Hi, this is Charles Hoskinson broadcasting live from warm, sunny Colorado. Always warm, always sunny, sometimes Colorado. Today is October 30th, 2025. I figured I’d make a video to talk about what the mission is, the vision is, where we’re going, and what we’re doing as an industry.
You see, there’s Solana versus Ethereum versus Cardano versus Bitcoin, and we get so competitive at times that we sometimes miss the broader picture: why we’re here, what we’re doing, and that our best days are ahead of us. This industry is about rewriting the rules for the economic, political, and social systems of society. I’ve always believed that. I’ve always felt it in my bones, in my heart.
We have a lot of ups and downs. I remember when Bitcoin was a dollar and it went up to $30. Everybody said, “The vision is here. The mission is here. Everything’s going well. It’s incredible. Oh my lord. Bitcoin is taking off. This is the best thing ever to happen.” Then it collapsed down to $4. Everybody said, “Oh no. What do we do? What do we do?” Then it went up to $250, and we said, “Oh my lord, it’s here. The mission’s here. The vision’s here. Everything’s okay. We’re doing good.” Then it went down to $80, and we said, “Oh, it’s over. Doom and gloom.” Then up to $1,200, and we said, “It’s finally here. The dream has come. Crypto’s taking over the world. Everybody’s okay. It’s good.”
Then it went up to $20,000. Oh my god, our time has come. Crypto has finally taken over the world. That was 2017. Then it collapsed down to $4,000. Doom and gloom. Oh no. Then all the way up to $68,000 in 2021. You guys remember that year? Oh my lord, it was a crazy year. Everybody was in crypto. Everybody was talking about crypto. Every person driving around, the taxi driver would say, “Have you heard of crypto? I’m buying this coin. I’m buying that coin.” Then it collapsed. Crypto’s over. Luna, FTX—the whole thing is dead. What are we going to do?
Then all of a sudden, it went all the way up over $100,000. The worst bull market of all time. What do we do? What does this mean, guys? All you care about is the price. Price goes up, price goes down. It will go up over time because it’s a deflationary asset. For the most part, assets in the ecosystem like ADA or Bitcoin have these characteristics, and they’re proportional in the long term to the people using them and what they use them for.
But why are we here? Where does the durability come from over the last 15 years? Why does it keep growing no matter what’s going on in the macro? Look at the world around us and ask a very fundamental series of questions. Is the world around us healthy? Do you think that everything is going well right now? Do you think the world is going well? Do you think everybody’s happy? Do you think that everybody trusts each other? Do you think everybody believes, generally speaking, that tomorrow will be a better day than today? Do you think that your job is secure? Do you think the economy is healthy? Do you think the money in your pocket is actually going to be worth something in 10 years, 15 years, 20 years? Do you feel safe? Do you feel listened to? Do you feel valued?
These are basic questions. They have nothing to do with crypto. They are just foundational things that exist. If the answers are no, if the answers are “it depends,” if the answers are “I’m uncertain and I’m scared,” what that’s telling you is that the institutions, the way we govern things, the way the markets work, the way the economy works, it’s not working for you.
Why crypto exists is that it starts a conversation about how we do things differently. How do we change the world in a way where we can answer that question? Yes, I feel safe. Yes, I feel like my money will be valuable. Yes, I feel like tomorrow will be a better day than today. That’s the whole reason this industry exists. That’s the whole reason we labor and build what we build.
We get caught in these self-destructive cycles where we lose perspective and we get depressed, saying, “Oh no, it’s all gone.” There was a time when ADA was three cents. I remember that day, down from $1.28. It’s okay. It goes up, it goes down. We fall, the rest of the market falls. In the short term, it’s a tragedy. In the long term, it’s really about asking, are we making progress?
The question is, do we have a path for nation-states to run cryptocurrencies? The answer is yes. Javier Milei just got reelected. His whole political party had a big election down in Argentina. There is a better than 50% chance that by 2030, half of all the value in the economy of Argentina will be in cryptocurrencies. There’s a better than 50% chance that the majority of their government will run on a blockchain—voting systems, identity systems, supply chain systems, and money—by 2030. That’s a 40 million person country. That’s just one of many with equivalent chances.
Has blockchain reached mainstream? Has crypto reached mainstream? Absolutely. A half billion people hold cryptocurrencies. Think about that. That’s more than the entire population of the world in the 18th century. It’s growing by leaps and bounds, and we’re looking at potentially a billion people within the next 3 to 5 years. That’s extraordinary. We’re doubling in terms of the people that hold it. We have nation-states adopting it.
