimes it’s not that we disagree on whether or not it’s constitutional, sometimes it’s making sure that we just have all our ducks in a row as far as explaining ourselves correctly.
Okay. I think we also have now Sam as a speaker. Welcome Sam. Hello. How are you guys doing today? It’s going great and everyone’s discussing and sharing knowledge. Good to see you here. Good to see you, too. Okay. Yeah, I’m proud to be on ACE Alliance. I was very humbled to have these guys ask me to be on their alliance when we ran almost a year ago now. So I will just listen here because I don’t want to sideline what you guys were talking about. But yeah, I’m here and if you have questions, I’m here to answer them.
Yeah, definitely. Your perspective will also give us a good idea about how things move around and I see Nico has his hand up. Yes, Nico. Yeah, thank you also to really just reiterate: our goal is always to of course vote as soon as we can because we understand that some proposals are time critical. Luckily we haven’t had that yet with a critical parameter change that is needed or a critical emergency hard fork—knock on wood we haven’t had that yet. But if we must rush with something or if there’s a time critical approach of course we would still be able to do that. But just as Hosky and Adam said, we sort of found out that also if we take some time with actually digesting proposals and debating them, maybe not just once but twice, we can discover some potential issues that one of us might have not seen. This is also one of the strengths of these consortiums—is that we have these internal deliberations, we refine our views and our rationale and then put it out there, whereas the solo CC members they don’t have that, which is okay, it’s a trade-off. I’m not judging them, but this is where you have the trade-off here. Yeah, thanks.
Okay. So we are at the half point of the space now and let me just give a short summary of what we have discussed. We introduced ACE Alliance, their members, their background. They have casted votes on 26 governance actions till date and we discussed about conflict of interest among the alliance members, how they handle that. Then we talked about how sharing of knowledge and insights can be helpful and what can be shared and what cannot be shared and how it reflects in the rationale. Now we were talking about their average voting days that is 26 days. So why does it take so long for CC members to vote? Before we move on to the next part, I had three short questions that I would like you guys to answer in ‘yes’ or ‘no’. You can keep your mic open so that it’s easier to answer. First question: Do you guys think AI can replace the CC in coming years?
So I can answer that one pretty easily. No, because I’m the one that’s like not an expert on constitution stuff. I’m the one that’s heavily using AI to come up with my rationale that I present to the guys. A lot of the times they kick them back and it’s like “that’s wrong because of X.” And then I can see that, oh yeah, that did the wrong thing there. So I mean, the only way an AI is going to be able to help you is if you actually know it yourself and you can guide the AI in the direction you want it to go. So, a complete AI constitution member—not going to work. I’m going to take the opposite and say yes, especially after it removes your kidney as the solution to your constitutional problem. In other words, no. Okay. Adam? Oh, no. I agree. No. Okay. Nico? No. That’s a no for me. Okay. Help. Yes. Right. But okay. You said one word, so no.
Moving on to the next question. Do you think a CC’s action—a constitutional committee action—ends just defining on-chain governance actions? Yes or no? Repeat. Does a CC—a constitutional committee role—end on voting on-chain rationale on-chain governance actions only? Well I’ll say no with a caveat that because of the fact that’s such a nuanced question. Okay. Hosky, Nico? Yes, our role is very clear. We’re here to determine the constitutionality of governance action. We’re not here to interject our opinion when it comes to the merits of the proposal. Okay. Question. Okay. Sam? Yeah, I would agree with Nico that basically our role is very much more to like look at the action, say if it’s constitutional. We can give our opinions outside of it, but that’s not part of our rationale.
Sorry, I got disconnected, but it’s—I think it’s simple, right? Like there’s been actions that I am totally against. But as a CC member, it’s not my call to deem that unconstitutional just because I don’t like it. That’s where my DREP side can say no to things. But again, it’s two separate seats and opinions don’t matter. What matters is what the constitution says. Okay. Last question before we move on to the next part: Have you guys read the new constitution fully?
Yes. And I read all the iterations coming up to it. Yes. And every revision that Uda made. I’m not the biggest Uda fan just from that perspective because he made us read a lot. That’s more reading about Constitution than a lot of other things that I would rather be reading about. But just kidding, I do like Uda. But yeah, every single one of them. Every single word at least once. Okay, Nico. Yes. And I know that there are some inconsistencies in it and that we accept that because those inconsistencies are not as, you know, bad as some people think. For example, if he changed the simple wording in a guardrail, I know he would have had to change the naming convention to B instead of A. But I mean these things are so meaningless. I mean meaningless. Yeah. Yes. Yes.
