Got rid of the intro because it would have sucked to sit through 40 seconds of me. Well, welcome, ladies and gentlemen. We are live. I am Crypto Crow here with Cardano founder Charles Hoskinson. I'm very excited to have him back. It's been a while. I think the last time we talked, you were on a trip in a car.
Yeah.
So much has happened since then, and I know that everybody's going to be glad to see this. But how the hell are you? I know you just got back from Asia, and I'm pretty sure you toured all of Asia for a while.
Oh lord, it was a trip. I was in Mongolia, Vietnam, Singapore, Korea, and Japan. It was a phenomenal trip because it's always nice to return to where you started and realize there are a lot of people that still love you and a lot of people that are super fans. That is where it all began. When you go to Japan and Korea, some of these people we talked to have been in the ecosystem for over 10 years, and they're just excited about how much progress has been made. When you widen the aperture and say that when we started, it was just a fantasy and a whiteboard video, and now it's a fully decentralized network. It's self-determining, it has recursive governance, and it's fully decentralized. We're making great progress on the roadmap, and they really appreciate that because it was just all promises and commitments back in the day for them. Now that they're actually able to participate in governance, they run the network by being stake pool operators. It's a big thing. They had a lot of advice about things they want to be done differently and where we want to go. But you know, that's good to hear.
Token 2049 was a huge event. There were 27,000 people there, and we took over the event. We were on every badge. The Wi-Fi password was "input output." We had the largest booth there outside of the sweet guys, and there was like a pavilion. We probably had 20,000 visitors at that booth, and we got to show off Hydra and the roadmap for Cardano. There was also a Cardano sister booth that was a joint effort with Emergo and a lot of others. It was good because Intersect was there, and they were able to showcase a lot of the cool things that are happening. Everybody was surprised to see that Cardano is still around. They thought you guys had all died, and it was pretty cool to see the ecosystem is still there.
Odd comment.
The problem is that there are a lot of root causes. We spent quite a bit of time asking the question: why is there such a disconnect between the reality and the perception of the reality when you look at Cardano as a whole? Things like DeFi Lama only register 50,000 monthly active users with Cardano, even though there are 1.3 million people participating in staking. You have a lot of monthly active users who are doing things on the network, like transacting or staking, but there’s not as big of a DeFi prominence there. If we could count our staking as TVL like they do in Ethereum land, we’d have over $12 billion or $13 billion in TVL just from that. But we can’t. They won’t let us do that. They’ll let Ethereum do it, but we don’t get to do that because we’re liquid and non-custodial. These are some of the relationship issues where the metrics are misreported. A lot of VCs and other people simply write Cardano off as it has been and assume it’s dead. So when you go to an event like Token 2049, they see there’s a vibrant, rich ecosystem and a lot going on. They realize they’ve misjudged, and it’s a window to re-engage people and talk to them again.
Yeah. There’s been so much confusion around a lot of the total value staked and all of these metrics that a lot of these other tokens use, and it’s always frustrated the hell out of me and everyone else in the Cardano community. Technically, all the ADA that’s staked to a node right now should be included in that metric, and it’s not. It’s always ignored, and it’s very frustrating because technology changes.
To me, I’ve always looked at it like you’ve got the SEC rules from 1933 in the cornfields trying to be applied to the crypto space. Now you’ve got how quickly the crypto market and cryptocurrencies change, right? Every three to four years, and we’re still holding on to the old metrics instead of favoring the new technology, the next generation. So it’s always been very frustrating. But I’m glad to see that you guys had such a successful event because I’ve seen so many pictures and video clips, and it’s actually really exciting stuff. How do you think Asia is going to play a big role in the way things change moving forward?
Well, you know, I’ve just gotten tired of asking for other people to do it. What we’re starting to do is take a step back and say IO needs to lead on a few things just to move things along. Like on Midnight, I think that’s been the most transformational project in the history of Cardano. It went from Cardano being a closed ecosystem where we don’t talk to anybody, the foundation being a no-show, and just writing them off to actually making deals. Midnight will be listed on every major exchange. That’s the first Cardano native asset to do that. It’s an inevitability; it’s going to happen. Midnight has made over a hundred deals. They got us good with Copper, Brave, Blockchain.com, and Bitcoin.com. These are not small things. What people don’t realize is Midnight is a Cardano asset. For that deal to work, they have to integrate Cardano and support Cardano. So every time Midnight makes a deal, it’s also making a Cardano deal at the same time. It’s solving a lot of the broken windows, like the oracle problem and the stablecoin problem. The Midnight Foundation is a super aggressive organization, and sometimes we have to slow them down a little bit because they want to make deals every day. In fact, they’re averaging one every three days, which is an incredible pace. We really enjoy it, but there’s a lot to do. Every time you make a deal, you have to service the deal. So it’s not good enough just to make the announcement.
That’s one lens and dimension. The other is we’ve got to change our event strategy as an ecosystem. I thought long and hard about this. We put a lot of money at IO into Rare Evo. We’ve done it now for three years in a row. Every time we’ve gone to that, it’s great to see all the old friends, but it was just Cardano talking to Cardano, and we were having a really hard time making that multi-chain. This last one, we had other chains show up, but you could tell it was kind of a courtesy instead of an investment or a commitment. When we looked at Token 2049, we said, “Holy [ __ ] we took over the event.” We took over a 27,000-person event. Everybody saw Cardano, everybody saw Midnight, our ecosystem, and there was a ton of hype and excitement. Every time they wanted to use the Wi-Fi, they had to be talking about us. That’s as much of a takeover as you can get. The price tag for that was one-third of what we paid for Rare Evo.
So, what we’re going to do next year is instead of doing Rare Evo at IO, we’re going to do four events per year. We’re going to do the big Bitcoin conference they have every year, we’re going to do Consensus, we’re going to do Token 2049, and we’re going to do Abu Dhabi Finance Week. Each of those events has over 25,000 people in attendance and are kind of the big things for the community. They run about every quarter. We’ll do the same package that we did at Token 2049. We’ll have the big IO booth; we’ve really gotten that down to a science. We’ll have the flavor of the week of whatever product we’re launching for that quarter, and then we’ll have a Cardano pavilion. What I want to do is find a path where we can take the top 50 to top 100 Cardano projects. We kind of demoed this at Token 2049, bringing Snack over and a few of these other guys. Have them come and bring a package of people with them, bring their swag, and then we can also set up a community event and an investor dinner. That’s your package for that, along with a media package. The total cost of that is actually less than the Cardano Foundation Summit or what Rare Evo cost us. I think we’ll get substantially more exposure. We can even put a hackathon on top of that if people want to sponsor it. That’ll be the pulse every quarter. We’re there; we’re talking to the Midnight Foundation because they share the same DNA as Cardano. They can go and fix the DeFi Llama problem and get these guys to accurately report and represent the chain. There’s only so much relationship building and momentum the guys can do. They’re working against years and years of negligence and neglect and, in some cases, broken promises.
It’s like you have to repair the relationship. You start from zero after you repair the relationship. You establish a new relationship. It’s always six figures or seven figures of money that have to be spent. You spend the money, and then after you’ve done that, you bring an integration team on within six months to a year to have a good relationship. You guys saw that with Google when we announced the Midnight Google Cloud relationship. It was so crazy; people at the CF were tweeting it’s not even a real relationship. Our response back was showing the panel with the guy from Google Cloud talking about how the relationship is there. But that’s it; it’s just like the other problem our ecosystem has. We keep shooting ourselves in the foot. Every time we have good news, there’s somebody who shows up and says, “It’s not as good as you think it is.” Anytime we have bad news, there’s somebody who shows up and amplifies the bad news possible. What are we doing? The other ecosystems don’t do this to themselves. I’m sorry; I don’t want to run the race on hard mode 24 hours a day, seven days a week. I just want a fair race. If I’m running, I don’t want to have to wear an 80-pound backpack while the other people are running without that backpack on. Let’s stop doing that, guys.
How much of that do you honestly think is based on the nature of Cardano being truly decentralized? Let’s face it, if you’re a venture capitalist, you’ve got millions or billions of dollars to invest. You want to invest in something you have more control over; you want to invest in something that’s a little more on the centralized side. How much of this is because the industry is built around the greed and the greedy nature of crypto as opposed to the more decentralized structure and everything that Cardano stands for? How do you think that really plays a significant role on the back end of things and ultimately filters out through its marketing, their media, their social media, and so on? Is that what creates this atmosphere?