Where are we at in terms of the capabilities of these things? When I entered the space, it was just Bitcoin. All we were talking about was Bitcoin versus a different flavor of Bitcoin—Litecoin, Feathercoin. It was the same code, same capability. You could push tokens around. That was pretty much it. They were toys. Now we have the zero-knowledge revolution. Now we have the DeFi revolution. Now we have all these amazing technologies working their way through.
Literally every day, billions of dollars of tokens are traded on DEXs. Every single day, billions of dollars of loans are given. Every single day, artists are able to issue NFTs, meme coins, and all kinds of creative assets. New forms of intellectual property are created. New types of video games are created. Every single day, we have a trillion-plus dollar economy that’s self-evolving, self-growing. That’s where we’re at on October 30th, 2025, and it shows no signs of slowing down.
It has no signs where people say, “You know what, let’s just go back to the old days.” What are we looking forward to in the old days? Fiat money that prints and prints and prints. Endless wars, hate, destruction, chaos, nobody trusting each other, property rights that don’t matter, no rule of law. What are we looking forward to in the old economy? Have you become so cynical? Have you become so hopeless that you believe you deserve that?
When you’re in crypto and you really believe that this is the future, what you’re saying is you deserve a better future. You deserve to be your own bank. You deserve to own your own identity. You deserve to have the final say on where your money goes and how your money works. You deserve your money to get more valuable over time, not less valuable because some bureaucrat steals the value from you to pay themselves. You deserve transparency, auditability, immutability. You deserve an objective reality that people can’t go and change.
That’s what you say when you’re in the cryptocurrency space. Then what everybody does is convince you that we’re failing because we have a bad day in the markets. There’s always going to be a bad day for somebody in the market. Markets have winners and losers by design. But there’s always a good day in crypto when we look at the macro. The macro is that every day we get more adoption, better technology, more capabilities, more provability, less trust, more resilience, and more decentralization.
Now, there are a lot of false prophets out there. You have chains being built by centralized actors attempting to co-opt and take over the industry. We have to make some hard decisions as an industry about whether we embrace them or they embrace us. Asset-backed stablecoins are not cryptocurrencies. They take advantage of cryptocurrency infrastructure, and they’re a nice asset to have, but at the end of the day, their value and operation come from the promises and commitments of centralized companies. We should never conflate or confuse them with the ethos we came from.
Real crypto will never die, and real crypto cannot be bought. You can trade tokens, you can own the tokens, but it’s the protocols themselves and the ethos behind them, along with the immutable characteristics of a love of freedom and liberty, that truly matter. I’ve been here from the very beginning. I’ve watched it go up, I’ve watched it go down, and I’ve seen every crisis in between.
I recently took some time off. I was down in Switzerland, just walking around, saw the beautiful mountains after finishing up in Milan. It gave me a moment to reflect upon the things I care about, what my life is about, and what I want to do. Do I want to just retire, go be a rancher, or do I want to do something else? I realized I’m happiest when I’m here with all of you, building this future, thinking about the economic, political, and social systems of the world, and being in the revolution.
There aren’t many of us left from the early days. They got picked off, retired, or got tired of the chaos. But of the few that are still here, we carry that torch with us. It’s exactly the same today in 2025 as it was in 2015 and 2010. We’re here for you. We’re here for us. We’re here for humanity. This is not about money. This is about the future of how humans live.
When we look at 2050 and ask what the world looks like, I want to live in a world where the backbone of every nation-state, every company, and every economic transaction is a blockchain that preserves and protects your rights as a person. I want to live in a world where human rights don’t just say “don’t be evil” but “can’t be evil.” I want to live in a world where you own your own identity. You are your own bank—a world of consent instead of a giant panopticon that takes it all from you.
I’ve lost complete faith and trust in the existing institutions we have. While we will work with them from time to time, including the legacy institutions, I never want to be a guest in their home. I want them to be guests in our home, and I want our home to be the only home in the long term. Everyone has to play by the same rules, and everyone should be constrained by a basic social contract that we’re all equal and no one government or otherwise gets to violate those rules for their own benefit.
To me, crypto is the only thing that matters because it’s deciding how we’re going to live in a world permeated with AI, fiat money that is collapsing, and great powers at war with each other in a global society where every single person is just floating around doing stuff. Our markets are 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, and everything is becoming digital.
In the next 25 years, because of augmented reality and the glasses and contact lenses, every single thing in the physical world will have a digital twin, a digital analogy. When you’re walking around outside and you look at the pizzeria, your glasses will show you the ratings, the hours, the friends that have gone there, the menu. Your physical world will become a digital world.
So, what’s the regulating layer for that? How do you know that the things you see in this augmented world are real and not adulterated? How do you know that when the AI tells you something, it’s not influenced or controlled by the few to the detriment of the many? What’s your control layer to ensure that we live in a just society when everything becomes digital? The only option is the technology of this industry. That’s it. If anybody tells you otherwise, they’re either ignorant, a bot, or both.
