Hi, this is Charles Hoskinson broadcasting live from warm, sunny Colorado. Always warm, always sunny, sometimes Colorado. Today is October 31st, 2025. It is Halloween. Congratulations, everybody, for getting this far.
Every now and then, some things come up. Let me go ahead and bring this up real quickly. I like trying to answer those questions and go through them. This one’s from Bobby Juice, and it’s a very adversarial post. Let me go ahead and read off some of these things. I don’t know if it’s coming from a good position, a position of ignorance, or if it’s a helpful post disguised as an attack post, but I think it’s a teachable moment and a useful opportunity to have a conversation about some things.
There are seven items here, and they say flaws holding back Cardano adoption. Number one should be no surprise to anybody. It says, "The absence of native stable coins, USDC, USDT, and blah blah blah were all bad. Horrible." Number two, critically low liquidity and TVL. Number three, severe network congestion. Number four, minimal on-chain adoption. Number five, negligible marketing reach. Number six, lack of interoperability and bridges. And number seven, no major exchange support for native tokens.
None of this is actually fair, and I don’t know if this poster has been following anything that’s been happening this year or if they have and just discount all of it. First off, the absence of native stable coins and critically low liquidity in TVL comes up quite a bit. All these people say, "When USDC? When USDT? When are all these various things going to happen?" Let me be exceedingly clear because for some reason, people can’t get this through their heads. There is this belief, a false belief, that has been propagated again and again in our ecosystem that if somehow, someway, Tether or Circle came to Cardano, then magically all of our DeFi problems would be solved, the price of ADA would go way up, and we’d have this incredibly attractive DeFi ecosystem on Cardano. I’m not exactly sure how that argument is made. No one has ever explained how the existence of one of these larger stable coins is going to make Cardano’s entire DeFi problem go away, make the price go up, massively improve our MAUs, our TVL, and all these other things.
I do agree that there aren’t enough stable coins issued, but remember we have USDM and USDA. They don’t dip; they’re asset-backed. We can mint them all the time. I’ve personally minted them myself, as has the CF, as have others. It’s not an issuance problem, per se. When you look at the critically low liquidity in TVL, it is absolutely valid that there’s about 680 million in TVL in Cardano. But here’s the thing that this post is not mentioning: we have 1.3 million people participating in either governance or staking in Cardano, and we have more than 15 billion ADA dollars worth of ADA participating in that. We don’t get to count that in our TVL. Ethereum does get to count that, as do others, but we don’t get to count that. Nobody seems to count those users.
So, he says there’s minimal on-chain adoption, only 19,000 daily active users. We have 1.3 million people using it, but we don’t get to count those people; we only count the anemic DeFi side of Cardano. One of our first and largest problems that we have in Cardano is that Cardano users aren’t using Cardano DeFi. This is very different than saying no one’s using Cardano. Cardano has a fertile ecosystem. There are a lot of people floating around, a lot of people who hold ADA, who have Cardano wallets, and who have been in our ecosystem for many cases more than five years. But not a lot of those people have crossed the chasm to use DeFi in Cardano.
There’s a hint of reality in that we have a small DeFi ecosystem, but it doesn’t acknowledge that there are existing users within our own ecosystem who can actually utilize and do things within Cardano. It’s kind of a chicken-and-the-egg thing. If we don’t have good metrics, it’s hard to attract interoperability and partnerships with people to come into the ecosystem. And if we don’t have those people to come in, we don’t have good metrics. You see these kinds of issues.
When you go down to number six and number seven, I’ve spent the last six years building Midnight. We’re getting ready to launch Midnight, which actually resolves pretty much all those concerns and problems. That’s just a fact. Over 100 partnerships are in place, and there are going to be tier-one exchange listings with Midnight for N, which is a Cardano native token. There’s no acknowledgment of that, no acknowledgment of the major partnerships that have come in. Midnight is connecting to eight ecosystems: seven blockchains—Ethereum, Bitcoin, Solana, Binance Smart Chain, XRP, Avalanche—and obviously the Cardano ecosystem. It acts as a bridge to talk to and connect to all of those different ecosystems.
