My Philosophy:

• If L1 scalability solutions conflict with security and decentralization I will choose the latter, but I also emphasize the urgent need to do all in our power to scale within those constraints. I also believe Cardano can scale just as well as any other blockchain while enjoying a higher standard of security, trustlessness and decentralization.

• Greater data efficiency is a preferable solution to greater throughput because it limits the ledger size, but both are needed. Dapps should practice good data hygiene. 

• Having multi-pronged yet complementary scaling approaches is better than one monolithic solution.

• One of our industry's hardest long term challenges will be figuring out how to store the full ledger history in a trustless and decentralized way.

• I generally approve of the methodical and rigorous approach Cardano's core entities are taking to deliver scalability (Ouroboros Leios and Peras)

Where we are:

At the moment, probably nothing embarrasses Cardano's community as much as our low throughput and transaction capacity. There are several solutions to this in rapid development which all approach scalability from different angles: Ouroboros Leios (linear throughput with Input Endorsers), isomorphic state channels (Hydra), ZK rollups (ZK Fold), new versions of Plutus, and many other community initiated projects (like Leviathan and Gummiworm). Scalability on Cardano is not a matter of "if" but rather "how soon?"

The rigorous peer review and formal methods process favored by IOG has provided Cardano with best in class liquid staking, decentralization and transactional security, but it has also consistently resulted in development delays. Moving forward, here are some questions we need to ask ourselves:

• Should we continue on that scalability path that IOG has set? How much additional funding, if any, will they need to deliver Ouroboros Leios as fast feasibly possible, given the workstreams? How much are we willing to pay if they do need more to expedite development?

• If we decide to focus on another scalability path: Can it run alongside Leios? How much will it cost and what is the expected delivery schedule?

Current projections have Ouroboros Leios probably being ready to deploy in about 24-36 months, and this will provide the linear scalability endgame solution that every sustainable blockchain will eventually need. In the near to mid term, the most promising solution will likely be the ZK capability that comes with Plutus V3 upgrade this year. This will theoretically enable Dapps to perform limitless transactions within each Zero-Knowledge proof they upload to the chain. Enabling this for most Dapps should adequately fulfill Cardano's scalability needs until Leios is ready.

A Path Forward:

Once we have access to the treasury, there are 2 scalability motions that I feel should be raised immediately. 

1. To grant IOG and its partners all the resources they need (within reason) to maximize the development velocity of Ouroboros Leios WITHOUT compromising core principles.

2. To fund development of open source ZK smart contracts built with Plutus V3 for as many Dapp structures as possible, starting with the types that contribute most to period of congestion. This could be done through Intersect and in close collaboration with the teams interested in deploying these contracts.

Secondarily, I think the parameters committee should explore the upper limits of Cardano's block size and frequency while maintaining security and reliability near current levels. This will boost overall throughput and supplement the efficiencies provided by ZK solutions as we wait for big-daddy Leios to ship.

Above all, as we do the above we must not compromise on our principles. We always put security, reliability and decentralization first.

Cardano's community needs to get more involved with liquidity. The enmity we have with the rest of the crypto space is one of our greatest liabilities. In particular, the distain of mainstream crypto media for Cardano hurts our prospects with businesspeople and institutions. Cardano lacks a good onboarding and business dev team.  The community is one of Cardano's greatest strengths, and we should exploit that strength instead of paying for marketing where possible. I introduce the idea of Cardano Callings, volunteer roles working for Cardano and recognized by Intersect for their service, as an option to get a lot of marketing work done without having to be a drain on the treasury. I propose brokering peace with other chains, and letting the merit of our chains speak for themselves. I think we either need to dramatically improve our relations with the mainstream crypto media/instructions, or collaborate with other often ignored chains to start a competing crypto media company that covers us fairly. We should focus on building connections within and bridges to Base, so that it's easy for new Coinbase users that are funneled there to be introduced to Cardano. Helping advertise successful products like Book.io or World Mobile will be more effective in driving adoption than advertising Cardano itself.

Where we are:

Here is my analysis of Cardano's standing with what are likely the 4 primary target audiences of our marketing efforts: Cardano users, Crypto users generally, traditional finance/business and everyday retail users.

Cardano Space:

The Cardano Community is very committed and well versed in Cardano's tech, principles and roadmap. However, despite buying ADA and advocating for it on social media, the majority of the community doesn't seem to be very active on chain, with trading volume and active addresses disappointingly low.

Crypto Space:

When looking at the crypto space as a whole, Cardano doesn't have many friends. With the exception of perhaps Ergo, Polkadot, MultiverseX, Algorand and Tezos, the communities of most other chains and most mainstream crypto institutions are either hostile to or dismiss Cardano. This general disaffection with the rest of the crypto space, especially institutions like Coinbase, DefiLama, and Messari, is Cardano's biggest liability in marketing terms. This is important because most new crypto users will initially come through Bitcoin and Ethereum, and so animosity/misinformation in those communities towards Cardano often prevents our biggest and most ripe audience from even considering us.

For potential crypto developers and builders, the onboarding process is also significantly less polished and straightforward than many chains with dedicated business development teams like Polygon and Solana. Cardano currently has no group dedicated to recruiting, orienting and assisting newcomers, which makes it comparatively harder to begin building on than some competitors.

Thankfully, Cardano does have a very robust social media presence on multiple platforms, which has historically served as our primary means of introducing, educating and onboarding new users.

Traditional Finance/Business 

When businesspeople interested in crypto want to explore options and learn about the ecosystem (if they need to give a presentation to their boss) they're not going to cite Twitter threads, Youtube channels or 3rd tier crypto news sites. They generally prefer polished and well-known news sites like CoinDesk, CoinTelegraph and Messari. Cardano's alienation from the mainstream crypto media presents a huge liability in terms of our rapport with TradFi.

Everyone Else 

Most normal people have never heard of Cardano, but they have heard of crypto and Bitcoin.

A Path Forward:

So, how do we improve from here? This is a question which, to answer thoroughly, requires far more than my limited perspective. All the same, here are some tentative suggestions for each of these target audiences.

