Below you will find my write-up as an independent after action report for the issue impacting Cardano late last week, along with things I learned, why I was impressed, and what I think we can do better at in the future. I try to strike the balance between confronting the seriousness of the issue, while defusing most of the over-stated positions from talking heads on Twitter. This is an adult conversation, not whatever the children are engaging in on Twitter this week. I don't think it's productive to get into debates of what constitutes "downtime" or not; Instead, I tried to equip you with a framework where you, dear reader, can think about these things for yourself, and decide what you want to call it. I just ask that you make that decision for yourself, or allow your audience to do so, rather than parroting some pre-decided talking points. More informed discussion leads to a higher quality industry overall. 314pool.com/post/cardano-pos…

For those wondering how @midgardprotocol is progressing, I decided to try it myself. Specifically, I tried from this commit, which @phil_uplc let me know was a decently stable snapshot, if you want to try it yourself. github.com/Anastasia-Labs/mi… I was able to succesfully deploy some SundaeSwap contracts, make a deposit, create a constant product pool between two dummy tokens (VALHANILLA / BIFROSTING, for a bit of thematic punnery), and execute a swap of 31,415 VALHANILLA for 30,369 BIFROSTING. The TxHash of the execution of that first swap is 68ae28279b0881ffd742b2208df6b2bf308101025a7a9eac45769442b34aec9d. @phil_uplc confirmed that I'm the first person to run a smart contract more complicated than "always fails" or "always succeeds", meaning I can now claim the title of first to run meaningful contracts on Hydra, Leios, and Midgard. My trophy belt is getting quite full! :) My honest assessment: progress is impressive, but developer experience right now is rough; there were quite a few things I had to hack through to get it working. The protocol is fiendishly complex, and so its success will entirely depend on how well the team can iterate and, as we say, "finish the second 80%" for a production grade protocol.

Late at night last night, at the 3.5th node diversity workshop, I was able to get a Leios node working, connected to a private devnet, and submitting sundaeswap transactions. So far as @ch1bo_ knows, were the first people to execute smart contracts / a dApp on a real Leios testnet 😅 At the end of the day, this is a vanity milestone, but I'm always proud when Sundae is able to be on the bleeding edge in Cardano. The private network is currently being pushed to 5 kilobytes worth of transactions per second, which is around 25 txs/s. The testnet is just warming up: linear Leios is expected to do around 40x that throughout! If you're curious, the main bottleneck right now is the mempool, which we had lots of interesting discussions about how to redesign to support the increased load of Leios. All that is to say, Leios is very real, progressing fast, and very exciting.

SIDE NOTE: I love each and every one of you, but... STARTING NOW, Any proposal where 2 or more people message me pestering me to vote will be an automatic No Vote (as in, I will not vote) with no justification. When and how I vote is between my delegators and I. If you delegate to me, or want to, and want to know *why* I vote, or how I *intend* to vote, so you can decide whether to delegate elsewhere, that is totally fine, I can be reached by email most consistently. If you are not, and have no intention to delegate to me, or are associated in any way with the proposal you're asking me to vote on, then how and whether I vote is no business of yours. What you don't realize, even if you have the best of intentions, is that that kind of outreach comes from *every* direction, and is *quite* overwhelming. I put a *lot* of thought into each of my votes and rationales, and having the extra pressure is really not productive.

I just voted YES on both the Cardano Summit and Token 2049 proposals. The Token2049 proposal was an easy yes, as it is consistent with getting Cardano in front of eyeballs it hasn't been in front of before. The Summit was a harder yes. Ultimately, the decider for me was that the @Cardano_CF was receptive to feedback and revised their proposal, and that the cost of the summit is trending down year over year. Cardano is at a key inflection point. We're launching so many cool new things (at both the application and capability layer) in 2026, and if we don't spend boldly to highlight those things, and highlight them with people *outside* of the Cardano community, it will mean very little. To both of the proposers of the above proposals, *please* make sure that these events are constantly beating the drum about ecosystem stars, strengths, and new capabilities, and don't turn into luke-warm repetitions of past refrains that everyone has already heard before. You can find my full justifications on my blog, at 314pool.com

Cherry on top of a great week! It was a rocky road to get here, because Gummiworm, as a protocol, ain't vanilla, but now it's looking Mint! Jokes aside, please reach out if you have any feedback about the specification. Maybe as my next live stream, I can go through this in detail?