That is the strategy for how we bring interoperability through the partner chains approach, and the success of Midnight will result in more CNT listings on tier-one exchanges. The success of Midnight as a Cardano asset will bring a lot of transaction volume into the Cardano ecosystem, and people are going to want to create yield with their Knight, so they’re going to utilize Cardano DeFi. Midnight actually resolves points six and seven.
As for negligible marketing reach, there was absolutely no conversation at all about the Token 2049 takeover, and there’s no conversation at all about some of the desires and efforts to actually create marketing within the Cardano ecosystem. I’ll give him a half-truth on this one because I absolutely agree that we’re not doing a great job. Even though it’s not my job, I’m going to make some of it my job for 2026. We’re going to put together an event strategy. We just talked about it today in a meeting, and we’re going to have four major events per year that we’re going to approach. Each of these events has tens of thousands of people who attend and are considered big events for the industry.
What I want to do is bring the top 25 to top 50 DAP D5 projects on Cardano to those events to augment the Cardano booth, the IO booth, and whatever product Input Output is launching. The model for this was Token 2049. We took over that entire event. In fact, the badges you had to enter Input Output as the Wi-Fi codes. The Solana people had to enter Input Output; they weren’t super happy about that, but they had to do it to come in. Joe Lubin actually had to walk by my booth as he was walking to his interview. He looked at us IO people and nodded, and I nodded back.
We actually have a model for how to do a takeover, do investor dinners, and integrate these things. That’s not the end-all, be-all of marketing, but it’s certainly the beginning of that. What we need to do is start having a conversation about a sustained campaign to talk about the USPs of Cardano. I completely agree that our foundation doesn’t market, and I completely agree that we are not winning the influencer game. That’s a fair criticism right now.
As for negligible reach with respect to network congestion, our blocks are about a third to half full most of the time or less. When you take a look at this live and do some statistics on it, for the most part, Cardano is not running at capacity. There are peaks of congestion, but there are some lies here. For example, when he says scaling solutions like L2 and Hydra remain unreleased. Hydra is working on mainnet right now. I know there are a lot of people on Twitter running around saying, "Well, Hydra is just vaporware. It doesn’t exist. It’s never been released." If you participated in the glacier drop, you were using Hydra. When you redeemed, you redeemed into a Hydra state channel. That is a mainnet application. We were able to load 33.6 million eligible addresses into it, and the cost to do so was less than five figures for the total operation cost of the entire drop. That was in a Hydra head on Cardano mainnet, obviously, because the smart contracts are Cardano native tokens on Cardano.
He says Hydra is not released; it’s just a straight-up lie. Hydra has reached version 1.0. There are numerous people on Cardano mainnet using Hydra right now on a per-application basis. Sam Leathers, Adam, and Kyle were processing transactions on a vending machine using Hydra. Okay, so Hydra does exist. Is it the end-all, be-all for scalability? Absolutely not. As for L2, we had a massive and major milestone for L2 this year. The SIP is done, and linear L2 is being planned for release next year. We actually figured out how to build it, and we had to figure out how to build it multiple times across multiple implementations. I believe come November, there’s actually going to be a dedicated website to track the progress of L2 because it’s such a critical component of our infrastructure.
But again, if the majority of the time our blocks are not terribly filled, do we really have a throughput problem? He’s saying contradictory things. He’s saying, "Oh, there’s severe network congestion, but nobody’s using the network." Well, which is it? Are we congested and everybody’s using it, or is nobody using the network? When I look at the network, for the most part, it’s being used as planned.