Cardano Space:

Within the Cardano Community, we need more more active users to supply liquidity and maintain volume since these are the primary metrics most institutions and CEXs consult when they receive requests to integrate Cardano or CNTs. This is the "chicken and egg" liquidity problem we so often talk about. 

In addition, I believe many members of Cardano's Community who aren't traders but who care deeply about the mission and success of Cardano and aren't sure how to contribute meaningfully. They don't know where they're needed, and they don't feel they have enough time to meaningfully participate. 

I believe a good solution to both of these problems is something I call "Cardano Callings." What I envision here is that when regular people who may not have the expertise needed to sit on the Parameters Committee join Intersect, they have the option to choose from a list of uncompensated, voluntary roles managed by Intersect. These roles (or "callings") would involve performing relatively simple tasks that most ordinary people can do but which are still beneficial to Cardano when many people participate. Here are a couple off the cuff ideas for Callings:

• Day-Trader Degen: Get on Cardano DEFI and make as much profit and noise as possible. 

• Inter-chain ambassador: This role would be to interact with the community of a specific chain, as an open member of the Cardano community. Not to shill Cardano, just to start lines of friendly communication and foster good-feeling. They can also pass cool and innovative ideas they encounter back to the Cardano community. "How to Win Friends and Influence People" recommended as good reading for people in this role.

• Passive Journalist (PJs): Maybe once a month, PJs might do a deep dive into a project, development feature or other Cardano related topic and post it on Twitter. The idea is "many hands make light work." Cardano's community is massive, but most are normal people who can't devote too much time to researching, making content, and building a big enough following for their content to have much of an impact. However, most people can find time to write a thread once a month or so. To unite their efforts, the PJs could make a Twitter account that represents all of them collectively, and which retweets all of the content that they post. This allows other Twitter users to have the convenience of only following one account to get all of this content, and gives individual PJs access to a wider audience without having to build up their own following. 

• Ecosystem guide: Remember how right now there's no entity new builders can approach to get introduced to all of  Cardano's infrastructure, services, open source repos and programming languages? Where does one get started? Let's say you're not in crypto full time, but you're very familiar with Cardano's developer tooling, infrastructure and have lots of connections. You could join a formally recognized group of ecosystem guides that newcomers can approach to help them get oriented. All you'd have to do is stay up to date on the Cardano ecosystem and answer a couple of calls now and then.

• Community Notes Watchdog: Any Twitter/X addicts out there? Contribute to Cardano and help keep all the big players honest by submitting and rating Community Notes.

Now, these are just a few ideas but I hope you get the picture. Self-voluntary roles like this have the dual benefit of getting a lot of important work done without draining the treasury AND providing community members with a sense of belonging and purpose. To serve a cause greater than oneself is one of humanity's most deep-rooted desires. How do you convert crypto tourists into members of the community? Offer them a shovel and invite them to work with you.

In summary, I think that if something like this "Cardano Callings" program is officially recognized by Intersect and executed well it can unleash the potential of the community like we've before seen.

Crypto Space:

Crypto will probably always be somewhat tribalistic, but I think there are important steps we can take as a community to foster healthier, more constructive relationships with the communities of other chains. Remember, antagonism with chains like ETH, Solana and others is one of our biggest liabilities.  We need to develop more connections and good feeling. Someone has to extend the olive branch, and sometimes that means going through a period of unrequited amiability. If we really believe Cardano is better, then we must trust that over time the shortcomings of other chains will speak for themselves and trust that Cardano's strengths speak for it. In the meantime, let's get some Intersect members working on building ties with other communities.

In addition, I think providing advertising funding to projects that build excellent products the use Cardano would both incentivize current builders to focus on real-world use cases and draw builders from other ecosystems. We want every crypto builder to know: "If you build really useful product or service on Cardano, they'll make sure you're seen." Then when they come, we want them to have a clear path to the resources they need. That means a group of "Ecosystem guides," whether paid or volunteer, to help point the way.

Traditional Finance/Business

In order to be attractive to institutions, I believe that it is essential that we either secure goodwill and fair treatment from mainstream crypto institutions, or start up an alternative (perhaps in collaboration with other marginalized chains) whose content and format are geared towards professional and institutional readers.

Cardano also must have projects that address the needs and real world problems of businesses, otherwise there'll be little for the institutional facing media to report on. So, as stated above, we need to promote Cardano projects that have clear business/institutional facing products and services, like Iagon, Palmyra and many others.

Everyone Else

Most regular users won't be persuaded to care about crypto, but they will purchase awesome products and services. So when marketing to retail I see two distinct objectives: 

1. Starting people on their crypto journey out of the fiat rat race, and then into Cardano

2. Getting them to use products that utilize Cardano without them knowing it.

At any given moment, there's only a limited number of people that are ready to try out crypto for the first time. Due to the marketing efforts of companies like Coinbase, competition for the attention and loyalty of these prospective users is quite intense, and most will likely be funneled onto platforms like Base at first. So to access that flow of those new users, I think it will be very important to establish connections with Base and have some intermingling of our communities. In addition, we should leverage the Cardano community's dominance on X to create some funnels of our own. I can envision Intersect members whose "calling" involves things like talking to book communities on X about Book.io, chatting with humanitarian groups about how blockchain-based supply chain tracking can combat child slave labor, and so forth. We have a community that's big enough and committed enough to be a very powerful marketing force on X if we organize ourselves the right way.

While I'm generally against the idea of paying Google or X to advertise the Cardano protocol directly, I think that allotting some funds to market products and services built on Cardano is an excellent idea. So long as the projects demonstrate a reasonable degree of commitment to Cardano, I wouldn't be at all opposed to using some treasury funding to make help make Book.io, World Mobile and Iagon household names. This would have the added benefit of demonstrating to outside builders and VCs that projects built on Cardano can succeed, which will hopefully make it easier for our other builders to get VC funding and attract builders from other ecosystems to Cardano.

TLDR: Form a multi-project coalition to get CNTs and homegrown stablecoins listed on exchanges. Create Cardano Index tokens and have them listed on other chains as well as CEXs. Increase stablecoin liquidity by providing Catalyst grantees the option of receiving their ADA funding in newly minted USDM. I support integration of USDC and USDT because they provide more options to users and enable capital movement into Cardano. I prefer algorithmic stablecoins (Djed) or Cardano native stablecoins (USDM) as the dominant stablecoins. 

