The Community Wants To Know - S2- EP2
Guest - Cash Anvil
Drep ID - drep1ygeyfh8nm03dnl5a2hxdtv09pu7uhep9l0cpg0zpr60jqys05cku2
RAW TRANSCRIPT (if there are any Mistakes you find do please tell them)
Host: So, how’s the day going?
Cash: Just getting started for the most part over here. Pretty good. Can’t complain.
Host: Nice. Before we move to the questions, let’s give a bit of profile about you to our listeners. He’s known as Cash in the Cardano community. He is CEO of Anvil Development Agency. He has been a Cardano constitutional delegate. He is also a DRep who joined on September 4, 2024, one of the early pioneers. He was a former voting member of the Intersect product committee. His core philosophy is building a legacy by proving that Anvil’s research-driven meticulous approach is a superior path for global blockchain adoption. He advocates for equal opportunity and strategic budget-conscious ecosystem advancement. He has 45 delegators who delegate 1.1 million ADA to his voting power. Till date, he has cast 64 votes and provided rationale for 29 of them. He has been in Cardano for 6 years now and is deeply involved in a lot of products. I myself have used multiple of his products that he has built, like staking websites and even vap.io. I know for a fact that he is building, not just the guy saying he builds, but he really builds. His strategic goal is to advance the Cardano ecosystem while maintaining a strict eye on equal opportunity and fiscal responsibility. Do you want to add something more about yourself, Cash?
Cash: No, that was pretty good. You even said some things that I forgot. Thank you.
Host: Today I invited Cash not as a DRep, but as a very respected builder with experience who has built his business on Cardano from ground zero. He’s one of the early members that I remember from way back when I joined in 2022 and 2023. Notable NFT projects at that time would tell us they built a staking platform with Anvil. My experience using Anvil as a staking platform—because the token stays with me when I stake—is one of the best features. Seeing all the hacks in the DeFi ecosystem today is a sad part, but that’s where Cardano is best and Anvil as an agency brings the best out of the best. Before we move on to the questions, I read your article that you posted a few days ago. One question is: why now? Why choose now when the budget process is coming?
Cash: It’s a great question. It is not something that I’m planning; I don’t have a big master plan for anything. Just being completely transparent, I just see opportunity. I see what I consider to be a general lapse in responsibility when it comes to the budget, the treasury, and the people who are involved with Cardano. One thing that I’m not afraid to do is speak up. A lot of people are in a similar place as me right now. For my own therapeutic reasons, I needed to write that post to get all that was in my head out on the paper. It was reassurance for anybody who agreed with me. It helped my mental state a lot. I’m hopeful that it helped other people just to understand you’re not the only one in the situation that you’re in. I’ve been here for six years and I’ve never felt inclined to write a post like that until now. I don’t know necessarily if there was a full motive behind it other than just clearing what was in my head, but it does align with the new budget cycle. I have a Treasury withdrawal coming, so getting more eyes on myself is never a bad thing. I want to get more delegation. I think there are a lot of proposals that are going to come out this year that need serious focus; you’re going to have to spend a few days going over them and making sure that the value is there before you vote. We learned we can’t just do what we did last year forever; it will never work. I’m trying to change that and give my business the best chance to succeed in this ecosystem. We’ve been building here since day one and I’d like to continue to do that. That’s pretty much the reasoning behind the post.
Host: That article resonated with me and a lot of people in the comments. It feels that it is not just your alone thought; it’s the whole community’s thought who don’t have the power to really make a change. Hopefully, the situation changes as we progress more in governance. You are a DRep and you’re also building a business. How do you handle your duty as a DRep while continuing your business? Does your business background make you more sufficient to vote on certain proposals more correctly?
Cash: As a business owner, I try to separate the two. I was a Cardano consumer first. I bought Cardano and NFTs before I built my business. I did the stuff with the constitution because I care about Cardano. When I do use my voice, I try to use it for stuff that will help everybody, not just stuff that helps me.