In our industry, if people repeat something again and again, it becomes reality. They say no one’s using Cardano; well, then no one’s using Cardano. They say Cardano doesn’t scale; well, then Cardano doesn’t scale. The truth doesn’t matter. Facts don’t matter. No one cares about the actual reality of things. The reality is that we invested big in decentralization and governance as strategic bets to create strong foundations. Then we invested big in technology that’s interoperable with Bitcoin and technology that allows a very strong partner chains model. That was called Cardano CL from Y Cardano, written by me in 2016. Nine years ago, I wrote that, and now it’s being realized with Midnight. Midnight is shaping up to be the largest drop in the history of the industry. There are already millions of addresses being mined right now with the scavenger hunt, about 200,000 participating in the glacier drops, and now exchanges are starting to participate. I believe Kraken and one other exchange, I think Gate. When you sum up all those people, it’s going to be probably over a million, which makes it larger than Arbitrum, which is about 650,000.
The Treasury has opened up; it paid out around 200 million ADA, and we’re starting to prime the pump of a self-governing recursive system. Now, can we invest in marketing? We should, and we should go big. The event strategy is one example of a quick win. There are other examples of quick wins. I proposed an aggressive sovereign wealth fund; it’s been reduced to a stable coin fund. That’s fine, but we’re starting to prime the pump on that.
As for other integrations, we’ve engaged in a lot of conversations with a lot of people. Midnight has brought a lot of wonderful integrations into Cardano. Midnight is a Cardano native token, so when Midnight needs it, they have to integrate both the Midnight Ledger, the partner chain, and Cardano for it to work. Whenever Midnight does something, it’s usually also a Cardano thing at the same time. Zero tweets about all these partnerships from the Cardano Foundation. Zero. Zero tweets saying Midnight is a big thing. That’s a funny thing. You create a multi-billion dollar project; it’s probably going to be the first project in our ecosystem on tier-one exchanges. There’s a large wealth transfer from that project to the majority of ADA holders and all these integrations for Cardano as a result of the project. Zero mentions. It’s frustrating to me because how do we win if we destroy ourselves, and how do we win if we’re operating on different wavelengths about the definition of success?
We can certainly set KPIs that matter as an ecosystem. We can say, "Okay, MAUs, transaction volume, TVL, the amount of DAPs installed, the amount of developers inside the ecosystem, the network value of those DAPs in terms of their token price and MAUs." We can look at other things like integrations and blockchain-to-blockchain partnerships. Typically, when you do a blockchain-to-blockchain partnership, the foundation of one blockchain talks to another foundation, and they agree to something strategic. Zero blockchain-to-blockchain partnerships from the CF. So IO started doing them. We went to Near Protocol, and you guys saw the Near intents coming through. I think Near is probably the best path to find a Chainlink integration because a direct conversation has been less than fruitful due to the price they’ve put on the table, which is mid-eight figures.
As for the stable coin side of things, that’s going to get totally resolved in 2026 because Midnight’s going to get one. The Midnight Foundation knows how to negotiate. If it’s on Midnight, we’ll have a trustless recursive bridge between Midnight and Cardano. You can move it back and forth, native issuance on Midnight into Cardano. It’s probably better that way because it’s anonymous when it gets issued there. You don’t want people tracking your stable coin. These things can be solved, and it’s either a blockchain-to-blockchain partnership, some new technology, or a place to get users. We have some DeFi applications that IO is building coming out onto Cardano next year, the largest of which is real. That’s the Africa thing. We never gave it up; we never stopped. Go to Twitter; people just lie until it becomes reality in their minds. They say we abandoned Africa. John O’Connor is still here. It’s a huge team. We’ve been lending money like crazy—my money—and we’re opening it up for microfinance, banking the unbanked, the economic identity side of it. That is coming in 2026, and I think that’s going to be the largest contributor to Cardano’s TVL when that service turns on.
It’s also being integrated with Bitcoin DeFi, so Bitcoin and ADA can be lent, converted into a stable coin, and then lent out to the Reali product. There’s a whole pipeline for that, and our belief is that will create billions of dollars of TVL for the network and bring a lot of Bitcoin into the network. Midnight also brings in an RWA play, and a lot of real-world assets can enter in. High yield products in Midnight and Cardano mean that people can participate. But we have to solve the fundamental problem that ADA users are not participating in Cardano DeFi.
