Block//45 - IO Labs Interview with Brandon Wolf

IO served its mission of what it set set out to do. I think it's an inevitability that we become more decentralized. We are working with a number of different partners. They just wouldn't be under the input output umbrella and that way they become much more autonomous in their own way now decentralized to the ecosystem. We're doing that for the consensus piece of the node. We're doing that for the ledger portion of the node. We're going to be doing that for Plutus, Laos, Paris, the or uh consensus mechanism, Hydra. All of these are going to be now decentralized. This is something that we have been building for all along. Welcome ladies and gentlemen and welcome to this edition of Block 45. I am your host Crypto Crow with my co-host Crypto Wendyo and IO Labs Brandon Wolf. Tell us a little bit more about your role, your position at IO. Like who are you? What do you do? And why has nobody seen you before? >> I I hide mostly. I'm not I'm not a public figure and I like to work behind the scenes. I think I do my best work uh you know in in the quiet corners of of the world. I started with input output about two and a half years ago. I came in as the GM of Lace. So I was the general manager of the Lace wallet and I ran that for about a year and about a year a little maybe over a year and then got an opportunity to run the Cardano business unit which is a much bigger endeavor because this is effectively everything that uh that we had done in terms of our engineering side. So a lot of our R&D work the D's part is done by the uh Cardano business unit. Now, we're evolving into what's called the IO labs. We're moving into more of an innovation engine uh component of the ecosystem, and that's really where I'm I'm going to be leading hopefully uh in the future on that part. >> Is is IO labs a result of a lot of the DREP funding and some of the restrictions and kind of chopping things down a little bit or is this just a new extension, a new arm that serves a very specific purpose to kind of keep things a little tighter? I think we looked at it kind of like a DARPA or Bell Labs or Sequoia, you know, this kind of component, this this again this this think tank, this um building out smaller components and testing them out and doing a lot more on the research side that to the to the engineering pipeline. That was something that we were trying to build out a little bit more predictively. Right now we are doing it in a uh ecosystem supported way. I think we, you know, we talk about decentralization within Cardono and we got a large number of people pushing back on the amount that we're taking from the NCL every year. Well, that that's something inevitability. If you go back to reading why Cardano from 2017, decentralization plays a big role of that. So, this is something that has led to that point. So, we're actually now taking a step uh in a different direction. not taking a step back but we are taking the teams that are building out Plutus Laos Paris the Oraos uh consensus mechanism uh pl uh hydra all of these are going to be now decentralized so there's the same teams but they're not going to be necessarily working within IO we're going to be supporting more of a collaborative uh uh cohort of companies that are going to be doing this work >> who initially created Blog Frost because I don't know and I it it popped up a while back and I kind of ignored it and then once I started getting into agentic workflows and building applications. It's like one of the first things that like claude or any of the main agents or models suggest, hey, you've got an open API you can use to do this and that on chain. Who created that and like how do we get more of it? Because there's it's it's been extremely helpful to me in trying to build anything using AI on Cardono. >> Yeah, Block Frost is I think um one of the we used it in Lace quite extensively. you know, when you want to interact with the with the back end, it's either you can build all of this yourself or leverage something that's already been built. So, Block Frost was actually built by a gentleman named Merrick and Merrick is the general manager CEO of BlockFrost, which is a company, a venture within input output. >> I never knew that. Yeah, >> I never knew that. It's been extremely helpful. We need more. >> He's a solid engineer and he's got a very small team. They're very efficient. They're very pragmatic. They work diligently. I mean, we love working with them. Are there any other like I don't know what you can talk about but are there any more plans in building new elements that will allow more agentic workflows to operate either on Cardano or Midnight or anything that's going on out there? Well, >> I think you're seeing it with Midnight City. Midnight City is kind of taking that um it's more it's expressed more as a simulation as a as a game type of approach to I think attract more people so they can see it. And it's just getting started. A lot of people are looking at it and not quite getting what it is and what it does and where it's going. But >> the more you hear uh Charles and the team talk about like where where it's going with an agentic civilization and all the possibilities that can be unlocked as a result of that and the need for privacy to be said on the back end with midnight. You it becomes a little more apparent like why this is going to be. So I think that's probably the best expression of that uh in in the environment. Now we do a lot of agentic workflows with with within input output from our engineering side. So we're doing a lot of I don't like to call it vibe coding, but we do a lot of agentic coding. We have a lot of teams that are doing much more on the AI side. It's more of an accelerant and also as a quality control gate. We don't we always keep humans in the loop. It's not infallible. It's how to use it. It's it's not that the fact that you if you are or aren't using it, it's how to use it correctly. That's become Yeah. It's become like the core central tenant of how we do our engineering. >> But I also feel like it's moving so fast too. And like I feel like with crypto companies, it's like crypto is so immersed with AI, but it's all like because a lot of the AI that we have now, it's all super centralized and crypto is trying to keep a decentralized aspect to it to where people get to have access to open source and get privacy and everything in between. So, I feel like it's going to take a little bit more time for us, not necessarily for us to catch up because everybody in crypto is super smart, especially