Where we are:

At the moment, Cardano has a respectable organic TVL but still far smaller than most VC backed and Ethereum oriented chains. Market depth in Cardano is also rather shallow, making it difficult to make large trades without significantly impacting prices.  At the moment, stablecoin liquidity doesn't meet the needs of the ecosystem, though that will hopefully change as the launch of Mehen Finance's USDM continues. 

There are also other stablecoin projects in the works. On IOG company is working on solving the capital efficiency - security dilemma of algorithmic stablecoins, and IOG also seems to be aggressively lobbying the state of Wyoming to include Cardano support in its upcoming stablecoin launch.

Just as with our marketing, much of our trouble with liquidity stems from the antagonism between Ethereum and Cardano. Whether it arises from the Ethereum community's dislike of Charles Hoskinson or from coordinated sanctioning of Cardano as a perceived threat, ETH based liquidity giants like Circle, Tether and Coinbase both seem to intentionally avoid or disfavor Cardano despite supporting chains with far smaller market caps, volume and mindshare. Most CEXs also have been hesitant to list Cardano native tokens.

To be fair, however, to this day there haven't been many convenient and secure ways of bridging assets from other chains to Cardano, which places another limit on liquidity.

A Path Forward:

Moving forward, I see three avenues to bring more capital into Cardano: CEXs, interchain bridging and stablecoin onboarding. Here are my thoughts on how to maximize each of these.

CEXs

Centralized Exchanges (CEXs) are the primary on-ramp most people use to get into crypto. The most CEXs a token is listed on, the easier it is for capital to flow into it. Charles H. and others have been working on assembling a coalition of Cardano projects to approach CEXs as a group to negotiate favorable listing terms. There are also discussions about creating an index token, rather like the S&P 500, that holds a portfolio of Cardano's largest projects getting that listed on CEXs. This would essentially allow casual crypto traders on CEXs invest in dozens of Cardano native projects by purchasing a single token on a CEX. I support both these ideas.

With Coinbase gaining dominance in the CEX market, I would also heavily push for Cardano integration in their Coinbase wallet. This would give Cardano some access to the flow of new crypto user capital that Coinbase onboards through its marketing.

Bridging

Secure bridges between chains allows capital to flow between them. Once we're confident we can do so securely, we should spare no efforts in ensuring there are bridging mechanisms from as many chains as possible to Cardano. 

USDC's mulitchain transfer protocol is especially important here because, like it or not, USDC is the most trusted and commonly used medium of exchange across blockchains. While I hope USDM becomes the primary stablecoin of Cardano since it can't be frozen, we do need USDC support and deep enough USDC/USDM or USDC/ADA liquidity pairs to allow users from other chains to bring their assets here and exchange them for native ones without losing too much of their purchasing power to slippage. 

Here's an example of what I see as the ideal scenario: A user bridges 1000 USDC to Cardano via Circle's transfer protocol. The user finds that all the CNT trading pairs are with USDM or Djed, so they convert their USDC to USDM with negligible loss of purchasing power. Then they can participate in Cardano defi without the risk of having their assets frozen by Circle, and without giving Circle too much power within the Cardano ecosystem.

The same index token strategy suggested with CEXs can be deployed with other chains by bridging and listing the index token on the DEXs of other chains. As users there purchase the index token and it increases in value, arbitrage traders can mint more of the token on Cardano (driving up demand for the included CNTs), bridge it over, and sell it for a profit. I would push for index tokens to be listed on major Dexes, like Uniswap, as soon as possible to access the liquidity there.

Stablecoin Onboarding

To bring more value into Cardano and increase the availability of stablecoins, I wholeheartedly support Mehen Finance's efforts to bring a retail-facing stablecoin on-ramp to Cardano. 

It provides an additional and cheaper channel for capital to flow from traditional finance into Cardano, decreases our reliance on CEXs for onboarding, and instead of paying transaction fees to CEXs that spend their money building other ecosystems, we can support Cardano builders.

To increase native stablecoin liquidity on Cardano, I would support Catalyst converting grant funds meant for builders into USDM (via minting) before distributing them. This could be an optional feature, but I imagine there would be plenty of projects happy to be paid in a USD stablecoin so long as there are enough CEXs supporting it to provide an easy off ramp to spendable fiat.

TLDR:  Right now transaction fees are nowhere near sufficient to cover the costs of consensus (staking rewards), and even if all blocks were fully loaded we still couldn't generate enough fees to match current staking rewards because of limited throughput. I am mostly concerned with reaching a point where our hardware operators (SPOs) can sustainably earn enough off of transaction fee revenue alone to run a reasonable profit. To do that, we need to better understand the collective operational costs of our SPOs, prioritize scalability solutions that enable higher fee revenue (not eliminate it) and do all we can to keep operational costs low (Mithril and other efficiency tools).

My Philosophy:

Every sustainable blockchain must at some point generate more in transaction fees than it pays hardware operators to run the network. If it fails to do so, it will eventually face a consensus crisis as operators stop supporting the network. All supply capped blockchains, including Cardano, have a bootstrapping period during which transaction fees are subsidized by new token emissions, but as those emissions run out, the cost/benefit outlook of operating those networks will quickly deteriorate if the networks' fee revenues are too low. 

Some chains have "mint reward -burn fee" tokenomics. These systems typically have a constant emission rate rather than diminishing emissions culminating in a capped supply. In this case, low fee revenue punishes all token holders through net inflation of the token supply. Those who participate in consensus (staking and mining), earn a consistent rate of return on their assets but the numerical increase they receive in staking rewards and token inflation cancel each other out in terms of value. This kind of value neutral situation might be acceptable to everyday users who delegate their stake, but it isn't sustainable for operators who have overhead costs to worry about as well.

These 2 systems each have advantages and disadvantages in different circumstances. For example, supply capped systems concentrate the benefits of high fee volume and the pain of low fee volume on the stakers and operators, while mint-burn systems dilute them across all token holders. The main point though is that all systems ultimately require adequate levels of fee revenue to sustain the operators.