How can we make the case for Solana users, Ethereum users, and all these other people cross-chain to come and play in our backyard if our own people in our own ecosystem aren’t using our DeFi protocols? Let’s talk about that and have an intellectually honest conversation about it. Let’s bring those people together and figure out why. Do they not know how? Do they not feel safe? Do they not think the experience is good enough? Do they not think the yields are good enough? What are the concerns there? Because if our own people consumed, our TVL would be 5 to 10 billion minimum instead of 680 million. That’s just our own ecosystem, our own user base. So that anemia has to come from somewhere.
As for the developer experience, some people say lies. They say it’s Haskell only; it’s a terrible developer experience. It’s the worst thing in the world. They don’t even talk about Aiken. They don’t even talk about how easy things have gotten on the DevX. Every programming language designer in the world says it takes about three to seven years for a programming language, once you’ve released it, to get to a point where you can write good production applications. We’re right there, right in the middle of it. We’re tracking the journey of Python, Scala, Java, C++, Kotlin, and Clore, and all these other languages. In fact, we’re far ahead of them in many respects, and it continues to evolve and get better. Plutus V4 is coming out next year. StarStream is coming out next year, adding contract composition. We’ve added a lot of primitives that have given us recursive snarks and an obvious path to rollups, and actually, the Hydra stuff is coming in with our layer 2 game with things like Midgard and Gummy Work.
So, if you step back and look at all these things, it’s not a grim situation. The challenge is nobody is broadcasting this 24 hours a day, seven days a week, to be louder than the critics who are lying or misinformed. Nobody is doing that for us right now as an ecosystem. I could come here and sit before this microphone and say these things and show you guys these things, but people don’t want to listen because I don’t have credibility in the other ecosystems. I’m expected to be pro-Cardano because I’m Mr. Cardano. So if a Solana person hears me saying how great Cardano is, they’re going to say, "Of course he’s going to say that. He’s Charles Hoskinson. Charles Hoskinson created Cardano. Of course he’s going to say it’s the best thing in the world." No matter what it is, he’s going to say that.
So you need an objective messenger, and that objective messenger has to have a big enough microphone to say that again and again. We have stability on governance, stability on the governance institutions, stability on development, a phenomenal roadmap. L2 is looking good, Hydra continues to evolve, and the partner chains ecosystems bring in a lot of wonderful people. Bitcoin DeFi is moving very quickly, so it’s going to bring a lot of people in. After Midnight, right on the back of that, another glacier drop, another token. We’re going to keep this going. I want to launch one every year, a partner chain every year, and keep it pushing, always bringing new users in, always bringing new excitement, and we learn as we do.
The next stage has to be setting a set of KPIs that matter to us as an ecosystem and setting some accountable priorities for those KPIs. An event strategy is a growth strategy. We can set commercial strategies, strategies to enhance TVL, strategies to enhance transactions, and strategies to enhance the MAUs. We can go around all the large ADA holders and say, "Hey, how come you’re not using DeFi?" Push them into it a little
Which will also give us the ability to integrate potentially with people who are too expensive or don’t really want to take us seriously for these big services because they profess to be decentralized. If they really are and their offerings and platforms are truly decentralized, they can’t stop us from integrating across another chain that they’ve already integrated with. They can’t. Otherwise, they’re centralized, in which case they’re lying to everybody when they say they’re actually a member of the service, and we can kind of show that off. So let’s just go do that, and then we have it. It’s there, and it’s just cryptography to make it trustless. Maybe it’s a trusted execution environment, or MPC, or a recursive SNARK. We can go do that, and we can move agile and move fast. There are a lot of great, very agile, and very smart people in the Cardano ecosystem. We’re tremendously passionate people.
Now, we’ve lost a lot of our influencers. I miss the Angry Crypto Show. I miss the Cardano Effect. I miss a lot of people who would broadcast 24 hours a day, 7 days a week about how great Cardano is. So, we need to come together and get some more. We either need to find people who want to do it, or we need to hire some people and bring them on in. That’s another part of that accountability. Back in the olden days, when I had to worry about all these things, I was the one who funded the Cardano Effect and brought these people in. I noticed there were super fans who were really excited about Cardano and wanted to talk about it, but they had no money to make it their job.
