MLabs

MLabs just delivered more reliable infra with Cardano.nix v1.3.0, including: 🔹Refreshed dependencies 🔹CI/integration validation 🔹Bug fixes 🔹Updated docs for easy adoption Made possible through #Cardano community funding ❤️ Details 👇 github.com/mlabs-haskell/…

@bigpey Dream big.

Trump is planning to launch a new token related to his media company. Should he launch it on Cardano?

We regularly dogfood our Catalyst-funded tooling in both internal work and client delivery. Some of these tools have clear adoption outside MLabs; others have been more niche. The clearest usage signals include (but aren’t limited to): - Plutarch: 2nd most used language in production. - Ply: commonly paired with Plutarch to make typed data/codecs more ergonomic. - CTL: a transaction-building stack used in production by multiple teams and dApps. - cardano.nix: Cardano-focused Nix tooling we use heavily for reproducible builds/deployments, in CTL, and that’s also used by some Nix-oriented teams in the ecosystem. - YTxP: a Cardano-specific proxy/upgrade pattern that’s been incorporated into at least one major dApp. - LambdaBuffers: schema-driven type generation used in client applications. - TxVillage: Rust-side transaction-building tooling used in client work. - Plutip: fast local testing infrastructure we use extensively for iteration and CI. - PSM (now CLB): similar testing infrastructure focused on production-adjacent workflows. Much of the supporting evidence here is public via the Plutonomicon, our own mlabs-haskell repositories, and the Catalyst milestone module. We also have additional work that’s internal, still in R&D, or tied to client confidentiality. That said, as scrutiny has increased across funding rounds, we’ve tried to align proposals with what builders and users actually need, and we’re continuing to improve our ability here with each iteration.

@MLabs10 @planetmaaz Out of all the tools that you were funded to build via catalysts how many are used?

Totally agree, @planetmaaz. We just published our own “show your work” rundown of MLabs’ treasury-funded projects across Catalyst & Intersect: what shipped, what’s in flight, and what we are actively closing out. mlabs.city/blog/show-your…

@bigpey Grain of salt.

Midnight is taking the best technology from over 10 different blockchains, implementing it, and then building more features on top of it. Midnight is going to ship FAST in 2026 due to this.

@planetmaaz You got the rates flipped.

gimme 1.5m thanks very much does the clanker get the bonus?

@ADAFrog_Pool @ArmyofSpies This. Using a lil AI ain't no thing but a chicken wing.

@ArmyofSpies you’re insinuating a lack of integrity amd value from an immensely valuable ecosystem contributor that’s bullshit

🔦🚨Now I get why this felt so off! It was all AI?!? This is an interesting scenario. Six months ago you posted that you were using Google translate to reply to me and that you "rely heavily" on it (see August screenshot below). Nothing wrong with that. You also mentioned AI. But, now I'm seeing responses like yours from today (second post below). It reads as 100% AI. I'm getting the distinct impression that I'm discussing this with Chat GPT and not really getting authentic responses from a human. I'm not so sure that's a valuable use of time on my side. I can talk to AI anytime on my own. 🚨🚨But, the Important Part: This surfaces bigger philosophical questions about your governance actions and how much they are actually human driven vs. AI. How much of the Constitutional Amendment was you and how much was AI? The massive reorganization of the sections definitely feels like AI in retrospect. Humans don't normally edit legal docs like that. But, AI does. It would also explain why it was so hard to just hit the "track changes" button. There's no wrong or right answer. But, people deserve the disclosure.

@yutazzz We support you using any and all tools at your disposal in order to be a transparent representative. In general we find your words are pretty consistent with your actions, frankly - who cares about the precise method you used to get there?

@yutazzz Many Japanese people report that chatGPT provides better translation with cultural context awareness than google translate. First and foremost as a drep your job is to communicate to your delgators what is happening and how you intend to represent them 1/2

Thank you for sharing your view and for the effort you’ve clearly put into articulating it. I appreciate the seriousness with which you are engaging in this discussion. That said, I believe the argument as presented contains several methodological issues that are significant in the context of constitutional and governance design. I will focus strictly on the structure of the reasoning itself. 1. Reduction of institutional analysis to inferred motivations The core issue under discussion is the scope, limits, and institutional role of the Constitutional Committee (CC) within the Cardano Constitution. However, the argument reframes this issue primarily in terms of inferred personal motivations—namely, that certain positions are driven by a desire to weaken checks and balances against individual voting power. Institutional design should be evaluated based on its structural effects and systemic outcomes, not on speculative assumptions about individual intent. Arguments grounded in inferred motivation are inherently unfalsifiable and weaken the analytical rigor of constitutional debate. 2. Aggregation of quotations without contextual distinction The cited statements span different contexts, timeframes, and specific concerns regarding CC authority. Treating them collectively as evidence of a single, unified intention risks conflating distinct arguments into a retrospective narrative. Concerns about excessive discretion or arbitrariness in CC decision-making do not, in themselves, amount to opposition to checks and balances. When quotations are removed from their original context and aggregated, institutional critique is replaced by intent attribution. 3. Construction of a false dichotomy The framing suggests a binary opposition between: •those who seek to limit or clarify CC authority, and •those who support strong checks and balances. This dichotomy is misleading. It is entirely coherent to support robust constitutional review while also advocating for clearer constraints to prevent subjective or arbitrary exercise of power. Excluding this middle, institutionally grounded position unnecessarily narrows the scope of the debate. 4. Trivialization of constitutional design as “preferences” Questions of constitutional authority, separation of powers, and governance legitimacy cannot be reduced to mere differences in preference. These design choices have concrete, long-term implications for power concentration, institutional stability, and accountability. Characterizing the disagreement as a “basic and predictable difference in preferences” risks bypassing substantive evaluation of those consequences. 5. Toward a more rigorous discussion A productive constitutional debate should focus on textual interpretation, institutional structure, and foreseeable systemic effects—rather than on who is presumed to want what. I believe the discussion would benefit from returning to these foundations and engaging directly with the design trade-offs involved.