Okay. So you know I have read something about law that when you read a law first you read the title. If the title explains it clearly then the judge usually takes into account what does the article mean. If not he moves into the preamble and if not then he looks at the examples of why the law was made right and coming to that part I read the constitution and I always go back to preamble of constitution about what it tells us right before moving into all those sections, tenets, guardrails and articles and everything. I’ve also shared the preamble on the jumbotron so you guys can click on it and read it. Just to give an example about it, what it says is that Cardano—I just read the first paragraph that’s it nothing else—Cardano is a decentralized ecosystem of blockchain technology, smart contracts and community governance committed to improving economic, political and social system for everyone everywhere. By offering this foundational infrastructure, Cardano empowers individuals and communities to manage their identity, value and governance fostering the emergence of decentralized applications, business and network states. Okay, there’s—there are like five six paragraphs. I just read the first paragraph and you know when I read this the first question comes: you guys, the CC, they are the only elected people in all the governance structure that we have today directly representing us on chain. You guys are the only ones elected because every bit SPO or DREP, they are voluntarily stepping up and the community rallies behind those SPOs or DREPs. As an elected member, we expect you to uphold the constitution, so when you vote on a governance action do you just read the regarding articles or tenets or do you also keep in mind the example of why the constitution matters and then you look at the governance action?
So I’ll give you the history of the preamble. That was actually written—well so the first paragraph was a tweet. It’s almost—I think one word was changed to make it suitable for the preamble—but it was a tweet from Charles Hoskinson that came right after he did his whole spirit quest thing from the direwolf thing that came from that. And I signed—Hansen and I were as part of the drafting committee saw that tweet and said this is actually like the encapsulation of the ethos of Cardano and from that we went and we spent about a week kicking back and forth the rest of the preamble and then we had to take it to the committee and they turned it into a camel as committees do so to speak. But you know it—I feel like the purpose of the preamble is to put something really aspirational out there. It’s not just for the Cardano folks. We fought very hard to make sure that the preamble would be the first thing seen on the constitution, ahead of any list of definitions, ahead of any historical framework like some people wanted to put, because we wanted it to be the first thing that a person who’s not in Cardano would see when they came to ask the question of what is Cardano governance about and so in my mind the preamble is always the ethos of Cardano. Now, that being said, we do have the text of the constitution. So, the order of how we rule constitutional matters always has to be the question: First, is there a guardrail? Because a guardrail, particularly the guardrail script, the guardrail script will stop things before we even have to make a decision on them. Second is, is there a written guardrail? Because that will set a boundary that cannot be crossed or should not be crossed depending on how it’s written. Third, is it in one of the articles because if it’s in one of the articles that is a specific guidance that the community has said this is the law of Cardano. Fourth, is it in the tenets because if it’s in the tenets that’s saying those are our values that we hold dear and then finally, how does that ethos of Cardano deal with it? So it is very important and it does come into mind but it can never overrule the set law because the set law is something where we’ve all agreed to it. And to set laws there to protect the minority against the majority opinion running amok and deciding they’re going to change things all of a sudden. So the minority opinion can say, “Hold on, we have a set law. We have an agreement that has to be changed in the constitution before you can do anything like that.” But yes, I guess in summary, that is always in my mind. Okay.
So you guys—it depends upon the governance action what it is representing and how you look at it and you feel that preamble is the ethos that we all should believe in, right? And when you see this ethos right agreeing on those parts as an elected member—I’ll always keep this word ‘elected’ impacted because you guys are the only ones that were elected by people amongst the other candidates. And when it comes to election it comes with its responsibilities. I know you guys are not paid, you’re voluntarily doing it, but since you stood up to take upon the role it means you also take upon the responsibility to uphold the constitution. And that’s where, you know, me as a community member, I hope that if the elected entity that has been voted by my ADA right—he should at least stand by the institution that I as ADA voted on that was my delegated representative right? And that’s where my questions come: if you guys just stop on on-chain governance actions and not take any call upon how to mitigate the DREP’s consolidation of power in the top 10 or top 15 and how that is very dangerous—because again bringing the first part, we are a decentralized ecosystem. And if our governance does not represent itself and you as a constitutional committee member elected, you do not give out any voice on that part right? Because we believe that in this era it’s either the DREPs or the CC members that can lead the next governance or Voltaire era next people and we see very lack of—passive CC member action because they tell, “Okay, we were not elected for that part or this part we were just elected to vote on governance action.” And DREPs tell, “We just voluntarily stood up, you want to move your delegation to someone else, just move it away.” SPOs tell us, “You don’t like how we are voting, move it away.” So how does a community member get his justice if everyone just, you know, raises the hands, “it’s not our job”? Anyone? Nico?