our developers, but at the same time, make it to where we still have our liberty and we can still have our privacy and the aspect of decentralization. >> Yeah, totally agree. Yeah. I mean, I think AI is it's transformational in many ways. I I go I go back to the web one days. I remember when the internet first came around. I remember then why >> I was a geocoder. Okay. >> If that's if you can even call it that. >> I I go back before that. And it it's it was back in before that. Yeah. The HTML one days like having to learn the off the W3C website. There was no like tutorials. There's no videos. None of that. No geio cities. No AOL. None of that existed. >> Bulletin board days. >> I didn't realize you were that old. >> I know. Me either. >> You've been around a while. >> That's why he's got a beard. >> But yeah, but his beard's not even as gray as mine. So, you know, I guess the benefit of me getting into crypto in 2017. I didn't have gray hair. >> Aed you aged me. Well, [laughter] >> but this is feeling like that kind of like that emergent um you know kind of transformational technological transformation from when the web first took off and it became commercialized. You started seeing dotcoms everywhere like what is this and then web two it became more you know interactive and you saw social media start to come out. This feels a lot like that next kind of phase in in it and uh >> swallow those phases that already has begun. It's intimidating but exciting at the same time because now you know you mentioned vibe coding and how it's almost becoming kind of a a negative term and it is in a sense because now it's it's really excelled at at >> I don't even want to see say vibe engineering but like AI engineering because there's a big difference from like where I started where I'm like build me a calculator right and that's vibe coding but engineering I've I've been diving a lot deeper into that because it's really how you structure the prompts I mean now my prompts are 12 pages long, you know, just to build something and then I'm more fine-tuning things. So, and and a lot I I'm really excited about the idea of seeing more tool sets that empower guys like me who actively want to build and are building things on the Cardano uh in the Cardano ecosystem, which is why I touched on uh BlockFrost because it it has been enormously helpful. And I didn't really understand I mean, I've been in Cardano since 2017. I didn't know anything about it until I actually started building >> Yeah. So yeah, >> I actually like but I like how easy it is to to vibe code and do stuff because again I don't come from a tech background like I had to teach a lot of the stuff in crypto myself and it was a little bit complex and for a long time it was like oh if you're if you're not a developer you shouldn't be in crypto because you don't understand how it works but I feel like with AI and being able to vibe code people that are more verbal like myself it's easier for us to actually build something and it makes more sense and then you can kind of dive into the crypto aspect of it in whatever type of niche you want and be able to build something that makes sense for you or like a trading bot or just something that monitors you know different aspects of you know like with Cardono for example there's so many different entities kind of to monitor that so you stay up to date create your own newsfeed just anything in general but I so got to disagree with you on that I like I like >> disagree with me on what >> that I like that it's that it's that it's not the vibe coding isn't necessarily like I don't think it's a bad term I like it because it makes it easier to do technology yeah >> yeah I I mean I understand in essence though what you're talking about is almost like reverse engineering the technology through AI, >> I guess, because like >> and you're learning the process. >> Yeah, cuz for me, like I would never be able to to code something on my own like Well, but I can vibe code now. >> Well, yeah, but you're going to be vibe engineering before long. What can you tell us about kind of the next phase? You know, here we are. Um, you know, we're in July. You know, the market cycle is what it is. And you know, we see the ecosystem, the DREPs, everybody is just kind of, you know, in a crazy situation. Um, and and I feel like so many people are looking for something to lock on to for like this next quote unquote term, right? What can you tell us about uh like what's in the pipeline that's that's like hard like the hard pipeline that's coming um that that's going to help facilitate a lot of the way the ecosystem in the world is changing around it. >> So we have a hard fork going on right now as we speak and it should be done by the time this is out should be should be down and live and then we're going to be immediately moving to a next one. Hard forks are not easy within the within the Cardano chain. >> Explain the hard fork a little. So this is where uh the entire Cardano ecosystem is comprised of multiple different components and those components have multiple different libraries. It's a coordination effort across multiple teams as you said it's a it's a very diverse ecosystem. We have to have somebody that is driving that in the driver's seat for that and bringing these all together so that we can release the next features on chain and it becomes part of the new Cardano ecosystem. How does Cardano get upgraded? It's through this hard fork process. So, it's this coordination and culmination of all the work that's been done over months and some of in some cases years and it's now reached fruition to where we say, "Okay, now we're drawing a line in the sand. We're saying now Cardano 10.63 is coming out and we're going to be launching that um with the new features in it." So, it's just like any software, but this software because it's decentralized, it spans multiple different people, individuals, individual contributors, companies, and everyone's kind of clamoring to get their piece of it into it so that they can build more or next onto the >> just like the banks with clarity act >> pretty much. Yeah, [laughter] fair enough. >> Well, that's a whole that's a whole another topic that we have to touch on later because >> why later? We could do it right now. >> Well, because I want I want to hear him finish. >> Oh, okay. So the the hard fork is is effectively when you see the next iteration of our Cardono and it doesn't really finish until all of the stake poolool operators dreps the the node operators adopt >> ds they're >> well yeah I love >> oh my gosh [laughter] >> once the uh node operators adopt that that becomes now the new version of Cardano so to speak >> you know real quick real real quick there's one thing that I would just love to see I would love to see >> because I see all of this >> [laughter] >> What's he gonna say next? What's he gonna say next? >> No, I'm I'm I'm beh I'm beh I'm behaved. No. Um, no. So, I I would just I would love to see I I'm so tired of seeing these narratives about Cardano's TPS and and and just all of the nonsense, right? >> TPS is stupid. >> It is so stupid. It's so stupid. Well, because you know, even when I was I was doing my vibe coding yesterday and, you know, and I'm and I'm doing some deeper dive research into the the blockchain and and a lot of the systems because I'm I'm building a whole bunch of stuff, right? And and even Claude tells me, you know, well, one of the key differences in Cardono and this is, you know, you're talking about TPS, but there's so many data points. There's so much information in one transaction as compared to because honestly, I vibe coded. How do I what can I build to increase the transactional volume on chain, right? And it's like, well, it's more difficult on Cardono because it's not a one for one like all the other chains. Everything is collected into one transaction. And so one transaction can be, you know, hundreds of data points and things where other chains are one for one makes them look bigger. And I'm like, of course, I wish the whole world knew that. How can we educate people in a real way outside of just, you know, us talking heads on YouTube or whatever? Is there any more official way that we can break some of this stuff down in an easily digestible manner so that we so that people can genuinely see and understand the the differences and why Cardono was designed to be the way it is rather than trying to work backwards. >> Do you mean like the benefits of having uh higher TPS and fast finality uh in terms of a use case or >> Okay, so let's just say one chain is a one for one transaction per second, right? And then Cardano is doing similar work, but it's able to bundle these these we can call them data points instead of transactions or endpoints or whatever you want to call them. And how they're bundled into that one transaction. If you compare them on chain, it looks like this chain is much bigger, much more active because Cardano basically moves everything into a U-Haul and then ships it. Whereas these other chains are taking, okay, well, here's your couch, here's your chair, here's your, you know what I'm saying? So it looks like a busier chain and that's also more easily manipulated in a lot of ways. Not that anyone in crypto does that, right? But and I'm tired of these narratives and so and and when we're I feel like in so many cases even Claude wants me to work backwards in a way say well if you want to improve the appearance of transactions you know you have to do it the way the other chains do it not the way Cardano was designed to be. So, one, I would love if you could maybe explain a little bit more about why it's designed that way. I know. I'm sure Wendy knows, but how many people out there >> don't understand? >> Explain it to me like I'm somebody that doesn't know. >> Yeah. >> Of what the TPS why TPS matters. >> Why it matters and why the difference in in how Cardono does it compared to the other chains. >> I feel like TPS is just so silly. I feel like >> it is silly, but it's the same thing I see on X every time. >> But but that's because you're on X. Like nobody nobody cares about TPS. Just as long as the thing works, just as long as it doesn't break, just as long as it allows an experience like you would use for Fiat or for just any type of tech in general, it doesn't really matter. Like the TPS wars, it's like a it's like a sword fight with the TPS wars. Like who cares? >> Well, the reason why is I think that comes from the credit card industry. They look at that and go, "Okay, in order for us to compete, if we want to become the next MX or Visa or Mastercard, you know, the the cryptocurrency, whatever the chain may be, insert chain here, has to perform at that at least that level. So that you have that adoption so that you can do more uh commercial uh you can have it in every storefront you can have it in your pocket in your phone. So those transactions no longer become a thing that you think about. You don't think about it when you do a credit card transaction. But when you do a crypto transaction, you have to think, okay, well, when is this going to finish? When is this going to actually I send from here to there, it could take minutes. You know, I sent to here to you on another chain, it could take a couple hours in some cases. And that's just not acceptable. So for the commercial adoption of that to become at scale, the TPS have to matter for it to uh to penetrate because that's what the adopters are going to ask about. They're gonna, well, how many transactions per second can I have? If I'm going to open up a web store, how many can I if I can only if I can only sell you one t-shirt a day? Kind of limits me. >> I think my point isn't clear. I think that's my problem. So, okay. So, um, let's say we've got a competing chain, right? And let's say I want to use my credit card or whatever, and I go to this this store that runs both chains, okay? They want to ring up my candy bar, my soda pop, and my bag of Doritos as three separate transactions, right? So, and they're using this other this competing chain. Boom. I just gave them three transactions, but I also have my Cardano card hypothetically, right? And instead of ringing up each item separately, they're all one transaction, right? And then I ring that up and well, there's only one transaction here. There's an obvious benefit to being able to bundle these items into one transaction, but on chain it looks less than >> looks like one transaction. >> It looks like one transaction compared. So, and even and I understand, you know, Wendy say, "Well, it doesn't really matter." It doesn't on a tech level, it kind of doesn't um because as long as it goes through and it works, fine. But unfortunately, so many people use this as a metric for success, right? And so, and that narrative is used against Cardono so often. And I'm and I'm I'm I'm waiting for the day when it clicks with people because I still feel like it hasn't, which is why I feel like Cardono suffers a lot in the grand narratives that are being put out by media or anybody that you know, I'm not going to go down a rabbit hole in this, but you get