Hi, this is Charles Hoskinson broadcasting live from warm, sunny Colorado. Always warm, always sunny. Sometimes Colorado. Today is December 15, 2025. We're oh so close to Christmas. We've got a lot going on—lots of cool things. But I wanted to make a video to talk a little bit about the year in totality and where 2026 is going and beyond.
This has been a really challenging year for our industry as a whole. A lot of people are cynical, angry, pessimistic, and bitter because we were promised a pony, and what we got was a donkey with some duct tape on its hooves. It was a donkey of a year, and not even a good donkey—an old donkey with a gas problem. We woke up in December of 2024 with a lot of hope. I was in discussions about the cryptozar thing, meeting with senators. We were looking forward to a new administration, a new way of looking at crypto. The end of the Gensler era and the American war on crypto was coming to an end, and we knew that four-year super cycle was entering another year. We thought a lot of liquidity would enter the market.
I was recently interviewed by either Discover Crypto or Altcoin Daily; I forget which one. I think it was Discover Crypto. They asked about what happened—why did we have such a bizarre market? Where did we go wrong in all of this?
First off, institutional money did come in, but they got locked into the Bitcoin layer. Because of the structure, they can't sell the Bitcoin and buy altcoins. So all that value accumulation that entered through the institutional side stuck to Bitcoin but didn't trickle down. We lost the trickle-down effect that we enjoyed in 2021 and in 2017 and beyond. That was the first issue that was very problematic for us as an industry.
The second thing was that we all thought the Trump administration would be more serious about the industry than it was. The canary in the coal mine—I sent ten people to the inauguration. They were running around, having fun, and they ran into Jake Paul and Mike Tyson, who was giving Mike Tyson a piggyback ride. They were high on mushrooms. That day at the inauguration ceremony, they launched Trumpcoin. At first, I thought it was a joke. I said, "Holy cow, Trumpcoin! What is this thing?" It was pretty crazy. We were like, "What are we doing here? This is nuts."
Okay, it came out. I guess it's a new administration; they just wanted to shake things up a little bit. Maybe it was a ham-fisted attempt to show endearment to the industry as a whole. But then they launched Melania, and it was clear these were cash grab situations. We, as an industry, had to just take it on the chin because we were hoping for a more permissive regulatory structure. So we said, "All right, it is what it is. Let's just move forward."
There were a lot of ebbs and flows. The cryptozar they selected is also the AI czar. More than 20 people interviewed for that position, and they picked someone who didn't interview—who's best friends with Elon Musk, was an operating officer for him, and is kind of a podcast bro in Silicon Valley. This person has no real significant connections to the industry, hasn't built anything in this industry, and just buys stuff in the industry like Solana and so forth.
Then they were supposed to have a crypto commission, and Bo Hines was going to be the executive director. Members of the industry who weren't selected to be cryptozar would come in to be on that commission. They decided to get rid of the commission. We were supposed to meet with the president, but invitations got rescinded. They had these White House meetings—supposed to be many of them—but they only did one, and it didn't produce the effect they wanted.
Then there was going to be a reserve, and ADA was in it, and Solana was in it, and XRP was in it, and Ether was in it, and Bitcoin was in it. Then it was Bitcoin only. But we're going to tweet it anyway, right? We got the Genius Act done. It was very hard to get that over the line. We started working on clarity in earnest, and a lot of things came together.
But the problem was that because of World Liberty Finance and Trumpcoin, it created an environment for the Democrats where crypto equals Trump equals bad. Everything that was bipartisan in December was not bipartisan by about June or July. The bills became a referendum on ethics instead of good policy for the industry. That's tough. It created a lot of unnecessary strife and bad blood.
The macro environment was also very uncertain. We had tariffs coming down the road. Are we in a trade war with China? Are we not? Are we headed for a recession? Are we not? We also had a lot of wealth accumulation at the top—the millionaire and billionaire class—and an extremely stagnant recovery for the blue-collar people in the sub-millionaire class. It's a split economy. If you're in my economic class, you're doing really well. If you're in a normal person's economic class, you're stagnant or declining.
Then we looked at a lot of the tech investments, and we are in an AI bubble. That AI bubble is evident by the fact that Nvidia is worth more than Australia and Canada combined. One company that's not sustainable. We understand there's great value there, and the AI revolution is interesting. There are a lot of value propositions to what AI is doing. But you can't have more than 1% of the entire US GDP committed to something that's not sustainable.
We don't have as a nation the will and the budget to build 50 power plants a year. We don't have the will and the budget to invest a trillion dollars a year in data centers. We're not China. This is not what we do. We don't have that central top-down planning. When you look at the investments and the expectations of those investors, that's not sustainable either. A lot of people know that.