First time streaming to Twitter; I've done a few streams on Twitch in the past. Hopefully some people found it informative, let me know if there are other topics you'd like me to cover in future streams!

This coming Wednesday I'll be doing some live-coding. Currently the plan is to talk about (and show off) how Sundae Labs is leveraging AI to accelerate development, without giving up the commitment to quality or craftsmanship that has made us successful. I'm hoping to co-stream through the @pragma_org Discord, and the official @SundaeSwap Twitter account, I hope to see you there!

I am still in the process of voting, but I have cast votes on 3 of IO's proposals. I have voted YES on the Cardano Upgrades and the Consensus Initiative. I have no ongoing conflict of interest on these proposals, and believe these are essential upgrades for Cardano. I do hope to see a stronger go-to-market / business development plan from the Consensus team, as just building the technology is insufficient, but this wasn't a big enough problem to challenge the proposal, in my opinion. I have voted ABSTAIN on the Blockfrost proposal, though I think it is a good one, because I have discussed with @stakenuts in the past the possibility of being a third party vendor to assist with Project Cayley. While nothing is signed, the possibility that I might receive funds requires me to abstain. I do intend to vote on a majority of the rest, but my integrity requires that I consider them carefully, and drafting well thought out justifications for my vote on top of all my other responsibilities is challenging.😅 You can find longer form jusitifications for my votes on my blog, 314pool.com/

If you're going to ask me to review your vibe coded node, please provide instructions for how to run a private testnet with 2 haskell nodes and your node. Also, you might want to make sure it actually *opens a connection* to the other two nodes. Pretty hard to have a blockchain without nodes talking to eachother. I'm giving them the benefit of the doubt while I ask for clarification, but expect a write-up soon. :)

Breaking my twitter hiatus to clarify something about my vibe-node bounty: Since I'm trying to stay off twitter, and twitter tends to send things to message requests anyway, if you'd like to claim the bounty, please send an email to my first name at sundae.fi, with the subject line "Vibe-node bounty claim" and a link to the git repository. I had the first official submission, and I missed it because of this. So, once I confirm they actually intended for me to evaluate it as a serious submission, I will report back whether they successfully claimed the bounty.

We are always thrilled to welcome Pi Lanningham of @SundaeSwap back to the Rare Evo stage! @Quantumplation is a longtime Cardano contributor who has spent years supporting the ecosystem through advocacy, education, strategic guidance, consulting, and open-source development.

Breaking my Twitter silence to announce my YES vote on Dingo, because it's just that important: 314pool.com/post/dingo-vote-… TL;DR: - alternative nodes may increase risk of consensus bugs - a lack of alternative nodes exposes us to much scarier existential ledger soundness bugs - This gets worse as Cardano accelerates - A single alternate node is insufficient to resolve this - @blinklabs_io are uniquely qualified to deliver that third alternate node As a reminder, I am largely off Twitter. The best place to follow me is my blog, 314pool.com, where I publish vote rationales and talk about things that are important to me. It also now has a place for you to suggest topics for me to write about, so it can be a place for me to talk about what's important to you, too. I've got a great blog on ed25519 signatures in the works :)