what I'm saying, right? But even though but listen but even though like with credit card transactions for example there's one place that I always go to that I have to that I have to spend a lot of money for appliances and whatnot. My credit card never goes through ever. Never goes through ever. So I always have to call the bank >> bill Wendy. >> Well it it's [laughter] >> No, but it never goes through because there's always a problem because it always blocks it because of the bank. My point is is I actually have to call the bank. I have to spend like 30 40 minutes on whatever. By the way, I had to buy a brand new refrigerator. It was a nightmare for a month. We can talk about that another time. But my point being, I already was stressed out about the refrigerator, but the credit card transaction wouldn't go through. My point is is like with Cardono, you know, it's going to get there. But I feel like like with traditional finance, we don't get to see what happens behind the scenes. With crypto, it's unique because everything's on chain and everything is public and you can track it. So all these people are going to be like, "Oh, this took forever because blah blah blah." And they're going to make this big dramatic narrative about it. And I just that's why TPS to me is like just as long as it goes through great because the normal the average person we don't care. We don't care how fast it is. Just as long as it goes through and it's we're done. >> And that's fair. I think from an individual use case that is perfectly fair and it can be a vanity metric depending on who's using it. >> It is a vanity metric to >> but TPS I think matters from a scale standpoint. So how many how many products can we support on chain at one time and are we limited by that architecture and that's what Laos is meant to provide and the finality like the Paris is going to solve the finality of how long a block actually becomes final. It doesn't sit in you know a pending state and have to go through the consensus mechanism and it takes a lot of time for that. So I think these pieces when you piece when you put them together I mean it forms a very clear strategy what Charles has been saying all along. It's like we've got to get Cardono to be able to scale up to meet the the demands of what people are asking of not just Cardano but crypto in general. >> So, and in in that I think my grand point is is that with Laos and then Hydra with the way that TPS is actually structured on Cardono, you're almost talking about a grand expansion of TPS that should far surpass that of any competing chain. >> Yeah. And I I think TPS also from that angle is maybe not the right way to look at it. We look at it as u it's throughput. It's really >> throughput is a better way of saying >> yeah it's it's transaction bytes per second is really when you get down to the technicality. So it goes back to your point about block density. How much data can it can it actually hold? How much data can be transferred not one transaction versus a bundled transaction like it's about the the density of it. >> It's always evolving and especially as things are changing and moving fast because AI is kind of making things move fast. It's always challenging to get that message out there and but it sounds like you guys are working on being able to articulate that message out across a very social so people understand what Cardano is actually building. >> That's right. Yeah. I think getting rid of the technocratic jargon and all of the um you know it it's just about this the kids who know and who who don't know. And I think that's that's all changing. It's been changing for a number of years now. I think once we're starting to see the adoption cycle become like well how do we bring in more people? How do we build the base of this? Which is why I was so heavy on our developer experience and our developer relations u proposal to make sure that we are building that base not just cultivating what we have in the system. Now I think we have to put a message out there that's going to be much more uh adoptive by by just the general general public and you know and so they understand why it's important. Obviously the first thing that is coming to mind is companies going to be security. So we always have to lean on that as kind of like our third rail item. We can't ever you know violate anything around security. transparency is going to be very important so people know that you know it's building that trust with it because we're talking about finances we're talking about real world assets we're talking about you know money and uh that's that's going to be the cornerstone of anything that we build up but then it's like why it matters like what benefit does this bring it's got to be more than I come from an older generation I never really got in on the meme coins never really got it on the whole uh you know the DGEN culture was not just never my thing I'm a technologist by trade so I think bridging that gap between technologist and just layman is going to be super critical that's exactly What took Web2o to It took Web 2 to say like, "Oh, you can buy things online now. Oh, okay. I see the benefit of that. It's just got to be that simple." >> How do you guys plan to do that though? How do you plan to execute that and get the message out? >> Again, I think it's taking more of a productled approach within the labs. So, uh we're we're going to be looking for um efficacy of anything that we build. So, while we're we're coming up with these great theories around zero knowledge proofs and you know um all of the cryptography that goes into it and and the technology, the architecture, etc., It's got to be a value ad to somebody that's going to adopt this and like perpetuate that growth. That's got to be key. >> Who is that somebody? >> That depends on the It depends on the technology. So something we'll be doing in the very beginning will be what's the total addressable market. Anytime you're starting a business, you do the same thing. What's the total addressable market for this? Like who are my customers going to be? What's the growth trajectory look like for this? What's the revenue potential, the upside going to be? We're going to be doing that same thing. We're going to be taking that same kind of lens through uh through anything that we're going to be adopting. like can there be something that can be realized either by us or by somebody or the community in general? Meaning can this affect the the price of Cardono, the price of midnight, can this affect, you know, we have to look at those things because