We Did It, Cardano Is 100% Decentralised

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The Cardano blockchain has gone through another hard fork, the Polym hard fork. This is following the Chang hard fork late in 2024. And this brings the Cardano ecosystem to its full level of decentralization, putting the blockchain in the hands of the community. We’re going to go through all the details of what it exactly means for the Cardano blockchain and how you may see changes to the Cardano ecosystem in 2025. Let’s go through all the details.

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Hey everyone, I’m Peter Buie. If this is first time here, make sure you hit that thumbs up, like, subscribe on your way in. It’s my first video for 2025 and hopefully I can pump these out for you on a regular basis to keep you guys up to date with everything that’s happening in the blockchain space. But this is super exciting news. ADA holders now have real voting power on blockchain decisions like parameter changes, treasury withdrawals and much more.

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The Cardano blockchain is now in the hands of the ecosystem itself, the builders, the holders of ADA, the people that can actually vote on chain itself. So if you are an ADA holder, if you do have a wallet set up, you can vote on various parameter changes. You can vote for various proposals that get put in place. And this puts you in control. It gives you that level of granular control to be able to vote on certain things in the ecosystem.

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is start registering your wallet, become a D rep or delegate your wallet to a D rep, a delegate representative. So someone that can vote on your behalf. So this is really exciting stuff. Now you will see all these headlines about Cardano being the most decentralized blockchain out there, but this is what it actually means. These are the factors that make Cardano so great as a fair distribution. That’s its token distribution. It’s decentralized in the way that the nodes

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and the block producing pools are set up. It has light hardware requirements, making it really easy for you guys to set up a Cardano node and get running and being a part of the ecosystem itself. And last but not least, it’s a massive community of holders and people involved in the ecosystem. But what does the token distribution for Cardano actually look like? And how does it compare to other chains? This fantastic graphic here details it quite well and really shows you how it compares to other ones.

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If you have a look at Cardano here, it has this massive pie, uh, blue here, which is part of the public sale. So this is during this first initial sale, uh, all those tokens were distributed mainly to people that were participating in that ICO initial coin offering. And if you have a look at some other chains here, look at Solana has a tiny slither here, which was part of the public sale and a massive allocation, 48% that is to insiders. These are VCs teams, et cetera. So

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They’re the type of chains that I try to avoid because of that massive holdings within the internal teams itself. So if you have a look at other chains such as Ethereum, EOS, Cosmos and Tezos, they have very big public sale, public holdings in their token distributions as well. So they’re the type of blockchains that I prefer to look into because I know they have a much fairer distribution. This other comment here about the 1100 block producing pools.

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This relates to all the different state pools out there that are currently creating blocks for the ecosystem. So there’s quite a few out there. And this awesome map here gives you a bit of a visualization of its distribution from a geographical point of view. So you can see all the relays of these block producers all around the world. And we even have my own state pools relay here on the east coast of Australia in southeast Queensland. So you.

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can see a lot of that distribution around there. We even have one in Hawaii, which is pretty cool. But it really allows users out there to create these relays and be a part of the ecosystem. Now this other comment here about a light hardware requirement and inclusive network, this is actually one of the reasons why I actually became a block producer on the Cardano ecosystem, because of its low requirements to join the network. I was looking into whether I should start mining some ETH or all sorts of other things.

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The best option for me was to set up a Cardano node because it was so easy to do. Now this here is a blog post that I put together. It looks at the potential revenue and hardware requirements and costs for running a state pool in general. And this would be the type of cost you’d be looking at if you were thinking about setting up a relay or a block producer node for the Cardano ecosystem. Now this is one of the pieces of hardware that I purchased for my home relay. This is HP Elite 800 G2 Mini. This is secondhand.

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This is 11 year old hardware and it cost me $350 off eBay. That’s 350 Australian dollars. And I’ve just got this running on my home broadband internet connection. So it’s a really low, low barrier to entry in regards to becoming a block producer and participating within the network itself. So I absolutely love that. You can pick up one of these off eBay yourself. This is the model that I chose. Pick something that has 32 gig of RAM and

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but there are plenty of hard drive space and you’ll be able to set up your own relay node or even a block producer node as well. You can see here my home relay node, it’s ticking over, it’s doing its thing and you know, it’s had nine days of uptime before I had to do some maintenance about nine and ten days ago. So it’s really easy to do and I highly encourage you guys to try it out yourself. Check out the videos I’ve made around this about setting out the own block producer node.

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Now, one of the really cool things that we look for after the hard fork is which pool is the first one to mint the block in this particular new era. And congratulations to Barry Ailes, one of the biggest contributors to the Kidano ecosystem. He isn’t around much these days, but he put together the very first NFT collection, the space buds, credit NAMI wallet. And he fortunately was the pool that minted the very first block of this.

