2021 was a year of incredible growth for Cardano, the Cardano Foundation, and the wider community. Having reflected on our achievements, we now want to look forward to what we hope to achieve in the coming year 

However, before we do that, it’s important to first consider our ethos and the five guiding principles of our overarching mission—our north star—for Cardano to become the future financial and social operating system for generations to come. 

Our ethos? Ensure Cardano is the blockchain for good. 

Our principles are:

• Adoption - Promote the positive adoption of the Cardano protocol on the global stage, steering the development of Cardano towards better use cases and solving real-world problems in a tangible way.
• Legislation and Commercial Standards - Engage in, educate, and drive global conversations around decentralized infrastructure, and its standalone benefits plus its ability to integrate with legacy systems. 
• Community - Establish a transparent and decentralized platform, ensuring that robust governance, standards, and ethics exist throughout.
• Stakeholder Accountability - Work to ensure that openness, standards, and communication flow through the Cardano ecosystem. This includes helping to shape legislation and commercial standards, ensuring stakeholder accountability, and prioritizing transparency, appropriateness, clarity, and comprehensiveness across the ecosystem. 
• Partnerships - Drive and accelerate collective success by working with partners who will design, build and deploy critical open source infrastructure, increase interoperability, and unlock value for Cardano. 

In 2022 we will advance and scale with these five principles as our guiding pillars, and our goals as follows: 

Educate our audiences

As blockchain continues to move from the margins to the mainstream, education has never been more important to ensure adoption. A lack of understanding amongst stakeholders can affect adoption and growth, as well as regulation. In 2022, education and communication will be a core focus for the Cardano Foundation. 

Some of the core areas we want to educate our audiences on includes Proof-of-Stake,  awareness amongst non-blockchain industries (knowledge, use cases, art of possible), inclusion on more academic agendas from business and accounting through to cybersecurity and cryptography plus participation in research programmes. Education is core to ensuring we have a robust and diverse ecosystem of active participants and fundamental to mass adoption.

Equip our community

The strength of decentralization on a blockchain is what we call trust. A small community of node operators, developers, and auditors, means trust can be weak. On the flipside, a larger, more engaged community means more stake pool operators, which means more ada delegated, leading to a more secure robust network. Ultimately, a more secure network means we are less susceptible to a wide array of security risks.

At Cardano, we know that our developer community are the architects of the future. In 2022, we want to continue to equip them with innovative decentralized solutions using Cardano. Ultimately becoming a leader in on-chain activity. 

That’s why we continue to provide our community with regular updates on the Cardano Developer Portal where developers can learn, share, and grow the Cardano ecosystem together. This portal includes open software architecture, smart contract code, and ‘how to’ guides. Recently, as part of our wider governance endeavour, we integrated the Cardano Improvement Proposals (CIPs) program directly into the Developer Portal to allow the community to give feedback and make proposals in areas they believe the Cardano protocol could be improved. 

Collaborate with regulators

Collaboration with regulators goes hand in hand with our education and communication goals. Blockchain will benefit from regulation in many ways, but it cannot come at the cost of innovation. For this reason, it’s important that regulators and industry players come together to understand the nuances between different protocols, share expertise, concerns, and solutions to the industry’s greatest challenges. In 2022, where there is ambiguity, there will be opportunities to provide clarity, based on a sound understanding of the industry, its needs, and its impact. We plan to lead from the front.

Achieving regulatory clarity will help everyone from developers to dApp builders, executives, partners, financial players, and regulators themselves. In 2022, we will continue to work closely with regulators and legislators to find these solutions and shape the future of the global blockchain regulatory landscape. 

Have a positive impact

Cardano is changing the world for the better. Across the globe, we continue to see a lack of diversity and inclusion, while environmental concerns arguably remain the largest issue of our time. Working with our partners and those at the cusp of climate change solutions, we want to offer Cardano as a solution to global Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) challenges. 

While we’re proud of the major milestones we reached in 2021, they were just the foundation for what we’re looking to achieve in 2022. Alongside our ecosystem partners, ambassadors, and the Cardano community we will continue to push the boundaries of possibility to foster positive change through decentralized solutions. We will seek to partner with those who share in our vision of creating a better world through positive change.

Increase interoperability and scalability 

At the time of publication, there are 199 projects building on Cardano. We expect that number will grow considerably in 2022 as the Cardano Trinity (Cardano Foundation, Input Output, & Emurgo) alongside the wider ecosystem participants continue to inspire and educate those beyond our immediate community. To cater to this, we need to be prepared. For Cardano to reach widespread acceptance at the institutional and local level we need to show we have the infrastructure in place for widespread enterprise and financial adoption. As such, partnerships that exemplify and show this capability are imperative to our success. Through this goal, we will enhance the usability of the protocol, advancing further towards our long-term goal of onboarding 50+ banks/regulated entities. 

As our technical and integration teams grow and Cardano enters the next phases in its roadmap, Basho and Voltaire, interoperability and scalability remain a top priority. 

Grow our team

In 2022 we will add new people to the Cardano Foundation team, making new hires across product development, engineering, marketing, cybersecurity, governance, and more. By increasing our depth of expertise and resources to develop new aspects of the Cardano ecosystem we will be in a strong position to work towards achieving our mission. 

In particular, the growth of our technical integrations team will pave the way for the creation of reference infrastructure to the blockchain for our community. For example a reference Cardano Explorer, which is built to give those who normally do not query a blockchain a bespoke experience, such as Auditors, Lawyers and Policy Makers. This will bring more clarity and transparency to how the blockchain actually works and the added value it brings. The added technical resources will also give us the bandwidth to further expand our bug bounty program and carry out more audits, increasing security and transparency. 

It’s envisioned that these new resources will have a tremendous impact on operations both inside and outside Cardano as we work towards enabling critical business and social infrastructure to be performed on Cardano.

We hope all of this gives you a strong understanding of what we hope to achieve and why we will do the things we do throughout the year ahead. It’s incredibly exciting for us, and we hope it is for you too. 

We’ll be sure to keep you posted as we progress towards achieving these goals.

We’d also love your feedback, thoughts, and ideas in the comments.

You, the community, are our greatest asset. And it is only with your support and input that we can make this happen.