The markets are a little soft and spongy and weak. We were promised Russia would stop attacking Ukraine, but that didn't happen. It's still ongoing. There's a little bit of peace in the Middle East, but it's not really what we want. Now we're starting a new conflict in Venezuela, committing act after act of war—taking their tankers and blowing up their boats. A lot of people believe regime change will occur within six to twelve months. Some friends of mine, including some people on my detail, have been activated to go and train people in Taiwan. There's a lot of discussion about a potential kinetic conflict with China in 2027.
As an industry, when we take a look at the whole, the biggest problem is that retail did not return. The answer I give to that is: why should they? What has this industry offered retail to return? Retail showed up in 2021. They were excited and enthusiastic. The cab driver was there, the waitress was there, the construction worker was there—everybody was excited about crypto. Then they got screwed. They got screwed again and again and again. They got roped into buying NFTs, like that million-and-a-half-dollar banana picture NFT and all this other garbage.
2022 decimated and wiped out a lot of people, leaving them disgusted and angry with the industry as a whole. There was always this question: do we learn our lesson as an industry and try to build something better and more sustainable? Instead, the answer was memecoin mania—doing a memecoin of a memecoin of a memecoin. Every time I post a picture, someone creates a memecoin and then spams my Twitter, hoping they too can get rich by dumping on retail.
Even legitimate projects like Midnight faced a lot of short selling—negative 800%. It was insane when you looked at some of these things on the market. People are pre-programmed with the mindset that everything is a scam, and everything is about dumping tokens on people. Of course, they got burned because it's not. The trading volume erased them, which makes me happy. But this is the mentality that people have.
In 2025, we did not restore trust and credibility in retail as a whole. A lot of people said if the president of the United States can issue a memecoin twice, including Melania, then this is not a serious market. It's just a parody of the financial market and a protest against the excesses of Wall Street. That's where we're at in 2025.
There's been great technological progress. A lot of amazing new protocols have come out, and a lot of great code has been written. Congratulations to the Solana ecosystem on Fire Dancer; there's amazing progress there. They hit a lot of their KPIs. When you look at the rank and file on engineering, it's impressive to see what's been achieved. The product-market fit for retail, not so much. It's been devastating.
Now we're looking to 2026. The question is: are we offering the same as we did in 2025, or are we going to do something different and new as an industry? I can't control the macro as the CEO of one company that builds one or two protocols. But what I can do is offer some advice. The advice has to be a return to first principles. No government is coming to save us. No large company is coming to save us. No large investor is coming to save us. There is no cavalry coming to save us.
We are on the island, and we as crypto have to decide whether we want to make a compelling case to bring people up or bring people down. It starts with the vision of the future. Here is what the billionaire class is offering you: they want slaves. They found a legal way to get them back. This is a real video from a real company showcasing the armies they're building.
When I was younger, you may remember this scene from "I, Robot." It was fantasy, science fiction. Well, guess what? Now it's reality. They're building that right now. In five years, maybe ten years, no later than fifteen years, every delivery driver in America, every construction worker, every office job, every fry cook—this is who's going to be serving you. It'll have the McDonald's colors on it or whatever. That's what's coming.
They say, "Oh, well, we'll solve it with UBI." Who would you trust to distribute UBI? A government or blockchain? They'll solve it with higher taxation so the taxes can go to corporate welfare for the billionaire class to pay for some more wars. Is it really going to go to the poor people? There's a lot of this coming, and there's also the question of whether those AI models should be controlled by individuals or companies if they become a public good.
If they're a public good, how do you regulate it? How do you control a public good? Blockchain is the point of it. It's a payment system, a trusted bulletin board, a ledger, and a controlling function for a shared resource. In the case of Midnight, it's computational privacy. In the case of Bitcoin, it's digital gold and the payment system thereof, but it's a controlling resource for a shared public good. AI is one example of that. AI has yet to meaningfully enter the blockchain space.
We've been trying, as have Near and others, but it's been difficult for a time. In 2026, we can look to the future of advertising, the future of artificial intelligence, the future of money. We return to first principles and say, "Let's look to the year 2030, the year 2035." We have to ask ourselves: what do we want as a society?
How you bring retail in is by convincing them that you have a vision where you can build a better world. You build a better world by showing them what the world could look like versus what it will look like if we do nothing. In the spirit of Christmas, there was a Christmas movie where the protagonist imagines a world where he didn't exist and the impact it would have on people's lives. It's the same here in blockchain.
Remove it from the equation for a moment. How does globalization work? How does robotics work? How does AI work? How does the digitization of money work when we get rid of cash and move to all CBDCs? How does any of that work? What you'll find is it's a dystopian hellscape. That's just the way it is. We have to ask ourselves if we're personally comfortable with that as individuals. Most people would say no because they don't have any agency. They feel like there's nothing they can do, no influence they can have, and no meaningful way to approach this.