it can adverse or uh it can be a benefit or an adverse effect. >> There there's obviously an end goal, right? And and I'm [clears throat] not quite sure I or or anyone else fully understands what that is. If I look at the other chains and I see what their claim to fame is or their their previous historical narratives have been to drive adoption and all of that, given that where we're at, you've got the hard fork, you've got Laos, you've got Hydra, you've got all of these different systems being put into place in the Cardano ecosystem and then Midnight in adjacent to that, right? What is the grand narrative for Cardano moving out of well for concluding 2026 into 2027? What is the grand narrative that Cardano's building and preparing for to compete with everyone else in the in the space? >> I don't know we have one for the remainder of the year. I mean our proposals I I would hope that they form a very good um vision of what we're trying to build out. And a lot of these are carry forwards from the previous years. we're finishing things that we started and I I don't think we did a good job of articulating that when we proposed them. It's like why is this showing up again? Didn't we didn't we already pay for this last year? Didn't the community already fund this last year? This is the continuation and some place in some cases the finality of it. So 2026 there's no grand vision for that. It's actually looking ahead. So we're trying to look at a five-year type of term like we want long-term road mapaps um that are that are playing out. Um and that is going to be what we're going to be leveraging and that's going to be about growth and adoption. It's going to be about usage. is going to be about um building up new um decentralization uh techniques on top of that. Midnight came as a result of this. We saw a need. We addressed the need for privacy and so midnight was kind of spawned from that. So I I don't think we have a like a grand vision for the remainder of the year on this other than finishing what we started and getting these things done because a lot of them do end at the end of the year. I also think that like the end of 2026, it's too shortsighted, especially when you're talking about technology because this is the thing, it takes like even when I've seen other other projects that they have, they have hard forks and they have different things they have to finish by or they say they're going to finish by, if it doesn't get finished on time, the community gets so upset. But I feel like people don't understand how hard technology actually is and you can't force developers to consistently ship things if there's underlying issues that need to be fixed or if they want to go back because something might have changed or technology might have changed. So, I feel like that's very important that it's okay to put out a five-year plan. It's okay to be a little bit late on your on your deadlines and and whatnot because if you're just pushing things out, then you're going to then there might be a vulnerability and you're going to have to go back and fix it. >> That's right. >> Yeah. But who who who are you building for in that interim? Like, you know, a five-year plan, cool. But as these products are being released, who are they being released for? To what end? as these things are happening, I guess, is what I'm looking for. Yeah, it's a good question. What is everybody gonna sink their teeth into as we go through each phase of of growth? >> We have multiple different personas that we we target. Um, some of it is tech- ccentric, but a lot of this abil and by techcentric I mean builders, you know, so I think having uh the ability for builders to create on the chain. It is a platform after all. That's really what we're talking about. um we're not we're not producing the products themselves unless we find that there's a gap or somewhere that we think we could add some strength and value to it to demonstrate it. Lace was that way. You know, we were not the first wallet. We were we're not the only wallet, but we wanted to build a wallet in a different way and we wanted to show uh we wanted to be able to have the um lace lace brings the ability for us to uh build on chain improvements as they're being done instead of a wait and see because we could fund that through through IO. So that's where we're trying to push the envelope a little bit harder on that around the builder side and we're and it's open source so you can extrapolate from that what you will and show that we can show that it works and you can take it and build from it from there. It is meant to be collaborative. We've got to leave some room for the business the earners on that the makers that are in the market too. So I think this is where scalability comes into play. the more scale that's there, the more builders that can come in. You have the the fees and transactions are one thing, but then L2s with Hydra. How do we how do we get operate in a world where there's vending machines where you can pay for it with Cardano? >> I already have one. >> Yeah, exactly. >> So, how do we how do we make them all that way? You know, >> that's up to the Hydra team. Yeah. I I don't have a lot of visibility. >> I'm coming for you, Hydra team. [laughter] >> Yeah. And uh so, I mean I mean there's multiple personas. Again, it's the builders, it's investors, it's, you know, we want to look at all of them and make sure that we're satisfying all of them equally. Um, I think the traders are one of the biggest untapped markets that are um that are out there. >> As decentralization really takes a hold, it's almost like things are kind of leaving IO and going on their own journey, but you guys are still going to have involvement. >> Absolutely. >> Can you discuss that because I feel like it might be hard for people to understand like why do we need IO if this is going to be more decentralized and it's going to run for it run on its own? But >> I think IO served its mission of what it set set out to do. I think it's an inevitability that we become more decentralized. We heard a lot. I'm sure everybody heard that. Why why is um uh why is input output taking such a large majority of the Treasury funding this year and we we have then this year and last year and that that is that is a fair assessment. Uh you don't want to be the fattest hog at the trough. So what we're looking to do is I was thinking about myself on that one, not you. Um what we're looking to do is um truly like it's it's built for you know this is built by many but it's it's a chain for all and we want to make sure that