Yeah, thank you. I mean it is a very difficult question: how and where does the mandate of the constitutional committee end? If such a question arises, I would always—my answer would always be to look at what does the constitution say exactly is our role as the CC. And I think it’s pretty clear that it lines out what we need to do: we need to assure that the proposed governance actions align with the Cardano constitution in its entirety. So that includes, as Adam said, the guardrails; that includes the appendix with the guardrails; that includes the articles itself, the tenets and to some extent also of course the preamble because it’s part of the document. But the thing is that—let’s just go with a thought experiment: if we now start to rule and say that a governance action is unconstitutional because it violates the preamble, then we would be forced to sort of view all future governance actions in a similar way. And that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s a bad thing. It just means that it sort of gives us as the CC too much power to veto governance actions because I can tell you one thing: we could rule every governance action as unconstitutional if we want so because there is some way how it violates one of the—either something in the preamble or something in the tenets. Let’s just go with tenant 8 of the Cardano constitution because it was brought up to me recently; it says—where is that?—“The Cardano blockchain shall not unreasonably spend resources.” Exactly. Okay. Unreasonably spent resources. Yeah. What—where is that defined? What what does it mean unreasonably spent resources? Should we now start to be the accountants that verify whether a proposal is requesting too much or not enough? It is a very slippery slope. So I think the stance that I would always advocate for—I’m also not speaking for ACE Alliance but now just as me—is we should first see if something clearly violates the constitution just as Adam said, and only after that sort of think about these other perspectives. It’s hard to explain. Okay, I get you. Yeah, I get you. It’s—yeah, thank you. Yeah, okay. Adam, do I have a hand up? Yeah. Yeah, I do. And I really appreciate Nico what you’re saying about how hard it is because it is. And what I’ll say is you—one of the things you pointed out is so very true: the fact that we are elected and everybody wants to talk about how this isn’t political. This isn’t political because you know we’re making a new system. Well, guess what? This is political. It’s politics. We got elected. So, it’s just a different form of politics. Hopefully, a better form of politics. Hopefully we can be more honest with each other and the game theory is set up with a liquid democratic system that the power can shift more easily. But ultimately like the CC cannot be the body that fixes all the problems with Cardano because if we try to step in and we say like “Oh well we see that there’s too much consolidation of stake among the top 10 DREPs,” well, they can just vote us out and they can replace us with people who will simp to them. And so that’s not a fight that is—I hate to put it this way—that’s not our fight. Like we as individuals can take a position on that and say whether or not we think it’s a problem, but when it comes to voting, we have to look at the Constitution and say, “What is the text of the Constitution and how can we protect the rights of the minorities on the chain against the overindulgence of people who want to pass things within the bounds of this?” And there is some nuance to that, right? There is some understanding of what the intent of the wording was when it was written and how we understand it. So, we do have to make that judgment and our perspectives will come in. But if people want to fix the big problems, it’s going to take everybody working together to make their case, everybody trying to make that change and we have to really focus in on what we can do which is uphold the constitution that the Cardano community puts on chain.
Okay. So the question of mine still stands: where does a community member get his justice served for all the injustice that he got? That is a difficult question and the answer will be found at some time in the future. Moving on to the next question. When the compensation of CC was not approved, I read the majority of the rationales of why it was not approved for CC and something that I found was that DREPs they wanted themselves to also be compensated. That’s why they said, “Okay, why is only one party getting compensated, why not us?” And for me that hit home like: Okay, so guys one was elected by the community one voluntarily stood up—I know there’s a limit to voluntary—there can be many reasons that volunteers should be paid and everything, I’ve been a volunteer myself in Intersect for 2 years almost, I know it, that’s another matter. But coming to this, how does the not passing of compensation show the future? Like you were just newly elected and one person retired—one member retired from the non-com due to non-compensation—once the member retired it put the governance on hold and there was a lot of repercussion after that where new main committee session all came up into place and that’s another talk. But how does the not passing of the compensation personally affect you during your future because you were elected for a two-year term? How do you see the 2-year term coming for your personal level? How does that not passing of the compensation transition feel to you?
