Hi, this is Charles Hoskinson broadcasting live from warm, sunny Colorado—always warm, always sunny, sometimes Colorado. Today is January 9th, 2026. We're not sleeping; we're working hard, getting things done, and having a lot of fun. It's really good to return to first principles, write code again, think about how the world works, and get things done.
Midnight is an incredible project. We have an amazing series of workshops next week, and everybody's getting ready for it. We're also preparing for the Japan tour, and we're super excited and fired up to go to Japan. We're going to Hokkaido all the way down to Okinawa, walking the entire Japanese archipelago. We're here to kick Japan a little bit, wake it up, and say, "Hey, you got something new. Fourth generation is coming. You got that rational privacy, you got that chain abstraction, you got that smart compliance. We have some cool stuff, and we're fired up."
Of course, we have Consensus Hong Kong right on the back of that, so we're ready to go and fired up for that too. We have some amazing announcements and special surprises for people there. There are some cool things we're going to be able to show you. The Pentad is working really hard, and obviously, Christmas slowed everything down because we were ready to sign some contracts, but the other side was like, "We're taking Christmas off." We were like, "We want to sign stuff. We want to announce some things about integrations for Cardano." Those haven't been forgotten. We're really excited about some bridges, oracles, stable coins, and analytics, so look for those soon. More listings are coming too.
Overall, the KPIs have been set in stone, and we told everybody this is the standard. You got to grab the boat and carry the boat. There are no excuses. There's no, "I just didn't have the time," or "I didn't know how." To be honest, I've been staying up until about 2:00 or 3:00 in the morning every night and getting up at about 6:00. I'm not sleeping much, but I don't care because we have things to do and places to go. This is our year. 2026 is going to be a good year.
It's a year where we've been promising and saying as an industry, and to be frank, we've been writing checks as an industry we cannot cash. I'm so tired of that, and you're tired of that. We don't want to do this anymore. What we want is real-world adoption, real-world assets, and real-world utility. We want every business on a blockchain. We want every ecosystem on a blockchain. We don't care where it comes from; it's got to get done. Full stop.
I'm pretty excited about the process and the people. When we go to Japan, we get to talk about the fourth generation for the first time ever in earnest with lots of people around. We can refine the messaging and the language and get people excited about what's coming and why it's interesting, especially how all these forces are converging together. We get to build all kinds of new applications that have never been built before—applications with privacy embedded inside them. The Pentad structure will enable all these commercially critical integrations. Cardano is no longer an island; it talks to everything and works with everything. Liquidity, users, TVL—all that stuff can flow freely.
The next stage after Pentad phase one is the exciting stage. I'm going to propose that we take the top 15 or 20 dApps on Cardano and get them upgraded to Bitcoin DeFi, XRP DeFi, and Midnight. We also need to get them tier one listings, get them aboard, incubated, and accelerated so we can 10x their TVL, their users, and their transaction volume. We need to take care of our own as an ecosystem.
There's a lot more infrastructure we need to build. We have to get the CCI done, which is the first order, but it's not long after that we can start turning the crank and get these guys upgraded. A lot of people ask me, "How will Cardano DeFi be competitive?" It's not going to be competitive by being slightly better, slightly faster, or slightly cheaper than Ethereum or Solana. That's just not going to happen. We tried that; others tried that, and it didn't work. You can't just be a copy of a copy of a copy. You have to do new stuff, interesting things, and bring new experiences to the table.
You don't beat MapQuest by building a slightly better MapQuest; you beat MapQuest by having Google Maps on the iPhone. Then everyone says, "Holy crap, let's get that done!" You beat those guys by doing something that no one's ever seen before. When you add privacy and get private stable coins, that's going to be sexy to show—private prediction markets, private DEXes. You're bringing something new to the conversation, something that people haven't seen before. If you have all the bridge infrastructure and the stable coins, you're bringing it to Solana, Ethereum, Bitcoin, XRP, BNB, Avalanche, and the rest of the industry. All those users will say, "Hell yeah, we want some of that!" That's how we get the TVL up and the transactions up.
Everybody's doing their job. They're fired up and ready to go. We're writing code. We're working 24/7 and on weekends. I think JJ's gone to Argentina like 26 times; at this point, I think he's got a girlfriend there—maybe two. He's getting his ass kicked, and that's exactly the way it should be. You have to wake up every day and carry the boat. The same goes for Fahami Syed and everyone at the Midnight Foundation. They're working their asses off too. I've never seen a group of people work as hard as them. The same goes for the Cardano Foundation; they're working harder than they've ever worked. Emurgo is working harder than they've ever worked, and so is Intersect. Everybody in the ecosystem wants to win, and we're inspired to win.