I mean, it would if it’s just an ADA conversation, but there are plenty of pseudo-federated or somewhat decentralized but not really projects on Cardano that are investable. So they would skip ADA. But then what about the CNA ecosystem? It’s vastly mispriced. If you take a look at it, there’s no other asset in the top 10 where the liquidity of the primary asset, ADA, is super high, but then the relative value of the assets issued on it is very low. That’s a mismatch that’s going to get closed at some point once we clean up the ecosystem. You’ve got a lot of 10x or 100x opportunities there. The bigger issue is not decentralization, but I think the bigger issue is that there was never an attempt made to integrate Cardano into the broader cryptocurrency ecosystem in a way that reflects us well. No one opened up a Silicon Valley office. No one opened up a New York office. No one opened up a London office. Nobody went and had dinner with A16Z. Nobody went and talked to Msari except for us and a few others. Nobody went and talked to all these big guys and said, “Well, hang on, let’s tell you the Cardano story and why Cardano is interesting and exciting.” Everybody says, “Well, the tech is self-evident; the ecosystem is self-evident.” Okay, you can have that opinion, but the challenge there is that you can’t then complain that the people who invest money and make decisions and write articles about who’s the big guy write you off because there are 20,000 options. Either you’re there and you’re talking, or you’re not there. If you’re not there, you’re not going to get fair representation. There’s no silver bullet to all of this. You have to do it in layers. One is just get your conference game good and go to all the big things and be well represented. People need to know that we’re real. Two, you have to show that you can write real stuff and build real stuff on Cardano. There are two parts to that. One, you have to have hackathons on a regular basis. Solana did a phenomenal job with Breakpoint. Midnight was great because we got to look into everybody’s dirty laundry. We looked into every network; we dropped into eight ecosystems and seven blockchains. We had to actually know how their technology worked to do the airdrops. We had to deploy Solana wallets, Avalanche wallets, Ethereum wallets, and Bitcoin wallets. We learned a lot in the process. We also talked to their foundations, engaged with them, and saw how they did growth hacking, what they did well, what they didn’t do so well, and so forth.
In addition to doing the hackathons, you also have to show that there’s white-glove treatment to the builders in your ecosystem. If somebody in Solana land has a problem, there’s a group of people they can call and say, “I don’t know how to build this thing. Can you help me?” Right now, Cardano is MIA; file not found. There’s no one at the foundation that does that, and Emergo doesn’t do that. We’ve always been core developers, so we do it when we can, but it burns our people out because they get pulled off a task and have to go answer a question for some third-party app that we have no connection to. The other issue is the minute we start helping them, they advertise that Charles Hoskinson is helping them build it, and they take it as an endorsement or something to benefit their ecosystem. There are some issues there with that structure. We have to change the way we do developer engagement.
A corollary to that is the venture capital side. Nobody’s representing Cardano to the VCs and having that conversation. We got very bitter about it and said we just don’t have the Ponzanomics and these other things. But not all VCs are evil. There are plenty of them that are actually good people, like Outlier or others that we’ve dealt with in the past. The only reason they don’t consider Cardano is they look at the same metrics that A16Z looks at. They look at a $300 million TVL, a $30 million stablecoin issuance, and 50,000 MAUs. From their perspective, they’re comparing that to Solana at $12 billion in stablecoins, $9 billion in TVL, and multi-million MAUs. They say, “Well, Cardano’s a dead ecosystem according to those metrics.” So, there’s a metrics problem. You have to fix that, and then once you fix that, you can start engaging. You go to all the big conferences, have investor dinners, and get our top 50 apps constantly in front of incubators, accelerators, VCs, and other people. If they get pitched by 30 or 40 Cardano projects, they start realizing that there’s a real ecosystem there, and it’s mispriced.
There needs to be somebody who worries about the venture capital side. Fourth, you need the integrations. We’re an island. Midnight is fixing 85% of it, and it’ll probably fix the rest of the 15%. But Jason, that has cost me personally over $20 million to do all these integrations. It’s not cheap; it’s so expensive. Some of the things that are being proposed are in the tens of millions. You go to the foundation and say, “Can you pay for this?” They say, “Sure,” and then actually we can’t. It’s the same story again and again. Good news, we have a treasury, an on-chain treasury, and we’re starting to utilize that. I think next year we’ll have a package for a lot of these integration budgets that Midnight is going to cover, but probably cover dollar matching or something like that. Those are one-offs. Once you’re integrated, you’re integrated. You have the relationship; you’re connected together; you’re good to go. That’s an ephemeral problem. It’s a frustrating one. Somebody had to be the bigger man and bite the bullet. Once we have it done, it’s easy to use our stuff. Then we can move users around, move liquidity around, and these types of things.
Overall, I’d say we’re not in a bad position. We’re not in a good position; we’re in a position of transition. As an ecosystem, we have to come together. We have to be vigilant, and every quarter we have to set aggressive KPIs. How do we get the TVL up? How do we get the MAUs up? How do we get the daily transaction volume up? How do we get the integrations where they need to be? Also, how do we take 5, 10, 15 DEXs and double their stats on Cardano? Let’s get our DEXs better. Let’s get our oracles better. Let’s get our homegrown ecosystem better. Let’s feel some accountability and responsibility for that. Midnight is opening a lot of doors. Getting listed means the exchanges support CNAs now, which massively helps because nobody bothered to build that ecosystem up for four years. There was just utter negligence. We had to go do it, and it was so painful. We started from -10 in every conversation and worked our way forward. But now we’ve gotten those conversations where they need to be, and they’re taking the ecosystem seriously.
Talk about shooting yourself in the foot. When we first announced Midnight, everybody said, “Oh, Charles is abandoning Cardano, and it’s going to kill Cardano, and he’s a bad guy
So, their impact is not going to be as big as consensus. I think they can carve out some great businesses and do some great things, but Emergo never gets in the way. They don’t show up and say, "We're going to do everything in our power to hurt Input Output or Charles, and he's a bad actor, and we have to protect the ecosystem from him." If we ask them to do something, and if it’s within their power to do it, they’ll try to do it. So, they’ve been a good partner from that perspective.
The foundation is a different animal. From the very beginning, there were issues with it. The initial leader was Michael Parsons, and the initial foundation was started in the Isle of Man out in the UK. It was called the Digital Asset Foundation, and I actually had founder rights with the original foundation. If Michael did something wrong, we had a path to get rid of him. What Michael did was, through a very clever series of actions, he was able to reincorporate the foundation and move the assets over to Switzerland. He made himself the founder of that foundation in Switzerland and then proceeded to do some things that a lot of people were uncomfortable with.
The Guardians of Cardano showed up, and when they did, we were able to get Michael pushed out. There was then a brief window of time where Emergo and Input Output were the majority controllers of the foundation in Switzerland. Three of the five board seats belonged to IO and Emergo, and there were two Swiss members because it’s required to have Swiss people. Tamara Hassan, Niko Aquirus, and Menmeet Singh were the key people there.
When they came in, we had to sit down and have a conversation about whether Switzerland was a suitable jurisdiction to run a cryptocurrency foundation. The answer we came back with was no, for two reasons. One, the stiff governance structure means that board members have personal liability, which means that no board member in their right mind is going to do anything risky because they have no indemnity for it. If they go and invest in some deal, instead of the foundation being sued, the board member can personally be sued if something goes south. That’s not good from a corporate perspective. Would you sign up for a business where anytime something goes wrong, you could be personally liable for that? The whole reason we have a corporate veil is to protect the officers and directors of a company from liability.
The second reason is the way that the regulators work in Switzerland; they’re extremely conservative. When you go to ADGM in Abu Dhabi and talk to the authorities there, they have bespoke people building dedicated solutions for cryptocurrency foundations. They give you all these cool things you can do, like if you hold the asset, you can vote on the board, but you can’t do that in Switzerland. So, we said, "Let’s leave Switzerland." We started the process to leave Switzerland and then got into a big fight with the Swiss members on the board. We tried to fire them, and they rejected that. They tried to fire us as the majority minority of the board. We ended up having a lawsuit and won the lawsuit over it. Then the Swiss regulator came in and appointed an administrator, who basically said, "Well, I just want to liquidate the whole board. You have two options: you can pick your replacements, or I can just put it into receivership and shut it down."
So, we said, "All right. Well, can we at least have some influence over the people that come in?" They said yes, but it has to be jointly agreed with the people that you just tried to fire. So, we put the board in, but it was under distress. The problem with this new foundation was that the minute that happened, these new board members were always neutral to hostile toward us. Every single person they hired had the mindset that we have to protect the ecosystem from Charles Hoskinson. That became the culture and mentality of that organization.
We tried in earnest to work with them for years. Either they would commit to something and back out, like the ADA redemption stuff, or they would do duplicitous things. For example, when they took the lead on trying to set up the Linux Foundation deal for the pre-incent days, they hired a guy named Dirk and paid him an exorbitant amount of money. His proposal came back saying, "Oh, well, you can create something at the Linux Foundation, but Charles Hoskinson can’t join, and IO can’t participate in the product and technical stuff." The inventor of the protocol and the person who controls all the engineers can’t be part of the product and technical committee? They wanted large companies with no connection to ADA to basically be in charge of the roadmap, and the foundation still wanted to do this. We said we had no desire to be part of that. Then they went around telling everybody, "Oh, Charles blew up the deal; he can’t work with the Linux Foundation," even though we now have three projects—Dentist and Compact—with the Linux Foundation through the LFTT. Apparently, I can’t work with them, but I’ve been working with them for six years.
