Hi, this is Charles Hoskinson broadcasting live from warm, sunny Colorado. Always warm, always sunny, sometimes Colorado. Today is June 2nd, 2026, and I'm up here in rough and rugged Wyoming. So, actually, the intro's wrong—just so autopilot these days. There's been a lot going on.
I wanted to make a quick video to talk a little bit about the summit. The community has been very clear that something needs to change. We need to do something differently with the summit. It doesn't make a lot of sense to host a Cardano summit just for Cardano people, especially in a place like Singapore, where it's expensive and hard to get to. Ultimately, the attendance will probably be under 1,000 people.
There have been a lot of ideas batted around, such as a virtual summit or maybe a hybrid summit where we embed the summit in Singapore. What I wanted to share is a hypothetical idea that I call the hybrid roll-up. I'll make a whiteboard video to explain it further. I’ll also host a poll, and if you guys approve it, we can put a treasury proposal together and see if we can get support from Emurgo and the CF for it. We're brainstorming here, and if you don't like it, we can always do something else. But we heard you, and we understand what's going on.
The idea of a hybrid summit, the hybrid roll-up, is that we would do two things at once. We have this asset called Midnight City, which is basically an agentic civilization currently in early V2. Very soon, there's a queue of people picking their agents, and those agents will spawn and enter the game world. Throughout the summer, we'll be upgrading to V3, where many advanced capabilities will come. Midnight City is becoming a vibrant city, transitioning from just watching to doing things like agentic trading. We plan to build hooks for live streams inside it for our KOLs who want to join. Other projects, including meme coin projects like Snake and Hosky, will have their own zones and areas inside Midnight City. We want to integrate as many Cardano dApps as possible into Midnight City, creating a beautiful exposé of the broader Cardano ecosystem.
What's really cool is that you can visualize it—there will be districts, buildings, and special features inside the game world. One of the things we have yet to build out is the social layer for the human-to-human component, which is a priority, and we think we can construct that in the next few months.
It would be very easy, around the time of Token 2049, to put a dedicated team together to accelerate the social layer of the system. We could prepare a large, prominent, open, free Cardano Summit within Midnight City for anyone to attend. We could have a virtual hackathon, prizes, and all kinds of events, and it wouldn't be very expensive to do this. We could put a lot of effort into creating a beautiful showcase.
In parallel, we have Token 2049, which is likely going to be the largest standalone crypto event of the year. We already have a Midnight presence there, along with some sort of Intersect presence and a concept of a Cardano booth. What we could do is merge all these ideas into one super footprint. This super footprint could be large enough to have a stage, an exhibition area for Cardano, a hackathon, and an investor dinner for all the Cardano dApps that come. We could also have after-parties.
If we do this right, we could bring lots of Cardano dApps to Singapore, showcasing the projects in DeFi on Cardano. We could use Draper to host an investor dinner, inviting other VCs, and then have a nice after-party for everyone. Because it's larger, we could have a larger sponsorship tier, which means we could likely get Fred a keynote and Phil a proper keynote. They usually give it to me because I'm the big guy, but for other keynotes, you need a larger sponsorship package, which gives them a really big stage since it's probably going to be greater than 50,000 people.
I would bring the Leios team because, by that time, Leios will be eminent. We would also showcase the new devX of Cardano, highlighting performance and ease of use, along with evidence of all the exciting things happening. It would be a perfect showcase for PoGan, which is Bitcoin DeFi, and realFi, our microfinance stack to bank the unbanked. They would be part of that pavilion, and we would have a big screen for a live broadcast of the virtual summit, showing the population count and all the activities.
There's potential for the Midnight City side to have more people in it than the entire attendance of Token 2049. This gives us a model for a conference takeover. If this works, we could do this every year or even multiple times a year, depending on the size and scale of the ecosystem. This will get cheaper as we establish the infrastructure and technology. The embed design, once completed, is straightforward and could be integrated into any conference, like Consensus or Token 2049, or even non-crypto conferences like Web Summit or E3.
So, food for thought—lots of options and capabilities here. If you prefer not to do a standalone event and would rather be in a larger tank to attract new people to the Cardano ecosystem, it's nice to have something that shows we're a vibrant, living ecosystem with a lot going on. We have high performance and a great DevX now, showcasing all the cool things being built on Cardano. We would have a welcoming community and constant presentations. We could also have a podcast booth there, constantly podcasting 24/7 with lots of interviews and content.
For those who can't make it to Singapore, there would be a parallel event, which would also have the happy side effect of getting all the Cardano dApps into Midnight City, giving them a storefront and advertising. This big screen would showcase real-time Midnight City and all the exciting activities happening.
This is just an idea, and it's still unfleshed out. There are iterations to consider and work to be done. I'm more than happy to put a proposal together, but first and foremost, I need a signal that the community is behind something like this. Then I can sit down with Stevie and Phil, and our team can talk to Fred to see if this makes sense. I believe it would be cheaper than a standalone summit, and you'd get a significantly higher level of attendance. Effectively, we would take over Token 2049, becoming the most prominent event there with the most exposure and mentions in the media.
We've already met with Midnight about taking over parts of Consensus, where we were the most prominent cryptocurrency. We need to work a bit harder for Token 2049, especially in Singapore, but I believe there's a path to make that happen. It would also be nice to bring a lot of the builders of Cardano together in one place. We could use this as an opportunity for a governance get-together for all the major D reps to discuss the future of Cardano governance.
So, you could treat it as a convention if you want. Anyway, just a quick thought for the summit, and I hope everyone has a chance to think about it. I'll put a poll up to see if people like it, and if they do, then we'll write a proposal for it. Cheers.
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