Much of the recent headlines concerning Cardano have been overwhelmingly positive and for good reason.

Charles Hoskinson recently announced that “soul of ‘Shelley’”, the long-awaited protocol upgrade, was finally ‘out’.

The soul of Shelley is out https://t.co/5Hcwt40BsU

— Charles Hoskinson (@IOHK_Charles) April 17, 2019

This news, which came out the day before the IOHK Summit set the tone for what should have been a weekend filled with exciting new updates.

The announcement by Charles Hoskinson was also accompanied with a lengthy blog post on the IOHK website detailing the new Shelley update.

A link to that blog post can be found here:

Dissecting the Blog Post

According to the blog post,

“ The goal of the Cardano Shelley era is to bring full decentralization to Cardano, moving beyond the federated epoch and handing control of the ledger over to the community via stake pools.”

The post then goes on to state,

“ As part of the process of delivering Shelley, we create formal specifications which allow us to verify that the final code is in line with what the researchers initially envisaged in their publications.”

Other technical specifications are provided, but what is noticeably absent is a concrete, fixed date for the release of the protocol’s final implementation.

IOHK Summit

As noted above, another major event that occurred recently was the IOHK summit, which was announced on their homepage.

You can find a link to that announcement here: https://iohksummit.io/#livestream

The summit took place over April 17th and 18th, and it is apparent that many in the community expected that it would contain more concrete information about future releases from the Cardano/IOHK team with regards to the protocol’s upgrades and ‘Shelley’.

Expectations Left Unsatisfied

At the time of writing, there are several posts on Cardano’s Reddit that reveal a deep-seeded dissatisfaction with Cardano’s progress, the Summit, and information revealed by the team up to this point.

Below is an example of one Reddit post that was left in the Cardano subreddit a few hours ago from the time of writing:

Deceptive communications from IOHK from cardano

The post, which has 55 upvotes at the time of writing has been removed by the moderators of the forum.

Below is the original post as it was published in the Cardano subreddit:

Other Instances of Censorship

Cardano’s Censorship is Concerning

While some may be tempted to minimize the removal of posts similar in nature to what was posted on the Cardano Reddit, this type of suppression is important to note because it essentially suppresses information about the project itself.

Could some consider those posts to be ‘FUD’? Sure.

However, this overly broad narrative typically completely overlooks the nuance in why the posts are being created.

This narrative does not consider the number of upvotes that these posts received or the corroborating comments (which can still be seen). This narrative also does not consider the fact that the posts cited above and their respective responses do not level unduly harsh criticism on the Cardano team.

For instance, the posts do not indict Cardano as a scam or even accuse the team of any sort of malfeasance. In reality, the posts do not even go as far as to state that the team will not deliver on its promises.

However, the community’s impatience is conveyed in the posts and that is a valid criticism. If the community was expecting an updated roadmap during the Summit and did not receive one, it does not seem unreasonable that community members would speak on their disappointment in the team’s failure to provide such.

Conclusion: Censorship is a Response

Another troubling aspect of Cardano’s censorship is that it essentially serves as the team’s response to the criticism that they have received.

By removing posts that are critical of the project, the team is essentially acknowledging that they have seen the holders bring up. However, rather than respond, they have instead opted to censor these posts by removing them en masse.

It is unclear why they would choose to do this because censoring the posts only serves to confirm what the users are saying about Cardano.

In either case, it is sufficient to say that there is definitely trouble in paradise.