That's how you bring retail back: you show them the vision. You give them agency. You say, "You know what? Let's all come together and figure this out as an industry. We're going to solve these problems systematically." What we've done as an industry, especially in the last four years, is say your goal is to buy at price point X and sell at price point Y, with Y higher than X. The delta is your profit, where you go back to the legacy system, which you're supposed to be out of, and use that to buy stuff—maybe stuff you need, maybe stuff you don't need, maybe pay off debts, whatever.
But financial freedom—that's what you're selling. How can you sell that and not have it be a scam? How is that possible? It's a rigged system. Ninety-nine percent of people will lose their money. If that is what you're selling, Gensler has a point. There's no path forward for value appreciation unless you've created a utility or service that creates natural consumption.
You have to have something on the other side of the rainbow where people are using it not to speculate but to solve a real problem that couldn't be solved before. Yet for four-plus years now, year after year since 2021, the narrative has been: what is the next 10x, and how soon can I dump? When people lose money, it's a scam. That's the narrative. There's no vision, no mission, no greater good or common good. There's no enemy that we're beating or slaying. It's just avarice.
Whether something's a good project or a bad project is completely connected to the token price on CoinMarketCap. What's the point of this? Why are we here? Why take the abuse? What's the difference? You've taken everything that makes us special and the problems we can solve and reduced it to "number go up" or "never go down" as an industry. Then you ask: why is retail not coming back? Because retail is smarter now. You screwed them. You hurt them. You made them look like fools to their families when they lost their life savings.
And now you want them to come back so you can do it again? Will they? No. No, they won't. No human being should have to endure that type of punishment a second time. Come on, grow up and mature. No one is coming to save you. Either you make the case that the utility is worthwhile and you're solving a major existential problem in the future, or you don't deserve to get rich.
Everybody wants to be rich. They want to be the big entrepreneur. You're wannabe entrepreneurs. You have to do the work and make the change. That's why 99% fail after it's all said and done. They don't really want to build the product or embrace the chance of failure. The vast majority of people will fail in any business endeavor. But those who succeed do so because they did something new, different, and special, providing real value to others over the long term.
So when we look to 2026 as an industry, we know the problems. We know AI is coming. We know the robots are coming. We know the global financial system is a Ponzi scheme—$338 trillion of global debt that is unrepayable, heading to $500 trillion globally. That is an astronomically large amount of money that no one can ever repay. It's just one Ponzi scheme where they shift things from one side to the other. We're headed towards a global collapse, strife, and conflict. We know that the rule of law doesn't matter anymore.
We really know in our hearts that the fiction of the rule of law is gone. We now know we have structural parallel economies where the millionaires and billionaires live well and consume, while everyone else is basically forgettable until they can be totally replaced with robots. What do we do with these giant piles of people floating around? We know that's coming.
So all you care about is "number go up" so you can try to get into the other group. You're not going to be in the other group. Ninety-nine percent of you won't be. So do something different. Opt out of the old system and into the new system. Opt into new systems with values where you have a voice, sound money, and agency over the custody of your funds. You control that, and only you control that.
Opt into something that can run the economic, political, and social systems of the world while preserving and protecting your liberties, your freedom of association, commerce, and expression. Then you get to say, "At least I have something in my life that they can't mess up. At least I have something real."
We said, "No, I'm not going to sit here and wait five years for a goddamn robot to replace me. I'm not going to wait five years to wake up and find out my job has been replaced with an AI that sounds a lot smarter than me, never calls in sick, and costs a dollar a day of electricity to run. I'm sorry. I'm not going to wait for that. I'm going to do something else and go to a different system."
That's been the arc of my entire career. Every day I wake up and try to find new and creative ways to enable that reality—new methods of distribution, new ways of dealing with these markets. There are a thousand compromises you have to make. Every step of the way, there's some value extractor or some horrible person or some reality of these markets and the mentality that people have that tries to dilute and damage the vision and mission.
It's truly remarkable that we've been able to keep our heads above water despite all these things. People ask, "Well, why aren't you as fast as Solana?" Because it's hard to be as decentralized and have all the bells and whistles we have in terms of security while being as fast as Solana. It's easy to be as fast as Solana. I attended CCS back in 2018. There was a beautiful protocol called Rapid Chain that could have facilitated that in 2018.
It's hard to do that and have 50% Byzantine resistance, Nakamoto-style recovery, and full decentralization. If you don't value that, you don't think those things are important, you think I've wasted my life for the past seven years. But I do value it because my mission is to build something that's here for 30 years, 50 years, 100 years—something that can't be co-opted, corrupted, or destroyed, providing utility for everyone everywhere.