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governance era on the Cardano ecosystem. If you want to check out the block, I’ll put links to it down below, but you can check out the details here. It was fairly chunky amount of ADA that flowed through that block and the amount of fees it generated as well was quite nice. So it’s good to see that that all worked seamlessly and flawlessly after the hard fork as well. Now, the biggest thing we’re going to see from this particular hard fork is the withdrawals of ADA from its treasury.

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The treasury at the moment is around 1.6 billion ADA and about roughly the same, just a little bit less in USD. So there’s a lot of funds here that projects can tap into and request to start building on top of Cardano. So they may be doing more marketing initiatives, helping scaling solutions, all sorts of things to make Cardano improve and get better over time. So you as an ADA holder yourself,

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you can start putting in proposals and requesting funds from the Treasury. Of course, all the rest of the Cardano ecosystem would have to agree with proposal and vote yes for them to get to get that approval for withdrawing of those funds. But there’s a lot of work here that’s been put in place to make this all possible and happen. And this is the starting point of how decentralized Cardano is going to be.

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There’s other ecosystems that have gone through this, such as Polkadot. And we’ve learned a lot from the Polkadot ecosystem in regards to how their governance has grown and flowed over the last couple of years. So hopefully we’ve learned a lot from that and the Cardano can improve on various aspects that have appeared in the Polkadot ecosystem and other ecosystems that have gone full governance as well. So this is really exciting stuff. Keep an eye on gov.tools.

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where you can see various proposals get submitted, but then also the governance actions that get submitted afterwards, that you as an ADA holder can start voting on as well. So if you are interested, do check out those links. I’ll put references down below for you guys. And if you are unsure about what you need to do in regards to voting, you can always delegate your wallet to a DREP, a delegate representative, or someone else that can vote on your behalf.

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And it’s really also important to do this because I believe the withdrawal of your ADA rewards may have been blocked at the moment until you start delegating to a D-Rep as well. So do check out your wallet. There’ll be various steps in there. I know all of them are now support. I know the majority of the wallets out there do support governance in the Cardano ecosystem. So do check that out. You may very well need to have already delegated to a D-Rep to be able to withdraw your funds. You still get your ADA rewards.

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You just can’t withdraw them from your wallet. So do check out those details. Now what’s next? What has Cardano hit for its roadmap? It’s gone through the various eras of creating its token, creating the decentralized network, going through smart contracts and now through its governance era, what is in progress at the moment is now the scaling side of things. And I know a lot of work has been done on these various scaling solutions to make Cardano even faster. And there’s a lot of L2 solutions that are looking

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to launch this year on Cardano. And I’m pretty excited about what 2025 has coming in. Now, the next steps now after this particular hard fork, we are looking for more people now to start delegating to adverse D-reps or becoming a D-rep yourself. That way we can get the delegate endorsed constitution for the Cardano ecosystem up and running. So this is a constitution in regards to how

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we operate how we conduct ourselves within the ecosystem. So this is a really big document that was put together. We had the constitution ceremony, I think it was called the ceremony back in December last year. So that is a finalization of the decentralization of the Kedana ecosystem. So if you are wanting to learn more about D-reps, if you wanted to become a D-rep yourself, I have a whole bunch of videos here on how to register as a D-rep.

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how to delegate to other DREPs in the ecosystem. And if you’re looking for one, check out the gov.tools website where you can see all these various DREPs that have registered and are part of the Cardano ecosystem. You can check out all their profiles here, see how they stack up within the community, and you can read up more about the particular delegates out there to see their stance and how they could potentially vote within the ecosystem. And these are delegates they could vote on your behalf.

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So if you don’t understand a lot of the technical aspects that are happening within the ecosystem, you can find someone to delegate to and they’ll vote on your behalf. Like I said, check out all the videos here. There’s a lot of useful tutorials covering almost every single wallet that does have voting capabilities within the Cardano ecosystem. So do check out that playlist, links down below for you guys. Now the other really big thing I’m excited about is the Lunar New Year, which a lot of people do celebrate. It’s just ticked over.

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And this year is the year of the snake or should I say year of the SNEK. So if you’re into SNEK or anything like that, it may be a very good year for the Cardano ecosystem and for the SNEK mean coin. We’re seeing a lot of cool things that are happening in the space here around SNEK, and I can’t wait to see what the guys have installed this year. Now, if you enjoyed this video, if you are excited for Cardano in 2025, make sure you hit that thumbs up, that like subscribe on your way out.

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and I’ll keep you guys up to date with everything that’s happening in this space.