Hi, this is Charles Hoskinson broadcasting live from rough and rugged Wyoming, up here at the ranch. It's about 10:17 p.m., and we're just about ready to say goodbye to 2025. What a year it was! We had a lot of fun, but we also faced a lot of downsides. Many of us didn't get what we wanted this year. Many of us didn't see a rally, and many of us didn't get the regulation passed that we wanted. We thought the bad times under Biden were over and that we were entering a new age of crypto.
But one of the things about crypto is that it has to change, and we have to change. We need to think differently, act differently, and ultimately go back to first principles. We have to ask ourselves what the purpose of our presence here is and what we do. We got so caught up in the success that we forgot to build something that can cash the checks we write as an industry. Crypto exists to change the economic, political, and social systems of the world. It exists to give you back your freedom of association, commerce, and expression. Somewhere along the way, we lost our way—not because meme coins or NFT projects are bad, but because when you overdo anything, it becomes a problem. If you lose focus, you lose your way.
I've spent quite a bit of time here at the ranch in deep reflection about what this year meant to me, where I want to go, and what I want to achieve. Ultimately, I ask how we can achieve the broader mission and what my role is in that mission. To get this right off the bat, I'm not leaving the cryptocurrency space. I'm aware that every time I make a live stream or say something, it gets misconstrued, negative articles get written, and it gets amplified by trollish hate groups like cryptocurrency Reddit. So, let's definitively put that on the table: I'm not going anywhere. But the approach has to change.
The reality of being a public figure is that we start with a strong desire to be accessible. We want to share our lives and experiences in real time with the countless thousands, if not millions, of people who follow us. Unfortunately, that gets weaponized. The more famous you become, the less accessible you have to be. This is a sad truth I've become aware of over the last few years, especially in these bad markets where people have become inordinately hostile and toxic.
It's not just about ignoring it. Because of my presence and persona, there are groups of people who will never participate in Cardano or Midnight. That's not fair to the countless hundreds of thousands of people around the world who believe in these projects and want them to succeed. I have to moderate my desire for accessibility with the stark reality that guilt by association has become the standard way people handle the world today. We don't ask what something does; we ask who made it, and then we try to figure out our relationship with them. If we love them, it must be good; if we hate them, it must be evil.
There's no greater example of that than Trump coin. Many of us in the industry knew that should never have happened, but none of the major cryptocurrency founders spoke out against it, with the possible exception of Vitalik Buterin. Kudos to him for that. The rest stayed silent, not because they agreed it was a good idea, but because they understood the consequences of speaking out. I see no integrity in that. Either we're here to speak our minds and speak the truth, or we're not. How can we assert that we have the right to run the world, that we're the rebels who will overcome the world financial system and build a better one, if we don't have the courage to say when things are wrong or when we made a mistake?
Cardano is the product of many of my personal mistakes and successes. Some of my most brilliant and least brilliant moments, some of my most heroic and most regrettable moments, happened during the Cardano project. As I reflect on all of that, especially as we enter 2026, I always ask, how can I be better? How can I grow? How can I do things differently? You have to look at that in every dimension.
For example, I've outgrown X. So, this is my farewell to that platform. I'll turn it over to curators and AI. It will go into silent mode for probably a few weeks to a few months as we build up that infrastructure because I have more important things to do. I'm going to uninstall the app and never think of it again. I've outgrown it. I just don't have time anymore for that way of interacting with people, and I don't have time to endure what they give. There's just no benefit to it; it's noise. Instead, I'm going to focus on long-form writing, AMAs, live streams, and new forms of communication on new platforms and new media. I might even do a Twitch stream and talk while playing a game. I think kids today really love that.
You always have to be uncomfortable and have a beginner's mind. You have to look at things from a new lens and a new perspective. I want to keep up with the times and find new and innovative ways to communicate with people and show them that I have great ideas and a lot to contribute. I'm also going to go into deep focus. I'm at a product level and a level of specificity I haven't been in for a long time. I spent some of this afternoon writing out a specification for a CKVm and working on adding privacy to Intense, discussing chain abstraction, and reasoning about how the different layers—application, permission, solver, and settlement—work from a cake standpoint or a nomia standpoint.
I was happy because I get to create things. I'm happiest when I can construct something to share with everyone, and I'm happiest when I see people use that and it wows them. Every day I wake up and ask, how do I build something a million people can use? Then I ask, how do I build something a billion people can use? Right now, I'm thinking about strategy for Midnight over the next five years. How can I write a strategy that will have a billion users and a trillion dollars of transactions on the platform by 2030? What would that take? What technology would we need? How many would come from legacy systems, and how many from Web 3? That's what makes me happy. That's what I enjoy: imagining that such things can exist and finding a way to make them exist.
