Quantumplation | Pi Lanningham

CTO Sundae Labs | to be less active on Twitter

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[Quantumplation | Pi Lanningham @Quantumplation]

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.

https://t.co/gPHc8lNT2U

[Quantumplation | Pi Lanningham @Quantumplation]

@alxaex @ch1bo_ 1000 tOKENA for 996 tOKENB

[Quantumplation | Pi Lanningham @Quantumplation]

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.

[Input Output Group @IOGroup]

Leios is getting closer.

The first public SPO testnet remains on track for June 2026, and progress this week was significant:
• Treasury funding approved by the Cardano community with 88% support
• CIP-0164 update reduced Leios block certificates from ~8 kB to ~200 bytes — around 40× smaller
• The reference implementation was successfully rebased onto the upcoming Dijkstra era
• Piranha, a new adversarial testing tool, is now live for protocol attack simulation

A lot of deep engineering work is coming together behind the scenes and the first public testnet is getting closer!

[Quantumplation | Pi Lanningham @Quantumplation]

@ReasonableSirr @ch1bo_ Dev's can run a local devnet and start building today: https://t.co/w91ufwh0zq

I can't speak for the team on when in June it'll launch, but it seems very promising from what I've seen at the workshop.

[Quantumplation | Pi Lanningham @Quantumplation]

@Cerkoryn @bomberd1234 @phil_uplc Also how did I get tricked into spending more time on Twitter?? Signing back off now lol.

[Quantumplation | Pi Lanningham @Quantumplation]

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 https://t.co/wtBvAD6cTV

[Quantumplation | Pi Lanningham @Quantumplation]

And I just disagree. I think they are important, but the set of people who *really* care (as opposed to paying lip service because it's part of "The Narrative" that they think will make them money) is very small, and largely already loyal to Cardano or BTC. When we focus on that we're showing ads for the TV show people are already in the middle of watching.

[Quantumplation | Pi Lanningham @Quantumplation]

@Cerkoryn @bomberd1234 @phil_uplc Shouldnt*

[Quantumplation | Pi Lanningham @Quantumplation]

@Cerkoryn @bomberd1234 @phil_uplc Again, I'm not saying we concede it. Or that we should try to find ways to improve.

I'm saying it does nothing to drive further adoption, nor should we wait until we've fiddled with the nobs to start trying to get adoption.

[Quantumplation | Pi Lanningham @Quantumplation]

@Cerkoryn @bomberd1234 @phil_uplc And all the fish were going to catch with that net are already here.

[Quantumplation | Pi Lanningham @Quantumplation]

@Cerkoryn @bomberd1234 @phil_uplc (to be clear, I'm not saying I wouldn't bother with trying to improve our decentralization; it's just not what if point people to when trying to sell them on Cardano)

[Quantumplation | Pi Lanningham @Quantumplation]

@Cerkoryn @bomberd1234 @phil_uplc And arguing from the point of decentralization is a difficult argument anyway, so I wouldn't bother. People don't care. Decentralization is a thing we do because it's good for us, not because it's sexy and attractive to potential users.

[Quantumplation | Pi Lanningham @Quantumplation]

What I'm getting at is that that doesn't tell the whole story, because how independent are those actors if they rely on subsidy and delegation from the foundation? In practice, is it closer to 1, as in, one actor could strong arm the others into some nakamoto compromising behavior.

[Quantumplation | Pi Lanningham @Quantumplation]

@Cerkoryn @bomberd1234 @phil_uplc Hmm, 17 people effectively on the solana foundation payroll, or 17 largely independent stakepool operator groups not dependent on the foundation?

Even just by your metric it's substantially better.

[Quantumplation | Pi Lanningham @Quantumplation]

@TheGoldRush my name at sundae dot fi

[Quantumplation | Pi Lanningham @Quantumplation]

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.

