Why is it important?
Most people do not understand the digital world still. Having awesome functional hardware built by Cardano will accelerate adoptions.
What does success look like?
Hardware that is built by the Cardano community at everyone's house, that gets used daily.
Key Metrics to measure
Parts sold
New Users growth
Number of hardware part counts created on the open source market place
Challenge brief
The goal with this plan is really to solidify cardano's staying power.
It's hard to tell if someone is a cardano user unless you talk to them about investing. May people get turn off by investing, so most people would not actually learn about cardano until they are an investor because it is still under "crypto" to the general public.
I think when cardano is able to introduce more hardware that people will buy and use, then the story will start to change significantly because it's not longer just "crypto" and speculation.
For example, There are likely many craftsmen that make awesome knifes in the cardano network. There should be a way for that person to brand their knifes under cardano. In order to brand it under cardano, there needs to be some level of standards to ensure high quality hardware products. Kinda like Michelin Stars for restaurants. We can have levels of quality on hardware that have been verified by the cardano's advisor that focuses on ensuring high quality products.
I think this is also a very important macro trend because one of the biggest issues we have today is that people are buying a lot of cheap and low quality product that does not last. This is not a great use of resource, and it also cost consumers more money over time. People used to old very high-quality products over a very long time, but things have changed since. I think cardano can help make the shift to make people start wanting to own more high quality products.
Personally, I've been designing hardware for the last 6 years now for spacex, and now i really want to start designing things for the open source world so more people can enjoy awesome open source products. Having a way to enable this will take a lot of the hardware engineering resources from centralized hard corporations into the decentralized world. So whatever is designed is no longer own by large companies that takes a large amount of the value, and allow that value get pass back down to the engineer or consumers. I think if we do this right, we can technically build the next NASA/SpaceX if we wanted to.
I think 500k might be a good budget to start for the next round. It will cost more for R&D because hardware is more expensive.
