Cardano Brings Blockchain Trust to AI and Payments

Hey everybody, welcome to the Open Source Summit here in Minneapolis, and I'm hanging out with my friend Terence McCutcheon. How you doing, Terence? Doing very well, mate.

And we're having a little chat about, well, blockchain and Cardano projects and digital trust and how it all comes together. How you doing, my friend? Ah, doing very well.

Happy to be here. Really enjoying. One of the biggest things with blockchain, or what I've found, is it's important to be out there in front of the community, wherever that community may be.

So from the technical side to the marketing side, there's always somebody to talk to and best place to be. I think everybody and his brother is talking about all things AI and quantum, and I think blockchain may have fallen off people's radar a little bit. So what exactly are you guys doing?

It's a decentralized platform, and the use cases are for corporate kinds of applications, but what does that look like? So Cardano is a layer one blockchain. We're a proof-of-stake consensus, and we are built for pretty much anything.

Anything you want to do, really. So we do want to look for different opportunities for corporate adoption. Whether that's securing data on the chain, whether that's, yes, moving into libraries and your AI LLMs.

Basically, how can you secure your transactions at a low cost, and then also have a good aspect of transparency alongside of that? That's where we're coming from with Cardano from a research basis. It's not just another blockchain, and it's not something where you have to go and mine it, we're designed to be something you can actually use and rely on.

And at the end of the day, your end user as a... If you're a corporation, your end users may not know that you're on a blockchain. But when it comes to your reporting, your stakeholders, shareholders, whoever, they're going to be able to see anything and everything that's happened from every level all the way in stone on the blockchain.

So as part of that, I need to build the analytics applications on top of this so that I can then go and analyze those workflows and those transactions, which I'm assuming are going to be based on some form of immutable data now? Basically, yeah. And you could build them yourself, or you can work with other partners.

So a good reason for being here at the Open Source Summit, there's a number of people who are building those analytical tools in every different capacity. Right? So down to your actual development metrics or down to a business offering, that corporate offering.

So, definitely a great place to partner with others. Or again, yes, if you want to build it yourself, again, you get into the scale of writing, like you said, that immutable data. Once you put it there, not only is it there forever for your reference, but others can then use that as well and know that it's a single source of truth, if you will.

Now, the digital trust is part of the Linux Foundation as well, and is a complementary project to this, or how does all this come together? Right. So, the way I've explained this, and maybe somebody will come back on me at some point, but it's kind of like Russian nesting dolls, if you will.

Right? So you have the LF at the top, and we are bringing together everything open source, right? And then inside the LF, which is now LFDT, right, you have the decentralized trust.

So now you have your other organizations. You have CNCF, you have Chaos Project, you have, I guess I just saw it for the first time today, AAIF, so Agentic AI Foundation. Mm-hmm.

So that's that next level where you may get involved for certain things. Where Intersect comes in as a member of LFDT, we are looking to still be that same piece that LF is for the open source community, but specific to the Cardano ecosystem. So if you are a project and the assumption, of course, is that you're building open source, the blockchain itself we look at as an open source project.

We want to give you that same feel of hosting, marketability, interoperability for partnerships, the whole nine. All right. Now, I'm sorry to say that Intersect is not a household name just yet, so- That's fair.

Explain what is it that Intersect does and where it fits in this ecosystem. Sure thing. So Cardano's been around, let's say the technology, for 10 or 12 years now.

And I think the first release actually goes back to 2017. So I guess we're still in the first decade here. But we have founding entities in the Cardano ecosystem, which is input, output.

They're still a primary engineering firm part of it. We have Emurgo, and we have the Cardano Foundation. Now, you'd assume that most everything goes into the Cardano Foundation, but the structure's been set up a little bit differently.

So Emurgo focuses on our VC stuff, and the Cardano Foundation is picking up every other thing that some other founding entity or Intersect, like I'm coming to here, is not handling. Intersect is the community-based organization for the Cardano ecosystem. And so what we want to take a look at specifically is within the blockchain, anyone that holds ADA is considered to be a Cardano community member.

Right? They are subject to abide by the Constitution and whatever else. For your standard person, that's not going to mean anything to them.

" Great. If you want to change your wallet from, "Hey, maybe I don't want to hold ADA in a centralized exchange anymore. I want to hold it in a Web3 wallet.

" That's where you start to come to an organization like Intersect because you want to get involved. You want to get connected with the right people. And so it is membership based.

Right now, the membership fees are as low as free, and you can come in and poke around and just see more of what it's like to actually get involved. So for Intersect right now, we actually run administrative capabilities or administrative duties for access to the Cardano treasury. The treasury works a little bit different here.