When we mention the board stuff, they say, "Oh, well, IO consented to this board." It’s not consensual if we’re told that we don’t consent to it, and then it gets shut down and turned over to the Swiss government for an arbitrarily long period of time. That’s not consensual; that’s a gun to your head to make a decision, and you’re making the least worst option there. We were always clear that we wanted the foundation to be a member-based organization. We wanted the board of the foundation to be elected by the community, and we viewed the money of the foundation not as private property of some weird thing in the middle of nowhere, but as property of the community as a whole.
When they asked, "Can we renormalize relations?"—like when we were at Token 2049 and the foundation was there—they said, "What’s it going to take to get you and Fred in the room?" I said, "It’s very simple. Have community members be elected to the board at the Cardano Foundation." Jack relayed the message. It’s kind of like the messenger between the Soviet Union and the United States. He relayed the message to the premier, and they said, "Oh, we can’t do that. There’s no path for the supervisory board to be under community oversight." In other words, if they do something wrong, no one in Cardano will ever have the ability to fire the person who’s done that wrong, regardless of how egregious it is, because there’s no community oversight for a community foundation that owns the trademark Cardano. This is my fundamental issue. It has nothing to do with whether they like us or hate us. And believe me, they do hate us, and they do everything in their power to make our lives difficult. It has nothing to do with that; it has everything to do with the original intent of the structure being a neutral place for the community.
We didn’t complain about it. Emergo and IO got together and ironically even invited the foundation to be part of this. They refused to do so and created Intersect. Intersect is now funded by the community and run by the community. The majority of the board is community-elected, and it has the product function—the roadmap and the technical steering committee of the code is there. It’s mostly fixed. The only downside is that the 600 million ADA is still trapped at the Cardano Foundation. So basically, Intersect has to be scrappy; it doesn’t have this large endowment and the ability to invest heavily. But at the very least, people have a voice now. If you want to have influence over where Cardano goes and what Cardano does, you join Intersect and participate there on the committees. They wrote the constitution, helped write the product roadmap and the technical roadmap, and they control the GitHub repos for Cardano. It’s made up of the community, with people from all over the world, including Sri Lanka and Japan.
Intersect was effectively created to replace the Cardano Foundation in a sense and be driven by the community. One of its primary roles is that if the Cardano Foundation were a member-based organization, there would be no Intersect, but they’re not. They’re self-governed; they keep their own counsel. The board picks its replacements. If they do something wrong, we can’t punish them as a community. There’s no oversight. They do some vanity projects, but it’s kind of like when Kim Jong-un builds a mall in North Korea. It’s a nice little vanity project, but what happens when you do something wrong? Can I fire Kim Jong-un? No. He just looks at himself in the mirror and asks, "Did I do a good job today?" This is literally the governance structure they have for a purported decentralized ecosystem.
So, the biggest hang-up is that DREPs effectively can’t do anything to get rid of the Cardano Foundation. They’re just there.
I’ve noticed they’ve been doing some fairly favorable things lately. Has anything changed?
They haven’t. This is what they’ve mastered: the art of doing nothing but appearing like they’ve done something.
In the last year, how many big Web 3 deals have they made? Have they made a deal with Uniswap, Chainlink, Redstone, or Pith? Have they made a deal with Wormhole or Layer Zero? Have they made a deal with any major cryptocurrency venture? Yeah, they’ve done some wine in Georgia; they’ve gotten ballistics on the Dubai blockchain from the Dubai police; they’ve done some Swiss and German tier 4 exchanges that do a little thing. Where’s the Binance deal? Where’s the Kraken deal? Where’s the OKX deal?
What’s their benefit to exist then outside of just sitting on 600 million ADA?
They pay themselves large salaries.
That’s it. They’re just sitting around collecting a check. So, it’s basically like our government.
But they do try to make my life miserable. They created Pragma in response to Intersect, and they also pushed node diversity. You ask the question, "When is Ouroboros Laas going to be launched?" The answer is, "I don’t know," and I’ll explain.
When it was one node, the original strategy was to get off Haskell and to get to a new 2.0 node built from all the lessons of the original Haskell node. The original roadmap was from 2015 to 2020. We’re a bit late on that for a variety of reasons, but the Haskell node was the first version. The idea was to go to a multi-client environment and start with a Cardano 2.0—a clean room approach. We wanted to bring a technical steering committee of all these different people who wanted to build a new node together and have them air their grievances about everything wrong there.
What the foundation did instead was incentivize people to create parallel nodes without coordination. Why? Because then they could break the IO monopoly. We have less say if all these other people are building that. Here’s the problem: if there’s no coordination between these nodes, how do we guarantee that the roadmap is actually going to be honored? Let’s say we finish Ouroboros Laas, but 40% of the network is on other nodes, and they haven’t finished it yet. We can’t fork until they finish it. When are they going to be done? If we’re not coordinating and talking to each other, we have no idea. They’re sufficiently resourced or under-resourced, and these types of problems create a giant headache for everybody.
So we had to go and fix it. We held node diversity workshops and talked to people to get them to come together. It’s dramatically better than where it was, but it was very painful because they just got people with grievances and said, "Hey, go build your own node in your own structure." But do we have a blueprint to certify against so only certified nodes can do things? Not yet. Why don’t we finish that first before you try to build a second copy of something? Why don’t we get to a stable roadmap before we go and try to build more nodes? You’re not adding any new features to the ecosystem; you’re just slowing down the delivery of new features like Hydra or Ouroboros Laas or these other things. They did that because they said it reduces the influence of Input Output in the ecosystem.
Yes, that’s the craziest part of it. It’s just like if we just had a conversation. By the way, we weren’t told that Pragma was being created until they announced it. They’re playing this game like they’re going to join Intersect and participate. Meanwhile, they’re negotiating this thing and backchanneling various developers, saying, "We want you to build a node," because we have to protect Cardano from the evil Charles Hoskinson. It’s stupid because you’re trying to beat me in the house that I built. You’re not going to win that fight.
There’s also no passion or excitement behind the people that work for them. What’s the vision? Let’s say I die tomorrow. What’s the Cardano Foundation’s vision for where we’re going to take Cardano? Is it going to be just more wine in Georgia on the blockchain? Who takes them seriously? Does anybody in the Web 3 space—honest question to the other foundations that aren’t Cardano—when you wake up and have a deal, is your first thought, "We should go talk to the Cardano ecosystem about this?" No, I’ve never met anyone who wakes up and says, "We should talk to Cardano about this."
We have to earn that. You earn that by going and talking to them. There are all these opportunities to go and talk to these guys, and they never show up. They’re just not in the room. They don’t care to be in the room because you have to pay to be in the room. You have to actually do stuff to be in the room. You have to make commitments, and then you have to take a risk. What if the deal doesn’t work out? You have liability. If you’re in a personal liability structure, you will never say yes. If ADA goes up, they get no upside; they’re paid a salary. If ADA goes down, they’re paid the same salary. They’re hedged in Bitcoin; they don’t care. There’s no financial upside one way or the other for success.
We already did it. We have the on-chain governance. We have Intersect. We have a complete reset. We have a real foundation now with the Midnight Foundation. Honestly speaking, what we need to do is just go all-in on Midnight for this type of stuff because we can do a Midnight every year as an ecosystem. You build a few of these up, we have a large treasury, and we’ll have an ecosystem group to grow things. We’ll have a second shot at building consensus for the ecosystem and just make sure that they take care of Cardano along the way.
The existence of Midnight gave us something to talk about with all the people that never wanted to talk to us before. That’s our only option: Intersect, Midnight, on-chain governance, and the utilization of the treasury, managing the really bad decisions that were made. Node diversity can be a benefit; let’s get to a point where it’s a benefit. I think we’re almost there. We’ve moved mountains as an ecosystem, and we’ve gotten to a point where we’re all drinking from the same well. It took a while to get there, but we’re there now. Just pretend they don’t exist.
Yeah, that’s what I’m gathering. It’s almost like a 600 million ADA mistake that now it’s just time to write off as it is and move forward. I mean, Solana just survived the failure of FTX and SPF going to prison, right? He was their patron, and a lot of people thought they were dead. We all thought that, and they managed to come back from it. Just because one of your entities doesn’t do what it’s supposed to do, it is what it is.
And you know what? If they’re going to make a bunch of noise in response to everything I’ve said here, ask the same question again: When will your board be community-elected? If they give you the answer that they can’t do it in Switzerland, ask them when they’re going to leave Switzerland. They can through grants; when are they going to leave Switzerland to reincorporate a foundation that can be community-controlled?