Where we are:

At the moment essentially all blockchains operate on massive fee to reward deficits, with the exception of Ethereum and occasionally Bitcoin. For example, the Cardano network uses the supply cap model and currently brings in is LESS THAN 1% of the rewards it distributes as staking rewards.

Scalability plays an essential role here. The amount of fees each block can collect is bounded by the number of transactions it can house. So during times of congestion, low throughput actually limits fees. To demonstrate:

Currently, about 12,000,000 ADA are distributed in staking rewards each week.

Fully loaded blocks right now produce about 15-20 ADA in fee revenue. So Cardano operating at full capacity constantly for a week (about 30,240 blocks) would only produce around 500,000 ADA in revenue. Even at full capacity, Cardano is currently only capable of producing 4% of what it currently emits in staking rewards.

We also have to take into account that about 20% of each block fee is diverted to the Cardano treasury, which further reduces the amount of ADA going to SPOs.

Thankfully, there are some positives to note as well. Cardano's incrementally lowering emissions, which decrease slightly each epoch, is less violent on stake pool operators than the sudden 50% decrease in revenue that Bitcoin miners have to deal with. The slow decrease gives operators more time to adjust their fees, which they can raise  at the expense of their delegators  to cover their costs as emissions outflows or ADA's price fluctuates.

A Path Forward:

1) Goal: Fee revenue 20x greater than collective SPO operational costs by 2030.

Goals are essential to progress, and as this is a time sensitive issue, I would suggest the year 2030 as a reasonable deadline for getting Cardano's fee revenue to at least 20x greater than the combined operational costs + reasonable profit requirements of all active stake pool operators. (We can probably figure out what this base operational cost is through collaboration at Intersect)

Why 20x greater, and why fix the goal to operational costs instead of simply having fees exceed ADA emissions?

The ultimate goal is that SPOs should be able to run and profit from their stake pools relying only on fee revenue from Cardano, but we have to take some things into consideration. Usually, only a small portion of each block reward goes to the SPO; the lion's share goes to the delegators. I think most people would see a 5% block fee for SPOs as reasonable, and so with that assumption to guarantee SPOs a certain amount of income we have to produce about 20x more in fee revenue. 

The reason I don't suggest "fee revenue to exceed emissions by 2030" is that emissions are themselves also falling. In 10 years, it may be very easy for fee revenue to exceed emissions, but that's no guarantee it'll produce enough to support SPO operations. We need to understand what our REAL base costs are to set meaningful goals for fee revenue.

As simple way of measuring progress, I suggest a ratio metric called FrC, where a metric greater than 1 is economically healthy and less than 1 is unhealthy.

FrC: (F x r)/C

F = Fee revenue total 

r = Average operator commission rate (which here I assume to be 5%)

C = Collective costs of all operators

2) Prioritize scalability paths that make the above possible without causing unnecessary bloat in the ledger state.

As explained above, Cardano is currently incapable of producing enough fees to cover its costs, so we need to scale in a way that enables higher fee revenue.

Typically, discussions on scalability focus on maximizing the amount of work that can be done in the smallest amount of time and for the smallest fee. This is important to providing the ultimate user experience.  Many scaling solutions, like ZK rollups and Hydra, do this very well and are also excellent for minimizing expansion of the ledger. (Ledger size is very relevant because massive ledgers necessitate higher hardware/storage costs for SPOs, which increase the base fixed costs we're trying to surpass).

 However, while these scalability solutions are essential long term, they present a major problem for fee revenue in the short term because they're too efficient. Without an overwhelming increase in on-chain volume, these solutions will tank fee revenue. Assuming as a community we go the ZK path, the only way to utilize this expanded capacity for work to generate more fee revenue will be to drastically increase the base transaction fee parameters. If suddenly we can fit 1,000x more transactions in a 88kb block, the only way to maintain the same fee revenue per transaction is to charge more 1000x more in fees per kb. This is very data efficient, but would severely punish any transactions that aren't ZK compatible.

Throughput enhancing solutions like Input Endorsers, on the other hand, are more straightforward in the way they increase fee potential. Right now it's about 15-20 ADA in fees for an 88kb block, and Cardano processes 1 block/20 seconds. If Input Endorsers allow Cardano to process 1000x more blocks every 20 seconds, then potential max fee revenue increases 1000x. That's simple, but it also massively accelerates ledger growth, which will necessitate higher costs for SPOs and causes hosts of other problems long term.

I support both throughput (IEs) and rollup solutions (ZK and Hydra). However, if "rollups" become the predominant scaling solution, we will need to carefully manage the fee / kb parameters to ensure sufficient fee revenue is maintained.

3) Increase fee revenue by driving increased transaction volume on both the main chain and partner chains.

See the business development and marketing section.

4) Decrease SPO operational costs

As demonstrated by my made up FrC metric, having a low cost of SPO operation (C) is a huge advantage in economic sustainability, which our friends on chains like Solana sadly don't enjoy. Tools like Mithril and other measures to decrease SPO operational costs will be just as effective at getting Cardano to a FrC > 1 as increasing fee revenue will be. We should also make maintaining and updating Cardano nodes as easy as possible.

Doomsday Scenario

If Cardano isn't bringing in enough fees, emissions negligible and SPOs are starting to shut down because it's too expensive and all other avenues are lost, I would support transitioning to a Mint - Burn tokenomics model to guarantee a steady stream of income to those who run the physical infrastructure of our network.

First and foremost, we don't have as much money in the treasury as we FEEL like we do. Companies like Disney alone spent over 7 billion dollars in advertising just in one year. That number represents multiples of our entire treasury's current value, without even accounting for liquidity. As a result, we need to be judicious in how we deploy these funds, like Norway's sovereign wealth fund.

When it comes to the budget, I think there are two equal and opposite errors we can fall into:

1. Quickly spending most of the treasury for short term gains and to chase vanity metrics.

2. Being too conservative with the treasury, such that Cardano is outcompeted by other chains because we weren't willing to invest in projects and protocol improvements that increased it's value.

