Hi, this is Charles Hoskinson broadcasting live from warm, sunny Colorado. Always warm, always sunny, sometimes Colorado. Today is May 22nd, 2026, and I have returned from the lovely land of the UK and I'm back here in Colorado, in my home office, just about ready for the weekend. I'm going to take a few days off, but we have one final push that we need to make, which is for the remaining voting proposals. I wanted to make a video to make my last pitch in favor of the Input Output proposals.
We've done X-spaces, we've done a lot of retail marketing, and ultimately we've tried to make the case that this is the best transition we can provide for the ecosystem as a whole. It's difficult building a decentralized product. If it's a regular product, I know what to do. You have a hierarchy, product managers, marketing people, goals, KPIs, quarterly planning, and whatever mechanism you follow. There’s a roadmap, and you can look at it. You can say Byron, Shelley, Goguen, Basho, Voltaire, and other things. We have conferences, we have releases, and you see this with Midnight. Every quarter we release something. We're hitting our KPIs, we're hitting our deadlines, and we have a spectacular launch with over $9 billion of trading. We had one of the best token launches of the year in 2025 with the Binance listing, and other exchanges are soon to come. The mainnet was launched exactly as we thought it would be. There were a lot of partnerships and beautiful execution at the booth, and that's because hundreds of people were working together with a common vision, common mission, and common goal.
Every person, all the way up from Stevie getting the booth done alongside others for the Midnight Foundation at Consensus, to Bob and the other engineers working day after day for more than 80 days straight to get the mainnet out. There’s a lot of great science and a lot of things on the horizon like Star Stream and Night Stream. It’s one team and one vision. It’s fun, and I really enjoy it. The people really enjoy it. It’s fun every week with the Night Force to broadcast for two hours. It’s like the good old times. I go and talk to them, saying, "Hey, this is why Midnight is special and these are the things we do."
When we pivot and take a look at Cardano, it hasn't been fun for a while. Every single time I try to make the case that we need to continue doing something, stay the course, or implement something, we descend into the lowest common denominator. In the last four years, particularly the last two since centralized governance has turned on, I have been accused of being an enemy of my own ecosystem, even though I'm still one of the largest data holders, a criminal, a thug, a narcissist of the highest order, brutally attacking people. All I'm trying to do is get Cardano out of a hole.
I can't literally win. If there's no marketing, it's my fault. If I try to do marketing, it's not my place to do that. If there's no roadmap, it's my fault. If I try to create a roadmap, then it's not my place to do that, and I'm stepping on the little guy. Every step of the way, I'm told by people, many of whom have never built a business and have no experience or knowledge about how products work, who I should hire and fire, which scientists stay, which scientists go, that our engineers are overpaid, and the work we do is not sufficient.
Then we make cuts. We cut the budget in half, and I have to let good friends go. We break it from an omnibus proposal to ten sub-proposals, and that’s not good enough. It should be broken down again and more. Sometimes people don’t even know what they’re voting on or why they’re voting on it. What makes me sad is there’s a beautiful, elegant vision underneath all of this. When you take Leos and Hydra, the partner chain strategy, and the PoS strategy with Bitcoin DeFi, when you look at how resilient we are to the coming apocalypse of AI for information security, and when you see that we’ve been able to seamlessly upgrade the chain for years without it collapsing, we’re right on the precipice of being bar none the best cryptocurrency in the world. The most decentralized, the most economically sustainable.
Yes, we have more to do like post-quantum and we have to get all the zero-knowledge stuff where it needs to be, but we bet right on liquid non-custodial staking. We bet right on UTXO. That wasn’t, to quote Andrew Westberg, a collection of somewhat implemented papers; that was very intentional. I can’t tell you how many thousands of hours we spent in chief scientist meetings. If we just audited because we had to migrate some of the data, there are nine and a half years of chief scientist meetings. Nine and a half years, every Thursday, relentlessly fighting, pushing, getting things done, trying to solve some of the hardest problems. Everything from how do we get that damn VRF to work to how do we get Ouroboros to have finality when it was never designed to have it. And we solved them. The hardest problems, we solved them.
It’s easy to build a centralized product. It really is. It’s hard to build it like this because it takes so long to get people to even understand enough to have an opinion, much less actually get them unified. Ultimately, it’s my fault. We did governance, and it pained me looking at the treasury having over a billion in ADA in it. We couldn’t touch it for the ecosystem and all these people that needed funding for their businesses. I wanted to have a system to unlock it. At the all-time high, it was $3 billion of ADA. I said, "Wow, if we could open this up, if we could get people to participate, look at how much stronger we would be."
But we didn’t have a lot of executive function. We really didn’t. The lack of that made the budget process a bloody mess, and it’s turned people deranged. Look, you can disagree without being disagreeable. I can’t disagree with anyone. It’s just not possible. Anytime I disagree with somebody, I’m attacking them, and they play the victim. Some of the people that abstained on the Midnight Ambassador set got death threats over their support of us. So, when I defend them, I’m a bad person. We don’t have the medium upon which to have debates or disagreements. We’ve allowed a small minority of rabble-rousers and perpetual haters to own the Cardano governance process.