They’ll never answer that question. For me, if they want to restart the relationship, if they put a community member on the board, we’ll talk to them again. We’ll have a relationship again. We’ll actually try to collaborate again because then I know it will start a process to purge that culture of "our only purpose is to put pain on Input Output and Charles Hoskinson" to "we actually feel an accountability to the Cardano ecosystem."
We’re going to set KPIs every year, and they’re not hard KPIs. You don’t have to be a mathematician to understand these KPIs: MAUs, TVL, and transaction volume. That’s what the VCs care about. I sat down with the A16Z people, Electric Coin Capital people, Panta people, and ARC. I sat down with like 25 VCs because of Midnight, and we had a lot of frank conversations. I asked, "If you could only pick three things, what do you care about?" They said, "Monthly active users, your TVL, and your transaction volume. That’s what we care about."
So that’s your market feedback. Quarterly, what are we going to do to make those better? We don’t care if it’s MinSwap or Sunday Swap or this thing or that thing; we just want those metrics to improve for the ecosystem as a whole. It’s not hard. Then you go make deals. There’s probably going to be more TVL at launch on Midnight than there is on Cardano because of Fami and the Midnight Foundation and the things these guys are doing. It’s not rocket science. The Midnight Foundation has 1/30th the money of the Cardano Foundation. It’s not a money thing; it’s a will thing. It’s a desire thing. It’s about showing up and actually having a desire to make a deal and get things done.
You have to have that passion and fire. I want our technology to be the best. We’ve had to move mountains to figure out how to get Ouroboros Laas to work in practice. We went to hell and back for that. It was years of figuring out how to get Solana-style speed without having to take the Nintendo cartridge out and blow it off and put it back in.
I want that. But you know what? I had to get the best scientists and engineers together, and we spent years in the trenches. We figured it out; we got a SIP for it.
So that whole infrastructure we're building is getting better every year, like Hydra; it improves, and you get a better trade-off profile. Now, are we done? No. That's just the entry point. You just got into the club; you're not getting laid yet. You still have to go to the bar and talk to the girl there.
So, what reason would anyone have to move their Bitcoin over? They have to get something for it. In an application store, you need yield. You have to have a path where you can click a button. There’s a DAP store; you click something, and you get yield back. You have to do something with the Bitcoin.
The other side of it is the application ecosystem. Which apps offer compelling and interesting experiences for Bitcoin and yield products for Bitcoin? This was always the failure of rootstock. They figured out a way to move Bitcoin back and forth, but there was never an app ecosystem to provide a compelling reason for a person to move over.
So Omar's job is to talk to all these RWA guys and others who offer yield products and say, "Hey, if I can find a billion dollars worth of Bitcoin for you, can you offer five or ten percent yield? Can you do something there?" They say yes. Okay, so you have to get those products in. Then you have to make the middle part, the cream filling, brain-dead easy to do this.
We have something called the toggle that we came up with. You’ll see it in my presentation at Bitcoin 2025, and we put it in Lace. The idea is you just click a switch to go to Bitcoin DeFi mode. Not new Bitcoin, not Cardano Bitcoin, but DeFi mode. It’s still Bitcoin according to the Bitcoin user. You pay all your fees in Bitcoin, and you get all your yield back. But the minute you click it, now you have DeFi capabilities with your Bitcoin protocol powered by Cardano.
And the Cardano uses people say, "Well, this is Bitcoin. Why do I care about it?" Because under the hood, every time Bitcoin does something on Cardano, it consumes ADA. That’s why we need Babel fees for it. It’s just like tourism. When you go to Germany and use your credit card, you pay in dollars, but they’re actually paid in euros. So, it creates demand for the euros. Similarly, when you pay with Bitcoin, you’re actually creating demand for ADA.
From the Bitcoin side, our TVL goes up, our transaction volume goes up, and the consumption of ADA goes up. Good for us. But you have to keep those three rules in mind. Omar is scaling up a 19-person team, and he’s working on all sides of the market. We have the toggle in Lace. I want to get that into Brave, bitcoin.com, blockchain.com because that’s a hundred million users on the yield side of it. We’re in discussions with dozens of yield partners. Midnight helps a lot because we can make private yield and bring all that stuff in. There are yield products that are ready to go.
Then, for the Cardano DAPs, we need to upgrade them to be Bitcoin native and support that. We’re talking to them too. On the bridge side, there’s deep, super technical work to make that whole thing work really well with low latency.
Now, I don’t care if you’re using the Bitcoin OS bridge or the Sundial bridge or anything else because, as an ecosystem guy, do you really care if someone took I-25 or 36 to get to your restaurant? No. They’re at your restaurant. The route they took to get there is immaterial. The fact that the car pulled up, parked in the parking lot, and they’re eating at your restaurant—that’s what matters.
If you have a toll road and you get paid every time someone goes on I-25, maybe you care a little bit about that. But your primary business is the restaurant. So, we’re agnostic to whether somebody builds a better bridge. We’re actively working with some of the bridge builders, like Sundial, and we talk to them all the time. We have a series of technologies we’re trying to build because what we care about are the speed, efficiency of the bridge, and cost.
You can’t enter the market saying that when they click that toggle, it says, "Alright, Jason, tomorrow morning your Bitcoin will be available." You can’t do that. When you click that toggle, your Bitcoin has to be available instantly. And it can’t be, "Well, thanks, Jason. That’ll be $400 to enter DeFi mode." You can’t do that. It’s got to be five cents. That’s what we really care about inside these dynamics.
So, how do you do that with a reasonable level of security that eventually settles to the Bitcoin network? In the short term, you’re relying on some other structure that’s probably reasonable, but in the long term, it’s batch settled on Bitcoin. Your long-term value is on the Bitcoin side. That’s the trade-off we’re looking for. Why? Because you can’t upgrade Bitcoin. I would love to change how proof of work works on Bitcoin and add a bunch of things into Bitcoin script, and then it would just be awesome and trustless like Midnight to Cardano, but you can’t upgrade Bitcoin.
The best you can work with is Taproot. Taproot is more of a daily settlement type of thing where you take a bundle of many events and settle as one batch proof. You pay a few thousand dollars for that proof for 10,000 users or 100,000 users or something like that. It’s not a real-time thing like every single time you do a swap on a DEX or use an oracle. You don’t want to call Bitcoin every single time. It’s not built for that. Its finality is 60 minutes, while ours is subsecond.
That just gives you a sense of how technologies have moved on. And that’s okay. We don’t want Bitcoin to change itself; just leave it as it is and deal with it there. Why us over a layer 2? It’s self-evident. We’re the large-scale layer one. We’re fully decentralized, and we figured out how to do UTXO programming. The Bitcoin guys never did because they’re not expressive enough.
When you go to build these Bitcoin hybrid applications where part lives on Bitcoin and part lives somewhere else, all these other guys like STAX have to go through the same challenges we faced for the last four years in Cardano figuring out how to build DAPs and DeFi with UTXO. Everybody’s an EVM developer, and then suddenly we’re like, "Hey, let’s build with UTXO," and all these developers just don’t know how to do that.
So we had to figure it out. We had to write Aken and create all these different dev patterns and things like that. But we figured it out, and we have great dev tools now for that. That’s the other side of Bitcoin DeFi. What we need to do is allow people to build an app on Cardano into Bitcoin.
It’s not good enough just to have a one-way bridge where Bitcoin goes into Cardano; it would be really cool if you could build an app on Cardano to talk to Bitcoin and do things on the Bitcoin network. Because then, all of a sudden, a lot of people who hate Cardano or don’t care about Cardano will say, "Well, no, we use Cardano as our development platform for Bitcoin."
It’s one thing to say we have no users, but Bitcoin has 550 million users and $2 trillion heading to $10 trillion worth of value. Every institution and every government has it, and it has much more liquidity than all the other cryptocurrencies combined. It’s a very deep market. It’s not hypothetical. When that short sale happened, Bitcoin fell a little bit, like 6%, while everybody else fell 50% or 60%. Why? Because they have liquidity. They can survive a $40 billion liquidation event. Bitcoin is solid from a marketing and market perspective.
So, if I’m looking for new customers, either I’m going to spend a billion dollars fighting Solana, Aptos, and these other guys for a little bit of table scraps, or I can go to Bitcoin, where there’s almost no TVL and $2 trillion, and there are 550 million people with no yield products right now. They don’t get stake yield or any of this other stuff. So, that’s like virgin territory. It’s like discovering North America. You’re in Europe, and you’re like, "Why am I fighting for Prussia? I’m just going to go to North America. It’s like four times the size."
So, what’s the best way to get into Bitcoin? I want to make Cardano the best place to get into Bitcoin. Build an app on Cardano into Bitcoin. We have the dev tools; we have everything. We got BitVMX working. We were able to get Plutus and Akin to compile to Bitcoin script. So, you can use our dev tools to write Bitcoin smart contracts and run them on the Bitcoin network.