Yes, we
That's about it. Social media's only purpose seems to be to complain and sympathize about everything. I don't want to live in that dystopian hellscape. I want to live in a world where I can verify that someone is a human being. If I want to pay to interact with a human being, I want to pay to interact with a human being, not a robot. I want to live in a world where the money in my pocket can't be debased by politicians because they can no longer be trusted. They're dishonest people, and there will always be dishonest people. Fool me once, fool me twice—how many times now? Come on, you can't trust them. They're basically diapers; you're just waiting for them to be filled. Some take a while, some fill up right after you put them on. But guess what? It's going to be full of [ __ ]. That's what a politician is, and I'm tired of it. You're tired of it. Let's stop it. Let's move on. Let's not let this happen anymore. Let's grow up as a society. That's what I want to do, and I believe that's what you want to do.
So, 2026 is a return to first principles if we choose it. Midnight was the beginning of that retail-only distribution. We traded $1.5 billion worth of Knight token today, and the market cap flipped Algorand. How about that as a new entrant? There was no ICO, no VC lurking around. It was just about giving the people something new and different and seeing what happens. People are excited about it. It has new things to bring to the table—private smart contracts. What's that about? It feels different. We can take all these DAOs and all this money, and they keep saying we can put a business on a blockchain. Reali is going to have a co-op with it, and I want to put that co-op on the blockchain. We're going to take Reeve and modify it a little bit and add a privacy layer to it. Let's find a path to have a cooperative run and have an actual DAO for the first time ever really be on a blockchain. Why not? Let's do it. Let's put our money where our mouth is. Let's try something different, new, and interesting. It might fail; it might not fail. But you have to be willing to fail to succeed. You have to take a chance. You have to believe that people are going to show up and get things done.
Every single time I've said, "Hey, do you want to do something new, different, and interesting?" all of you showed up. The retail showed up, and you said, "Yeah, why not? Let's take a shot." So that's what 2026 for us is going to be defined as. We tried the flashy stuff; that's just not who I am. I tried to put on the suit, I tried to play nice with all these political people. I tried so hard to fit into that crowd, and I just don't. I won't. I'm the guy with the lobster on the mic. I'm the guy with the bee on the mic. That was a gift from someone who gave me a honey hive. I had trouble putting it together. That's who I am at my core. I wake up every day, read papers, read books, think about weird things, opine on the future, and then join X spaces in the middle of the night. I wake up every day and just do the work. I did it when I was poor, and I do it when I am rich. I don't care if I go back to poor; I just do it from an apartment. It's what I love doing. I enjoy it. I like being in the driver's seat. I like having some semblance of agency because it makes me feel better about the future. It makes me feel like maybe, just maybe, we can actually have a say in all of it.
I've seen what's on the other side of the curtain. I've seen the greed, the avarice, the sociopathy. I've seen the disdain that these elite people have for the common man, and I've also seen where they want to take this. They want to make you useless and then get rid of you because you're no longer needed. I don't want to live in a world where there's a group of people that think that's okay. I want to live in a world where everybody matters. Is that it? It's pretty simple, huh?
2025 was a tough year. I feel your pain; I really do. It was tough for me. It was the hardest year of my life. I traveled more this year than ever before—one place after another, one interview after another, one thing after another, one launch after another. We had to deal with everything. The perfect day was when I was in executive workshops talking about how we're going to make everything work in 2026, and then they called me in for the soft fork. We dealt with that, and then we had a workshop with Real Fi—all in the same day. It felt like a 26-hour day, but we got it done. We pushed through. We do it for you.
When we look to 2026, though, it's going to be a better year because it's the reset. The nonsense is over. We're back to work, back to where we were, back to first principles, and we'll see where it goes. Maybe good, maybe bad; I don't know, but it's going to be different, and different is good. Thank you all for listening. I wish you a Merry Christmas and happy holidays. Take some time; social media is not reality. Spend time with people in reality—friends, family, or even just yourself. That can still be good too. But don't spend it online. Take time off. Get off Twitter, get off Facebook, get off all these platforms, and reset a little bit. The world needs to calm down. We all need to calm down. Have some more empathy, have some more love in your heart, have some more compassion, and understand that the world is filled with a lot of people just trying to figure it out.
The next five years are filled with wonders and magic, and there are a lot of really cool and interesting things down the pipe. But they're also going to be filled with pain and heartache, and many people are going to go through difficult times. Understand that just because you're not one of them right now doesn't mean that you won't be in the future. There's a karmic cycle that we go through, and we really need as a society to take a step back and realize that all of our problems are our problems, and we're only going to get through it together.
So in 2026, it's a return to first principles. In 2026, it's a return to retail, and we showed that with the launch of Bitnight. We're going to continue showing that with Cardano, Midnight, and Bitcoin DeFi, and we'll see where it goes. I, for one, believe in you, and I, for one, need your help. So we're all going to work together, those who are willing, and hopefully, we can celebrate 2026's Christmas with a slightly bigger smile than this one. Good night, everyone, and God bless.
1:07:35
26:05
26:19