I hope my life's work will be to make or contribute to a meaningful rise in the global floor and median quality of life. I believe the best way to do this is for the world to build social institutions on top of transparent, efficient, tamper proof ledgers that reduce bureaucracy, exploitation, and waste. I believe the second best way to do this is to build up access to finance, passive income, and financial literacy for as many people as possible. That's why I'm in software. That's why I'm in crypto. That's why I'm on Cardano. And that's why I've built up Sundae Labs as the software company it is. Every day, and nearly everything I do, is geared towards this. It's why my salary is substantially lower than I could make literally anywhere else, lower than the job I left, and exactly the median salary of what my team makes. It's why my net worth (excluding the completely illiquid value of my equity in Sundae Labs) has been flat or slightly declining since I started this journey. It's why I've largely soldiered through death threats and some of the most toxic hateful bile you can imagine. But spending time on Twitter, where I've often enjoyed connecting with an audience, has become a threat to that mission. It's clear that I'm not going to solve the problems I see in the world through Twitter discourse. For a long time I thought it might help: engage in good faith to share my perspectives, break down what I know so others can understand in the hopes that it contributes to their ability to navigate the technological changes that are coming, and serve as the best example I can for effective and thoughtful discourse. But instead, especially lately, it has simply become a drain on my energy and motivation. Even if I engage less, just *reading* the way we treat each other is demoralizing. Even people who I believe have good intentions can't help but contribute to a storm of negativity that is fighting to sweep us out to sea. There is a mob that is so frustrated by the state of the world and the very problems me and other builders are trying to solve that they can't help but funnel that discontent into a... miasma, directed at anything and everything around them. Somehow posts that are "just asking questions" and would, in any other environment be totally welcome, end up as weapons picked up off the bloody ground to be hurled in anger at an unintended target. Somehow close friends grow so embittered with each other they'd rather tear the thing they both believed in in half to spite the other. Somehow legitimate mistakes immediately get brandished as fraud because scorched earth total-war tactics to destroy someone we dislike become the only thing that can hold our attention, the only thing we can think to do in our ineffectiveness against a cruel and difficult world. Somehow some of the kindest and most like-minded builders have their patience ground to dust until they reach their breaking point and they lash out in ways that don't reflect who they are. We're all so fucking tense, or sick to our stomach, or caught up in the sound of our own voice, that it's impossible for us to take a beat and sort out a misunderstanding in DMs before making some public fucking tabloid accusation or insult on the timeline. And again, I don't think (would like to believe, as a fundamentally optimistic person) that most of this is in bad faith. But the medium leaves no other outcome for us. So, for me, Twitter is no longer just a waste of time, it's an active threat to my goals. It's a long drag on a cigarette taken between work calls that no longer even brings me comfort, it's just the thing I do, and it's slowly giving us all cancer. It saps my energy, ruins my mood, and makes me, on darker days, doubt whether any of this is even worth it, let alone possible. I don't want my life's work to amount to being unhappy and resentful of the people I'm trying to help (yes, even if you and I have disagreements, even if we hate each other, I want better for you too). So, I will be trying the nicotine patches yet again. Since there's no "Non Smoking" section of Twitter, I will be dramatically reducing the time I spend on here, and funneling that energy into other, more productive channels. I hope to write more for my blog, 314pool.com. Perhaps I'll get back into live-streaming some of my work on Twitch. If you want to stay in touch and we're not connected elsewhere, the best way is by email. It's just my first name at sundae.fi. (Yes, I know this isn't an airport, and I don't have to announce my departure. I considered just disappearing, as this feels a little bit melodramatic. But in the end, I wanted people to know why I've gone quiet, and how to reach me.) I hope I'm not alone in noticing this trend, especially within our community. If any of this resonates with you, it might be worth looking at what the timeline is accomplishing (or not) for you. And don't worry. Recent weeks have been harder than most, as I'm sure you've all seen on the timeline, but I'm made of tougher stuff. I'll still be here and building, and you'll still see the impact of the work that my team and I do (and boy do they have some exciting things for you soon). I just really really don't think Twitter is the right place for me to fix the problems I want to fix.

I think we've found and worked around most of the intermittent failures people were seeing, if anyone wants to give it another shot! For those curious, the main culprit was a subtle timing issue; when you build a proof, you do so with reference to a specific block state. This is to ensure your transaction doesn't become invalid every 6 seconds as new blocks come out. Then, when validating your transaction, the midnight node looks up the block state based on the `created_time` of the transaction. The midnight-js SDK makes it very difficult to ensure these align. We were able to work around it, and will be making some suggestions on how the SDK could be more robust and help people avoid this foot-gun.

Restarting the server to scale it up, please hold :)

Midnight Mainnet is officially live! Huge congrats to everyone involved with this massive undertaking. Now that the foundations have been set, how do we make onboarding completely frictionless for users? Meet the Midnight Capacity Exchange. Try our first demo below to see how it works: