Cardano Over Coffee ☕ Open Mic 🎤

The Spaces covered a wide-ranging community discussion around Cardano’s present and near future: the final days of Midnight’s browser “mining” event, practical guidance on wallet use and anti-bot/blacklist rules, and tokenomics concerns. A major segment debated marketing versus engineering priorities, introducing the Amplify Cardano initiative for grassroots campaigns and events, and logistics for meetups (moving from Meetup.com to Luma) and Nairobi side-events in February. Governance dominated mid-session: frustrations with DRePs’ inactivity, “snap election” procedures, committee compensation, and the risks of quadratic voting versus participation thresholds (now 2% of actively voting ADA). The technical highlight was Phil’s deep dive on Midgard, a rollup L2 for Cardano: how operators earn fees, the two‑week challenge window and fast withdrawals, and why Hydra (state channels) fits closed, small groups while rollups suit general-purpose high throughput. Throughout, Lido emphasized “earn ADA” paths and building local hubs (especially in Nairobi), Jenny pushed pragmatic marketing and ambassador improvements without hype, Devin outlined Amplify Cardano’s bottom-up funding, and Musa voiced community fatigue with internal conflicts and weak marketing alignment.

Cardano Over Coffee – Recap and Analysis

Midnight “Scavenger” Mining: Experience, Rules, and Frictions

• Mining flow and wallet rules

  • Lido flagged that ADA wallets that qualified for Midnight’s free airdrop are blacklisted from participating in mining; miners should use new wallets to avoid disqualification. He advised waiting until the December 8 consolidation guidance before moving funds to avoid wallet blacklisting risk.
  • Alex attempted to consolidate multiple internal addresses to one, encountered site errors (404 on the address lookup page), and considered trying alternate addresses not tied to the airdrop.
  • Reports of intermittent site/browser mining instability: forced wallet re-connection after OS restart, inconsistent address recognition, and the feeling that “testing was just enough.”

• Emissions, solves, and last-day dynamics

  • Participants noted a sharp variance in solve rates—some days were “abysmal,” then the final day’s difficulty curve eased non-linearly, yielding more overnight solves.
  • Community chatter estimated >300 million solves overall.

• Bot/anti-sybil posture

  • Lido hypothesized Midnight would favor broad participation (“spirit” of the team) and likely embed anti-bot mechanisms; this aligns with blacklisting airdrop-qualified wallets from mining.

Token Supply, Valuation, and Metrics Skepticism

• 24B token supply and fully diluted value

  • Alex speculated that pre-minting 24B tokens ensures lower price per token, even with a small float, because market capitalization (FDV) scales with total supply. Locked status doesn’t affect FDV—existence of the tokens does.
  • Lido countered with examples (e.g., Liquid/Fluid) where tiny circulating supply can inflate price until unlocking reduces it.

• Critique of crypto “success” metrics

  • Lido and Alex drew analogies to CPU/megapixel marketing wars: whatever metric is advantageous becomes “the” metric. They questioned TVL, market cap, decentralization counts, etc., as often misaligned with real adoption and value creation.

Marketing, Messaging, and Ecosystem Events

• Musa’s proposal for global same-day events

  • Musa advocated for a synchronized global Cardano day, coordinated across countries, to galvanize the community and improve marketing reach. He raised cost and governance challenges under decentralization, noting entity friction.

• Amplify Cardano initiative (Devon)

  • Devon presented “Amplify Cardano” (amplifycardano.io), designed as a bottom-up complement to top-down entity-led event strategies:
    • Two application tracks: events (meetups, workshops, side events) and marketing campaigns (content creation, social media, billboards, product launches).
    • Goal: omni-channel cohesion and empowerment of projects and creators, rather than sporadic one-offs.
  • Epoch welcomed the initiative; friendly ribbing over “omni” buzzword aside, the approach was well received.

• Jenny’s stance on hype vs substance

  • Jenny emphasized onboarding through real utility and relevance rather than hype cycles. She recounted successful, low-fanfare onboarding of friends and family and cautioned against “crazy hype for no reason.”