Host: Do you use a business sense to vote on proposals?
Cash: I do, but I don’t let it be the whole thing. Not a single person voting right now is going to be perfect. Everybody has biases and that’s the beauty of governance; what we produce should be a culmination of all that. What I try to do is first think about how a proposal is going to affect the Cardano blockchain. It is going to negatively affect it instantly because you’re taking ADA out of the ecosystem in 99% of these cases. For me, that’s something that I always consider right away: how bad is the ask? As a business owner, I’ve written a lot of these proposals, so I’m able to use my experience in drafts and proposal writing to see if the structure is right and if the funding request matches what I’ve seen in the past. A lot of that also has to do with the CBDO. Every six months we do a voting round and we all have to read each other’s proposals and provide direct feedback. It’s been a really resourceful tool to teach you how to dissect a proposal and ask the right questions without being mean about it. We need to have middle ground where we can come together and talk about these things and have a mutual understanding. I definitely use the business side to help me vote, but it’s not everything. I voted yes on Draper because of business, and I voted no on the CF events, which had nothing to do with business. I try to keep all bias out of it and think: Is this good for Cardano? Will it produce transactions and lead to more users? Ultimately, that’s what every treasury withdrawal should do.
Host: You have been a constitutional delegate in Buenos Aires. Which place were you representing?
Cash: Florida, Fort Myers.
Host: I heard the constitution was not completely finished and it has been forgotten. What is your comment on that?
Cash: I personally have lapsed a lot on that. We all made a verbal commitment to each other to keep working on it, but there was no formal commitment past the actual delegation event. We felt like it was in a good enough point to get governance started. Anvil did try to propose changes to the constitution so far, but it’s not from that original working group and it never will be again. The whole event itself was rushed. They could have pushed it back three months, but they didn’t want to because they already had paid for everything. Charles paid for the whole event out of pocket, which was impressive. There’s definitely been a lapse and we need to continue to work on it. It’s hard to get coordination around that with a lot of people and a lot of opinions trying to write one document.
Host: As a business on Cardano for six years, how much of the 350 million ADA treasury withdrawal from last year actually reached businesses that are building on Cardano?
Cash: That’s a really tough question. I’d personally love to have the data. I would say not much. We saw none. We didn’t see any Treasury money last year. Catalyst got canceled when we had a big proposal in with an enterprise partner. We had an opportunity to work on some stuff with IOG and they flaked on us. Not many people got a lot of ADA from what was taken out of the Treasury last year.
Host: What did you expect as a business owner from the budget process last year?
Cash: My expectations are very low. Over the last six years, I’ve watched every single other person get handed check after check. We’ve had some funding, but it’s accounted for less than 5% of our gross revenue over five years. Nobody should expect anything out of the treasury. If I have a proposal and it’s valid, then I should get funded if I can show that we’re going to make transactions, create wallets, and bring new users to Cardano at a reasonable price. Why aren’t we hiring ecosystem players for core infrastructure stuff? You don’t need to do all the work on your own. My biggest gripe with Cardano Foundation right now is they don’t have a clear mandate; they compete with the builders on Cardano. The treasury is meant to fund the ecosystem, and the founding entities are separate from the rest of us who have had to literally work for every dollar since day one.
Host: Do you have the capabilities to build the core infrastructure that can be trusted to your company?
Cash: Absolutely. We’ve had those capabilities for a really long time. When we joined the space, we saw the most opportunity with NFTs. We built NFT minting, doing 457,000 native assets and over 237,000 transactions on Cardano through minting and staking alone. We’re more than qualified to do it and we’ve been in front of the people who do core engineering, but we simply weren’t selected. We literally rewrote the RFP for the founding entity. It’s a very small, selective group of people who get to work on the core infrastructure and it’s gatekept. That’s why I voted on alternate nodes; I don’t think it should just be one or two people getting to do all the main work.
Host: In your DRep profile, you wrote about being mindful of equal opportunity. How do you mean equal opportunity?
