With institutions starting to offer crypto ETFs, the battle to keep blockchain governance decentralized will soon kick into high gear.

How can #Cardano prepare for that eventuality?

Here's a few lessons we can take from efforts to keep governments free of corporate control.
🧵 In the mid-to-late 1800's, the US saw the rise of mega-corporations like Standard Oil, Carnegie Steel and JP Morgan.

This was a new challenge to the democratic process and

over time, it became very evident that these entities held alarming influence over the political process

When discussing Cardano parameters, most of us are familiar with k and minpool fee by now

but have you heard of

"a0" ?

This parameter governs how an SPO's locked pledge (their personal commitment) affects the reward rate they and their delegators earn.

Let's dig in! 🧵 a0 is a variable in Cardano's staking reward equation

which can be any number between 0 - ♾️

and defines the degree to which an SPO's pledged stake affects the amount of rewards their pool earns with each produced block.

Of #Cardano's three main scaling strategies,

Hydra will most likely be the first we see really improve Cardano's user experience since it's been in active development for a while now

So, where are we at, and what's coming next?

Here's the TLDR, and some unexpected Alpha 👀🧵 Whatever the IOG's Hydra team has been doing, they've certainly been very busy

Consistently within the daily top 1-3 in Cardano-related Github commits.

And GitHub is where we can see what they're working on NOW and what's in their ROADMAP

https://twitter.com/ProofOfCardano/status/1661009163047292928?s=20

Oroborous Vs BFT Style Consensus

Cardano is famous for it's security and robustness, but is its consensus mechanism more secure and reliable than competitors?

And if so, how?

Here are some reasons I'm bullish on Cardano's longest chain consensus mechanism 🧵👇 First, we'll look at how Oroborous and most BFT protocols work

Then we'll look at how they hold up against likely attacks and network failures

Last, we'll summarize some exciting improvements coming to Oroborous over the next couple years.

This'll be fun!

I got some really good counter-arguments in the replies to this thread about the benefits making ADA inflationary.

I'm not quite as worried about the supply cap anymore

Here's some of the best arguments from advocates of #Cardano's supply cap

🧵👇

https://twitter.com/TobiasIlskov/status/1658155675246292992?t=YMe0oWvwtHU-jls0inmtRQ&s=19

1) Tampering With Monetary Policy Sets a Dangerous Precedent

@cardanoan argued that if we introduce inflation to help incentivize staking, it would theoretically open the door to all the inflationary embezzlement we see and hate in TradFi. The supply cap needs to be untouchable

Unpopular Opinion:

The more I think about it, the more I feel #Cardano's ADA supply cap is a long term liability.

We rightfully consider inflation one of the worst bogeymen of TradFi,

but in a PoS system I don't think inflation is necessary bad at all

My thoughts 🧵👇 First we should ask, what aspects of Cardano does its monetary policy influence?

- The long term price of ADA (store of value)
- Staking Incentives (network security)
- Transaction fees (user experience)

Let's compare how these fair with capped and inflationary models...

#Cardano has a lot of advantages as it moves into the next bull cycle

but it also has some serious short and long term issues that we need to understand and resolve

So, what are some of Cardano's competitive vulnerabilities?

Here are 8 🧵👇 Vulnerability 1: Relatively high transaction fees

While Cardano's fees are a lot lower than #Ethereum and #Bitcoin, they are still significantly higher than other 3rd gen blockchain's like Solana, Algorand, Tezos etc...

https://twitter.com/wandering_stoic/status/1656181965815685121?t=99EsVZ7aj0Kz5eigSYVTcA&s=19

Few industries are more competitive than the L1 Smart Contract Space.

Does Cardano have a moat?

Here's my analysis of CARDANO'S SUSTAINABLE COMPETITIVE ADVANTAGES:

I see 6 🧵👇🏼 MOAT 1: Features of EUTXO (Hard, but not impossible to replicate)

With the exception of Ergo, all other SC chains use the account model, so effectively speaking the following advantages of EUTXO are unique to Cardano.

1) Knowing exactly what a transaction fee will be

Since the rebirth of meme madness, #Cardano's been consistently working at near full capacity

Some are discouraged that even after the Vasil upgrade last year we're only doing about 3 smart contract TPS

While that's true, Cardano is CURRENTLY capable of probably 50-100x more 🧵 There's two ways to increase TPS:
- Increase block size/frequency
- Make transactions more data efficient (or smaller)

The Vasil Upgrade enables dramatic improvements to both, but that capacity hasn't been exploited yet.

Why You Should Be Excited About #Cardano's Upcoming Midnight Sidechain 🎉

- Scalability and Privacy Through ZK Rollups
- Its Advantages Over Other Privacy Solutions
- How It Paves the Way For Cardano's Comprehensive Sidechain Toolkit

And much more... 🧵👇🏼 IOG has indicated it has "wonderful plans for ZK Rollups", and that they focus on Midnight.

"ZK rollups" are a scalability tool that bundles many transactions and submits them together, so it's probable Midnight will serve a similar role in scalability as Polygon's ZK EVM on ETH