I believe the right budgeting policy is somewhere in between these. Obviously, we'll need to spend a lot of the treasury to keep up with the competitive market, and especially to fund the expedited development of scalability solution like Leios. At the same time, we want to avoid trivial expenses and embezzlement of any kind. Deciding the rate at which the treasury can be sustainably spent is an intriguing one and I look forward to seeing that the budget committee come up with.

In general, I also support:

• Trying volunteerism to try to accomplish a task before paying for anything. Give the community the opportunity to step up.

• Exploring ways to profitably deploy the treasury. Perhaps a Voltaire controlled multi-sig wallet that can be used to house assets that diversify the treasury? Having some profit generating assets or ventures owned by the treasury may be another way of maintaining the treasury.

What is Chain Security?

I define chain security as the safety and liveness of on-chain assets, and the preservation of permissionlessness and decentralization of power in Cardano's governance, consensus, infrastructure and liquidity.

Where we are:

At the moment, I don't see any immediate threats to chain security. Cardano has already made many sacrifices in development velocity to ensure the high levels of consensus and smart contract security we enjoy today. 

Over the mid to long term, however, I see the following threats and challenges (listed in my order of priority):

Legacy Plutocratic Governance Takeover: Passive Plutocratic Attacks

As a proof of stake system, Cardano's consensus and governance are vulnerable to hostile takeover (buying shares/tokens until the attackers have over 51%) just like a company is. The larger the market cap of Cardano becomes, the more difficult this will be. Of course, if an attacker were to spend billions of dollars purchasing a majority stake in ADA, all current holders would be handsomely rewarded, and the attacker would have a massive financial investment at stake, which would discourage them from using their influence to harm Cardano too much.

However, if Tradfi institutions were to make an attempt at conquering Cardano, they would probably not use their own money. They would use the same approach that they use to control most corporations today: Act as custodians of stocks purchased with other people's money (IRAs, 401Ks, pensions, etc...) and in the terms and conditions require  clients to permit the asset managers to wield the voting power of their stocks in corporate governance decisions. This strategy has allowed a small group of unelected people to leverage the wealth of entire nations to dominate corporate decision making while keeping the true owners of the stocks they wield mostly oblivious to it.

This is already a risk to Cardano because of the assets held on crypto exchanges, but thankfully out of respect for the ethos of crypto they don't wield that power (at least not yet). If and when ADA starts being listed with its own ETF or as part of publicly traded crypto indexes, the same asset managers who control most of the world's corporations will suddenly start to control large amounts of ADA, which will pose massive challenges to both the consensus security and governance decentralization of Cardano. 

The reason I list this first, as the greatest threat, is that unless there is a worldwide cultural shift in the way normal people interact with and store their assets I believe this is something that WILL HAPPEN. Not a matter of if, but of when. If ADA becomes widely recognized as valuable for its utility and transaction fee rights, hedge funds and asset managers will come for it, and eventually much of it will be custodied by institutions.

Liquidity Capture: Stablecoins

Fiat-backed stablecoins are a huge boon to on-chain financial activity, but they come with risks. Unlike with purely crypto assets, fiat stablecoins have a real world component that cannot be doubled when chains fork. As a result, if a stablecoin is pervasive throughout a blockchain's defi ecosystem and the chain forks, the fork that the issuer decides to recognize as the legitimate blockchain keeps all rights to redeem its stablecoins for real fiat, and the other chain's stablecoins are worthless. This grants the stablecoin's issuer a massive amount of power over an ecosystem through what is essentially potential economic blackmail. Cardano currently has neither of the natively supported mainstream stablecoins, USDC and USDT, but there is a lot of enthusiasm to do so. There is also USDM by Mehen Finance, which is far more aligned with Cardano's values than Circle or Tether.

Quantum Computing

Disruptive technologies seem to have a habit of advancing slowly, unthreateningly and then suddenly reaching viability. If quantum computing were suddenly viable, Cardano and most other blockchains would be in serious trouble since quantum computers can break our encryption algorithms. This would put essentially all funds on the blockchain at risk of theft or tampering. However, just for the sake of perspective, it's worth mentioning that quantum computing hacking would throw the entire world into chaos, so we might have bigger problems than wallet drains.

Reduced Staking Participation

Cardano's longest chain consensus ( aka. Nakamoto Consensus) ensures the security and integrity of the Cardano network so long as at least 51% of staked ADA is staked to honest validators (SPOs). While the total supply of ADA is fixed at 45 billion, the amount of ADA staked at any given time is not. Cardano's native liquid staking makes it very easy to stake without any negative consequences (no lock up, unbonding period or slashing risk). However, as the Defi ecosystem starts to look more attractive than staking, the % of staked ADA in circulation can drop as users move their ADA from wallets to smart contracts. You may see the implications on consensus security... If only 50% of ADA in circulation is staked instead of 100% (theoretically), then an attacker only needs to control about 26% of the ADA in circulation to capture the network instead of 51%. 

Scammers

While Cardano's core infrastructure and coding languages are "military grade" in their security and reliability, humans are fallible and newcomers are especially vulnerable to scammers. In Cardano, the weakest link in the security chain is typically the user. Anyone can be careless and sign a malicious transaction if they're not paying attention. This has happened a lot over the last few years through a variety of scams, including dropping "reward tokens" into users wallets and setting up malicious dApp frontends mimicking well respected projects.

Client Diversity and Version Currency

As well designed and rigorously tested as IOG's Haskell node is, there is a VERY REMOTE possibility that a critical bug could cause all the nodes in the network to fail, which could be either simply embarrassing and inconvenient or catastrophic depending on the nature of the bug. The natural solution to this is to produce more Cardano node clients created by separate teams in different programming languages. This moderately increases the risk that node errors will happen, but dramatically decreases the risk of the entire network going down due to a single bug.

Another related but opposing challenge is that even with just one client, a huge portion of Cardano SPOs aren't running the latest version of the Cardano node. This causes inefficiency in the network, and slows down the rollout of new features/benefits to the chain as a whole. Cardano stakers should hold them accountable by transferring stake away from poorly performing SPOs, but for the most part they're not.