If you want, you can have David Gachin talk about Cardano a lot instead of Gemini. Notice every one of his shows is sponsored by Gemini. How about being sponsored by Cardano? We can get a lot of that, but again, who’s accountable for that? Certainly not the CF, unless you want to have wine or ballistics or a big expensive party in Berlin, and obviously, that doesn’t do anything for us. Now, it does. So, I understand where people are coming from. It’s gotten very negative and cynical. Honestly speaking, we have to change the mindset and mentality and get rid of the cynicism.
I’m sorry, but a project that has been in the top 10 for eight years straight, has never gone down, has honored its commitments, is the most decentralized cryptocurrency on the planet, and has the best on-chain governance on the planet, sitting on basically a billion dollars of value in an on-chain treasury with a phenomenal technical roadmap and an army of engineers to implement it, is not dead. Anyone who tells you that is just straight-up stupid. They don’t know what the hell they’re talking about. They’re parroting something an influencer from another ecosystem installed in their brain through repetition. That’s what they’re doing.
Now, we can complain about it, or we can solve the problem. And we have to again ask the question: Who is the megaphone for us? Who is the loudspeaker saying every day, “Cardano number one. Cardano going to the moon. Cardano is the ecosystem to follow. We’re the ones who are going to win”? Who’s that person? No one’s going to listen to me, guys, because I invented it. I don’t have credibility in the other ecosystems. They won’t listen to me because they think I’m going to say that, and they shut off even if it’s the truth.
So, we need to create accountable parties, relationships, and partnerships where these things are said again and again. Then people will listen, and they can come in and see. Second, what experiences are required to make that true? One of the reasons I built Lace is that I wanted to better understand the retail side. I wanted to better understand how people use cryptocurrencies today in 2025, not in the days I grew up in. Everything was so different back in the day. Bitcoin Core, we had Electron, we had all these crazy things. There was Electrum, and Armory was another wallet we had. It was just so different back in the day. Now we have new stuff, and it has to be fast, easy, and simple.
So, you build a wallet, you learn that stuff. And boy, it’s been hard to try to figure out how to put all those pieces together. But in the process of doing so, we refined and iterated CIP 30, kind of figuring out what the UX needs to look like. We’re converging to some great ideas, and we’re working with our neighbors. We joined Hedera Hashgraph's Derek, and we started working with them alongside XRP and other ecosystems. We learned from them very quickly, and there are dozens of these initiatives and programs that we have. We’re not static; we’re always moving forward. But we have to get the right experiences, and they have to be simple.
When our community builds these great experiences, we should put them up on a pedestal and say, “Hey guys, look, we have something special here. This is really cool. There’s something interesting here,” as opposed to saying, “Well, that’s cool. Ignore it completely. No funding for you,” and moving on to find another thing to complain about. We have to stop complaining. We have to stop the toxicity. We have to stop the self-destruction in the circular firing squads. We spent a chunk of this year with the ADA voucher drama. Everything is a fight. The budget’s a fight. This is a fight. That’s a fight. It’s exhausting, guys. It’s got to stop.
Midnight was such a fight, even though it’s the single best project for this ecosystem, by the numbers, in every dimension and respect—from creating new income streams for the stake pool operators to increasing the decentralization of Cardano, to connecting Cardano to all the other networks, to adding a privacy layer for Cardano, to enhancing the cryptography of Cardano, to evolving and integrating things like the finality of Cardano with Ouroboros' Paris that was needed for the bridging mechanism for partner chains, accelerating the conversation around Mithril and Hydra, and getting all these things done, productizing Hydra faster, getting tier one listings for Cardano native tokens, getting integrations for Cardano native tokens in major wallets. Go down the list; there are dozens of things there. And it was attacked.