everyone has a piece of that. So we are next year not going to be coming back with the amount of ask for our coverage of that. In fact we're taking the teams that we have now and we are working with a number of different partners. We're looking work we're working collaboratively with our own ecosystem. Uh so that the people who have been building these things which is really where the strength lies and that's what input output was providing was a lot of these smart technical savvy people making sure that they continue on with that work they just wouldn't be under the input output umbrella and that way they become much more autonomous in their own way. So when you think about the we just did it with myithil that has now gone to teragon systems and teragon systems will now take the piece of that for fast bootstrapping the node and they will run with that. It's not an input output. Um, it's not centralized within input output. It is now decentralized to the ecosystem. We're doing that for the consensus piece of the node. We're doing that for the ledger portion of the node. We're going to be doing that for Plutus. Just about all of the um all of the proposals that we have right now will in some form become the um carry forward of another entity. And so we will go from a roughly 30 million um ask each year to about five. And that's really where we're trying to get to so that we can be good stewards of our own ecosystem. This is an inevitability, by the way. This is something that we have been building for all along. This is not something that we just saw some feedback and decided to make a change. This is going to come anyway. In fact, it was hard for me to bite my tongue when I'm hearing all these people talking about. I'm like, you only knew what's coming now. We can finally >> Why bite your tongue? Just jump in, man. >> Just say it. You got jump into the bar. >> I'm so not a Twitter I'm still not a Twitter person at all. I don't I don't I follow people and I read and I but I yeah I I know better than to get involved in social media. >> It's important to communicate so people actually know what's going on because unfortunately there's so much misinformation and because the market is the way it is right now. It doesn't matter if I mean anytime number goes down people >> like they forget about the technology. They forget about why they're here. They don't they forget about what the next five years holds. And we're in such a pivotal point of technology right now. So they're like missing I feel like they're really missing the point to what as to what to look forward to long term. >> That's that's fair. It's frustration. Anytime you see this when the stock goes down, stockholders become naturally upset about and they want to understand like give us answers. What are you doing about this? How are you correcting this? Now look, we cannot control those prices. That's not what we're we're not the company that you're investing in when you when you buy a Cardono. >> So many jokes I want to make about other chains. >> Yeah, >> some chains can control it to some extent. >> Some can. Yeah, some can. But our philosophy has been like we really don't talk about it that often because it's not something that we can directly influence. It's kind of like blaming the president for the stock market, you know, going up or down. It doesn't have any direct control over that influence. Yes. So we have to re reassess what our influence is and where we're going. We think we feel like this is the way to do it. Uh we no longer become the core component of this. We want mo node diversity. We've been a Haskell node forever. We want to see Rust nodes and go nodes. We want to see these start to come up, start to compete. The competition is always going to be good. And if we're even if we're competing against our own in a friendly way, competing against our own ecosystem, I think that's productive. It's healthy. >> How much do you think uh in terms of the um the the changes and improvements in Cardono? How much of that do you think has gone to the wayside because just where we've been in the market now for the past year? Because I feel like Cardono, if it's if it's known for anything, it's coming to the market with amazing new upgrades or new technologies when the market's down. when when the least number of people are paying attention, you know what I mean? I mean, we saw it in 2021. It's like the market just peaked and then oh, Cardono has smart contracts, you know what I mean? It's just like what why is it backwards? And and like it seems like now that that's changing um now we're starting to see a lot of these improvements and expansions happening in the bare market leading into the next bull market cycle. Yeah. So that's a big boon, but like how how do we really make sure that everybody knows about these things in a real way? I mean, obviously we're doing this right now. That's a part of it, a block 45. Uh so that's a that hopefully filters into everybody, you know what I mean? Um but like are there other planned uh mechanics to to make sure that everybody's in the know? >> I I think we have to be a lot more transparent with the work that we're doing. I mean, we couldn't we couldn't really talk about the decentralization play because it was still wasn't figured out yet. Like, who are we going to engage and who's even interested in doing this? Who's going to who wants to carry this forward? We didn't want to start announcing things before they really had legs because then it would have been would have backfired on us, I think, um, in terms of response. >> But don't you think it's going to backfire anyways? Like, don't you think, especially with the market being the way it is, people are going to find something to be mad about regardless? >> Well, they'll make it up. That's typically what I see. >> That's different. I mean, if they make it up, they make it up. But I'm looking at it from a what are we actually doing? what can we commit to and what can we what can we verbalize and vocalize publicly to people. I mean we have to be a bit a bit measured in that. We can't just say we have this idea that we're going to do this and then it becomes the talking point the narrative when it may not go anywhere. A lot of that happens by the way we do have a lot of like vaporized ideas. I think back to your original point about this is like where is IO really going to play in the role in this and that's going to be on the research side. That's always been the strength of something from of Cardano's backing. It's peer-reviewed. The science is there. We