A Path Forward:

Some of these threats have fairly straighforward solutions, but others are complicated and nuanced problems. Here are my thoughts on how we can deal with them:

Legacy Plutocratic Governance Takeover: Passive Plutocratic attacks

Considering the passive plutocratic attack threat, we have to remember this spans two dimensions of Cardano: consensus and governance; and each has to be considered separately. Remember, consensus is the constant process that Cardano nodes use to verify and process transactions on-chain, whereas governance is the process the Cardano ecosystem as a whole uses to decide how the chain should be developed and how to deploy the funds in the treasury. Compromising the integrity of either would be disastrous for Cardano.

Solutions to Governance Attacks:

Both of my ideas are based on what I call the True Stakeholder Principle: that governance power should be wielded or delegated DIRECTLY by the true stakeholder (the person who ultimately owns the ADA)

• Less aggressive solution: Simply write into the constitution that exchange or asset manager controlled ADA can't be used to push a proposal over the acceptance threshold. The execution of this would be up to subjective human interpretation.

• More aggressive solution: Design Sanchonet (Cardano's governance protocol) to automatically exclude the yea or nay votes of ADA (delegated or not) that originates from wallets that are known to belong to custodial institutions. The identification of these wallets could be done by treasury funded oracle feeds.

I realize that the more aggressive solution sets the precedent of censorship of votes, which I one that many in Cardano, including myself, find detestable. However, from a utilitarian standpoint I don't think it makes a difference because if regulated institutions like Blackrock or JP Morgan ever gained a controlling stake in ADA, they almost certainly wouldn't continue the precedent of respecting the right to vote even if we held it sacred. This may not be the time or place for crypto Kantianism. 

Solutions to Consensus Attacks:

Consensus is a rather sacred topic. One does not simply interfere with staking and consensus. It is the ultimate root of trust in the blockchain. Blocking certain wallets from staking wouldn't only be unacceptable it would likely be impossible. The only way I can see to partially safeguard consensus from a passive plutocratic attack would be to transition Cardano to multi-resource consensus, like a combination of proof of stake, proof of work, proof of storage etc... Given enough time, dedication, and resources, an attacker could possibly assemble enough of these diverse consensus resources to control 51% of block production, but at least it wouldn't happen accidentally because too many people decided to invest in ADA ETFs.

A Cultural Solution (THE BEST SOLUTION)

Of course, the best outcome would be if centralized institutions are never placed in that position of power at all. If we can facilitate a world-wide paradigm shift, where custodianship of assets becomes a thing of the past then this problem ceases to exist. That would of course be a colossal undertaking far beyond the means of Cardano to facilitate but we should at least encourage it, and if the winds of fate blow the world that direction we may not have to adopt the more drastic protective measures I prescribe above.

Liquidity Capture: Stablecoins

Here we have a dilemma. Cardano desperately needs liquidity avenues, and stablecoins like USDC are one of the best solutions to that problem. But it also opens the door to economic capture or at least manipulation, which violates our commitment to decentralization.

Assuming we can't manage to develop the liquidity we need through Cardano native stablecoins like USDM and DjedV2, and we must integrate USDC, the only I can see to "eat the cake and have it too" would be to somehow park and exchange USDC for a native Cardano stablecoin once it arrives on Cardano, and primarily use native stablecoins in Defi.

For example: 1000 USDC are bridged to Cardano via Circle's transfer protocol. USDC on Cardano has been designed so that it can be frozen and clawed back, so users exchange USDC for USDM, which they can use freely. All the trading pairs are also denominated in either DjedV2 or USDM, so USDC itself is less useful on Cardano.

This would have 2 benefits: preserve the permissionlessness of CNTs for users, and limit the market penetration of USDC within Cardano while still allowing for asset transfers from other chains.

Here are two additional important questions to consider and my thoughts:

1) How would we park/exchange USDC for native stables in a way that really transfers value to Cardano without infuriating Circle so much that they stop supporting Cardano?

Simply bridging USDC to Cardano and trying to exchange it on a DEX for USDM won't work unless there's already a lot of USDM in the system. To really transfer liquidity to a USDM oriented Defi ecosystem, someone (probably Mehen themselves) would need to facilitate the redemption of USDC for USD and transfer that USD to Mehen's own accounts where it can act as backing for more USDM. Mehen might be willing to do this, but if it happens too much Circle might cut off Cardano from USDC again to stop the bleeding. Another solution could be create a Cardano based derivative of USDC that doesn't have the freezing capabilities and trade with that in place of USDC.

2) While we love USDM and Mehen is very Cardano aligned, is it worth making any fiat-backed stablecoin the backbone of Cardano's ecosystem if it will ultimately still be subject to Tradfi regulations that are hostile to crypto?

In a perfect world, I would prefer a purely algorithmic stablecoin if it were sustainable and scalable enough, and it might still possibly happen. But in the immediate future I doubt it'll happen and so I'm willing to throw my full support behind USDM.

Quantum Computing: Time to discuss quantum proof VRFs

As soon as all Basho agenda (scalability) items on the roadmap are delivered, I think that funding research into making Cardano quantum proof and getting that workstream going should be a high priority.

Reduced Staking Participation

Here are 3 ways I see to reach and maintain a high staking participation rate:

1) Encourage dApps to incorporate liquid staking into their designs so that no matter where the ADA is in the protocol, it is staked somewhere. Preferably, the staking rewards and SPO assignment rights of the defi-locked ADA should remain with the user (like with Indigo), but if that's not possible for a project's specific dApp design, then I'd still encourage dApp developers to set up their smart contract wallets so that any ADA in them is at least staked somewhere. If this requires difficult coding, I would support funding to produce open source libraries that enable this to make it easier.

2) Make sure education on staking is included in the onboarding process of every Cardano wallet, and have pop up reminders to do so occasionally if they continue to neglect it.

3) Introduce new base layer staking mechanics that allow users to select a backup stake pool that their consensus power will be assigned to if their first choice SPO stops producing blocks. There is a depressingly high amount of ADA still staked to pools that have long ago retired and is doing nothing to contribute to Cardano's security.