I also love working with amazing people. I'm incredibly privileged to have worked with incredible individuals throughout my career. It doesn't matter if they're the president of my company, Tam Hasen, or an intern from some university no one's ever heard of. Each person contributes something. When I have the ability to work with someone who takes their job seriously, it makes my day better because they bring something original and creative that I couldn't come up with myself. It increases our chances of success and realizing our goals.
2025 has been probably the hardest year of my life. I entered it thinking I would lose a bunch of weight and was ready for the bullet ant ritual. I had the courage to take my shirt off on the internet, even though I don't look so good, and I tried earnestly to lose the weight. But the stress and biochemistry got in the way. I traveled for more than 260 days, and my sleep scores averaged only five and a half hours a night. It's not sustainable. If I keep this up, I won't look 50; I'll look 70, and metabolically, I'll be the same. No amount of stem cells will fix that.
So, it's not lost on me that I have to make some changes. After Japan and Hong Kong, in addition to not having Twitter, I'm also not going to travel as much. I'm going to stay on my ranch or my farm and get reacquainted with getting back in shape and eating right. I'll spend a great deal of time in calm reflection and reading. There are so many things I enjoy reading, so many books I love, and so many ideas I want to dissect. I want to study mathematics. My critics love to remind me that I never finished a degree in mathematics, despite taking dozens of advanced courses and running one of the largest research groups in the world with 168 scientists and over 250 papers on dense mathematics.
Technically, I'm not a mathematician, but I am a math enthusiast, and I deeply enjoy the art of problem-solving. Mathematics is a game where you have something you want to be true, but you have to discover the path to get there. People who love that are never bored, never alone, and never have a bad day. The saddest days are when you solve your old friends, when you finally get there. The Japanese have a saying called Yugen, which is the idea of pondering what's on the other side of the mountain. You can't see it, but you wonder about it. If you wonder too deeply, you ruin it. But if you reminisce on the potential beauty of it, it's magical.
Writing proofs in mathematics is much the same. When you're young, you never see behind the mountains because you've never climbed a peak. As you get older, it's harder to climb unfamiliar peaks, and you start valuing creativity and originality. I've been to 75 countries and launched cryptocurrencies that have reached a value of over a hundred billion dollars. I was a billionaire at the age of 33. It's not a brag; it's a consequence of being lucky and fortunate to be in the right place at the right time, to have met the right people, and to have worked relentlessly towards an end.
I'm proud of that, but I'm also reminded that if I keep doing the same thing over and over, there's no more joy, excitement, originality, or creativity. So, 2026 has to be about returning to something new—a year of originality, creativity, and doing things differently. If I get there, I feel young again, and I won't look so old or be so curmudgeonly or stressed.
This journey is not measured in minutes or hours, days or weeks, or even months. It's a journey of a lifetime. You wake up with a mentality that you just have to keep pushing forward. Even if you don't get everything done on your to-do list, every now and then, you accomplish something, and that's enough.
I was driving one of the back roads with my brother when we saw that lightning had struck one of the trees. I said, "I've never used the winch on these new UTVs. Let's clear that tree off the road." We cleared it and then thought, "That tree is a fire hazard just being there, all dead on the side of the road. Let's grab a chainsaw and have some fun." We found a chainsaw, chopped it up, and I still have all my fingers. I'm a lucky man.
That really is the meaning of life. When you look at the mountains, you smile at the prospect of what's behind them, and when you find a tree in the road, you take a side quest to clear it. If you do these things, you have a good day. If you do them every day, you have a good life. How many of you listening, addicted to social media drama and the vices and problems of others, can honestly say you found a tree today, metaphorically or physically? How many of you can say you truly lived in the moment?
Most of you probably didn't, if you're being honest. Myself included. When I spend too many days without finding that tree, I know I need to make a change. That's what growing up is about.
Looking to the future, I think 2026 is going to be a great year. There will be new faces, new ideas, and the old people will be a bit wiser and more humble. I can see a world where Midnight has a remarkable year, where Cardano has one of its best years ever, and where our industry as a whole grows up and changes things.
I can also see a world where we continue to be dragged down by greed and avarice, where we remain in conflict with each other. But why buy into that? If that's the outcome, that's the outcome. Let's choose not to believe that will happen and instead believe that the better angels will persevere. If we want a bull run, we'll create one. If we want crypto to be adopted, we'll create that too.
At the end of the day, we're selling stories and hope. If people bite, we create a movement. With a real movement, we can change the world. There's no reason why crypto can't be successful unless we, as an industry, choose not to make it successful. There's no reason why crypto can't ascend, get billions of users, and be involved in everyone's life unless we choose for that not to happen.