have very smart people working in universities academics. and I don't understand their world. They live in a completely different it's a lot of math and chalkboard, more letters than numbers and um that is going to continue to persist. So that will be the main stay of labs and like that is one of the pipelines by which new innovations will come about then it but it will always be um tempered against a product mindset. I think if you don't have somebody that's there saying okay well this is great math this is great theory but who's actually going to adopt this? Who's going to buy this? Who's going to take this to the next level? Who's going to build on this? that's going to be tempered against um the research and then once we have that we can start communicating those a little bit more I think transparently than we have been in the past and bringing people into it. Another thing we're going to do for for transparency next year is we're going to um do our outreach before we start to launch our um our proposals on chain. We want to bring people in dreps. We want to bring in uh the community. We want them to see what we're we're proposing why this matters. Let's have the discussion and the debate before it gets on chain. >> Brilliant. And you can still have it while it's on chain. We're not changing that. We're just moving it up a little bit to say when come January time, everybody should know what the plan is. We're all kind of aligned on that. I think having that coordinated effort is going to be it's going to be a huge lift. >> I feel like we have all of the infighting of the regular government politics. Let's let's also, you know, have these discussions prior to a bill hitting Congress for votes. You know, it makes the most sense to do it that way. And honestly, I feel like in a lot of ways, it alleviates some of the initial shock in some instances. uh especially if everybody can kind of understand the purpose of things before they're proposed. So yeah, that's that'll be a big help. >> And I want to see what Cryptocrow thinks about our proposals online. What he's you you would have had time to review it. We can talk about it and all of its greatness all we want, but it's going to fall on deaf ears unless we have some coordinated, you know, some other people who are supporting it and why they support it. Not just paring what we say, but you have your own particular spin on that. That's going to be important. You know what? I I mean, as a DREP, I mean, I would love to see proposals uh be met with adoption partners because, you know, I think one of the biggest criticisms that we have as DREPs when we're looking at a lot of these proposals is they're typically high ask um but there's no um necessarily, you know, these are the these are the people that are going to utilize this or these are the people that this is directly going to change. You know, a lot of it is built on the research and the ideas which we're used to. I'm genuinely uh interested in seeing how some of those changes come about and the you made a key point um that because I have seen a lot of these narratives kind of come across the table right on on social media about oh well you know IIO's getting so much flack for all the money that they're asking for and now they're shrinking right and you're like no this has been the the idea from from jump. We've never planned on being >> what we've been for so long, ultimately you guys are the farmers, you know, planting all of the seeds and then you're teaching everyone else how to water them and moving on. >> That's right. We have to live by the word that we say. So when we say, uh, you know, decentralization is the way. Um, and then if we come in and take 60% of the NCL every year, doesn't really set a good message. Now, we had to to in order to get these basic fundamental things across the line that we thought were important for the chain. And it is a bit of an adaptive process. So you look at the first year we did our treasury proposal. It was one big omnibus package. You know, it was just this is it. You get everything. It's in one vote for this or it fails. And a lot of people didn't like that. So we came back this year and said, "Okay, we're going to break it apart into multiple different components." And we still got one wrong. The um uh the the hydro proposal, we had hydra, we had Midgard bundled together, and that was still too bundled for most people. So we've broke those apart. Okay, we'll make them stand on their own. And that's the really the way it should be. So we're doing a lot of this adaptive like feedback from the community of how this because this process is relatively new. It's not what the constitution is what two years oldish you know and uh so we're kind of we're kind of you know adapting as we go as well. We we put together the the plan for this but now we have to live in that world. >> How much is Midgard kind of an unsung hero in the ecosystem? >> Midgard Labs I think they're doing a lot more than people realize. I think they are too. Yeah. >> Yeah. I want to kind of go back a little bit more to like the AI systems because I think that that >> as we continue moving forward, these new models are competing with each other for market share. We've got these IPOs. I mean, this is going to be the big bread and butter, I think. and anyone that's able to truly capitalize on that. I see such a huge opportunity for Cardano when both its security um it's expansive throughput right that that's just continuing to be built upon and the tool sets associated with being able to do some of this agentic engineering. I'm I'm curious if there are any models or tool sets on the back end that allow uh you or anyone in the ecosystem to be able to to say hey you know we can tell who is building you know using aentic workflows in the Cardano ecosystem and if not when do we get that I would love that to be a new metric >> because I can really see that becoming a thing you know where you know it's like you know one chain has the meme coins another one had like the ICOs I really would love to see Cardano be able to cap capitalize on because one of the biggest arguments back in the day was well there's not there aren't as many builders on Cardano because it's Haskell and I don't want to learn Haskell because I know C++ or I know whatever right and and so now that that argument is kind of being dissipated by AI and vibe coding or Gentic I like to call it engineering but I'm a snob um you know I would love to I just I feel like there's so much opportunity and I'm very curious to what you have to say about like