So, if that’s the lived experience that a builder on Cardano is going to have, you shouldn’t be surprised if people stop building on Cardano if they get criticized when they bring something here. Stop it. You’ve got to stop the criticism. We have to unify. We have to give some delegated authority to people who step up and want to be accountable for growth. We have to agree on the KPIs, and we have to get megaphones and start broadcasting every day about how awesome Cardano is. We have to create a welcoming culture, including helping people build and talking about the entire pipeline.
That’s another thing that has been blatantly negligent. This is mostly Emergo’s fault. We’ve tried to help where we can at IO. We started the C Fund; it didn’t work out so well. We had a lot of missteps at IO, and I take personal accountability for that. Although I’m not a venture capitalist, I’ve had to learn how to be one as a technologist. It’s been hard trying to build a mentor program and learn how to work with people, help them build their companies, fund their companies, and acquire and merge companies. We’ve done a lot of work in the background, and we’ve worked with dozens, whether it be the SNET community or Sunday Labs or Anastasia, to help them along.
It’s a lot different in 2025 than it was in 2021. But there was supposed to be an entity that was accountable for that—from setting up the incubation to the acceleration to the white glove treatment so that when you build something, there’s a team of people to help you build that thing and help you go on the journey to get that thing to be big because your users are our users. Your volume is our volume. We’re starting to wake up as an ecosystem and realize that’s a requirement as well.
So again, when we look to 2026, do we want that function? If so, how do we get that function? And how do we hold it accountable? The event strategy of getting the top 25 to 50 to come to the events is good because then I can introduce them to the big VCs. We can talk about their technology issues, their frustrations, their talent problems—whatever it is. At least they’re there, and they’re in the room. We’re engaged with them. We’re working with them. We can figure these problems out as a community ecosystem. It’s a good start.
But just like you need somebody with the megaphone shouting every single day about how great it is, you need somebody who’s holding hackathons every two weeks. You need somebody who’s worrying about incubation and acceleration. And you need somebody who’s there to give white glove treatment to people building on the ecosystem, helping them along and answering questions about how to solve a problem. Be that tiger team for these types of things because other ecosystems have that as well.
It’s okay if we don’t have these things right now, but we have to aspire to build them and build them quickly. You’re adults, and I’m speaking to you as my business partners and equals. I’m not your leader. Cardano is decentralized; it’s that simple. What I’m trying to tell you as your fellow business partner here in building up Cardano, making it the greatest thing ever, is some of the things we need to do if we want to be competitive across this—not this learned helplessness of “savior, come save us, figure all these things out, and why are you guys so stupid for not solving this problem.”
Part of decentralization is accepting the fact that you have to do things out in the open, together, and in a systematic way that’s inclusive. Centralization is picking a savior and doing it. Delegated authority is a compromise where you create an entity or have an entity take that accountability, but they’re still transparent and open in that they have to tell you what’s going on.
We said Laos next year. Well, you know what? I need to create a website to actually show you every day the progress made so you can see it. We already have the monthly meetings; they’re public. You can attend them. You can see them. We announce them. You can see the SIP; it’s written, it’s on GitHub, it’s there. But we need to go a step further. That’s the expectation of transparency for this type of stuff. But that’s how we get it done—either together or apart. Apart, we will fail; together, we will succeed.
Holding ADA means something. When you hold ADA and you have a vote, you have a voice. You have a say in the governance of the system and in the security of the system. That is not true for Bitcoin. That is not true for Ethereum. It’s only partially true for them. Security of the system, but not the governance of the system, the roadmap, the direction, the philosophy, and ultimately the accountabilities and who you’ve given delegated authority to. There’s a little bit more work, but because it’s more work, you have more control and say; it’s that simple.
So, I believe we can win, but I also believe that we need a mindset change to win. I do believe that we have to get out of this miasma. It’s a dark and terrible miasma, and it’s partly because the macro hasn’t worked out the way that people want it to work out. Believe me, I was so frustrated. It’s been a hard year, and it’s been a really, really frustrating year.
