It really hurts that CF did not vote for Sundial, proposal to build a hybrid Cardano-Bitcoin L2 on the Midgard framework.
The vision for Midgard was to start the L2 boom on Cardano, to allow builders and teams to easily launch and deploy their own L2s on a modular framework with the architectural tradeoffs that make the most sense for their domain / applications. To be the Optimism of Cardano, except without the centralization and security issues of essentially being a custodial multisig.
Sundial is a perfect first adopter to showcase this. It aims to inherit security from both Cardano and Bitcoin, and act as a layer-2 for both chains. This targets a truly unique niche for Cardano, as it allows Bitcoiners to interact with Cardano DeFi without “bridging” out of Bitcoin. No matter how trustless a bridge is, there is a huge class of Bitcoiners who refuse to interact with non-Bitcoin DeFi (thus why RootStock, Stacks and Merlin all have massive volume and TVL) because as maximalists they value certain security properties that Bitcoin provides and that those Bitcoin native “L2s” attempt to inherit. Sundial inherits the security of Bitcoin to the same extent that the aforementioned Bitcoin native L2s do, while simultaneously inheriting security from Cardano for the components that Bitcoin cannot provide (ie smart contract VM / execution).
If this proposal is funded, it will allow us to see in practice how easy it is to customize an L2 with the Midgard framework, and to see the problems and challenges that external teams face when doing so. It benefits us (Anastasia Labs) to have as many independent teams as possible building on the Midgard framework, so that we can identify common challenges and address them, and so that we can improve the framework, reduce complexity, increase modularity and reduce development time required for deployment of customized L2s.
It received by far the highest amount of community interest and unique voters (highest number of unique voters with 800 unique wallets, the second highest didn’t even come close at 600).
Instead, they voted for other proposals in that category that are extremely controversial with the community. But it’s their Ada so I respect their decision.
That aside, regarding CFs participation in catalyst / governance, I think it is a good thing. In-fact I think they should participate with all of their stake. If we want to start taking onchain governance seriously, all the founding entities need to actively participate with all their stake, otherwise the whole thing is just a farce. We need to be able to see transparently the voting power of each entity, and use this to start campaigning to put pressure for more community stake to get involved.