Resignation Of Cardano Chairman, What Next?

The aim of Cardano intends to have an on-chain liquid democracy in the future. Until we reach this time, Cardano is regulated by three bodies. With the community growing and driving adoption being the two main responsibilities of the Cardano Foundation. Input Output Hong Kong (IOHK) and Emurgo are taking care of the technical development and business adoption of the Cardano ecosystem.

Mid-September, IOHK CEO Charles Hoskinson expressed concerns about policy and funding choices made by the Foundation. On one of the Cardano forums, some community members began a thread which expressed these and many additional concerns in relation to the chairman of the Foundation, Michael Parsons. During September this year, the Cardano Foundation arranged a video-chat with members of the Cardano community however, the actual concerns were never fully responded to.

On October 12th, a group of community members released an open letter an began a petition to pressure the chairman to either improve what was happening or resign from his post.

This open letter never got a public response and public channels such as Twitter had #MichaelParsonsResignation and #freeCardano being popular tweets amongst members.

A second open letter was published by the same group on 30th October which showed a chart connecting Parsons to several individuals and professional endeavours that might represent a conflict of interests.

On the 13th November, Parsons resigned from his position and shortly after the IOHK CEO Charles Hoskinson published a video on YouTube trying to explain the current situation.

The video showed Hoskinson thanking the Cardano community and the community members which posted the open letter to Parsons.

Despite Hoskinson having no official role in appointed Cardano Foundation board members, he hopes that the Foundation can reinvent itself to become more democratic and have at least 7 seven board members.

The community and Hoskinson both seem to be happy with the outcome and nearly all questions got answered.

According to Hackernoon:

“It is essential that the Cardano Foundation, led by the to be appointed a new executive director and board members, regain the trust of the community. If it can be successful at that, the Cardano ecosystem may actually turn out to be in better shape than it has been at any point over the past two years, where the Cardano Foundation has been largely ineffective.”