Well, then what are all the developers going to complain about?
Oh, it’s too complicated.
You think that would be enough motivation for them to learn something new outside of the old?
Well, if they’re going to learn something new, they’re going to learn to chase a $2 trillion opportunity, not a $30 billion opportunity. So, that’s how you get the developers.
What are they going to do? They’re going to download our dev tools, and then suddenly we’ll get thousands of developers from Bitcoin DeFi who don’t care about Bitcoin at all but do care about Bitcoin DeFi. Some of the partners from the Midnight Foundation made that happen. They were like, "I don’t know about Cardano." I said, "Well, you know you can deploy from Cardano into Bitcoin." They were like, "Really? Yeah, that’s coming in 2026." They said, "Actually, we should integrate you guys because we really think Bitcoin DeFi is going to be a big thing. That’s a good market."
So, that’s a superpower that only we have because we’re one-to-one with UTXO, and we have a very similar model to Bitcoin, whereas Ethereum doesn’t have that. Solana doesn’t have that. You just can’t take an Ethereum app and dump it to Bitcoin. It doesn’t work that way; it’s a radically different design.
We have a first-mover advantage there, and we have four years of DevX history. We’re getting to a point where the DevX is really good on Cardano.
Do I know what your answer is already going to be? If I don’t ask, everybody’s going to troll me. Is there any window for launch for any of this?
Oh, 2026, probably the first half of the year. We’ll start seeing some things come on.
So, lead by doing. That’s another problem we had. We would build capability, but we never paired a capability with a consumer of that capability, and that’s why the capabilities never got used. Like Hydra, we had around for like two years. We were talking about it; I was on my ranch, and I had a bad connection with you. It’s been two or three years since we were talking about Hydra.
It’s crazy; it’s been that long.
But then suddenly Hydra got real when we did two real things with it. Now three. The first was Hydraoom. Then we did Hydro.
Yeah, it’s like you could see it. It’s like, "Holy [ __ ]! Every frame of transactions, a million TPS. That’s real."
Okay, and the cost to run it was very minimal. The second thing was the glacier drop for Midnight. All those transactions, when you go to redeem, you’re not redeeming on Cardano; you’re actually redeeming on the Hydra network. So, that’s a mainnet Hydra application.
I did not know that.
Yeah, because it cost us like $20,000 to do 33.6 million potential redemptions. That’s Hydra. And that’s a great Hydra use case. People are like, "When mainnet? When mainnet?" It’s on mainnet, baby. If you got your knight, you used Hydra to get it.
Nobody knows that. I didn’t know that, and I read everything.
Yeah, and that’s just magical. The third thing was the vending machine. In Singapore at Token 2049 and also at Rare Evo, we did this.
I did see that; that was cool.
Yeah, you can literally buy [ __ ] in a vending machine using the Hydra network. We have a company being spun out, the Drip Drops guys. Some of them are starting that company with Sam Leathers, and they’re going to go do it for all the ATMs, point-of-sale systems, and vending machines. It’s a really cool product. So, we physicalize Cardano through Hydra.
Okay, so Hydra is real now because people are using it to do real things.
So, I got this amazing yield product that’s coming next year, and we’ve been working on it. Those microfinance shelfi.
Yeah, real finance. And realfi is.co, I think, is the website.
So that’s the IOHK version of Bitcoin OS.
No, no, no. Real FI is the yield product. Remember, everybody’s like, "What are you doing in Africa? You know, bank the unbanked, all this stuff." We never gave up on that. Africa was not a failure. That team kept working, and they actually built a real product. I put my own money into it and lent out millions of dollars to people last year and the year before, and 98% of the loans repaid us. So, we had a great NPL rate. I said, "Let’s open it up."
So, I got a yield product; I need some TVL for that yield product. What I want to do is actually go to the Bitcoin people and say, "Hey, how do we get Bitcoin, lend it to stablecoin, get stablecoins into our system, and get that done?" We’re going to pair our Bitcoin stuff with Realy, and Realy can absorb billions of dollars worth of TVL. It has a good yield product there.
That’s a great example of a use case for the Bitcoin bridge. We can do the same for XRP DeFi, and we can do the same for ADA. So, we have three things that can lend in, and we’re going to aggregate a large amount of TVL. But that shows how it gets done. What does that do? It improves my MAUs, improves my transaction volume, and makes my TVL numbers a lot better. More importantly, it gets all the rough edges out of the bridge and the user experience.
So, the next app has a significantly easier time getting Bitcoin to service its TVL. We’re doing that, man. I told the team, "Let’s get this launched in the first half of 2026. Let’s find a path to make this happen." I told the Bitcoin DeFi team, "Let’s find a path to get that done." They’re kind of in that scientific mindset of, "Oh no, it just takes so long." Either you do it, or I find somebody else external. That’s how it works now.
I knew exactly when this would all launch. I would know that it was going to be the peak of Bitcoin a month before.
See, that would be my metric, but we don’t have that.
I’m just joking. I’m curious how Midnight has been doing, right? There’s been a lot of, you know, "Oh, my wallet, this wallet doesn’t work," or "that hardware wallet doesn’t work."
How has it been overall in terms of adoption? Because obviously, the whole point of a lot of this stuff is to establish more unity in the space, right? You’ve made that message abundantly clear, and you’ve been evolving everyone that wants to take part. How has that been translating into establishing a little bit more cross-chain unity across the board?
It’s great; it’s so good. We have about 150,000 redemptions so far. We’ll probably close out the glacier drop period with around 200,000; that’s what we expected. We expected about a quarter million to half a million redemptions. The scavenger hunt, which is the mining part of Midnight, will probably get a few hundred thousand from that. So, we’ll be in the top five for the largest airdrops of all time.
Most importantly, I got the graph right here. I’ll actually just show you the graph. I get a daily report every day on the Midnight airdrop.
Oh, nice.
This is the total claims per network. The blue part is Cardano, but the non-blue part are all the other networks. So, the other networks, Bitcoin, Ethereum, XRP—27% of the claims were Bitcoin claims, and 11.05% of the claims are Ethereum claims. About 6.3% are XRP, and the other 4% are from the other networks.
That brought a lot of new users into the Cardano ecosystem. Those were non-Cardano users who didn’t care about Cardano at all. They basically just took a chance and said, "Forget it, we’ll redeem."
Yeah, there are a lot of challenges, but it was a multi-month endeavor. We told people it doesn’t make a difference if you redeem day one or day 60; it’s the same amount of night. There’s no difference between the two. If you’re having trouble in the beginning, it’s okay.
Why was it so hard? Because it was eight different ecosystems, seven blockchains, all different cryptography, all different structures, all different wallet structures, and many permutations of those structures, including the hardware wallet components.
Another side that made it really difficult was the fragmented ecosystem. What about the custodians? What about the exchanges? A lot of people came and said, "Well, I had my money on Coinbase. How do I redeem?" We’re like, "Well, you don’t have your keys; you don’t have custody of that. You’ve given it to them, so they have to redeem on your behalf. Go talk to Coinbase."
We actually offered a lot of exchanges the opportunity to redeem on behalf of their customers. Some considered it, and some just went silent on it. They said, "Oh, it’s not a thing." But that’s the risk you take if you turn over custody of your asset to another party. That’s why we also had the proof of
You're at the Starbucks at the Berlin airport. You have your credit card and you buy a venti mocha frappuccino. You paid in dollars. What happened? You had to convert your dollars into euros and go from a credit card network to their bank. There are about 40 steps involved in that. All these different things had to come together. But what was your intention? Your intention was to buy this coffee for this price with this instrument. You broadcasted that, and the things came together. You pay a transaction fee, or the vendor pays a transaction fee. You don’t see any of that; you just pay and move on. That’s how finance works. That’s how markets work. That’s how commerce works.
Intents are the next big thing in the cryptocurrency space. And you know what? Cardano has a huge built-in advantage for all that stuff. Because of the UTXO model and state channel isomorphism, we can build an intents layer onto Cardano, and we get a guarantee that whatever happened there can happen on Cardano and back. But that layer can have all these magical components inside of it to build transactions, to be a workspace, and all this other stuff. Right now, with Ethereum, it is horrendously fragmented. In fact, they pulled something together called the Chain Abstraction Key Elements Working Group, and there are about 25 companies in it. If you’ve read all their documentation, they state that they have a massive fragmentation and user experience problem. Everybody speaks a different language. We have all these layer twos, and there’s no way to coordinate it easily. They’re having to invest billions of dollars in all these different approaches to try to pull everything together.