I fully appreciate how hard times have been. 2025 was the worst year in the history of crypto. It was the year where the US government rug pulled us. They teased us like a lap dance, but we didn't get to seal the deal. We didn't get to first base. They said they were going to do all this stuff—the Reserve, the Clarity Act. They were going to adopt crypto, buy crypto, and integrate crypto, but they didn't do any of that. Shame on us for trusting them. We're not going to win because the US government tells us we're going to win; we're going to win because we're the good guys, and there are billions of us.
The world deserves crypto; it's a global product. There's no such thing as an American cryptocurrency, and there's no shortcut to being an American cryptocurrency. None. You're a global cryptocurrency; you're there for everyone, everywhere, all the time. Stop believing otherwise and stop getting caught up in the miasma of things. It's good to be off Twitter. I'm still broadcasting to it, but I haven't read a comment in nine days, and I'm healthier and happier than I've ever been, even though I'm only sleeping three hours and writing code until 3:00 in the morning. I'm having fun and enjoying it again.
It's good to be back, to understand how all these systems work, to read code, to go through repos, and to read papers. It's good to think and be done with this drama. I was in the Midnight Discord today, and all these people were going, "Oh, the price is going down. It's all over." I said, "Get out of the Discord. If you want to complain about it, go home. Go to X or YouTube comments. Go somewhere else where people care. We don't care here. The whole point of that Discord is to figure out how to make Midnight better. When are we going to do that? Who wants to partner? Who wants to build? I have time to work with you to get your stuff done, but I don't have time to pump your bags."
We're going to change the world. Yes, the markets are going to be stagnant for a little bit longer, and all kinds of challenges are just going to keep coming down the pipe. We've gotten so used to it that let's not let it bother us as an industry. Let's get back to business. We have a new generation to build, a new narrative, and we're going to 10x the population of cryptocurrency. We're going to 10x the assets under management in the cryptocurrency space if we play our cards right. The vast majority of securities will be traded on cryptocurrency rails, not in exchanges, by 2030 if we play our cards right. You can use cryptocurrency from your cell phone; you don't need a wallet. It just works—tap to pay, instantaneous, and nearly free, working everywhere for everyone. By 2030, let's go do that.
Are you tired of losing? Let's go win. Why not us? We have the technology, the people, the gigabrains, the engineers, the community, and the decentralized governance. We've put in ten years of grinding. What do you think this means? We just did nothing? We weren't all just waiting for the McDonald's ice cream machine to get fixed? That will never happen. I can promise you anything in the world, but I can't fix the McDonald's ice cream machine, guys. That's not what we're doing here; we're changing the world.
So, before I go home and eat my ice cream—my one little vice, gluttony among others—I wanted to make a video to tell all of you this is going to be a good year. No matter if you want it or not, we're going to drag your ass kicking and screaming to the finish line, and we're going to have fun and enjoy it, or I will turn this car around, kids. You're going to love every minute of it. So, stop whining, stop complaining, and enjoy life. These are the best times ever. There are so many cool things and wonders, and we have agency. We're in charge, and we can win.
We have a great game plan with Leo's and Hydra. We're getting those integrations done. Midnight launched, and it launched more valuable than Leo, ZK Sync, StarkWare, and Mina combined. So, stop crying; it's doing good, and it's going to do better. The Japan tour is going to be phenomenal and incredible. Hong Kong's going to be phenomenal and incredible. Then, every two months, a bag of goodies comes. That's the cadence. It's a death march. The team knows it. They're sad that they have to do all the work, but they're happy that they have the privilege to make it happen.
I'm very glad how many of you have stepped up to be ambassadors. There's an overwhelming number of people who applied, and I'm finally going to be able to meet a lot of them in person. We're making a big shakeup at IO, adding some people, getting rid of some people to rebuild our social media, our Discord strategy, and change the way we interface with people. Every two weeks, I say, "What have you done for me lately?" That's the rope we give. It's not long anymore because we have a lot to do, and we measure things quickly and get things done. We haven't lost the formalism; in fact, we have even more rigorous formalism thanks to our good friend LLMs. We can check things at levels that have never been checked before.
In fact, I'm designing a new model called IMO, which stands for intention models and oracles. I think it's going to become the gold standard for testing ZK systems, especially if it's a canonical executable specification oracle. You'll see that in the repo if you want to start it. In fact, I'll give it to you. Why not? Working out every day, getting it done. I'm going to start the cold plunges again Monday next week. Ready to go. My dog will be watching me while I'm in the water, probably thinking, "What are you doing, man? That's crazy. You don't go in there." I said, "Sorry, got to get it done. This is just what we do now."
It's just what we do—going full Goggins. Probably not a good idea, but I don't care. Anyway, happy New Year! Be careful what you signed up for; you signed up for a revolution. And guess what? You're going to get one. Good night, everybody.
1:07:35
26:05
26:19