So we're, trying not to get too far off track, but where Bitcoin, you had a treasury that would be released in tranches for people to go and mine, this is different. So subject to the Constitution, people can put forward a request to get access to treasury funds, and the design is that they're going to do something that, A, gives money back to the treasury via transactions, or B, markets Cardano to another place to where other people will conduct more transactions, put more things on the blockchain, giving additional utility. So there was some bias around blockchain that came out in the early days at least, where people understood the idea of it in distributed transactions, but they ran into some performance challenges because they were trying to figure out how to do something at scale, and that limited the use cases.

But as we've come along since then, what are the use cases that we can use this stuff for now, and then how far up that performance scale can we get? Well, just because it's easiest, I'm going to jump to a little bit of what I'm doing with it. Makes the most sense, or I can talk the most about it, I would say.

So I actually run the open source office at Intersect. To my knowledge, currently, it's the only functioning OSPO within the Cardano ecosystem. That's not to say that we're the only ones doing open source, but we're the only ones looking out for the open source culture within the ecosystem.

Based on some research and also sentiment from ecosystem partners, we took a look at, hey, what are the true needs from an open source perspective? And this comes around with the Log4j incident, and hey, do we actually have maintainers? All of these different things.

So what we came down to is we actually formulated what's called a paid open source model. And so we're experiencing this. We're actually in our first implementation.

Some of the key programs, we have our Maintainer Retainer program, Developer Advocate program, Tooling Sustainability program, so they're all programs. The goals here is that with Maintainer Retainer, we want to bring people from the community, and also former displaced maintainers. Somebody was, whatever it is, unfortunately let go, we don't want to lose their expertise.

Mm-hmm. They can still maintain, and we can give them a small token of gratitude with actual ADA. And what they're asked to do at that point is, from a community perspective, continue to maintain on the projects.

Continue to provide and share that advice with the... Not advice, but functional expertise with the community and ensure that the transactions don't break, that the chain itself doesn't fall apart. The Tooling Sustainability, we're in a period where we need a lot of tools.

We have a lot of tools, and not every tool that we have is exactly where it needs to be. And there's going to be, I don't want to say constant upgrades, but as there are upgrades, those tools also need to become compatible with those upgrades. And so, the Tooling Sustainability is designed at continuing to have those tools funded, as well as funding new tools that are identified to be critical.

The last part I'll jump to, and I'm only highlighting a few of the programs here, is the Developer Advocate program. And the main piece here is to look at the developer experience and how are we actually onboarding from, hey, okay, I got my GED and I did a couple of courses on development, and I decided that all I want to do is be a web developer. Great.

How do we now bring you into Haskell? How do we now help you understand the difference between the Haskell node and whether or not you want to contribute to another language node? Because those aren't being built right now.

I know a Rust node, Go node, and then a couple of others. But what is that experience like as well for someone who maybe even had some formal education and they still have to come in and they have to learn Haskell, and then how do I get up to speed? " Great.

Now you've done something or you know how to do something on the blockchain, but you actually understand how to maintain when we start talking about multiple contracts or ensuring that there's still good throughput. And so yeah, we're taking it from the perspective of we want to go down to the very basics of what do you need within an open source ecosystem or an open source project at that point, and how do we ensure that those rungs are cared for so that the project itself can stay maintained over time. It almost sounds to me like it's not a question of the technology anymore.

It's matured, but it's the level of skills and expertise around it that still needs a little bit of work and the tooling a little bit. But we can build some pretty impressive applications at the end of the day. Yes.

Yeah. So the Cardano blockchain from that perspective, it's mature. It works.

It's live. Mm-hmm. Come and use it.

As of now, it doesn't break. You may find a vulnerability here, vulnerability there. It's a small piece of a piece of a piece.

At the end of the day, you can still go through your explorer and you see, okay, hey, we still had over 1,000 transactions happen in the last number of hours. People are still minting tokens. People are still minting stable coins.

People are still... It's innumerable, the options that you can do. So what you've seen so far, what's that aha moment where people go, "Wow, I want to get involved with this"?

Or are all the journeys so different, or are there some commonalities? I guess it's a little bit weird for my placement. I guess I'm not fully in touch with what each person is looking at in total from that specific standpoint.

And I'd have to tie back to where my purview is, is stillHey, I want to focus on what is the development experience to still back up the blockchain. And from the Intersect perspective, because we touch so many things, it's okay, what's happening in this decentralized governance era that we as a blockchain are in, and are we actually making proper decentralized decisions? Do we have the right amount of participation?

So, because the technical side is working, yeah, there's a big focus on the non-technical aspect right now, and when it comes to, "Hey, we want to build this, and we need technical help to do it," let's connect you with the right parties. But we're pretty sure it can be done. Sure.