What's the alternative? Federated networks of banksters who rob us every year, politicians who rob us every year, going from one war to the next, debasing our currency, and accumulating a global debt heading towards 500 trillion dollars that will never be repaid? Is that what we want to fight for? Have some agency.
The greatest con ever perpetuated on humanity is convincing the mainstream populace that they're powerless. It's robbing you of the ability to ask why, to say, "I didn't consent to that," and to say, "I'm going to change that." It is unreasonable to sleepwalk into a system where mankind is placed in bondage, where the few dominate the many. It's unreasonable to be told to work hard your whole life only to have everything you saved become worthless.
The purpose of crypto is to give all of us the freedom to imagine that we can make a difference. It's not just to launch meme coins or NFTs, as magical as those things can be. It's much more fundamental: to tell you that you have the right to dream big dreams and to be a big person. I came from nothing. There's nothing in my background, education, or connections that would have given me any ability to do these things in the conventional legacy world. I'd have been laughed out of every room.
The same is true for every entrepreneur in our space worth something who wasn't implanted by some bank to form an enclave to perpetuate control. We came from nothing, and that's why I don't care if I return to nothing. You can't take it with you, and it doesn't matter if I go from broke to billionaire to broke. What matters is that I can look in the mirror and say I chose to do something different, something new. I chose to be something different. I chose not to consent and to bring people along, saying, "We're just going to go our own way."
That's how I live my life. You have to build, as Musashi used to say, that inner house. It's rule 12 in a book he wrote while dying of stomach cancer in a cave. He was a ronin, wandering around Japan, masterless, sometimes sleeping outside in the rain, sometimes in a stable, sometimes in a house—broke, going from duel to duel. He thought to himself, "This could be the last day."
How do you stay happy and calm when you live a life like that? You build an inner house where, no matter the external circumstances, you're happy. The core of that house is integrity. Never let people rob you of your integrity. Have the courage to do the right thing, say the right thing, and accept the consequences when you do things wrong.
My inability at times to work with people and how I've treated them has created unfortunate circumstances that limited my opportunities. Despite these things, I've achieved great things. Imagine how much greater it could have been had I acted differently. You don't obsess over it; you just change, move forward, and become a different person.
Are we so cynical and pessimistic as a society that we rob people of the right to grow, to redeem, to become different? What does that say about ourselves? This is as good as it's ever going to get? Enjoy your misery? Empathy, love, and hope are some of the most magical gifts we have. If there's any proof of divinity, it's those things.
Some of the best moments of your life have been in service to others, in love and empathy. As we look to 2026, we have to ask ourselves if we live in a world of empathy and compassion or in a world of hate, cynicism, pessimism, greed, and division. Where does that start? It starts with you, the listener. You can't abdicate responsibility and say, "I'm a loving person, but all those others are terrible."
Have you audited your relationships? Most of you haven't. Be honest. Why lie? If you have, your life would be a lot better. I've taken the time in recent months and years to reflect on the good and bad times, the good and bad interactions, and ask myself where I could have loved a little more, where I could have had a bit more empathy.
Ultimately, how do you live a life with unconditional positive regard for everything and everyone around you? If you do that, people can sense it. It's hard to hate someone who exudes love. You see it in figures like Mr. Rogers and Bob Ross; those are just good people. The road to becoming a good person is simple: you just love people.
I love being accessible and spend time on X and other channels because I genuinely love the community. There are so many good people there, and I'm sad when they pass on or leave. We've lost too many good people—friends who cared about the things I cared about. It was enjoyable to see people for who they are and give them a chance to express themselves. That was magic.
I have to find ways to keep that going because I would miss it too much. 2026 will be a year of compassion, health, building, restoration, and ultimately realizing our dreams. RealFi will finally achieve what we've been trying to do in Africa for a long time. It's long overdue, but I'm proud of the people who built it. They've given out a million loans over the last 18 months, changing many lives.
We finally launched Midnight—six years of my life on that one. It's magical to see that we still have some mojo. Cardano will have a great year, with Leo shipping and Hydra getting better. The community will gain full agency as other nodes turn on and decentralized governance becomes hardened. We've gone through several cycles and crises, but we've come out strong.
It's going to be a good year. If all you can think about is the price, you've already lost. Even if it goes up, you've lost—not just in crypto, but in life. The beauty is that we have a community of dreamers, and we have people getting their agency back as human beings, realizing they're not cogs in a system. They're people equal to the president of the United States or the heads of the European Union.
It was people who went to Argentina and signed a constitution for Cardano—not special people, but self-selected individuals who woke up and said, "I want to be special today. I want to matter today. I want to do something that matters today." Never forget that. I certainly won't.
It's easy to love when I see so many capable
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