Chang upgrade: a big step in changing the world with Cardano

The Chang* Cardano upgrade will take place on Sunday 1st September at 21:44 UTC . In a recent video message, Input | Output’s Charles Hoskinson set out the importance of the hard fork at a symbolic venue – Jackson Hole – where he was attending the SALT conference. This Wyoming resort is popular for three reasons: skiing in winter, trout fishing in summer, and an annual gathering of central bankers since 1982.'

The venue was picked to attract Paul A. Volcker, then chairman of the US Federal Reserve and a man keen on fly fishing. Jackson Hole moved from the financial to the front pages of the world’s press during the nascent financial crises in 2007. There, bankers, economists, government representatives and others deliberated over monetary policy, such as quantitative easing and other responses to the Great Recession.

Elsewhere in the world, these crises sparked a very different response – Satoshi Nakamoto's 2008 Bitcoin-defining paper. That paper changed Hoskinson’s life. And his response – the Cardano blockchain and the academic and engineering infrastructure that underpins it – is also changing the way the world works.

Below is an edited extract from the video by Hoskinson about the Chang upgrade, its importance to Cardano, and the future it may herald.

Why Voltaire

Decentralization and the concept of sound money has always been a bedrock of the cryptocurrency space. Another bedrock is the idea of being governed by the many for the many, instead of the few. With blockchains we don’t have leaders; instead, we all come together as a community and decide on doing things. Building a decentralized government to run Cardano in the decades ahead is a tremendous challenge. For the past two years, we've worked on creating the age of Voltaire with many people in more than 25 countries.

Cardano Improvement Proposal CIP-1694, set out the technical design of a minimum viable government for the Voltaire system . It’s the beginning of something that will blossom into a thousand flowers and a thousand approaches. This took time and effort from so many people, far too many to thank individually. But because of their efforts, the world will look a little different after the Chang hard fork that will implement CIP-1694. Hard forks to implement new eras are easy on Cardano. We did it with Vasil, we did it with Alonzo, and again with Shelley. But Chang is the most consequential upgrade because it unlocks the most advanced governance system in the history of the cryptocurrency industry. It combines concepts such as liquid democracy with that of a constitutional republic.

The crown jewel of Cardano

Chang enables strong institutions to work through a budget or a roadmap. Furthermore, it unlocks the crown jewel of Cardano – a sovereign wealth fund of 1.5bn ada valued at almost $600m today. This is a truly extraordinary thing to be used by and for every single one of the millions of members in the Cardano ecosystem. It’s amazing that so many people who don’t know each other, have never even met each other, are now going to work together through a blockchain and make decisions whose consequences will ripple through the history of the world.

The futures of nation states and commerce can, in some way, be influenced by what we do as a community. In the Cardano world, the technology that’s been brought to bear is truly extraordinary.

Cardano has a reputation for being the most reliable blockchain besides Bitcoin. This is vital because if people are going to build the world’s future economic, political, and social systems, they ought to build on bedrock. They ought to build on granite, not quicksand. We've had to do things the hard way as an ecosystem, accepting the criticism of our peers at times. Sometimes, we’re not the first to market, but we will always be best in market, and governance is no exception. By unlocking the abilities of millions of people and their representatives to sit and think about where we should go, we can collectively solve the hard problems facing Cardano.

How do we market and brand the Cardano ecosystem? How do we communicate who we are? How do we find funding for those vital projects unloved by venture capital? How do we ensure that the best developers and scientists continue to find funding to take the platform to the next level? And where should the roadmap go? These are hard questions, and the decisions cannot be made by any single individual, company, or leader, but only by the collective will of an ecosystem. The purpose of Voltaire is to harness, aggregate, and refine that collective will into one clear voice – despite our decentralization – about where to go and how to get there. The reality is that no one is smarter than everyone.