What's the biggest challenge you're seeing with the people when they first join the project? Or what do you wish they would come with that maybe would be a little bit more prepared to join or become an active member? What should they be, yeah.

What homework would you give them before they called up? That's great questions. The biggest falloff point I wanted to attack that for a moment is really continued participation.

" And then they see a portion of the tech stack, or they'll see documentation whether complete or incomplete, and they'll say, "I don't know. " And there's a little bit of good and bad on both sides, right? So it's the participation of those of us in the ecosystem to keep them engaged and say, "Okay, well, you gave us this so-called barrier.

" But it's also on the consumer in this case as well. "Hey, you came to us, you said you wanted to build this, and we told you how to do it. " As far as getting prepared, I'd have to say joining Intersect, really.

And I know that sounds like a selfish ploy, but join as an associate. It's absolutely of no cost, and you get access to tons of data just on Intersect and what we've done over the last two years. But you also get first-level access to these other ecosystem partners, and you get a chance to see projects.

I don't have it here with me, but normally we have a banner of our enterprise members. And we have 50 plus enterprise members, and those are people who've chosen to pay $1,000 a year, right? Now that's a lot, but what are they getting out of that is they get, generally, that frontline view.

When we go to an event, we say, "Hey, we work with these people, and they do this. " Internally what that comes is that somebody wants to integrate something. It becomes a lot easier when we have an enterprise member that offers a solution because you say, "Here's what you need to do from the technical side, so your developers focus on that.

" At the end of the day, we have the product that you intended, but probably in a better suited format than you were thinking because we have partners to help support that. Mm-hmm. Who are you looking for to join the project?

Because my assumption is that it doesn't have to be the world's greatest blockchain developer. It seems like there's even small things like just helping with the documentation makes a huge difference. Yes.

So both technical and non-technical participants we're looking for. Anybody that really enjoys participating in some type of decentralized governance or just decentralized ecosystem is really great. We know that we're not going to get everything right on the first go.

And so there is, I would hate to say public policy, right, but social policy as well that there's still other opinions that we as an ecosystem can consider. And then from the technical side, that's exactly correct, yeah. Whether you are just barely scraping the surface technically, you're motivated to move forward, or you do consider yourself to be an expert, we're looking for it at all levels to say help us continue to move forward and continue to keep...

We expect the chain will keep moving. Heaven forbid it were not to keep moving, we need somebody to fix it, and we can't always rely on the engineers because they'll probably move to another project, and that's not something that we as an ecosystem have control over, so they have a different boss. So where do you hope that this project will be a year from now?

I'm sure you've got a roadmap, but what's top of mind for you? There's definitely some AI and LLM implementations that I've heard about on the roadmap, if you will. Right?

Want to see, hey, how can somebody have a chatbot? And instead of going through just mountains of resources that say, "Okay, well, here's how to use the Cardano blockchain. " It's okay, I want to get involved, and I want to get involved with this specific piece.

What do I need to understand? Well, if you don't understand the EUTXO strategy and you don't understand that we're going to have a hard fork every six months to a year right now because we're still trying to improve what's already built and working, then in theory, those things may put you behind even from a non-technical participant perspective. Other things, we're looking for more corporate adoption.

So who actually wants to secure their data, secure their process, their funnel on the blockchain? I know there's a couple of bigger partners here. I was listening to, I think, the keynote this morning, and there was one on UCP, right?

Mm-hmm. We do actually still use payments in the blockchain ecosystem. That's a big part of the fiduciary duty that we have.

And so, there are additional bridges that we still need to build between DeFi and TradFi, and so experts that are good in that. I'm hoping that we see some better implementations moving forward in the next year. Oh, cool.

And where do people find you? Find me? Yeah.

LinkedIn. I'm on X @IntersectOSO. That's the Open Source Office, Open Source Committee.

And you can probably find me at events. So this is my third summit in a row. I don't really plan on missing any, so I'd probably have to be laid up if I did in the future.

But other Cardano events as well. I think the next big one for Cardano in general is actually a blockchain conference in Vegas, Las Vegas. It's called Rare Evo, and it is a multi-blockchain conference.

It's right before AI4, actually. So, if you're going, just extend the stay just a little bit and come and hang out. It's actually a really fun experience, and you do get to see a little bit more of what actually happens on chain, whether you know it or not.

So you can walk in, talk to these projects, and there'll be a number of them that'll say, "Here's this call to action right here at our booth," but now you've just done something on the Cardano blockchain, and now we can see that forever. All right. Okay, folks, you heard it here.

If you want to be at the center of the blockchain meets AI, meets payments, he's your guy. There we go. Thanks, Mike.

Thanks. We'll be back in a minute.