Hi, this is Charles Hoskinson broadcasting live from Cole Cloomy, London. I finished out the day and had a chance to take the guys out for cigars and whiskey to celebrate all the wonderful things we were able to achieve and accomplish. I'm just going through the last-minute stuff before we call it a night. Some of the people stayed up for more than 30 hours straight to put the war room together, but the chain has healed. All the pieces are back together. As I predicted, two chains have become one, which is pretty special if you think about it.
What happens next is a long slog of analytics and comparison. We have to see what the damage is because there are all these orphan blocks, and it’s unclear if there were double spends or whatever. But we’ll figure all that out. I don’t want to make a video as a postmortem. There are already blog posts being written, and a lot of information will come over the next 48 to 72 hours.
I did want to make a video about the sentiment changing a bit. When we entered this day before the attack, it was pretty glum. It was pretty bad—not because of the attack that occurred, but because we’ve lived now with four years of constant market decline, with a little glimmer of hope here and there, like when Trump tweeted about ADA or other things, and we went up to a dollar or something like that. But the markets are weak, and it’s caused people to get into this cycle of neurosis. We keep having disappointment after disappointment, and understandably, everybody is not having the best of times. 2025 has been a very tough year. There’s been a lot of airing of grievances, a lot of built-up rage and anger. When you look at it, these were not new things, but things we just couldn’t express properly, or it wasn’t the time to express them. When governance finally came out, we could all say what we really felt. There’s truth in all the things that people said, regardless of whether it was hurtful or not.
At some point, you have to look at yourself and ask, "Is there anything productive to be gained by continuing to tell the same truths again and again?" It felt good for people to come together across the ecosystem. Some like each other, some don’t, and some really don’t like each other. For a single day, we got to set all of that aside and unify. The community as a whole is a simulacrum of that. You guys came together as well. Today, November 22nd, about 3:11 a.m. here in London, you guys are more unified than you’ve been in a very long time as a community, as an ecosystem. That’s a special thing. If we will it, we can keep it that way. If we don’t protect it, cherish it, and let it grow, it’ll break apart again.
The coming 90 to 180 days are going to be very pivotal. I’m going to spend an enormous amount of time getting Midnight out the door. To me, that’s the single most valuable thing I can do for Cardano DeFi. I commissioned a report; my people write them on the state of things in Cardano. It’s a long report—about 40 pages long. The TL;DR is we’re not where we need to be. In fact, it’s like the slogan of the United States: the real one. We know we’re working on it. There’s nothing that can’t be fixed. But the reality is there are a lot of integrations that have to be done, a lot of products that need to be built, a lot of DApps that need to be developed, and a lot of people who need to be given a glass of ice water and help. More broadly, we lack a set of unified KPIs for what defines success.
This year was about airing grievances, surviving attacks, and people saying what they really meant. Governance institutions came alive, and philosophical discussions ranged from how much we should pay for the treasury to whether the constitutional committee should be compensated. We had all those conversations, for better or for worse; there were winners and losers. They’ll keep going on, but they no longer define us. It would be pretty boring if we kept talking about the same things over and over again.
So then the question is, what should we talk about? I, for one, like to talk about setting some objective metrics for this network over the next 90 to 180 days and measuring where we’re at. We took the measurement here, and our best approximation is that we’re not in a good place. We need to socialize that and discuss why, because there’s a lot to do. I know how to get hundreds of millions, if not billions, of dollars of TVL on Cardano. In fact, the existence of Midnight and the upcoming Realy project alone should probably do that. We know how to get the integrations done. The ticket price for all the integrations that Cardano is going to need is probably going to be around a hundred million dollars.
You all come to me and say, "When this, when this, when this," as if we don’t ever talk to anybody. We do talk to them. Every year, they give us increasingly more onerous prices for integrations because they don’t take Cardano seriously many times. At some point, somebody’s got to pay. It’s probably going to be the Midnight Foundation and Input Output that end up biting the bullet, and we’ll find a path to just get it done.