Cardano Twitter, Ambassadors, and Meetup Infrastructure

• Cardano community account transition

  • Jenny discussed transitioning the @Cardano account toward community stewardship, and programmatic improvements to strengthen ambassador impact.

• Ambassador platform attribution

  • Lido requested proper credit: the Mesh team and Lido (within their ecosystem collaboration) contributed to the ambassador platform—presentations often only cite Mesh.

• Meetup migration to Luma

  • Jenny plans to migrate from Meetup.com (expensive, underused) to Luma over roughly a year. Lido cautioned that Meetup’s global map/discoverability is valuable and suggested Intersect and CF collaborate so the new stack doesn’t lose the “hub-like” feel.
  • Discussion included the possibility of Intersect helping align ambassador-led meetups with a hub model, given 80+ ambassador countries; cost, tooling, and data visibility are key.

Nairobi Hub and Fellowship Model (Lido)

• Local hub blueprint

  • Lido outlined the Nairobi Blockchain Center approach: emphasize community as currency—regular meetups, shared learning, and social cohesion (yes, pizza and beer) in a lower-capital environment.

• Nicodano Fellowship Cohort

  • Beginning January: 20-person cohort across roles (e.g., SIP editors, open-source contributors). Small stipends, participation requirements, recurring Thursday meetings. Primary aim: grow builder engagement and content contribution in Africa.

Technical Deep Dive: Midgard Rollup vs Hydra and Hydra Zoa (Phil)

• What Midgard is bringing to Cardano

  • Midgard is an L2 rollup (Cardano-native) enabling high throughput and low fees, while maintaining L1 compatibility:
    • Any L1 app (NFT minting, DEX trading, lending) can run cheaper/faster with better UX on Midgard.
    • Phil reported 8 of the top 10 Cardano apps by TVL plan to deploy on Midgard at mainnet.

• Current status

  • Pre-prod: deposits via a forked Lace wallet by switching network to “Midgard (Lace).” Withdrawals are next to complete the cycle.

• Operators, economics, and security

  • Unlimited operators; revenue model: 75% of net fee revenue to operators (fees generated minus L1 cost and a 25% donation to Cardano Treasury).
  • Bond requirement: 100k ADA per operator.
  • Fraud-proof model: two-week challenge window. Any party can submit a fraud proof; dishonest blocks are invalidated and operators who published them lose bond and status. This discourages griefing and ensures canon only reflects valid state.
  • Fast withdrawals: third-party liquidity services can instantly bridge funds to L1 for a small fee, while the actual L2 withdrawal settles after the challenge window.

• Hydra comparison

  • Hydra (state channels) vs Midgard (rollup):
    • Hydra requires all participants to multi-sign every state transition; participant set size limits (currently ~7–9). Great for high-frequency, zero-fee interactions in closed groups, but not ideal for general-purpose apps serving thousands of users.
    • Hydra Tail improves fanning-out logic but does not remove the participant-set limitation or multi-signing requirement; liveness remains a bottleneck (one node dropping stalls the head).
    • Hydra Zoa aims to reduce complexity, optimize for the optimistic path, and enable networks of interconnected heads. Still state-channel-based; non-participants must trust participants collectively.

• End-user security nuance

  • Hydra inherits L1 security only for participants; non-participants must trust at least one honest participant in the head. Midgard secures via on-chain validation and fraud proofs, minimizing trust in operators.

Governance: Intersect, Atlantic Council, Compensation, and Snap Elections

• Intersect committees and compensation

  • Epoch and Jenny noted disappointment that earlier committee compensation proposals didn’t pass or weren’t backed by entities, given Cardano’s governance emphasis. Now, compensation is reportedly being enabled; Intersect committees will have paid contributions, with claims soon in member dashboards.

• Atlantic Council retirement and snap elections

  • Jenny confirmed retirement effective Nov 25, prompting a “snap election.” Debate ensued over the term, but in parliamentary systems (e.g., UK, Canada), “snap election” is standard for an early call.
  • Quorum: certain bodies require seven members; activity stalls until seats are refilled. Jenny suggested contingency mechanisms to avoid governance halts during transitions.