I was talking to a DRep the other day, and she told me that 99% of the ADA holders don’t participate, don’t know anything about this, and don’t care. They would be deeply saddened to see Cardano die. Why do we let so few have so much power over the process and dialogue? Because people are just afraid to get hit. I understand it. I really do. I’ve been hit now for years. It leaves wounds. You have an anger inside of you. It affects your psychology. It makes you bitter and hollow. It takes the fun out of things. You know what you need to do, but you don’t even want to do it. You have to get up out of bed, drag yourself out, and say, "All right, I’ll go fight yet another fight, yet another day."
What hurts the most is when you meet people in person and they’re nice, and you get along with them, and you do good things with them, and then they become monsters over Twitter, grandstanding, attacking, and stabbing you in the back. This governance brings out the worst in people, and it’s not doing Cardano any service. It’s getting in the way of people putting a vision and a roadmap together. It makes me sad because there’s so much good that we have. There’s so much value that we’ve collectively produced over the last ten years.
So, where do we go from here? Well, there are IO proposals, and I think they’re very necessary to get us to the next stage. They will continue to decentralize the development of Cardano. By this time next year, such proposals will be funded, and we will have a diverse and vibrant ecosystem of many developers from many different companies building multiple implementations. The Haskell node will no longer be under Input Output; it will be spun out. Leios will be fully implemented, integrated, and turned on, and most of the core development will be in the hands of the community, including the roadmap.
In terms of research, we need to figure out how to do D-side. I don’t think people appreciate or understand how remarkably hard it is to run a research group. And why would they? It’s a rare skill set. It’s not something that people encounter on a day-to-day basis. Believe it or not, you can’t just copy-paste something because a vibe coder told you. You don’t even know what security parameters to pick. You just don’t. So, it’s going to take some more time to figure out how to decentralize that function, but believe me, I have no desire for it to be solely in the control of Input Output. It already has been at the institutional level. We have independent labs. I suppose we could break them out and try to find a way to get treasury funding for each individual lab, and probably next year that’s the way to do it.
But I wanted to make sure that we were well prepared for the ZK revolution, or else we’ll fall behind. Well prepared for the abstraction revolution and well prepared for the quantum revolution. I wanted to ensure the foundational research was done correctly so that we still stay competitive and there’s a reason to buy ADA and a reason to stay in the ecosystem. On the governance side, there have been over 11,000 DAOs created; most have failed. A lot of people that have embraced on-chain voting have not had joy and have not been successful, for lack of a better term. We need to do something about that.
Somehow, I have to find the energy to look at all those 11,000 DAOs and all those failed governance efforts and make some changes. It’s already clear that we need to use a lot of privacy in the Cardano ledger. The voting of the DReps or voting on these proposals does need some privacy. The intimidation has to stop. We need a different forum to have discussions, and we do need to reintroduce executive function. There probably needs to be an elected budget committee as opposed to direct democracy on voting so we don’t end up with these insane free-for-alls. There needs to be someone accountable for proposing a roadmap for Cardano. This decentralized roadmap is madness; it can’t be done. We continue to fall behind, and it hurts us in ways that I don’t think people fully appreciate.
It was a lot of fun when we had Goguen, Shelley, and all these other things to look forward to. It’s not a lot of fun right now, is it? There’s nothing unifying us, nothing connecting us. No next big thing for Cardano. We also need some executive function to manage the KOLs, marketing, and branding and perception of Cardano. This is chaos right now. We have our KOLs who’ve worked for free for half a decade or more, told that AI can be better and replace them. That doesn’t make any sense to me.
I thought about my own role and place. Should I become a DRep? Wake up some of my ADA, go and make a case for people to delegate to me? Probably change the dialogue. People would be a little nicer, maybe. But it’s a stopgap, isn’t it? It wouldn’t solve the problem outright. If the goal is decentralization, you don’t go take power back. There’s a lot to be done, but we have to get through the months ahead. As a DRep, you have some decisions to make. If you don’t think IO provides value, then vote against us. Do understand, it is not a threat saying that we’ll just do other things.
What kind of person is unwilling to pay for something and then complains that they didn’t get it? This is a flash drive. The company that manufactured it didn’t just give it to me; I had to buy it. This is the end result of thousands of engineers and business people and all kinds of effort to manufacture. You don’t get this for free. If you want it, you have to purchase it. We’re offering a service—the last miles of decentralization of the system and putting Cardano in a very solid place.
For us to continue to participate beyond that, because believe it or not, I don’t like living or subsisting off of this treasury fighting. Every single year we go back to it. It takes a chunk of our soul, and we lose people. It causes people to get more deranged. It’s not a good way of moving about. There’s no certainty in it. There’s no humanity in it. It’s caustic, and you’re arguing with the lowest common denominators about things they don’t fundamentally understand. And again, why would they?