Holy [__]. You know, in November when Trump won and we were having conversations, it looked like there was going to be an opening for either to be the cryptozar or be on some advisory committee. Then suddenly, an old friend of Elon Musk gets the job, and then the advisory committee—the guy they hired to run it—they decide not to do it. He’s like, “I guess I go work for Tether now.” Okay, they’re supposed to meet with the president. Then they cancel it. Then they put ADA on the reserve. Then they disinvite me to the White House. Then I’m moderating panels with the kids.
It’s up, it’s down. The Genius Act passes. The Clarity Act. We’re ready to go, and then the government shutdown happens. Then tariff after tariff after tariff, and it destroys the economy. We try to put the pieces back together. I’ll tell you the thing that complicated things more than anything else: Trumpcoin. We went from a bipartisan thing—“Okay, we should get it done”—to “Crypto equals Trump equals bad” for every single person on the left. It doesn’t matter if he had the right to do it; it wasn’t helpful.
I’ll be the first to say it, you know, because I call it as I see it. I don’t lie; I just say this is the way it is. It’s not helpful. It hasn’t been helpful. But that’s okay; you deal with it as it is, not as you want it to be. You don’t wake up and say, “God, if only things were a little different and more organized and coordinated and we had this and we had that.” You don’t get to make that decision. You don’t get to choose your macro.
Okay? The XRP community didn’t get to say, “God, if only the SEC was a little nicer to us over the last five years.” They had to deal with it as an ecosystem, and they spent hundreds of millions of dollars and took the worst of all of it for all of us, with the possible exception of Binance and a few others. Holy moly. And now we’re on the other side, and we’re working hard. We survived. The industry survived. We’re still in the game. The markets aren’t where they need to be, but why would they be? The United States has almost $40 trillion of debt. We’re staring directly into a Thucydides trap with China, where there’s a very strong possibility we could be at war.
And video—the company that built this magical little thing right here, this DGX Spark, beautiful, beautiful device worth $5 trillion. It’s the most valuable company in the world. You know what their real market value should be? Probably half a trillion to a trillion based on their sales. It’s a circular little AI economy. It’s a bubble. This government shutdown, as it keeps pushing forward, you know what it’s going to do? It’s eventually going to trigger something. This game of chicken between the Republicans and the Democrats—they’re not going to be able to swerve the cars fast enough. They’re going to come colliding into each other, knocking us into a recession.
When they knock us into a recession, these valuations collapse. When they collapse, mass layoffs happen. Mass layoffs beget layoffs beget layoffs. We’re headed right into a recession, potentially even a depression, depending upon how it’s managed. Crypto should be a counter-cyclical asset, but right now it trades like tech stocks. I don’t know why it’s the hedge, but that’s the way it is. You call them how you see them; you see them how you call them.
Now, there are great opportunities in this because some things will be highly undervalued, and on the other side of it, when we get through it, it’s going to look good. But you don’t build for today, right now, October 31st, 2025, and chase some market like a dragon chasing its own tail. You build for the future. You say, “In 5 years, 10 years, 15 years, what’s going to be the stuff that matters?”
Why do I have this little device from Nvidia? Because this has 128 gigabytes of RAM. It has a 20-core processor, but most importantly, a petaflop of graphics processing power. Right now, we’re trying to figure out how to get folding and recursion to work with tensor codes and tensor networks. If I can do that, all the zero-knowledge stuff in the world runs on this hardware. Bubble or not, this hardware is exponentially growing, which means you can do zero-knowledge stuff in milliseconds that right now takes minutes to hours. That’s the kind of leapfrog competitive advantage stuff that if you bet big in five years, it means something.
And the thing about Cardano is we bet big on the things that really matter. We bet big on decentralization. We bet big on resilience. And we bet big on philosophy and principles. Cardano is one of the few things left outside of Bitcoin where we actually kept the faith of Satoshi. We actually care about what cryptocurrencies were intended to do. I’m sorry if your intention is just to buy at a dollar, get out at $2, and then go buy something. I don’t work for you. I don’t work for that intention. If your intention is to liberate yourself from the panopticon we live in, the economic systems we live in, and get into a new system that actually has principles and dignity and honor behind it, then you’re my friend. We work together.