Catalyst Voting: Quadratic vs Alternatives and Thresholds

• Quadratic voting concerns

  • Phil objected to reintroducing quadratic voting due to game-theory exploits (splitting ADA across multiple wallets scripts). It advantages sophisticated users and penalizes regular voters.
  • Epoch joked about “how many wallets to open” if quadratic returns.

• Active participation thresholds

  • Lido clarified the threshold shift: from 1% to 2%, and critically counting only active voting ADA (not all historically registered ADA). This aligns incentives to real participation.

• Quality vs quantity funding

  • Escalation asked Danny (Catalyst) whether funds must be fully allocated each round, or whether funding only high-quality proposals and rolling unused funds forward is acceptable. He argued for focusing on quality and threshold adherence rather than optics-driven volume.
  • Reference was made to “Treasury Direct” outcomes surprising some by funding more proposals than expected.

Stablecoins, Wallet Lore, and Misc

• USDM recognition

  • Jenny highlighted USDM winning an award; community celebrated.

• Large ADA swap rumor

  • Jenny raised a “mysterious wallet” that swapped ~14M ADA to USDA; comments suggested voucher redemption at ICO pricing; discussion stayed speculative.

Upcoming Events and Logistics

• Nairobi, February (11–13)

  • Side events aligned with the summit and Africa tech conference; anticipated large turnout. Additional ideas floated: hackathon/walkathon/bar crawl. Logistics: Nairobi has one international airport (NBO).
  • “Amplify Cardano” encouraged for structured event and marketing proposals.

Key Takeaways

• Midnight mining had uneven difficulty, blacklists apply to airdrop-qualified wallets, and site reliability caused friction. Use fresh wallets for mining; wait for official consolidation guidance.
• Tokenomics discourse emphasized skepticism toward surface metrics; supply and FDV framing matters more than lock status for price optics.
• Amplify Cardano offers a practical path for grassroots marketing and events to complement entity-led strategies.
• Ambassador program improvements and Meetup-to-Luma migration must preserve global discoverability; Intersect–CF alignment could help retain the “hub network” feel.
• Midgard is a significant L2 addition: operator economics, fraud-proof security, fast withdrawals, and L1 app compatibility likely to lift UX and throughput across Cardano.
• Hydra remains powerful for closed-group, high-frequency use; Hydra Zoa may improve scalability via interconnected heads, but trust and multi-sig limits persist.
• Governance is entering a transition: Atlantic Council retirement and snap elections require careful quorum/continuity planning; compensation for committees is being enabled.
• Catalyst should anchor on active participation thresholds and fairness; quadratic voting remains contentious due to exploitability.

Open Questions

• Will Midnight publish explicit anti-bot/anti-sybil criteria and wallet consolidation rules beyond Dec 8? How will enforcement work?
• What’s the precise plan and timeline for @Cardano account transition to community governance?
• Can Luma (or a custom tool) replicate Meetup’s global discovery map for Cardano meetups?
• Midgard operator onboarding: detailed SPO-equivalent docs timeline, and how k-parameters (operator set sizing) might be tuned post-mainnet.
• Catalyst’s formal stance: must all funds be allocated per round, or can unspent funds roll forward to preserve quality standards?

Suggested Actions

• For miners: use non-airdrop wallets; hold consolidation until official guidance to prevent blacklisting.
• For organizers/content creators: apply to Amplify Cardano (events or campaigns) to secure support and align with an omni-channel marketing strategy.
• For meetup leaders: plan the migration path to Luma, coordinate with Intersect/CF to maintain global visibility and standardization.
• For developers/SPOs: monitor Midgard pre-prod, review operator documentation when published, and evaluate economic viability (bond, fee share).
• For governance participants: register for the snap election, fill seats to maintain quorum, and track committee compensation claims in Intersect.
• For Catalyst voters/proposers: understand active ADA thresholds, prepare for potential voting method changes, and focus proposals on clear utility, roadmaps, and budget reasonableness.