I’ll just say on a personal level, it would be nice to have some more compensation for all the work I do for this particular position. It is something that I can afford to forego at this time because of the fact that it also builds my career in other directions. The fact that I’m an academic who studies decentralized networks and socio-technical systems means that the work I do here feeds into that. So at this time it’s worth it for me to continue staying on the constitutional committee. The fact that I’m part of the Intersect board means I do have compensation from that position which means it makes sense for me to stay very involved in the Cardano ecosystem in a constitutional committee capacity. So I can afford to do this as a volunteer at this time. We’ll see in a year from now whether I still make that same calculation. It’s very likely that I would even if we don’t get compensated. If we do get compensated, it makes it easier for me to take care of my family. So, it makes it much easier for me to justify staying in a position like this. That being said, I think just as an overall part of the ecosystem, you should watch out because not compensating the CC will make more consortiums as far as we can think like the ACE Alliance. So, maybe that is a good thing. Maybe you’re all going to decide you’re not going to fund the CC because these are five people who have independent funding sources within the ecosystem. Most of us, we have deep ties to institutions within the ecosystem. People have complained that we are the institutional CC seat. That’s a double-edged sword. So if you want to have more people have more independence, you fund them. And that was our justification for when we put forward our request for funding: if you fund us from the community treasury, we have independence from the other institutions where we can say we’re getting funded by the treasury so you don’t have any hold on us and telling us how to vote or how to work. That’s something to think about. DREPs they have a constituency that could be funding them, but they have ideas as well about how there might be a fund. I’ll leave that up to the community to decide. I feel comfortable continuing to make the case that the CC should receive funding not just because it would help me personally but also because I think it would increase the amount of good people who would be able to participate on the CC.
I think it’s also worth mentioning that we lost Cardano Atlantic Council which was by far the best CC seat with the best rationales that were going out during the interim constitution because they don’t have that level of institutional funding, guaranteed salary and whatnot. So they were like, “I can’t continue to put,” and I think they averaged—they said they were averaging like 20 hours a week basically reviewing governance actions, which they had like the 30 back-to-back ones from Intersect, for instance. And so you’re not going to get people stepping up in the community that are like, “Hey I can do this,” unless they actually have institutional money from like the CF, Intersect, Emurgo, wherever else and whatnot. Because it’s not sustainable to just volunteer your time all the time, especially if you’re not making ends meet at home.
Nico, I totally agree with what Adam also said. And one thing that concerns me a bit when it comes to the constitutional committee is—right for now, we have a lot of passionate people that do this sort of job because they just really care. And you could argue that okay, this will just be the way it’s going to continue because that passion usually—if you care that much you would probably just continue doing it. But at some point, you might just stop, as we saw with the Atlantic Council. And maybe that is the right approach: that we have constitutional committee members that serve—maybe you should also not serve more than two years, three years, I don’t know, right? And then it’s time to move on and sort of let the new blood take a stab at it. But unfortunately, what also happens is that we see that some people see the constitutional committee also as a bit of a promotional tool, where popularity matters more than competence or than skill, right? And it’s hard. I don’t want to be harsh and say there’s constitutional committee members that are not as well-equipped in doing their job as potentially other people are. But it is a fact that sort of the way we currently also select constitutional committee members in the off-chain election is somewhat… Yeah, it could lead to a process where we elect maybe not the most competent people in this position. And this is what I’m always afraid about—that we sort of get a constitutional committee that are just saying yes to everything because that’s the easy path. You just approve everything and that’s it. But that’s not good governance and that really would conflict with how our governance model works with the at least two of the three roles is required to approve something. So this is just something that I’m afraid about if we don’t figure out—it doesn’t mean immediately we don’t need to immediately figure out compensation but in the long run a functioning system requires economic incentives. I mean this is how the blockchain itself works, right? We have these economic incentives that drive the security of the protocol itself. And I see it similar with the CC: we do not want the CC to be captured by other institutions or by incompetence, right?
I just want to say thank you for hosting the space. I got to jump on the hard fork working group call, but thanks for inviting us and yeah, please let us know if you have any other questions. Yeah, I have to go with Sam. So, thank you all so much and thank you especially Gintama. Really appreciate you hosting this. Yeah. And as I promised Adam that the space won’t go for more than an hour before I invited him. So, any last words you guys have before I speak my ending note? Adam, Nico, Hosky. No, I’ll just say I guess last words are just, you know, it’s a tough job, but it’s very fulfilling and I really appreciate getting to do our best for the community. Okay, Nico, thank you Gintama for hosting this space. Yeah, Adam said it. So, nothing to add.
Okay. Okay, good. So that, my friend, was just a glimpse into how ACE, our elected constitutional committee member, acts as an on-chain governance, and their viewpoints. It was just a small part of their whole contribution to Cardano. It is not everything but one part of it and hopefully we get to learn more in the future. We do not do this space to attack but to protect the integrity of Cardano. To the delegators, the developers and the daily users: You are the heartbeat of this chain. Your voice is your power and the facts are your fuel. We are going bigger, better and braver to ensure that every voice from the largest whale to the smallest builder is heard. The Hot Seat is just getting started. I am your host. See you at the next episode of The Community Wants to Know. Thank you for joining.
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