Tier one listings for the first time ever for Cardano assets are coming, so that’s something to look forward to. It opens the door for everybody else, but it’s not a full DeFi market, and there’s a lot we can do to make that happen. How do we get there? We do it with the newfound unity that we have. All the solutions, all the knowledge, all the entrepreneurial will, if we unify as a community, is there. I know that for certain. There’s sufficient funding and resources to get all these things together.
While all these people run around outside of our community, spiking the ball and saying, "Ah, see, Cardano is not so invincible," I don’t think they fully appreciate or understand that an attack of this nature and a fork of this nature in a proof-of-stake system is nearly unfixable in a conventional proof-of-stake protocol. So much so that you would have to hard fork the network, restart it from a checkpoint, and have a permanent scar. It’s now as if it never happened. Your Boris is built like a tank. That’s special, and we found a way to preserve that into the future with Laos, which will ship in 2026.
We’re going to do our part. Hydra is really coming into its own with Delta DeFi launching, and Sam and his team are starting to do vending machines with Hydra. As a community, if we fully embrace that, we can take it to the next level and really showcase its second-generation capabilities, achieving nearly unlimited TPS on a DApp basis. With Laos being 60 times faster, the layer one is going to be strong. But there’s a lot more we need to do. We need to get Star Stream in to get composition. We need event sourcing, PubSub, and data availability. These things will come along with the bridges, stable coins, and oracles.
It will happen where we, as a community, can come together with this newfound unity and, just like today, can say, "What problem do we need to solve this hour? Who do we need to talk to right now? How do we assign tasks? Who’s responsible for this? Who’s accountable for this? Who’s consulted for this?" We just do that. And after all, why can’t we? There’s nothing defective about us as people or about this ecosystem. What we just showed the entire space is that you can kick us in the teeth, and we get right back up and keep on going. The network never stops. Even when it’s forked, it never stops. It keeps moving, keeps building, and there’s a lot of goodwill. Deep down inside, every single person wants Cardano to succeed in the Cardano ecosystem.
In the telling of truths and the following of our own narratives, we can all be divisive, myself included. There have been many times where I’ve been unnecessarily harsh to people. Most of this comes from a position of indignation, frustration, and exhaustion. To be frank, it’s hard to do the same job for ten years straight and live four of those ten years in a state of perpetual decline. Every year, we’d give it everything we had to try to get things where they need to be. It’s also hard to have a lot of integrity and look at an industry that often has none. Let’s just be frank about it. This is the industry that gave us Celsius, OneCoin, BitConnect, Luna, and FTX—unbounded corruption at a scale we’ve never seen since the perennial age of banking. It’s not going to get better. As the markets get more globalized, we will continue to see that. Some of the people who won probably shouldn’t have, and they’re just going to get away with it. But they have to live every day looking at themselves in the mirror and knowing that it wasn’t honest. At the end of the day, they didn’t get to change the world; they just got to scavenge some value from honest people.
So, we keep beating the drum and pushing forward. We’re not going to get accolades for what we did today. The people who spent 30-plus hours up in the war room writing code, picking up the phone, calling people, emailing people, getting exchanges to upgrade, getting SPOs to upgrade, and testing things under enormous pressure and uncertainty from the crypto media—they won’t get accolades. But at least we can have the compassion to give those accolades to each other. From the bottom of my heart, to all the people who were part of the solution, thank you. You did your job. You held the line. Some small, some large, but each and every one of you mattered. Each and every one of you did something significant in the long run. You kept this dream alive. Now we’re unified, empowered, and we have a new kick in our step back. I’m tired of the four years of decline, and I think you are too. I’m tired of the macro being our master. No matter what we do, if Trump tweets something, or if a tariff comes out, or if some bank in a country we’ve never heard of collapses and suddenly the markets go down 20%, you know what? Forget it. It’s about time we go our own way. We’re never going to go our own way unless we unify as one. We get together and just get it done.