[Quantumplation | Pi Lanningham @Quantumplation]

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 https://t.co/wtBvAD6cTV

[Quantumplation | Pi Lanningham @Quantumplation]

@realdecimalist @buxdabomb @Cerkoryn @phil_uplc lol do you think I'm doing so well that I could afford a house? 😭

[Quantumplation | Pi Lanningham @Quantumplation]

@FrugalGamerNet To be fair, nobody is asking me to vote a specific way, just to vote and give a rationale. So it's in good spirits, it just gets overwhelming.

[Quantumplation | Pi Lanningham @Quantumplation]

@AussieBella__ Lol it's ok, Im not sure why I hid it either, just a knee jerk reaction

[Quantumplation | Pi Lanningham @Quantumplation]

@nimuepool @Cardano_Stefan No.

[Quantumplation | Pi Lanningham @Quantumplation]

Sure, you do you, I'm not trying to convince anyone to change their vote.

For what it's worth, I've never said Hydra or Governance fixes anything :) Nor do I think Leios/Peras alone fixes anything.

The world is built on imperfect systems. The things that are successful are often not the things that are the best. It's just a sad fact of the world.

The things that are successful are the ones that make themselves inevitable, and a big part of that is getting in front of people with imperfect solutions.

The mistake Cardano has been making is the exact opposite of what you describe; we keep saying "one more core improvement to the tech and *surely* people won't be able to ignore us!" without bothering to ask them what they actually need.

We need to solve exactly the minimum amount of pain required for people to be willing to build on Cardano, and then shape what we do next based on what they find, what they need, and how we can make them successful.

Meld chose not to build on Cardano because they were worried about liquidations if Cardano throughput was saturated. Leios raises the ceiling so that dApps have plenty of head room to be sure that their transaction can *always* make it on-chain in a timely matter.

Others have avoided building on Cardano because having theoretical 12 hour finality wrecks the UX for things like bridges and cross-chain signalling. Peras solves that problem so that we can provide 4 minute round-trip times with Ethereum.

We're never going to convert other users by focusing on whether your staking power is forfeited to a dApp because users have no frame of reference to understand why that matters. If we unlock granular staking capabilities for dApps, that's a *subtle* win that benefits people who are already here, not a user acquisition tool.

And dApps are still plenty parallel. Our utilization is nowhere near saturating in a way that we'd ever notice the small amount of sequentialism on an individual pool. In practice, because of the tx/block unit costs, Sundae v3 *suffers* from having pools split across different UTxOs, and would, paradoxically, have higher throughput if it were more sequential. And having a batcher is a huge *selling point* to people from other ecosystems who face huge losses due to frontrunning.

The things you list are problems worth solving in the long term, but they're abstract and hard to articulate to new users. IMO your strategy is like trying to redo the tile in the upstairs bathroom in the hope that it sells the house... instead of listing the house on Zillow!

[Quantumplation | Pi Lanningham @Quantumplation]

@Cerkoryn ( also, only reason I didn't mention Midgard, is because I wasn't sure what @phil_uplc's launch timeline is and I didn't want to commit him to 2026, but it sounds like he's optimistic :) )

[Quantumplation | Pi Lanningham @Quantumplation]

No, I think we will see real, demonstrable, and sellable iterations of those things in 2026, many before the summer is out.

Leios will be in testnet in June, and we can start selling that to developers, businesses.

And the way to sell it is to point out that, sure, 3k TPS is less than 20k TPS, but do you know how ridiculous and unneccesary 20k TPS is? And if that's built on a rotten foundation, what's the point?

Certainly ~4-10 TPS is it's own fundamental risk that has prevented businesses from building here.

But would you rather have a razor with 5 blades that is solid and reliable enough to last you 2 years, or a razor with 20 blades that lasts a month? Are the 15 extra blades *really* doing that much for you?

As for MAU/TVL, that's where the collaborative piece comes in. Some of the products above will demonstrate that you can benefit from Cardano's stability and security, while reaching users that are on other chains and don't even know they're using Cardano.

Once you can demonstrate that, as a repeatable design pattern, the calculus for a new startup deciding which chain to launch on materially changes.