where where we're going and leading leaning into that if we are leaning into that >> we are we are definitely so we are uh we have teams that are looking into an MCP a model context protocol for Cardano specifically maybe baking it into the node at some point so it's directly there or as an add-on uh we've got a lot of people that are using um rag against the documentation so that they have a retrieval augmented generation of the the idea the documents yeah so that they can immediately query that from within their IDs and doing it I'm a huge proponent of agentic harnesses like Hermes and Open Claw, you know, a lot of these things. I'm a big I'm a big believer in the orchestration model, meaning I have one agent that I'm talking to and it has sub agents that does specific specialized tasks, >> right? >> I'm very checkoriented. So even when I build my organizations out with people, I want to make sure there's a natural tension that exists between them. So product engineering, delivery, they all have a pressure on one another. I do that with my agents as well. So that we have QA a QA agent that's checking the work that's being done that passes over to the DevOps agents to make sure it follows the pipeline. Forget the development, forget the coding itself. Just the fact of deploying software and going through a quality check. It it takes a lot of effort to do that. That's usually the the the longest part of any type of is deploying it. >> Man, you just gave me some crazy ideas on Well, I'm just thinking like why why why don't we have like an open- source harness of our own that's specific to Cardano development? >> Maybe they're doing it. Are you doing it? >> Don't know. >> We are not doing it. No, I I wish I wish [laughter] we were. >> They will know. >> We are we are not building our own hardness. No, we're using the ones. Now, I don't want to make it policy driven like I I have uh enabled the engineers in my team to use AI in their own way. I think when you come with a top- down policy of you must do it this way and you must follow this pattern. I think you start to break it immediately because as you said earlier, it's moving too quickly and you can't keep up with that with a policy. A policy of an AI policy will not keep up with that. But to your point about measuring that, we have what's called an AI maturity model that we are looking into. So new ventures that are being built up within IO or engineering teams that we have, we're dog fooding it ourselves. How is the AI, how has it been reached? Like you have to measure it on the back end to see like well what is the throughput for this? We started doing agentic um coding with lace two years ago and Charles was asking me almost every month, how fast have you made it go? How much what's the quality returns from these things? Does the things that need to be measured? It's not about how they're using it or the the constructs that are involved. It's like what's the actual net result. Are you faster? Is your quality better? Are you more secure? These are important pieces. That's what we got to measure. >> So, I need to build my own harness for Cardono. >> You can I mean I I I genuinely like the ones that are out there right now. They they need to improve it. Memory is the worst part of right now. I'm thinking about it more in terms of like um you know like you can go out and you can build uh an app you know if you kind of already know what you're doing or you can buy a kit >> and that kit can just you can say I want to build this app and it just already knows kind of what to do right it's the same as like um like super app right it's specific to building mobile applications using AI and it's amazing it's amazing you can do the same thing just using claude right But it's a lot more simplistic and and more intuitive to do it on super app. So I'm thinking if we had like a super app version for the Cardano ecosystem and then we could just hand people away to say here just take this and build cool stuff. >> Yeah. >> You know what I mean? Maybe maybe that's something. >> So we do have an SDK software development kit uh as you were talking about. I think there's actually a number of them that are out there. Uh there's wallet SDKs. There's all of these things. I think harmonizing those and make them more I don't know reachable by people right so that when you it's more plugandplay. So that way when you are when you are ready to develop it just knows where to go, where to find it, how to use it, how they work. Uh and then it can do all of its testing. >> I've got two weeks to do this before this show airs and everyone else out there tries it. >> And then we'll do another one about what you built in those two weeks. >> Right. That sounds like a good idea. >> All right, Brandon. There's so many moving parts. There's so many things that are starting that are coming to a close, things are in progress. Like >> for people to stay up to date on what's happening with IO, where should they go? Because it's a lot. I know it is. I know it is. And we want to try to be mindful of that. So, we are launching a website. It will be coming out roughly the time this will be launched uh on on the web. So, that we'll put the uh all of the links uh available on this video as well as you can follow our social media from input output and I'm sure you guys will be uh graciously shing that out as well. But we'll have a website that will cover mainly [clears throat] our progress against the um the work that we're doing right now. We want to be as openly transparent as we can like what's being made. We have milestones that we have to reach, when they're being reached, are they being reached. Um, you know, whether it's Laos or Hydro or Plutus, all of those, if you want to keep uh tabs on our progress on those, that will be on the website. And also, as we move into the decentralization, as we start to move a lot of these projects to different entities, different partners, like how that's going, who that is, when that's happening, who's how that's being carried forward, what their proposals are going to be for the for the next and subsequent years. >> Perfect. Yeah, >> that'll be easier to understand or at least follow because I feel like again there's so many different moving parts, but it's nice to see everything kind of coming together and being pushed out to the proper partners for people to be able to track. >> We want to keep it simple. Yeah, we want to keep it simple. Absolutely. >> Thank you so much to Brandon for joining us on Block 45 and of course Crow. I hope you all enjoyed the show.