@planetmaaz Glad to hear we're in agreement.

@MLabs10 Never said anything about removing catalyst, focusing on expanding the opportunity space for ecosystem funding

If you’re a commercial entity and you’re not building a public good that is *actually* useful Go find customers that are willing to pay. If you need money to do so, raise. I can understand our ecosystem funding needs maturing away from free money. Working on this together with others. @builder__dao is doing something interesting, let’s take a look at that. Draper proposal is a 3 pillar approach to a holistic ecosystem funding needs maturing. We need more dedicated and specific funding instruments. Working on a pipeline of solutions and knowledge on this topic. Hope to have it ready for budget season!

@solidsnakedev There's been offline script evaluation for a long time. But this certainly will make it easier for many devs.

nice!

@SLFMR1 Or maybe agents aren't the solution...

Hot take: Instead of paying people to poorly use AI to review Catalyst proposals in bulk with little effort, we could let a few opinionated agents review the proposals for free.

In a world where software consultancies seem to be slinging mud back and forth. We are frankly surprised and delighted that nobody used grok to generate and distribute nudes of their competitors. Thank you for your attention to this matter.

@planetmaaz But we won't get there without strong pathways to get new stuff built responsibly - by people who intend to run real businesses onchain. Catalyst is this space right now. If it's not functioning as intended, that doesn't mean removing It with no replacement is the right way.

@planetmaaz Anybody who tells you a successful economy doesn't have a free money channel is simply trying to exclude you from the free money channel. I/we do agree that we need to focus on useful and responsible spending if we hope to achieve treasury sustainability before the well is dry

@amw7 @SurgeCardano And how do you factor in the massive slippage that comes with volume stsble trades?

I want a stablecoin strategy in @SurgeCardano . If stablecoin less than $1... buy. If stablecoin more than $1 sell. Taking fees into account to make sure every trade is profitable.

@astral_enigma_ @gaffar_olamide @ayrongmatos_ @phil_uplc @txpipe_tools @Catalyst_onX And how do you propose the Ada economy gets stimulation? We believe the function of @Catalyst_onX is vital. Though yes, it's structure and incentives sometimes means we learn expensive lessons.