Scammers

As with staking participation, I believe user education is probably the most important step in protecting newcomers from scammers. I also strongly feel every wallet should have software that flags and requires non-routine steps to sign dangerous transactions. I would support small funding incentives to promote integration of scam/drain protection systems into all wallets. Having an open but authenticated dApp store, like the one on Lace wallet's roadmap will also act as an important guard rail to keep naive and unsuspecting new users away from sketchy or lazily designed dApps.

Client Diversity and Version Currency

I support the efforts of Pragma and Harmonic labs in their development of new Cardano clients. Despite the slowing effect it will have on the chain's progression I see it as a worthwhile tradeoff for the benefits it provides to security and decentralization.

To help promote use of the most current node versions, there are 2 measures I would want to investigate and pursue:

1) Improving the SPO update and maintenance experience. I've heard from SPOs before that updating Cardano nodes to the latest version often takes a lot of work. To simplify that process, I would support the creation of tooling and perhaps even frontend software that streamlines the node update process. To update phone apps, all you have to do press "update" and it does everything for you. I'm sure many SPOs would appreciate the same.

2) Enabling direction of our ADA's stake pool delegation assignments to another user, just like we do with dReps for our ADA's voting rights. We need more ways to encourage our SPOs to run the latest version of the Cardano node because currently few delegators care enough to actually move their stake. They need to be held better accountable for their performance. This way, if an SPO stops updating their node, only a couple of "staking dReps" have to notice and reassign stake for the SPO to feel some heat instead of hundreds of people having to notice and reassign stake.

My Philosophy

In general, I believe that regulation causes more problems than it solves and, if unchecked, ultimately centralizes power within bureaucratic regulatory bodies. However, while I don't think Cardano should ever prosecute or sanction builders or participants in the ecosystem, I feel it is prudent to at least encourage certain universally advantageous behaviors, especially among builders.

Where we are:

There are several adjustments that the Cardano Dapp community needs to make in order for Cardano as a whole to perform optimally. For example, Cardano's scaling approach relies substantially on builders choosing to take advantage of tools like Plutus V2 and V3 to make their Dapps more data efficient and decentralized. As a result, the Cardano community collectively has a valid interest in the way Dapps are built. Keeping our Dapps current with the latest forms of Plutus is just one of at least 4 ecosystem management initiatives/pushes Cardano is going through at present:

1) Encouraging the use of Plutus V2 and V3 to make efficient use of block space. Plutus V2 smart contracts are about 10x more data efficient than the V1 smart contracts, and at times of chain congestion the primary culprit is often Plutus V1 Dapps.

2) Encouraging eUTXO native Dapp designs that exploit Cardano's advantages, rather than copying EVM models. Cardano's accounting model, eUTXO, has many intrinsic advantages over the Ethereum world's account based system. However, the first Dapps on Cardano borrowed heavily from known Ethereum designs, at least in their initial implementations. These EVM-adaptations not only resulted in inconvenient and expensive workarounds (like batchers) they also didn't exploit the incredible efficiencies and potential of eUTXO. As of this moment, most of the liquidity in Cardano sits in these unoptimized EVM-style smart contracts, which means that traders have both pay extra fees to batchers and miss out on the possibilities that only eUTXO enables. We love our Dapp pioneers, and we wouldn't be where we are without them. But for the good of Cardano as a whole we need to encourage eUTXO native designs.

3) Encouraging the true stakeholder principle in Dapp governance and especially management of ADA locked within Dapps. There has been some controversy surrounding DEXs, lending platforms and other ADA-holding Dapps that purportedly leverage their user base's pooled ADA it to downvote the catalyst proposals of competitors. If it exists, this kind of behavior may inhibit Cardano's ability to evolve into its best form, with liquidity heavy incumbents suppressing competitors that offer better features and benefits than themselves. Taken to theoretical extremes, it could also endanger the decentralization of both Cardano's consensus and governance.

4) Determining how to choose which Cardano project tokens will be included in the index tokens that we'll use to import liquidity. Lately, here seems to be a push towards Cardano Native Asset (CNA) Index tokens as a solution to importing liquidity from CEXs and other chains to Cardano. I think this is a good idea. Many people who would not have taken the time to invest in individual stocks have done so thanks to tools like the S&P 500 index (a single fund that represents a portfolio of the 500 largest companies in the US). It creates simplicity and diversity for investors, which attracts capital. However, once a CNA index starts to gain popularity the question of how and who gets to make project inclusion choices will become very important since all Cardano projects will want to get in and take a slice of the liquidity it provides.

5) Dealing with project redundancy There are certain Dapp niches within Cardano that are oversaturated with good projects and teams (DEXs and Wallets), while other areas suffer from a lack of viable alternatives (JPG store's NFT market monopoly). While it isn't the role of Cardano's Voltaire government to micromanage the ecosystem, it might benefit at some point be prudent to facilitate discussions around mergers or kickstart innovative competition in stagnant niches.

A Path Forward:

Most of the trends I describe above revolve around encouraging builders to move in directions that are most sustainable and beneficial to Cardano as a whole. So how can we as Dreps and voting ADA holders facilitate this? Ultimately I hope most of this work won't manifest as proposals on Sanchonet but rather as discussions with these projects within Intersect. I certainly would never support sanctioning or otherwise persecuting anyone building on Cardano. If builders need encouragement to transition to the latest programming languages, eUTXO designs or true-stakeholder-friendly governance infrastructure, then I think listing these as prerequisites to any other form of Voltaire funding is the best way to motivate. While it might be tempting to just say the treasury will pay protocols to update, I think it would be unsustainable and anti-competitive to pay for incumbents development fees. 

As for the matter of CNA indexes, I think that Xerberus.io's risk rating baskets may be a good solution since they continually evaluate projects based on objective measurable metrics.

"The philosophy of the school room in one generation will be the philosophy of government in the next." - Abraham Lincoln

My Philosophy:

To anyone who doesn't think philosophy and culture are important to crypto, let me remind you. The ideas of two once seemingly insignificant men, Jesus Christ and Mohammed, have gone on to conquer most of the known world. Movements without strong cultural and philosophical foundations in the people never escape the cradle; and those that catch fire in peoples' hearts have gone on to burn down thrones and topple tyrants.

