Charles Hoskinson discusses the coronavirus response and Cardano marketing plan 🚨 This article is 5 years old...
Charles Hoskinson discusses the coronavirus response and Cardano marketing plan
3 min read
Updated: May. 1, 2020 at 9:55 pm UTC
Photo by Casey Horner on Unsplash
With the launch of Shelley inching closer, the time has come to kickstart the marketing efforts around Cardano. Charles Hoskinson, the CEO of IOHK, said that the philosophical debates around government intervention shows that Cardano’s marketing will have to focus on the technology’s long-term potential which is reinventing society, rather than just its immediate value proposition.
Hoskinson discusses the government’s response to coronavirus
Aside from its immediate economic and health impact, the ongoing coronavirus pandemic has forced many to have a deep, philosophical debate about the extent of power centralized governments should have. According to Charles Hoskinson, the CEO of IOHK, the government’s overreach has laid the perfect foundation for the advent of blockchain technology and achieving decentralization.
In a YouTube video update, Hoskinson discussed the current state of the Cardano network, saying that the current state of the world has highlighted its value proposition. The point of Cardano and blockchain technology, he explained, isn’t to make rich people richer, make companies more efficient, or make it easier to do business abroad.
Instead, the point of this technology is to put everyone in the same playing field and allow people to live in a society that doesn’t require them to hand their autonomy, power, and privacy over to “central actors.”
“We’re now getting a taste of a pervasive government power,” he said, adding that the pandemic has highlighted “very real stakes” that have nothing to do with the coronavirus but have everything to do with how we’ll live going into the 21st century.
This, Hoskinson said, is where Cardano steps in.
“We’re trying to reinvent society.”
A cohesive marketing effort needed to spearhead Cardano adoption
However, for Cardano to be able to reinvent society, it needs to become widely known and accepted. This, according to Hoskinson, is where the ongoing marketing effort comes in. The marketing itself needs to have two efforts running simultaneously—one to focus on getting the messaging and brand representation right for the broader public, and the other to focus on the existing Cardano community.
The thing both IOHK and McCann, the company tasked with Cardano’s marketing, are figuring out is how to present Cardano so it’s easy to understand what the platform is about without the need for a huge intellectual overhead. As there’s a long way until Cardano’s messaging is able to do this, it’s important to focus on strengthening the existing Cardano community, Hoskinson said.
With the right facts, experience, and messaging, the existing Cardano community can be turned into the largest marketing army any project can have. The first step in facilitating this is the launch of the friends and family testnet for Shelley. With a launch date set for May 11, a select group of people with the knowledge of the network and the expertise needed to improve it will be able to test it.
This, Hoskinson said, will allow the actual launch of Shelley to go fast and smooth without overwhelming IOHK. When the huge wave of stake pool operators flock to the newly launched Shelley and start asking questions and looking for advice, the community will be able to solve its own problems.
He also added that there will be some major CLI updates going live on May 7, and that May is going to be a busy month for Cardano.
Cardano has already begun seeing significant community involvement, with “micro controversies” about issues such as pledge amounts and forks already present in the community.
All of this points to an extremely busy month for Cardano, with both IOHK and the wider Cardano community visibly excited for what’s to come.
Mentioned in this article
Posted In: People, Technology
In this article
Cardano is a decentralized public blockchain and cryptocurrency project and is fully open source.
Input Output
Input Output Hong Kong (IOHK) is a research and development company committed to using the peer-to-peer innovations of blockchain to build accessible financial services for all.
Charles Hoskinson, based in Colorado, stands out as a prominent figure in the blockchain and cryptocurrency sphere.