We’ve lived too long with carnival barkers running around. I’ve seen it all across the political and economic spectrum, and we’ve lived too long with cynicism. So on days like these, where we see the markets, the macro, and the micro not looking so good and people start losing hope, you need to pick up a shovel and realize that nobody’s going to save us but ourselves. Crypto has always been and always will be the solution and the answer.
We are the ones in this industry who are going to decide how humans are going to live in 2050, what rights they have and what rights they don’t have. We’re the ones, either by recusing ourselves and handing it off to a small group of people to decide on behalf of everyone, or we get involved and force it upon the governments of the world.
We’ve won a lot of victories, and we’ve done things that I thought were impossible. We got the United States of America to go from an adversary to an ally. We built technology that can truly scale to the needs of billions of people. We’ve performed many miracles of computer science to get these systems where they need to go. We’ve tokenized trillions of dollars of assets, and that’s just the beginning.
Think about how powerful we can be if we don’t lose faith and keep pushing forward. Think about how powerful we can be if we’re the ones who don’t panic. Instead, we stay calm in the face of the storm. Nothing is going to get easier from here on out for anyone in any context because the world is changing, just like it did last century.
As a direct consequence of the industrial revolution, instantaneous communication, and new transportation infrastructure, the whole world changed. It went from agrarian monarchal societies that were mostly ruled by kings to a war between communism and fascism and democracy, which reached its apex during World War II and caused profound social change.
Now, in the 21st century, because of technological progress, we are going to face similar challenges. Economies are going to collapse. America is coming into some really hard times, and there’s a non-zero probability that we’re entering into a great depression. There’s a non-zero probability that before the close of this decade, we will be at war with the nation of China. There’s a non-zero probability that we may no longer have a democracy in the next 10 or 20 years. These are facts.
You can take crypto out of the equation. These are the challenges before us. At some point, we’re going to have to pick up the pieces and clean up the mess after we resolve these crises. We have to ask if we got a chance to redo how the US dollar works, do we just want to build it the exact same way with the exact same Federal Reserve, the exact same oversight, governance, and management, and the exact same institutionalism that is exclusive and can be co-opted? Or do we want to build it differently?
The same goes for our political systems, how we vote, how we express ourselves, how our viewpoints get propagated. The same for our social systems, how we organize, who we give power to, who we listen to, and how information flows—the epistemic hygiene of society as a whole. When we look at these things, we have to make decisions.
We don’t get to choose the crises of our time. We inherit them as emergent properties from the millions of decisions made by the people who came before us. The prior generations, for better or worse, have inflicted this world upon us. What we get to choose is how we deal with those problems and how we clean up the mess that those problems create.
All of you have these tools now—tools to create objective reality, tools to promote honesty, and tools to build fair economies for every single person in the world. We must never forget that, diminish that, or think that because a token price has gone down or a market’s in the red, we’ve somehow lost. That cynicism has no place in a revolution that wants to restore agency to the people.
I’ve seen worse times than this, and we will see worse times ahead. But never once have I wavered in my belief in you, and never once have I fallen apart and said people can’t do these things. There’s no greater example of that than Cardano and its governance system. In a year, we transitioned from a federated governance system to a completely open and decentralized governance system.
Everybody said, “Oh no. You can’t do that. You’re trusting all these people across the entire world to just simply take over. Won’t that result in anarchy and chaos? Won’t all these people just blow it all up and destroy all the value?” If you believe that people are stupid, if you’re cynical and think that humans can’t manage themselves, then perhaps that’s true. But I’ve always had an optimistic, non-cynical view.
I’ve always believed that if you trust people, give them real power, real agency, and autonomy, and respect them as people, you empower them. They’ll rise to the occasion and find a path forward. It won’t always be pretty. They won’t always make the right decision. They’re not perfect. We’re humans. We fail. We make mistakes. But that’s part of being human—picking yourself up, having the courage to be wrong, and still showing up the next day to keep pushing forward.
We did that as an ecosystem. We learned all these hard lessons, and we keep showing up. We keep fighting hard. That can serve as an example to so many others. There’s no reason we can’t rebuild the governments of the world. There’s no reason we can’t rebuild the economies of the world. There’s no reason we can’t call truth the power.
It’s been a difficult year for me. It really has been because it’s been a year of compromise. There are many things I’ve seen the US government do that I have questioned the judgment of, especially this year—many policies, many actions, many behaviors of leaders. I’ve tried to stay silent about it and reason my way around it, but sometimes you have to call a spade a
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