But for us, with things like Starream and how we’re building out Hydra and how we think about this stuff, we’re going to have an intents layer. In fact, our first intent is Babel fees, if you really think about it, because you say you want to pay in your currency and somebody else is going to pay ADA for that. It’s a special kind of intent, and there are thousands of them that exist. So we’ve already started partnering with people on this, like Near. We just announced with the Near Protocol. It’s a great network. Ilia is a phenomenal founder. I met with him at Salt, and Near intents have come to Cardano. So we actually already have one intents layer, and we also have the DRC alliance with all the wallet guys. Right now, we’re talking about keys, but very quickly after keys, we’re going to start talking about behaviors in your wallet. You want to initiate something, and we talk about multi-chain. We talk about Bitcoin DeFi; we talk about Midnight, the whole partner chains ecosystem. What you’re really talking about is having a transaction that settles on three or four chains at the same time. Imagine Bitcoin DeFi to Midnight: Bitcoin to Cardano, Cardano to Midnight. That’s three chains involved in something. The Bitcoin user doesn’t see it. The wallet layer doesn’t see it. They just click a button and declare that thing.
This is the kind of stuff—not TPS and not TVL from the past—that changes the future. This is the kind of stuff that brings in a million users, 10 million users. This is the kind of stuff that when you’re on Microsoft Windows and Microsoft, because of the Clarity Act, decides to build a wallet into Windows, or Google decides to build a wallet into Android, and you’re one of the five billion users there wanting to use that. This is the stuff you’re going to do. You’re not going to see DeFi. You’re not going to see Solana or Ethereum; all of that is going to be hidden from you. You’re just going to enter your intention, and something’s going to happen. You do that, and it’s going to settle on dozens of different networks at the same time. We need to be in that conversation.
Well, you’re obviously building all the infrastructure for it. And I guess part of making sure you are is this whole Digital Chambers Advisory Board thing I just saw. What is that? I saw a big congratulatory post on X, and I’m like, “Oh, what is this about?”
I mean, it’s just like we’ve got to get this done. You know, we lived through four years of scary Gary trying to put us all in prison. It was horrible what we were dealing with. The Biden administration was an unmitigated disaster. For being a cancer-ridden dementia puppet, that guy was certainly effective at trying to kill our industry. It’s about the only thing he could do right: trying to kill crypto. Of course, he messed that up in the end too; he got Trump elected over it. So, it was bad, and we can never go back to those days. We just can’t.
Part of it is getting the right regulations in place for the right rule-making and the right industry interfaces so that we don’t run into a situation where the SEC sues every single US exchange and begins suing all the layer ones. We cannot go down that road. It’s just not going to happen again. The Genius Act passed, and that created clear rules of the road for stablecoins. The next step is the Clarity Act, which is the market structure bill, and there’s a lot more work to do. We’ve been working with everybody—the Senate Banking Committee, the House. We’ve been working with the trade groups, joining some of them, working with them shoulder to shoulder to get the language to a point where we have something that’s workable as an industry.
The good news is we’ve gotten the language where it needs to be. The bad news is the Democrats are doing what they always do; they’re peeing in the well. I don’t think they can stop it, per se, but they’re drinking the Kool-Aid. There have been some things on the Republican side that have not been helpful. You know, Trumpcoin was not helpful. World Liberty was not helpful from a perspective of changing the narrative. In December, the narrative was that crypto should be bipartisan. One of the reasons Harris lost was she was anti-crypto. Now, on the left, crypto equals Trump equals bad. Trump made $5 billion from crypto. Crypto is corruption. Blah, blah, blah. That’s their talking point for 2026.
It’s going to be a major part of their campaign. The leadership of the Democrat party told all the rank-and-file members to hold the line because they want to use this as an issue next year to attack Trump. So if you guys vote and get something passed, then you can’t really attack Trump because you passed the bill, his bill. Unfortunately, it created much more complex politics, and we’re working hard to navigate our way around. Not everybody on the left is super cynical and a political troll. Some people do realize this is a $10 trillion industry, and it could be an American industry that creates millions of new jobs. Arbitrarily and capriciously punishing an entire industry because “orange man bad” is not good policy. More reasonable people are starting to do that. Unfortunately, like Elizabeth Warren, there are vastly unreasonable people, and they always will be because they’re bought and sold by the institutions. So there’s not much we can do with that side of it.
I’ve been working hard with a lot of people. There have been a lot of ups and downs. It’s been confusing sometimes, Jason. You know, the Cryptozar thing was confusing. There was a lot of confusing stuff with Mar-a-Lago, ADA in the reserve. It’s confusing. It’s been a wild year. Every two weeks we have ups and downs, but directionally it’s actually going in the right direction. We got a lot done. We’ve already passed one law and have a second law ready to be passed. The government shutdown didn’t help either; it slowed everything down.
Unfortunately, there are a lot of ETFs waiting on getting approved and pushed.
Oh my lord, you got the ETFs. The DATs didn’t help. There are just too many of them. They traded above what they should, and now there’s some blowback on that. There’s just a lot of that going on, and it’s creating complexity.
Yeah. So do you have any Cornucopias lands yet, by the way? Are you into Cornucopias yet?
Oh yeah, they wanted me to invest, and they offered. There’s going to be some collaboration probably when we do Quantum Hosky and we get that through. In 2022 and 2021, there was a huge NFT and GameFi push, and that all kind of died out. Then it all went to memes, and Solana was clever; they became the memecoin chain and it resurrected them. But then all the memes died out after Trumpcoin killed it. That was kind of the straw that broke the camel’s back, and we’re not seeing the same love and excitement and joy of meme coins today.
For GameFi to survive, there has to be something about it that is an actual game. You see, it used to be we were crypto first, we were a game second, and you played to earn, and who gives a damn about the mechanics? You were here to make money; the token goes up. That model failed completely. Now, if you’re going to be an actual game, and you just so happen to have a crypto component, the crypto component should enable the gameplay and make the gameplay better in some way. But you have to build a game. It has to be a compelling and interesting use case and experience for a game.
So the challenge for Cornucopias is how do you build an open-world MMO that’s both beautiful and useful and doesn’t feel like a plastic wax museum?
Yes, you checked it out recently.
There’s some cool stuff that they’ve done, and it’s pretty amazing. Tomorrow is going to be a really big day. I’m just going to hint you in on that.
Yeah, and that was their big challenge for years. They focused a lot on making it pretty and using Unreal Engine and state-of-the-art stuff, and a lot about making it scalable. They’ve gotten past that slump. Now they’re working on the usability, the experience, and actually making a compelling, interesting social experience. I think they have some good days ahead of them, and we would like to collaborate with them when we do Quantum Hosky. Quantum Hosky is going to airdrop to a lot of different token holders. I know a lot of people in the CNA space were angry that they didn’t get an airdrop from Knight; only ADA got it, but the CNAs didn’t get it. So, I’d like with Quantum Hosky to give certain select tokens in the Cardano ecosystem an airdrop of the Quantum Hosky stuff in addition to other ecosystems. I think that’s one area where we can partner. The other thing is cross-partnership, where we can take elements of their game and put it in our game and vice versa. We all have a treasury system in Quantum Hosky that buys tokens and other things. I think there are some paths of collaboration there, but we’ll negotiate those on a case-by-case basis.
Sure, sure. Yeah, I’m super excited. Tomorrow’s absolutely going to be a huge day, and I think that some of what you just talked about will be a reason for you to tune in as well.
Now, this is a little more personal. I have a list of questions that I came up with that I want to try and ask for myself and for the community. You do so many different things outside of just crypto. I mean, you’ve got your glowing plants, obviously, which we see sometimes in videos. You have your medical facility, and you have a lot of these other things going on. I’m curious if you’ve been able to or have plans on using, for example, your medical facility for building and improving use cases for things like Midnight. You know, obviously, medical records and all of these things—are there ways that you’re able to use your medical facility to demonstrate how this technology can benefit the medical field in efforts of attracting more?
It’s a lot of fun, man. We’ve got a lot going on. I’ve got the ranch. We do synthetic biology work. The Blackhawk is starting to do some really cool and interesting things. It started with Hurricane, by the way. Thank you for that. You were the guy who said, “Hey, get your ass over to North Carolina.” And we did. We sent the Blackhawk out there.
You didn’t just say, “I’m on it.” I was impressed by that, dude.
Yeah. I said, “Let’s figure this out.” We sent the Blackhawk out there, and we ended up flying Don Jr. and a whole bunch of other people. It was a great experience, and it helped a lot of people with generators, medical supplies, and tons of stuff.
The medical facility, I think, is the family legacy. My dad’s a doctor, my brother’s a doctor, my grandfather was a doctor—he’s dead now—and my uncle’s a doctor. So that’s the family business. When I first went to college, that’s what I started studying. Then I said, “You know, I should be a mathematician.” I transferred from Metro to CU Boulder. There was always a desire to do something in healthcare, and the reason why I didn’t end up committing to healthcare was that the healthcare system is horrendously broken. It’s a multi-trillion dollar leviathan that gives no regard at all about whether they actually cure you or heal you, and a lot about how to extract as much value as possible from you.