I do not want to trade my soul for a bag full of silver. And that’s what’s happening right now. They’re praising Ark, the Circle guys, literally going and working with BlackRock and Goldman Sachs and Visa. These were the people that when I was growing up in the industry, we were trying to get the hell away from. Now we have to pretend it’s an amazing thing that these institutions are coming into our industry, changing the regulation, changing the actors, creating competitive moats. You know what that means? Every single thing you buy is tracked. At any given moment, you could be shut off from your money.
Don’t believe me? When COVID happened, if you said the wrong thing, your Twitter account was shut off, your YouTube account was shut off, your Facebook account was shut off. You could have your father die in the ICU, and you weren’t even allowed to see him. You had to have a call on an iPad with him, and they wouldn’t let you in. When you complain about it on Facebook, they suspend your page for spreading medical misinformation. That actually happened to people. You don’t think for a moment that if your money was controlled in the same way by the same type of actors that you wouldn’t be economically deplatformed? You don’t think for a moment that that
Not once do we have to give up what makes us special. We didn’t in the last ten years, and we won’t in the next ten years. We just have to make the conscious effort to come together. We have to set the cynicism aside, and as an ecosystem, we have to push together.
Now, I’m going to keep doing my part. I’m going to keep launching partner chains. We have Midnight coming out, and we have Bitcoin DeFi. I’m going to continue building DAPs and DeFi in the ecosystem. I’m going to continue investing heavily to ensure the infrastructure gets where it needs to go. We’ll keep writing code. We’ll keep working with people. We’ll keep working with our neighbors. I’m doing my part, and I’m going to keep going to events and making the case that our ecosystem is a great ecosystem. I’m going to keep appearing in the media and saying that. I’m going to keep talking behind this microphone until I’m blue in the face about how great these things are and why we have to keep the faith. That’s my part. That’s my job. That’s my lot in life. I don’t care how hard it is. It’s what we do. It’s what we signed up for. That’s why we’re here.
But I need you to do your part too. It starts with you, your mindset, where you want to be in life, and how you want to get there. The most fundamental question you have to ask is: Are you a slave, or do you have liberty? If you allow yourself to be a slave, you’re a slave. If you demand liberty, you’ll have to fight for it, but you’ll get it in the end, one way or the other. What we have built here is a tool for liberty. That’s what we’ve built, and I’m not going to give it up. I’m not going to let it disappear. I’m not going to let it be conflated with the avaristic dreams of traders. I’m going to fight very hard behind this microphone and tell each and every one of you what you have and why it’s special.
We need to amplify this and get other people to say the same things, to get them in rooms I can’t be in, and to get them to shout from the rafters about how special this is. We have to fight. It’s worth fighting for. This is our challenge as an ecosystem, as a movement, and as humans. We’re losing our humanity, and we have to take it back. We’re losing it to bureaucracy, to algorithms, to automation, to AI. We’re losing it in a crisis of meaning where we have no meaning. You feel it. I feel it. We sense it. Objective reality is melting away. We’re losing the very concept of truth. It’s going away. We have to take it back.
And it starts with ourselves. It starts with our autonomy, then the tools, and through those tools, the people we work with, how we work with them, and what we do with them. Yes, it’s hard. It’s uncertain. There are a lot of setbacks. There are many things that don’t work out the way they’re supposed to. There are many things you think are going to happen, and they don’t happen. Cry me a river. There have been plenty of times in human history when it’s been a lot harder, believe me. And there will be times after this when it’s a lot harder. That doesn’t excuse anything. You just pick yourself up and keep fighting. You grab a shovel, and you get it done.
Cardano, if we allow it, will change the world. We have the roadmap, we have the vision, we have the community. It’s just up to us if we really want this to happen. I do, and I’m never going to stop. Just deal with it.
1:07:35
26:05
26:19