Cash: When I first joined Cardano, Charles was talking about equal rights and equal financial rights. Cardano offers a global economy and gives everybody the chance to have a voice. Equal opportunity could be the difference between hiring a European dev or an African dev, or the Foundation’s proposal to host events getting turned down while a community’s gets voted in. I want everybody to have the same chance to win and then the winners rise to the top. Your demographic or background should have nothing to do with your ability to succeed on Cardano.
Host: How do you feel as a business owner about Cardano’s slow approach versus chains like Solana or Sui moving with a faster approach?
Cash: I’ve had those thoughts plenty of times. As the price goes down, those thoughts become more rampant. But I end up reminding myself I didn’t make a mistake; I chose this chain for holistic reasons about equal opportunity. It is hard to sit here and watch Solana and Ethereum have all the success in the world when you feel equal or better at what you do. We are a development company first and we’re going to work where the money is. If there’s opportunity on another chain, we’re going to take it, but that’s not going to be like us moving our product. We might have a project on Tezos soon because they are focused on business development. If we focused on boring applications that produce volume and massive transactions, we would win. Cardano has the power by being slow and secure to win that race. We’re moving to be Web2 first and blockchain second. Our proposal to the treasury involves a company that has invested more into Cardano than Cardano has invested into it. They paid 100 grand of their own money to put Cardano NFTs into their system. They’re going to do 200,000 transactions in a year. You don’t even need to market if you have apps like that. We need to utilize other people to do our dirty work. Why can’t we get a concrete company that does millions of transactions a year to track their supply on Cardano? It’s very low-hanging fruit and we don’t need speed to compete because we have safety, security, and compliance. Once we figure out predictable fees, we’ll be in good shape.
Host: You were part of the Intersect product committee that brought the 2030 Vision. How do you see that?
Cash: I was on the first product committee board as a temporary fill. I have a lot of respect for the 2030 Vision. It’s really good to have KPI guidelines so the ecosystem is focused. I think most proposals should be aligned with it. They did workshops all across Japan, the United States, and Europe to get feedback. Now we have something to hold people accountable to. We need to be more data-driven and find out what’s working and what’s not.
Host: What do you imagine Cardano as in 2050?
Cash: Hopefully, I’ll still be around. My vision for 2050 would be that Cardano is something you can use to pay the rent. I hope it’s given identity and financial tools to those people who never would have had access otherwise.
Host: The 2030 Vision is being used by some in a negative or weaponized way to pressure the community. How do you see that?
Cash: I don’t want people to weaponize it. Half of our job as DReps is to read through the snake oil. The KPIs I care about most are transactions created and monthly active wallets. It shouldn’t be hard to say how you plan on meeting those without weaponizing it. We funded the summit and it should be easy to quantify how many people made wallets or transactions because of it. If we don’t focus on refilling the treasury with transactions, we’re not going to have a treasury. We have four or five years left of this rampant spending before people are never going to get another dollar from Cardano.
Host: Catalyst 15 was suddenly dropped. There is a gap in communication between vendors and the community. How do you see this gap fulfilled?
Cash: The Catalyst stuff was a major letdown. I’m glad we’re taking a step back to re-evaluate it, but the communication around it closing was horrible. Catalyst left a 40 million ADA void in the ecosystem that won’t be filled by things like Draper. That money won’t reach startups at their earliest stages. We need a tighter-knit program to fund ideas and startups. I don’t think Catalyst will ever come back because it’s too hard to regulate. Other ecosystems have us beat there because they offer incentives, opportunity, and a clear path. When you come to Cardano, where do you go? There is no pipeline. All the work goes to the Foundation or it just doesn’t pan out. We have a major problem with communication.
Host: If anyone wants a capable business leader to be a DRep, do delegate your stake to Cash.
Cash: Thanks for having me, brother.
X Thread link - https://x.com/silversoul8668/status/2047306014043861448?s=20
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