What I wanted to do was, from first principles, build a clinic from scratch, make it the Mayo Clinic of Wyoming—best doctors, best equipment—and learn how to run a healthcare system in a way that’s patient-centered as opposed to money-centered. The other thing I wanted to do was build a biotechnology company that would actually look into next-generation cures, not treatments. I was so angry with the pharmaceutical industry, where everything is a copy of a copy of a copy, and everything is a treatment. Nothing fixes your problem. You go to the doctor, you say, “Doctor, my dick doesn’t work right.” “Well, take this pill; it’ll kind of sort of maybe do that for you.” Can you just give me something to fix it? “No, no, just take this pill.”
My back hurts. “Well, we’ll give you back surgery. It’s not actually going to cure anything, but we’ll just give it to you.” I’ve got a lot of friends who are UFC fighters and a lot of friends who are former special forces guys. My security detail includes Seal Team Six, Green Berets, and Rangers. They’re awesome people, but they’re damaged because they’ve been blown up 50 times, and their joints are all messed up. They have a lot of problems, and they’re some of the most disciplined people, but they need somebody to come in and help them out, you know, to fix the TBI and joint and back problems.
So I said, “Let’s do a biotechnology company where we do stem cells and exosomes, and we worry about regenerative medicine. Let’s use the clinic as the clinical side where we actually do the clinical translation because everybody who does this stem cell stuff does it in a lab, and then they have no path to get FDA approval. They have no path to actually do the translational medicine and get that stuff done.”
So we’ve done that. We have now 17,000 patients, and it’s growing by leaps and bounds. It’s a 70,000 square foot facility. We have 40 providers. We’ve been in the community with Hoskinson Health for several years. You could Google us and see how many great reviews we have. People love it. It’s the Mayo Clinic of Wyoming. On the biotechnology side, we’re getting ready for our first FDA trial with meal adipose-derived stem cells. We take your fat—I’ve got a lot of it—and when we extract it, we culture expand it, and then we compare it with hyperbarics. We’re going to do a phase one-two clinical trial and then expand it to phase three and go through the entire process. We think we can...
I’ll be part of your clinical trial.
Everybody wants to be, right? Apparently, I’m 51 years old according to my labs recently, so I’ve got things to do.
You’ve got to. Yeah. Same for me. I’ve got to clean this up. But we know a lot of guys, especially these older UFC guys or these older Brazilian jiu-jitsu guys. Like Royce Gracie, he’s a friend of mine, and his niece does security for us from time to time. He’s like, “Hey, when you got something, man, you call me.”
He’s like, “We need some of that magic juice.” They’ve got the will, but the body sometimes doesn’t add up to the will. So you call them up and say, “Hey, you want to be part of this clinical trial?” 100% yes. Everybody wants to do that. What’s really cool about adipose-derived stem cells is they’re your stem cells. It’s your repair mechanism. When you cut yourself, that’s what fixes it. When you get injured, like a broken bone, that’s the kind of stuff that fixes it. There’s no chance of rejection, and there are no gene therapies or any of these exotic weird things. It’s not like iPSCs where you’re using Yamanaka factors to make pluripotent stem cells. It’s a much more conservative approach.
When you pair it with the right things, like exosomes or peptides or hyperbarics, you get the equivalent effect or better of umbilical cord blood or pluripotent stem cells or these other concerns that people have. It’s a slow burner. Everything in medicine takes a lot of time. It’s a highly regulated field. But we’ve gone from nothing to 17,000 patients.
You asked the blockchain question: Is there going to be a blockchain component? Of course. I’d like to do an open-source EHR (electronic health record) system, and I’d like to use principles from self-sovereign identity, so DIDs and principles from the blockchain space to do that. We have one project called Project Galen that’s currently internal, where we are having discussions about what we can do in the blockchain space.
What’s really cool is there are a lot of Midnight applications for this because you want to have private medical records, but you want to extract the semantical value for clinical trials and for patient value, like epidemiological information for public health. You really want to have that discussion about that. To me, it’s been so much fun because I get to work with my dad and brother. They’re both internists, and it’s the only business I have
Because when there's a 100% tariff on China, all the inputs that go into the Nintendos we build and the game cartridges we build go up 100%. So if you have a 60% margin, you go to a negative 40 just off of that one thing. So are we exempt? Are we not exempt? What's going on here? It's like our prices just double for our entire business. We have no idea. And that's one small example with a million businesses in the United States. You could be in construction. Where does all the drywall come from? Where does the steel come from? Where do the PVC pipes come from? If there's a 100% tariff, does that mean that my cost of construction is going to double? So how do you, as a construction company, bid out? How do you say, "Hey, I'll take this job for 350"? You have no idea because you could end up having $700,000 in material costs after the tariff comes in and takes effect. That is the downstream consequence of that.
So what do people do? They pull their money out of the markets. They get conservative. They don’t do business for a little bit, and you knock yourself into a recession when you create this type of uncertainty. So there are prices to pay when playing chicken with people. There really are. Now after you do it, people price it in. We figure out new ways, and you know, six months to a year, things get better. So if you want to do that, you can do it. But either get off the pot, right? Don’t pussyfoot with it. You can’t be half in, half out. You have to take a step back and say, "Okay, what is the policy?" Within six months to a year, we all adapt to the policy; we all live there. Biden sanctioned Russia; you can’t do any business with Russia. It was tough for Europe for a little bit because they bought so much stuff there, like all the oil. They figured it out. Now that they got it figured out, they got it figured out, right? But it took a year to figure it out, and that’s the policy.
What would have been bad is if they said, "Okay, this week we sanction Russia, and you can’t buy oil. Next week you can; this week you can’t; next week you can," because you don’t know what the rules are for this entire thing. So that’s the broader macro problem with what’s going on right now. We just have to get past that. And I think Trump can’t do that in 2026 because of the midterms. He can’t blow up the economy, right?
I think what he’s going to do is as much posturing as he can, get it all out of his system, and then he’s got to do everything in his power to wax the economy so it looks good for the midterms so he can keep his political power. So what does that mean? He’s got to get the Fed to cut rates, and he’s got to do everything in his power to make good trade deals and get them all signed, get them all done. So, worst-case scenario, it’s going to linger until quarter one, but then it’s got to stop, and then the economy will get better.
So, I actually have my own little theory I didn’t put anywhere, and you’ll probably think I’m crazy and say, "Crow, you’re crazy." But a part of me was wondering, you know, there’s obviously been a real big effort. And this is just hypothetical; obviously, I know nothing. But I thought it was very interesting that it happened around the shutdown, and the goal being to pay the troops. A part of me wondered in the back of my mind if this was a way to generate a little capital to pay the troops to buy some time. Because then all of a sudden, after this all happened, somebody comes out and says, "You know, I’m going to go ahead and stop doing this; I’ll pay for the troops. You don’t have to play these games on Twitter and everything else."
And you know, you got this guy over here and that guy over there. The word on the street was that it was Elon Musk who made the offer. It’s about $8 billion every two weeks, right? I looked. Yeah. I’m like, "Well, 200 million isn’t enough to pay the troops."
No, no, no. That’s scavengers. You know, scavengers always take advantage of things. That happened during the Clinton administration, happened during the Bush administration. Look at the insider trading right before 9/11. That’s crazy. People don’t want to talk about that.
Yeah, people don’t want to talk about that. But, you know, if you look it up historically, there was some stuff there. There was some insider trading before the Iraq war. There was some insider trading before a bunch of stuff in the Obama administration.
I know the guy that owned the buildings had just taken out new insurance policies on all the buildings, and in order for him to capitalize, Building 7 had to go too or something like that. Like the building that wasn’t even touched by anything and imploded for no reason at all, but apparently it was part of the insurance thing.
Yeah, I heard about that. And also, was it one terrorist attack or two terrorist attacks? Because both World Trade Centers got hit. So, was it the same event, or are they two unrelated events? Because there was actually a lawsuit over that, and it turned out to be two events. Silverstein, I think.
You know, oddly enough, my old house, two houses down, the guy who owned the flight school that apparently those terrorists trained in, he owned the house two houses down from me.
Oh, no.
Yes. And he got in a lot of trouble, and apparently he had to foreclose and everything. This was before we moved in. We don’t live there anymore now, but yeah, two houses down was the guy who owned the flight school.
I mean, it’s like you have people learning to fly who aren’t interested in landing the plane, you know? Sketchy, man.
It’s like nobody has questions about why they didn’t want to know how to land.
Yeah. It’s like somebody showing up for police academy and saying, "Hey, I really want to know how to kill somebody and get away with it." You know, can you tell me what you guys have a hard time investigating? Why do you want to know, Bill? Oh, no reason. I’m just morbidly curious about getting away with lots of murders. What’s the best way of disposing of a body? Should I incinerate it, melt it?
AI nowadays, like, you know, somebody should be keeping track of that.