The original libertarian crypto movement has a very compelling philosophy and sound moral backing. But over the last decade it has begun to be consumed by the TradFi paradigms it was meant to replace. Crypto has the chance to free us from a CBDC and top-down dominated future, but if we don't keep our feet firmly planted in the original crypto ethos (including caring about more than "number go up") then I'm afraid the crypto revolution will only be a passing detour on the road to techno-tyrannical serfdom.

One of the biggest challenges over the next 5-6 years will probably be seeding and maintaining that original crypto ethos in the next generations of adopters who, like many of us, at first only came for the money.

Without a plan to educate these newcomers, and the votes they'll bring with them, Cardano may very easily be dragged away from the philosophical foundation that has served as the root of its durability.

Where we are:

At the moment, the Cardano community is small enough that has been able to maintain a pretty strong commitment to crypto ethos even as the crypto industry as a whole has drifted away from some parts of it. This is in no small part thanks to the efforts of Charles Hoskinson whom I believe is a very good principled man, no matter what tall tales people accuse him of telling in the past. He set Cardano on its current trajectory and over the years his AMAs and Youtube videos have served as a reliable anchor for the community, consistently reminding us WHY we're here.

Charles is well spoken, charismatic and well grounded in crypto's ethos, but he's just one man. He won't be able to serve as Cardano's moral compass forever. I'm sure he'll be in Cardano for a long time but there needs to be new generation of "Cardano priests" to preach to the choir and help educate newcomers.

Cardano has a sizeable group of influencers and OGs with large followings, but on the whole they talk way more about prices, tech, projects and the competitive landscape than they do about crypto values.

A Path Forward:

I think the first step is simply for the community to recognize education as an essential component of Cardano's operations and future. We care about reaching economic sustainability. We care about importing liquidity. We should care and think about education in the same way.

To accomplish this, I would support the creation of a Cardano Ethos and Education committee within Intersect; a place to set goals and makes plans to cultivate the community's commitment to Cardano's core ideals, and present motions to the Voltaire government for approval, if needed.

Here are a few other action item suggestions:

• As part of the Constitution, or around the same time as the constitution, we should release a document or statement outlining what Cardano's core principles are. This will help remove ambiguity around the ethos, and give the Ethos and Education committee something to focus on. 

• Produce a short, concise and compelling video about Cardano's ethos that can be easily used in the onboarding experience for wallets and other frontends like atrium.

• Organize some of Intersect's members (perhaps as an Intersect calling) to produce Cardano Ethos focused media content and share it on social media.

In some of the sections above I discuss goals and objectives for the Government within the Cardano ecosystem. The most obvious way to achieve those goals might seem to be passing lots of funding proposals to fund initiatives. However, I really want to be careful with treasury funds, and we all know what a mess regulatory regimes become. Let's not have that on Cardano. Hopefully, we can achieve a lot of our goals just through discussion at Intersect, not through official action.

So far as the composition of the Drep, SPO and Constitutional Committee go, I think it would be wise as a general rule for most participants to only be in one of the 3 bodies to maximize decentralization. There are many SPOs who I think would make great dReps, but if all ADA users just end up delegating their votes to the same people they stake with, then the checks and balances between SPOs and dReps become useless since both government bodies would consist of the same people. For this reason, I generally think Cardano would benefit more if most dReps aren't already SPOs, but I also don't disapprove of it.

Who Should Represent Us?

Cardano is slowly turning into a Network-State, and like any other large well-organized group of people we will need a consistent and respectable way of expressing our wills and stances to other important groups, such as governments and other institutions.

For example, if an institution like Messari or Electric Capital accidentally published some incorrect information about Cardano, whose job would it be to engage with them? What if a national government wanted to make a deal with Cardano. Who do they talk to within Intersect?

Of the three founding entities, The Cardano Foundation (CF) probably has the most connections and experience dealing with government entities. They've been working with European governments for years now, and due to that experience I feel they're a good choice. I would support Cardano's Voltaire government officially commissioning CF, as a member of Intersect, to the task of representing Cardano to governments and institutions.

While one might argue, "The Cardano foundation already does this," passing an official motion in Voltaire assigning them to represent Cardano would demonstrate that they do it by common consent and further substantiate our claims to decentralization.

If a time comes when the CF is no longer the best fit for the role, then I would suggest passing another motion thanking the CF for their service and proposing another individual or entity to take their place.

What Should Cardano's "Foreign Policy" Be?

Strict Geopolitical Neutrality

Once Cardano has a government and institutions, it will be possible for governments to approach Cardano and ask for favors. For example, it seems this has already happened with Ethereum wallets and validators, which currently blacklist certain regions of the world. That means effectively that Ethereum has taken a Geopolitical stance on the side of the West.

While as a citizen of the US and Denmark I'm very sympathetic to the goals of these sanctions, it is not in line with Cardano's core principles to act as the auxiliary of a coalition of nation states. We would not be able to comply with their requests without giving up permissionlessness and decentralization; so we shouldn't.

Be As Helpful As Possible Without Compromising Core Principles

In situations like the one described above, where accusations of facilitating terrorism, drug trade and sex trafficking will probably arise, I think the best way to be both good humans and guardians of decentralized commerce will be to do all we can as an ecosystem and create tools that help law enforcement apprehend bad actors without compromising on non-negotiables like permissionlessness. I'm not sure how, but I think this will be an important topic to discuss eventually.

Goodwill Towards All

This hardly needs saying, but I support a "friendly relationships with all, entangling alliances with none" policy when it comes to blockchain wide relationships with national governments and other powerful institutions. We want the world to have positive view of Cardano.

There will no doubt be some proposals involving parameters and technical changes whose ramifications go beyond my scope of understanding. 

For these kinds of proposals, I will wait until near the end of the voting period to observe the debates on the issue before voting.

My first consideration will likely be the recommendation of the relevant Intersect committee, if applicable.

I will also seriously consider the opinions trusted community experts and builders like Charles Hoskinson, Pi Lanningham, Rick McCracken, Jarek Hirniak , Patrick Tobler, Sebastien Guillemot, @phil_uplc, @zhekree, @_KtorZ_ et al.

When in doubt, I will err on the side of security, stability and whichever option most advances the other goals I describe above.