1. CIPs for the Community

Why does Cardano need a CIP process, editors, and development standards?

The success of a blockchain is prefaced, at least in part, by how broad and useful to developers its extensible standards are: as seen already in Bitcoin and Ethereum's evolution from their initial days of obscurity through their rise in popularity and value with the addition of modern commercial standards like the Ethereum’s familiar token standard of ERC-20.

Not only do CIPs document what official Cardano blockchain developers are doing to improve core technologies and conventions, they also expand the scope of what the larger Cardano community will deliver: through standards submitted by independent developers and architects. Once a standard is proposed through a CIP, it becomes a reference point upon which other developers and agencies can build: which promotes new applications and broadening markets for Cardano.

Each well defined standard promotes more rapid development since developers have an increasing number of CIP-based tools and methods to employ in their projects. The best example of this in Cardano's early years has been the proliferation of NFTs, since they are generally built by third parties according to CIPs coming from the community itself rather than from Cardano’s core developers.

Any developer, engineer, scientist, entrepreneur, or user should have a means of proposing one of these standards. This process is documented in CIP-0001, which defined and created this process… a document which itself is regularly updated as editors and reviewers continue to refine our process in practice.

The CPS (Cardano Problem Statement)

About a year into the CIP process, editors acknowledged that CIP drafts were being submitted which:

• offered or required great flexibility in how the proposed standards might be implemented;
• focused on a particular implementation, when review indicated that a more general approach, or a number of approaches, would serve the industry better; and/or
• had irreconcilable differences between author and reviewers(s) about which approach to the CIP's problem would be best.

Editors and key reviewers therefore developed a format for the Cardano Problem Statement, described in CIP-9999 (or CIP "minus one" in tens' complement notation), allowing the definition of a problem rather than a solution... and therefore a range of possible solutions to be covered.

The CIP editor & reviewer community hopes to verify with time that the body of CPSs will help developers and standards architects to focus on its most pressing problems, while regularly offering solutions guided by these CPSs so they can be applied as broadly and readily as possible to those problems.

What general benefits does the CIP process provide to the Cardano ecosystem & infrastructure?

The most basic benefit is that Cardano has a standards process! 😇 Current CIP editors believe that this standards process is most effective when it maintains visibility to and auditability by the community which are goals of the process followed by CIP editors.

The CIP process is the most definitive embodiment of Cardano standards, considered part of Cardano’s developer infrastructure itself: repeatedly endorsed by founding Cardano agencies IOG and the Cardano Foundation. Project Catalyst representatives have also declared that “standards” are part of Cardano's development & infrastructure effort, as measured by:

New applications

The standards process of CIPs not only suggests new Cardano applications, it also identifies entirely new markets for Cardano when more than one agency (e.g. different NFT-based businesses) implements these standards.

Efficiency of development

It also ensures that the rush to develop new commercial applications does not either a) waste developer time, money and credibility trying to reinvent something already done & documented in the public domain; or b) develop something only to find its commercial life is short-lived due to lack of interoperability with other Cardano products and services.

Educational value

A good percentage of CIPs are documentation themselves: e.g.

• Cardano’s protocol parameters and definitions;
• wallet keys and addresses;
• procedures to evolve languages like Plutus and data structures like the Ledger.

Supporting the CIP framework also invests time in quality documentation that developers and new converts to Cardano can learn from quickly.

Open source commitment

Not only are all CIPs open source (free to re-use themselves by open source license) but the methods they describe, being open to the public, also encourage the Cardano community to converge on open-source implementations, and to open-source their APIs and other interfaces even their products may use proprietary components internally.

Number and quality of standards

With community-based developers involved in the review process for nearly every published CIP, their feedback has always guaranteed this growing number of standards will be well received, understood, and maintained by the community going forward.

How can the Cardano Community verify that CIPs are making a difference?

The evolution of the Internet, followed by the emergence of astonishingly valuable blockchain assets (many of which are strong competitors to Cardano), has shown us that robust open source standards in Cardano’s design and governance will lead to:

• higher & more sustainable native asset values
• more & better interrelated business propositions
• increased adoption relative to other blockchains
• an anticipated freedom from regulation if claims of decentralised governance can be upheld.

Also, because the CIP process constantly supports communications with a broad spectrum of developers, it promotes this “feedback” process:

1. We have a growing number of CIPs, approaching a larger & more diverse body of standards such as long seen on Ethereum’s EIPs.
2. Observers from other blockchains note that Cardano’s standards process demonstrates growing functionality, interoperability, commercial applicability, etc. to support their current and upcoming projects.
3. Developers migrate to Cardano from other blockchains and bring their ambitious applications and expectations with them.
4. These in turn require new CIPs to define them, which feeds back into Step 1… continuing cyclically with more CIPs, containing better research and covering more applications, with more standards-driven adoption & developer engagement expanding the Cardano ecosystem. 🤠

Is the CIP process of any direct benefit to the Cardano community and Ada holders?

Three years into Cardano's CIP process (as of late 2023), we can verify that this is already happening in past & current CIP-anchored fields:

NFT standards have supported the most economically valuable of Cardano’s interactive components.

Wallet standards will drive many commercial implementations, promoting Ada as a currency and therefore increased market capitalisation and utility driving a higher ADA value.

Governance standards will help dismiss claims of centralised control, including the notion that Cardano is a “security” and must be registered as an investment proposition: while irrefutably decentralised governance will promote less regulated adoption with greater capitalisation and liquidity also supporting a higher ADA value.

READ ON: Why has the CIP process always been decentralised?