You know, Charles, one last question I’m curious about. I had a couple others, but I have one more I’m going to ask you, and then I’ll let you go because we’ve been at it a while. I don’t want to keep you too long, but with everything institutional happening, it’s obvious that the institutions are kind of pushing the market this time. It’s not necessarily retail so much yet. I think that’s still to come at some point, at least in my opinion. But what are some of the biggest things you’re most excited about with all the irons, everything you have going on? Obviously, I’m thinking it probably has to do with Midnight, but what is the most exciting thing for you right now that is going to play a real role in the transition of TradFi into crypto?
Well, I mean, there’s what I’m personally excited about, and then there’s what I’m excited about from a business perspective. These are kind of different things. So, from a business perspective, I think Midnight’s time has come. It’s the next generation of cryptocurrencies. It’s the bridge between the TradFi and the DeFi world, and it solves so many problems for so many people. It also opens Cardano up for business and allows Cardano to have an emissary to trade on its behalf and bring value back into the main network. So that’s long overdue, and I’m just really tired of the status quo. Anytime that happens, we try to change that. It’s been overwhelmingly successful. You know, the airdrop is exactly what I thought it was going to be, and it’s right about the right numbers. 13% of the supply has been distributed. It’ll probably end up about 20%, give or take, which is just phenomenal for where it sits. The model was great.
Now personally, that’s a different thing entirely. You know, personally, there’s some stuff I can’t talk about that’s internal. I just had a board meeting about it, and it’s...
Sure, you can...
I can’t. It’s just magic. Literally, when people find out about it, it has nothing to do with crypto. It’s in a different world, and when people see it, they touch it, they’ll just be like, "This is a new world we’re living in. It’s so cool." So that’s really cool. Hopefully, next year we can talk about it.
And then Quantum Husky is the other one that I’m incredibly excited about because there I just went all out. I just went and said, "Just screw it. Let’s just go for it." We just swung for the fences. So we literally have an MMO. It’s a massive multiplayer online video game embedded in a four-dimensional space. Normally, you have X, Y, and Z; we got W. It’s a four-dimensional space with quantum computing stuff, with AI brain-computer interfaces. Actual dish brains, human brains in a dish playing the video game with you.
What did you just say?
I know, right? Right. Cortical Labs is our partner on this one. We’ve got a few of these CL1s. We have dish brain computers inside the game world, and a non-Euclidean geometry. It’s just nuts. We are just swinging for the fences. We even have a quantum beacon in the game using a quantum random number generator, a photonic quantum random number generator that changes the game world. You can mine with your mind in this game. You can use your brain with a brain-computer interface, and you put like an EEG headset on, and you can make blocks with your brain. I mean, this is so crazy, dude. It’s so out there.
And to be able to do that, we just said, "Take every assumption out. I don’t care if we make any money at all. I don’t care if it’s a successful or colossal failure. Go big or go home." Working with Trim on that, who’s also a mathematician, is just a phenomenal experience. I love every bit of it, and we’ve learned so much in the process. It went from kind of an impossible thing to we actually know how to do it, and it took a year, but we actually figured out how to do it, and we’re actually building it now.
Has it been a year since you first brought that up?
Yeah. Well, there were a lot of internal conversations. Then we kind of exposed it to the community, and then we took it on a roadshow and all this other stuff. But it’s going and actually turning into a real project, and we’re actually asking the questions like how do you deliver this to market and bring other things to market. But you’ve got to have stuff like that, you know, because it gets so boring if it’s always the same thing: token go up, token go down, MAU, TVL, transaction volume. It’s important, yeah; it’s the broccoli of business, but you can’t do that again and again and again. You have to do new things.
The fact that I get to do new things and experience new things, and the fact that I can still do that within the Cardano ecosystem is phenomenal because Quantum Husky will be in the Cardano ecosystem, and it’s going to bring all these meme coiners from different ecosystems and GameFi people and metaverse people into Cardano. It’s a completely different lens than the lens of Midnight or the lens of Bitcoin DeFi or any of these other things. It’s a different world, and it’ll be a partner chain just like Midnight is.
Every year, I want to do something like that. I want to swing for the fences and do a crazy project and bring it on in. If you’re in the ADA ecosystem, you’ll be part of that origin story. That’s what keeps it fun. That’s what keeps it exciting. You have to be willing to take a risk and take a chance.
I wish overall that people would be a bit more empathetic and understanding. I wish people would not be as mean. The big challenge that we have in our industry is that people have become way too comfortable saying extreme things.
There’s a world of difference between saying, "I don’t think it’s going to work," to "I think this person’s a sociopathic, psychopathic, evil scammer who’s a pathological liar and has accomplished nothing and done nothing." Okay, you’re the troll. I’m the billionaire. I’ve done some things in life. I was there in the beginning of this industry. I’ve followed the bouncy ball all along. A lot of my competitors are in jail. Some died. They’ve all had lawsuits and other issues. I’m still here. I run a thousand-person company, okay? We’re still relevant. We’re still talking. We’re still pushing. You may disagree with what I do, but have some respect for God’s sake and stop with the extreme language. That has gotten so bad, and more than half of the people that you see now are bots.
Oh, I know. I see them in the chat right now. Every one of them has a long string of numbers after their name, and they all love you to pieces.
Yeah. You know, and they’re all bots, man.
Right. It’s insane.
Yeah. I just did a video on this. It was called "Bots, Bots, Bots, and AI Slop." The challenge with that is that you can’t convince them because they’re not real.
Right?
So how do you have a conversation where the other side of the aisle has been programmed to do nothing but defame you, and there are no consequences for the defamation? We’re looking at the end of social media. We are going to have to invent something new and transition. That’s going to be another product that we get involved in.
It’s going to be all about digital ID at some point. As much as we want to avoid it and we see what’s happening in the UK and how they want to utilize it, digital ID is... I really am actually for it because of stuff like this. You know, actually, one of the team members of Cornucopius built something for me years ago to get all the bots and the bot comments off my channel, and it worked. I won’t say who, but somebody shut it down and said that basically the scammers and the bots have rights too. I’m not kidding. He showed me a screenshot because he tried to challenge it and say, "No, this is fine. This is how it works." He had to demonstrate it, and they basically said, "No, you can’t do that." In order for it to work, he had to use a part of the conglomerate’s system, and they said no. They are actively trying to keep a lot of this stuff happening.
Yeah. You know, it’s just because they make money from it. They don’t want to admit that half their customers don’t exist. They want to broadcast they have 600 million customers when they actually only have 300 million customers, and they want to broadcast their engagement rates where 90% of the engagement is bots.
Right?
So, you need to start building a human-centric web, and I think that’s the only way is using blockchain. I’d encourage people to check out that video. But that also excites me that we can solve that problem. That’s a big problem. You know, the agentic commerce problem is a big problem. And the human web is a big problem.
Human web. I love that term.
Yeah. You know, it’s like the human part of the internet. It used to be 100% humans.
Right.
Now it’s half humans, half bots, and by 2030, it’ll be 95% bots and 5% humans. The vast majority of people just aren’t real.
And it’s deranging people. It really is because if every interaction you have is in a certain direction or negative or toxic, your brain isn’t built to know, you know, implicitly that that’s not real. It thinks it’s real. What happens to your brain is you start reacting accordingly. Every study that’s come out of major universities has shown that this is causing a mass neurosis, especially amongst Gen Z and Gen Alpha. You can’t talk to a Gen Z kid anymore, man.
No, they’re crazy.
Yeah, it’s so hard. They’re just weird shut-ins, and you can’t hire them because they’re just so messed up from 24/7 exposure to all this.
They think that’s the world around them, and they’re so desensitized to the toxicity of everything that it just becomes a part of who you are, and so you just don’t even see it anymore.
Yeah, exactly right. So that’s another one we’re going to solve. After we get Realy and Quantum Husky, those are the two big ones for next year. We’ll have some surprise announcements; we always do. Just all the Cardano stuff, getting Leos out, and keep building up the ecosystem. Obviously, Bitcoin DeFi and getting Midnight to its fullest extent. That’s one we’re going to start very aggressively looking at is how to roll up a lot of concepts like DIDs, prediction markets, veracity bonds, AI, proof of human, and all this other stuff to create a human web, human internet. Lace is a really good launching platform for that because it’s built into the browser, easy to use. You can launch into kind of a bespoke social network with economic agency behind it and have real conversations with real people.
Actually have perfect secrecy for off-the-record conversations that don’t get recorded forever by dystopian governments and used against you 10 years later. It’s so bad. There are back doors everywhere, and there’s no privacy. It’s just so bad, especially if you understand the technology. We have all these cryptographers and information security people, and we understand how it works. When we see under the hood how bad the surveillance state has become, Google knows your daughter’s pregnant before you know.
You know, Google knows you have cancer before you know you have cancer. It’s so crazy the amount of information these companies
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