It is very common for developers in this ecosystem to grift non-technical community members into believing they have produced useful technology or otherwise fulfilled their obligations when in actuality they just writing non-functional code in a void that is never intended to see use and publishing that code to Github to collect their catalyst milestone rewards with zero intention of actually delivering anything meaningful to the ecosystem or even actually delivering the milestones at all. The below is a great example of an egregious instance of this. Let us walk through each of the proposals that they have said are "completed" and explain the actual status of the proposals in a way that non-technical people can understand. zkFold x zkPass: Bring zkPass to Cardano Problem statement: Implementing data oracles is a critical problem in the blockchain space. Cardano currently lacks a universally accessible, cost-effective, decentralized, and reliable data oracle. Solution: zkPass is a leading cross-chain data oracle solution. Leveraging zkFold's expertise in Cardano smart contracts and ZKPs, we aim to integrate zkPass's robust data verification services on Cardano. By verifying zkPass proofs on-chain, users get an independent, unforgeable attestation of the validity of their private data. Currently, zkPass supports many EVM chains. By implementing zkPass proof verification contracts on Cardano, we enable Cardano users to access zkPass functionality from the comfort of their Cardano wallets. Wow that sounds great! zkPass is a massive oracle provider in the blockchain space, it would be huge for Cardano defi if we could have a means to verify zkPass proofs on Cardano. The proposal talks about how they will be teaming up with the zkPass team to deliver this functionality; that's a huge collaboration! The project was completed! They collected all milestones, a total of 250,000.00 ada. Great work! That must mean that we can verify zkPass oracle attestations on Cardano now! Or at the very least that zkPass team was involved in the delivery of this in some way as promised! Or that zkPass is integrated or used in some form somewhere in whatever they delivered? We should at-least have the following two components that were promised in the proposal right? 1. Onchain smart contract that can verify zkPass proofs 2. A JS library that integrates with zkPass's JS-SDK and contains the off-chain code for building Cardano transactions and querying attestation data from the blockchain. The following outputs were promised in the milestone delivery: 1. Client-side (browser) blockchain querying code 2. Finalized smart contract code (Haskell) 3. Finalized JS/TS library What did they actually deliver? Here is what they gave the in final proof of achievement: Link to Client-side (browser) blockchain querying code: github.com/zkFold/capital… Ah this must be the JS library code that queries the zkPass attestation data from the blockchain right? No. Well then what did they submit? What does this code do? It is a glorified geography trivia game. > This game tests your geography knowledge about countries and their corresponding capitals. A score between 0 and 5 is assigned to each trial. Does it at-least get any information from zkPass or consume zkPass data or have any relation to zkPass at all? No. It is a game that lets you answer questions about what the capital of each country is. What about the smart contract to verify zkPass oracle attestations? Here is what was linked in the final milestone, Link to Finalized smart contract code (Haskell): github.com/zkFold/zkpass-… Okay okay, the querying for zkPass attestations wasn't what we expected but surely the smart contract verifies zkPass attestations right? I mean look at the codebase, it's got a ton of lines of code, lots of super advanced terminology like "Plonk", "NonInteractiveProof" "ZKCircuits", "ZkPassToken"! The smart contract in the link above named `untypedZkPassToken` even says in its documentation that it is a "Plutus script (minting policy) for verifying zkpass computations on-chain." That sounds promising right! Even if we don't have the offchain code to get attestations, at-least we have the smart contract that can do it right? Wrong, this smart contract cannot verify zkPass attestations at all. Not a single one of them. Nada, zip, zilch. This smart contract is a generic verifier for plonk proofs that was copy pasted from another project. Plonk proof verifier! That sounds cool! So even if they didn't actually deliver a contract that can verify zkPass proofs at-least they made some progress on it? Or at the very least they attempted to do it? No. They did not. You see, zkPass oracle attestations come in the form of a JSON blob with ECDSA signatures no zk required, also importantly ZkPass DOESN'T USE PLONK AT ALL. Okay it is completely not related to zkPass in any way shape or form but `untypedZkPassToken` must be doing something right? What zkProof is this contract being used to verify? Prepare yourself for this, you are not ready for how amazing and advanced this is, and how valuable to the ecosystem it is: This is used to verify a zk proof that the number 5 is indeed the number 5. Sorry what? Yes, that is correct. It verify the identity function! This has nothing to do with zkPass or oracles at all. It verifies that if you have a function f(x) = x ie. that takes whatever you give it and gives it back to you without doing anything at all, then if you give it a number you will get that same number. Revolutionary! 250,000 Ada collected for a smart contract that verifies that 5 is equal to 5. Great work from the zkFold team! Okay, okay what about the final output that was promised the JS/TS library for interacting with zkPass JS-SDK. Surely this at-least is something remotely relevant to the proposal or at-least something that does something useful at all right? Unfortunately, no. Here is the link they provided for that output: Finalized JS/TS library: github.com/zkFold/zkpass-… Well what does this do? It is the exact same game that lets you answer questions about what the capital of each country is. Compare it to the repository that was submitted for the other output: github.com/zkFold/capital… You will notice they are exactly the same, except zk-pass-client has one additional commit from the CTO of ZkFold. What does that commit do? Nothing. Since it is the same code as the client code, does that mean it is a fork of the client code? No, instead of forking it, they downloaded the client code and manually pushed it into a new repository. This is a common trick that is used by developers to hide the fact that a project is a direct clone of another project. TLDR what do we have for 250,000 ada: 1. A guessing game 2. A smart contract that is used to verify the proof that 5 is equal to 5. 3. The same guessing game from output one, but in disguise. What does this show? This shows the ZkFold team does not care about actually delivering anything at all. They care about collecting catalyst milestones, and use their position as developers to lie about what work they have delivered in order to collect milestone payments and then let the project die slowly. Maybe they are still working on it? There has not been a single commit in 8 months. Did this project have anything to do with zkPass? No. Did it result in us being able to consume zkPass oracle data? No. Did it produce anything even remotely useful to anyone? No. Did anyone ever use any of this? No. This is fraud. I urge the catalyst team to review this evidence and draw their own conclusions on the above. I also urge all community members to review the above and see if you believe that zkFold is actually making any honest effort at all to deliver a zk rollup L2, or if they are repeating what they have done above, publishing vaporware crap code that does nothing to github repositories and marketing it "super advanced zero-knowledge proofs" to non-technical reviewers to collect milestone payments.

@astral_enigma_ @RodrigoPacini @ayrongmatos_ @gaffar_olamide @phil_uplc @txpipe_tools Happy to chat - we are connected elsewhere I believe - BH

@Demosthenes555 @iHoldMusic @Rashilow99 @phil_uplc @gaffar_olamide @txpipe_tools We are providing an address privately and it seems this will move ahead. Thanks for your attention to this matter.

@iHoldMusic @Rashilow99 @MLabs10 @phil_uplc @gaffar_olamide @txpipe_tools god damnnn...really?!

@yutazzz We may need to work harder...

"Hey GPT, please give me a picture of how I've treated you so far." He seems a little tired 👀