No matter how brilliant or virtuous a founder could be, we will win because Voltaire brings together the collective intelligence of the whole. This is the promise and magic of an on-chain government and something that we will show the industry is our unique path forward. I'm proud of that. I'm proud of so many of you who spent so long working for nothing. You volunteered, you showed up, and nobody had to tell you to do it. You just woke up in the morning and said ‘I could make a difference. I'm part of something bigger than myself, and I believe the work we do here matters not just for us, but for the world.’

Cardano is built for decades

I'd like to thank each and every one of you for the time that you put in over the last two years in the Voltaire workshops, the forums, online and in person. Together, we will be able to embrace a new era, the beginning of a journey that will take us to the highest peaks. Cardano is built to look at the world in terms of decades and centuries, a stark contrast to the ‘move fast and break things’ blockchain industry around us. We don’t particularly care about the ebbs and flows in the markets because we’re here to stay.

Time and again, we've proven that we make the best decisions. Whether it be first to market with liquid non-custodial staking, which everybody is now trying to copy; or Hydra Doom demonstrating how far we can go using the power of the extended UTXO model (EUTXO) paired with state channels. Software engineers appreciate how easy it is to do rollups on EUTXO, as we've seen with zero-knowledge ventures, from our partner chains model, and with all the things that are coming out with input endorsers. Every step of the way, our decisions have been guided by research papers – 210 and counting – written by 168 scientists and a multitude of engineers hailing from South America to Japan. For the first time, we can match that incredible innovation and engineering with an army of people on the governance side who are ready and willing to help get us where we need to go.

Of course, mistakes have been made in the past 10 years. There have been missed opportunities, roadmap items that should have been prioritized in different ways. But no project is ever going to be free of error. The power of decentralized governance is that we have the freedom to admit such things, and we know how to leverage those failures to be able to pursue wiser and better ventures. Our ability to overcome our mistakes, gain wisdom, and learn to grow is a unique competitive advantage. We are not captured by dogma or the ego of a founder. We are not captured by a desire to pursue vanity. Instead, we’re here to do the right thing. We want the world to be better. We want it to be a better place for everybody to live in.

Voltaire and Satoshi’s blockchain vision

And we want to realize Satoshi’s vision. When he wrote his watershed paper in 2008, Bitcoin was a social contract. It was a direction for humanity’s future. It wasn’t the end, but rather the beginning of the story. We picked up the flag and have continued to carry it. Not only have we made progress, but the industry deep down inside looks to us for leadership because following this path is tough. It’s not sexy, it’s not glorious. In fact, leaders face criticism and scorn and stagnation every day. But in the long term, we will pioneer a world where each and every person is truly equal, and there is fair consideration based on algorithmic governance. By century’s end, all economic, political, and social systems have the potential to be touched by a blockchain. And if we continue on our path, that blockchain will be Cardano. The world will run on it because that will be the just thing, and the right thing. It’s only by the fact that we’re willing to endure the journey that we get to see the summit.

As a co-founder of Cardano with Jeremy Wood, I'm proud that you stuck with this project for so long. It’s been hard, but it’s been fun. After Chang, I'm still going to be here, but like you, I'll just be another community member. There’s no special Charles. That is the truth of decentralization. And that is the reality and nature of a structure that is here to stay because it can survive the loss of its founders. It can survive the founders being wrong. It can survive bad roadmaps.

We’ll wake up in the future knowing Cardano’s institutions are strong, the governance is strong. And we’ll know that tomorrow's future will be better than today. I've been to 74 countries in pursuit of my Cardano dream. I've met tens of thousands of people, and I've seen the passion and the enthusiasm, the excitement. Now, I can’t wait to go to 100 countries over the next decade and I can’t wait to see Cardano running nation states. We’re going to make that happen, and we’re going to make that happen together as equals. So to all of you, thank you – and welcome to the age of Voltaire.

*The upgrade is named as a tribute to Phil Chang of Input | Output, who passed away suddenly in 2022. Phil Chang's significant contributions to Cardano's governance strategies and the Voltaire concept have left a lasting impact.

Find out more:

• Charles Hoskinson’s Age of Voltaire video
• Why hard forks are easy on Cardano
• Chang documentation and testnet.