Simplicity, transparency and efficiency.

Absolutely! We heartily invite any interested parties to join our open source development projects and help us collectively build a stronger ecosystem. Projects under PRAGMA are open to contributions and we will make sure that those who want to contribute are onboarded.

You can have a look at contribution guidelines for respective projects. It is generally a good idea to reach out to project maintainers on Discord or GitHub before undertaking an important chunk of work as they can provide context on where the project is headed and what is the best way to incorporate contributions.

At the moment, PRAGMA is not open to new members. While the plan is to open PRAGMA to new members during 2025 and beyond, the founding members first want to explore how the organisation can work with a limited number of parties before hopefully scaling it out.

No. PRAGMA is a complementary effort. The mission of Intersect is broad, and the challenges they face are significant. PRAGMA is focused solely on open-source software development, whereas Intersect strives to be the broader governance entity for Cardano. With PRAGMA, we hope to start small, and figure out the most efficient way to work together on an initially limited number of projects.

In the long run, we hope that PRAGMA and Intersect can work hand-in-hand to deliver what is best for the Cardano ecosystem.

For the founding members, 2024 is a phase for building trust and finding what works for us. We want to bootstrap the association with a few key projects, and manage to reach our identified milestones.

By 2025, we will have experience with how best to work together with a limited set of members from the Cardano community and ecosystem. From 2025 onwards, the ambition is to open PRAGMA up to other blockchain ecosystems to leverage synergies and take advantage of overlaps between them.

The Greek etymology refers to doing something. It conveys the practical idea that we are builders and people who want to ship software. In a more obvious manner, it is also short for pragmatic/pragmatism which again points to the way we approach software development in general.

Second, in the software industry, a pragma is a way to specify extensions and options to programs. Pragmas are usually found on top of files to add new capabilities to an existing program. For example, they may enable specific language features in a compiler. So, in our context, it resonates with this idea that PRAGMA acts as an umbrella for an alternative ecosystem that provides extensions to what exists without disrupting the established ecosystem.

First and foremost, because we seek to meet developers where they are. To successfully bootstrap an open source ecosystem, we need enthusiasts and professionals who feel comfortable in contributing. Rust has ranked as “1st most admired technology” in Stack Overflow’s 2023 developer survey and it is particularly prevalent in the blockchain industry.

Second, because Rust is a language ecosystem with a solid foundation, created by Mozilla, supported through open governance via RFC, and now supported by the Rust Foundation created by several IT industry leaders. Rust as a platform is massively performant and easily interoperable, with a rich ecosystem of tools and libraries. In particular, Rust is well-suited for cryptography and has excellent support for cryptography primitives.

Thirdly, Rust has a long history within the Cardano ecosystem. Starting with the Incentivized TestNet (ITN) which was powered by Jörmungandr – a Rust node, Rust has remained one of the largest sub-ecosystems on Cardano with projects such as Aiken, Mithril, Oura, Pallas or the cardano-multiplatform-library.

Absolutely! While Rust is our language of choice within PRAGMA projects at launch, we believe that the right technology for the job is the one that helps you deliver. We want a panel of proven technologies used under PRAGMA, not just Rust.

No. PRAGMA is not geared to be a funding vehicle; its purpose is to be an umbrella organisation for open source development efforts.

PRAGMA will not receive, administer or deploy funding from members or third parties for projects, nor will PRAGMA provide direct funding to maintainer committees, maintainer committee members, or contributors.

This means that PRAGMA projects will need to look for other sources of resourcing, which we believe is paramount for the long-term success of the association.