Max van Rossem

Dear Intersect Members, My name is Adam Rusch, and I am honored to stand for re-election to the @IntersectMBO Board of Directors. Serving on the Board this past year has been one of the most rewarding experiences of my professional career and time in the Cardano community. Together, we’ve made important progress in strengthening Intersect as an institution that serves the Cardano Blockchain Ecosystem with independence, transparency, and accountability. I hope that you will review my Board Candidate Application and consider voting for me: 🔥 members.intersectmbo.org/das… The reason I joined Intersect was the same reason I got involved with the Crypto movement and Cardano. It started with a belief that our future prosperity depends upon building trustless systems that improve people’s lives by allowing them to collaborate freely. I realized that for Cardano to succeed in this mission, those ideals need strong and independent institutions capable of supporting them. Thanks to its diverse and vibrant membership, Intersect can play a role providing the foundation for governance, infrastructure, and community coordination without being beholden to any single entity. Over the past year, I worked to ensure that member issues were heard and acted upon. When members raised concerns about unresponsive leadership, I brought them to the full Board for a fair hearing. As a result, we appointed an interim executive director and established the process for selecting a permanent leader. This was a crucial step in ensuring Intersect could meet its mission. I worked with the new leadership to ensure that Intersect’s funding request and budget process would be in line with Cardano community expectations so that we would be trusted to continue our work. Finally, I championed expanding the number of community-elected Board members, so that a clear majority of the Board will now come directly from you, the membership. If re-elected, I will continue working to strengthen Intersect as an independent institution that serves the Cardano community. This includes completing the search for a permanent executive director to lead our staff and making sure our committees and working groups have the proper charge and support to advance Cardano. I am optimistic about what Intersect can achieve with a more inclusive Board, a strong leadership team, and a community empowered to guide Cardano’s future. Thank you for the trust you have placed in me. I would be honored to continue this journey with you as a member of the Intersect Board. Sincerely yours, Adam Rusch

Cardano is approaching a critical milestone with the governance action to Replace the Interim Constitutional Committee about to pass! By empowering a full community-elected CC we take another step forward in the decentralization of Cardano governance. 🔥 adastat.net/governances/47a0… One of the most important lessons is that decentralization cannot be achieved all at once. There is quite a bit of wisdom in the meme that says, “make it exist before you make it good.” Ethereum’s early history shows this clearly. It was born from Bitcoiners yet departed from the architecture, endured controversy, and even rolled back its chain after The DAO hack. Yet it still grew into one of the most influential networks in decentralized technology. Cardano has its own path. In the early years, three founding entities controlled the network. The Shelley era expanded participation through stake pool operators who started with a Testnet of crashing nodes and support systems that emerged from the community. Today, with CIP-1694, governance is evolving again as DReps and the Constitutional Committee define their roles. Each stage marks progress toward deeper decentralization, even if the process is uneven and incomplete. Cardano governance will not look like traditional democracy. A proof-of-stake blockchain will not become an Athenian assembly where every citizen shows up, nor will it evolve into a Wilsonian republic with neatly defined tiers of representation and hierarchy. Those are historical models tied to geography, citizenship, and centralized authority. Cardano, by contrast, has no borders, no monopoly on power, and no central government. What it can grow into is something more radical. A blockchain governance system creates direct lines between ownership and participation. Holding Ada does not just make someone a spectator in the network, it makes them a stakeholder whose incentives are directly tied to the health of the system. Participation is about recognizing every participant as a co-owner whose contributions and decisions can shape the trajectory of the network itself. In Cardano governance, stakeholders are not passive recipients of decisions made by elites, but active participants who can delegate, propose, deliberate, and hold others accountable. The network is designed to grow by continually onboarding new participants and empowering them to contribute. Unlike most traditional governments, where legitimacy comes from controlling territory and enforcing laws, legitimacy here is grounded in the willingness of stakeholders to remain engaged and to recognize each other as peers in a shared endeavor. So what is the true purpose of Cardano governance? It is about building coalitions. It is about stakeholders finding others who are creating value on-chain and supporting them to do more. It is about using stake and voice not only for individual benefit but to strengthen the ecosystem as a whole. Even as we take the step now to elect a new Constitutional Committee, we must look further ahead to what Cardano will stand for. Governance must continue to create pathways for more direct participation, representation, and accountability. Decentralization is not a fixed destination. It is a direction of travel. Each step Cardano takes, no matter how imperfect, moves us closer to that goal. And that journey is worth supporting.