A lot of people at Input Output are going to work really hard on the Cardano business unit. We need commitments at IOE and to finish out a big chunk of the old roadmap as well as a lot of future stuff. Many people in the company are working hard right now with Bitcoin DeFi, and a lot of people are working hard to get Real launched and make that a multi-billion dollar concern. In fact, I heard a statistic today while I was smoking cigars. John O’Conor said to me, "Charles, you know what I’m most proud of in the ten years I’ve been part of all this?" I said, "What is it, John?" He started at the Cardano Foundation before he worked for me, back in the Michael Parsons era, so he’s been here since 2016. I said, "Man, there’s so much you’ve gone through, John. What is it?" He said, "Charles, I read through all the statistics. Guess how many loans we gave out with Real File last year?" I said, "How many?" He said, "Guess." I said, "50,000." He said, "1 million loans rolled over every one to three months. Roll over, roll over, roll over. 1 million loans, about 70% of which were to women." I said, "My God, John, that’s incredible." The average interest rate was 17%, and the NPL was 2%. Normally, it’s 85%. I asked, "How do we bring that to the world?" He said, "We got it done. We know how to do it, and we’re going to get it done next year on Cardano." When I said banking the unbanked, we didn’t give up on that; we just had to figure out how to do it at scale, ethically, and with integrity. It’s why I built Cardano. I just didn’t trust the other platforms. I realized somebody was going to come by and mess it up. So, I said, "Let’s get it done right." It was really amazing to have that conversation and to see the data and statistics. That’s just one of many projects—not just our own projects. If you look at the broader ecosystem, whether it be Strike, Liquid, Fluid, IGON and their recent successes, or World Mobile getting listed on Coinbase, or the SNE community, or the Hoski community, or MinSwap or Sunday Swap, there are hundreds of stories, small and large. Most of these things are made up of small teams of people who never lost faith.
At the Midnight Summit, we saw a lot of them because many were building on Midnight. Jerro Wallet was there, and I had a lovely hour-long meeting with the three founders. These kids are great. They believe in what we do. We’re all neighbors, even if they come from different ecosystems and different chains. We had people from Avalanche there, people from Solana there, and they all left saying, "You know, we had low expectations and expected people to be quite hostile because we’d heard such bad things, but we were pleasantly surprised that everybody welcomed us with open arms. They just wanted us to know the cool and interesting things we were building." That’s pretty special, and that’s what unity is all about.
As an ecosystem, when we rally, we need not only to fix the problems but also to acknowledge and recognize the people who got us here. We need to make sure we make an effort to get those people where they need to go for the greater good of everything that’s been done and will be done. Cardano is not going to fail; that much is certain. No matter how hard you hit us, we get back up. But at the same time, that doesn’t mean Cardano is going to succeed in becoming the world standard. You have to earn that, and it doesn’t stay that way. You have to earn it every single day. We earned it today, right now on the 22nd. We showed the entire cryptocurrency space that you can hit us, and we can get right back up. But we’ve got to earn it tomorrow. How we earn it tomorrow is a little different. We earn it with a positive attitude and a genuine belief that we can find a way to get along, even if we disagree, even if we’ve been disagreeable, even if harsh things have been said, even if there are philosophical differences. We can say, "Okay, what’s the next thing we need to get done? What’s the next thing we need to build?" If we keep this attitude, there is no reality where we’re going to lose. It’s going to be hard. The road is long. But you know what? What else are we going to do? Just sit on cryptocurrency Reddit and post mocking threads on suicide hotlines, memes about people working at McDonald’s complaining about yield not being attractive anymore and your coins not 10xing? How pathetic of a lifestyle, so bereft of empathy. Our way wasn’t necessarily lost, but it was buried and tarnished and lost its luster. Today, we got to experience what we used to be, and I hope that reminds everybody of that and inspires everyone to pick themselves up, remove the tarnish, and dust off. We’re a little older, we have some more scratches, and it’s not going to be as easy as it was in 2021. But you know what? We’re going to win. There’s nothing I saw today that convinced me otherwise. I saw unified people, brilliant people, capable people who truly understood why what we’ve built is worth saving.
I just wanted to make a quick video before I went to bed. I am incredibly tired, and that’s okay. I’m going to put in the work tomorrow. You are, too. We’re going to wake up one day, and we’re going to be number one. Good night, everyone.
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