Hazelpool

I vote yes on replacing the Interim Constitutional Committee with the members elected through the Intersect-led process over the past few months. This group includes a mix of well-known individuals, established consortiums from the period when we relied on the ICC, and newly formed consortiums composed of community members, many of whom I have personally met.

I am confident that the highly responsible duty of verifying the constitutionality of proposals for the next 146–73 epochs (depending on the CC member) will be carried out with diligence and integrity. I confirmed the correct hashes from the governance action rationale against on-chain data of registered committee hashes, and verified that the two non-script hashes and five script hashes are valid, as are their proposed on-chain terms. No other discrepancies were found.

We are voting YES on the upcoming Plomin hard fork, which is a crucial moment in Cardano's history. This hard fork is likely the only one that requires just SPOs and the Constitutional Committee to vote (in the future, dReps will also need to participate in the decision). We believe it is our responsibility to monitor and comment on the overall state of the ecosystem as part of our voting rationale and deliberation.

While we have significant concerns about the percentage of total ADA delegated to dReps — only 7.5% compared to 58% delegated to stake pools — as well as the overall distribution of said dRep delegation, we believe the Plomin hard fork is necessary to improve the Cardano ecosystem. We discussed delaying the hard fork due to these concerns, but we think that for Cardano to make meaningful progress, control must be in the hands of all ADA holders, not just the Interim Constitutional Committee.

There will be many discussions about the budget and the constitution, and not everyone will be happy with the outcomes. Waiting until everyone agrees would be counterproductive. On the technical side, more than 80% of pools by ADA staked upgraded to the highly recommended 10.1.4 node version in less than two weeks, which is impressive. This includes several centralized exchanges that also showed their readiness by voting on the hard fork.

Overall, the ecosystem is as ready as it can be. Best of success, Cardano.

Our vote towards adjusting the k parameter is yes. This has been a topic of some discussion and magnitude for a long time in the community. In the last (pre-Chang #1) poll HAZEL voted no on changing k to 1000, and yes on decreasing the min fee to 170 ADA. Our reasoning back then was clear, and has not changed since then. We do not believe k should immediately be raised to 1000, but instead to an intermediate 750.

We believe that recent events around large retiring stakepools and the slow flow of delegation to dReps clearly show that a large portion of held ADA is unused and must be considered sticky. With doubling k, this would mean a large number of ADA holders would lose their rewards, often over extended periods of time, potentially reducing their trust in Cardano.
While we cannot hold off these changes forever just because holders are complacent or inactive, we can reduce its impact by increasing k in smaller steps.

Generally, we support raising k, but urge everyone to understand that we need to track the outcome of such a parameter change in detail to evaluate its success (or lack thereof) with regards to improving the ecosystem.

I am voting No towards the proposal of naming the next hard fork HOSKY. While HOSKY has undeniably contributed a lot to Cardano, with onboarding initiatives, educational work about governance and decentralization, and the support of smaller, individual SPOs (of which I am one), naming a hard fork after the project has two main issues for me.

The first one is that as an open blockchain, it might be perceived as a type of advertising, and influence people into thinking that HOSKY is an officially endorsed project. In the past, hard forks were named after individuals that have no commercial benefit from having it named after them. I believe that this should continue.

The second issue is, that HOSKY presents itself as a meme project. While I have nothing against meme coints, I believe that naming a hard fork after such a project might not be the best way to represent the Cardano ecosystem to the outside world. Even if the project itself strongly advocates for what I believe are the right values when it comes to our blockchain, and HOSKY might be known by many already in the community, external parties we are trying to onboard may see this as facetious behavior. I would rather ensure we are taken serious while having fun, instead of being seen as a joker, trying to appeal to the entire world.