Do you know how the circuits in this work? Do you know the specification for USB-C? Can you quote it off the top of your head? What voltages does it run on? Why would you know unless you built it? It’s a skill, a hard skill. There have been 50 million tokens issued. There are 18,000 blockchains running right now. How many are successful? How many have stayed in the top ten for over a decade? How many have stayed relevant through all the ups and downs? Not many. Very few people have these skill sets. The people who do literally make billions of dollars. CZ is richer than Bill Gates. It’s not common for these things to occur.
What’s happening now is we’re saying that either people should work for free or they should work for an ever-diminishing pie with no incentive. After they created all the value, it gets taken, and then they should come back next year and work for less. Anytime something goes wrong, they’re to blame. When something’s right, they get nothing. It’s not how entrepreneurship works. It’s not how any company works. It’s not worth the abuse for any entrepreneur.
Then you wonder, why don’t we have better people? Why don’t we have better ventures? It doesn’t make any sense to me. This structure has to change. Governance has to change. We have to get better at attracting better people, and we have to have places for decisions to be made that are sensible, as opposed to this direct democracy Twitter mob that’s formed.
Some of you listening, it’s a Rorschach test. If you like me, you say, "Yeah, Charles has got a point. The olden days were a lot better and a lot more hopeful. We had a lot more structure, and we didn’t have this noise, chaos, division, and vitriol." The other group of people who hate me say, "Oh, this is the unbridled narcissism of Charles. He wants to dominate and control and harm all of us. The greatest threat to Cardano is Charles Hoskinson, and when he leaves, it’ll be so good for everybody." How can both be true?
I’ll say they win. Okay. What’s next? The morning after. Great, Charles is dead. Where do we go from here? I suppose somebody can come up, some company can rise up, and negotiate with the big guys and come up with the roadmap. Great. What incentive do they have to rise up? They won’t get a founder distribution of ADA. If they get big, they’ll remember the lessons of all the other people who got big. They were murdered.
This ecosystem doesn’t seem to reward the people that build things for it; it seems to punish them. Whether it be JPEG Store, Book.io, TapTools, Midgard, SundaeSwap, IO, or Midnight, we don’t have a good track record of saying, "Please come here, do great things for us, and we’ll take care of you." We have a track record of kicking people while they’re down, demanding that they work for nothing, and then pissing on their corpse when they die and saying, "Good riddance."
So, who will rise up in that type of environment to be the next big guy? You’ll say, "Well, we don’t need that." Okay. When people say, "What does it mean to hold ADA?" What does it mean? Are we the fastest? Do we have the largest ecosystem? What compelling reason would someone have to say, "Pull the lever for this one?" I’ll wait. You tell me.
At least when there’s a roadmap, there’s hope that someday in the future we’ll leapfrog it and have something no one else has—something new, something different, something prepared for the storm that comes. We were always the peer-reviewed science coin. We were the coin that knew the future. Today, March 22nd, 2026, we’re having a legitimate debate about whether to fire all of our scientists or make the proposal split out so that they can nickel and dime and fire half of them and turn them into part-time grant writers.
Of course, the scientists will have to explain how all these things work. Are they explaining to the NSF? No, they’re explaining to people with no background in any of the science. They’ll just hopefully make the right decisions. You know what they’ll do? They’ll just go to ChatGPT and ask questions. "Why aren’t you more like this?" The scientist says, "Well, why do I do this? I’ll just go somewhere else. I’ll go work for a university or something. I don’t know. This makes no sense. Why would we destroy that?"
Because they don’t know what they don’t know, and they’re angry. The price isn’t where it needs to be. Politics isn’t where it needs to be, and it’s popular today in 2026 to burn down anyone in a position of authority and any institution. That’s the brass tacks of it. There’s nowhere you can look where leaders are loved. There’s no institution you can look at where people who do great things are revered. They’re demonized and attacked, whether it be Elon Musk or big CEO XYZ, the burn-the-rich movement, the notion that no one can become a billionaire without being on the backs of everyone else.
It’s popular today to hate those who’ve done something. In that type of environment, you don’t get greatness. You burn the monuments the great people constructed down. You destroy the greatness, and you’re left with nothing. You have no expertise; you don’t even know how the systems work. Somebody else will have to tell you at a much higher price.
And despite all that, we survived and thrived, and we're here today. It was sheer force of will. If you think for a moment that it wasn't, you're delusional. What I'm trying to tell you now is we have to stop. I am not the enemy. Input Output is not the enemy. You will achieve nothing with this dialogue. We have to regain our vision. We have to make it fun again. We have to reward our builders again. We need a path forward.
So, when we get past this budget period, changes have to be made to governance. We have to move our conversations from Twitter to somewhere else—somewhere productive. I did this with Midnight. It's in Discord. It's a happy place, a productive place. We even built an agentic civilization called Midnight City, which is even happier and more productive. Being on Twitter and sharing channels with the rest of these bots is killing Cardano. We have to move off of it. We need to reset, update governance, add an executive function, and regain our passion. We have to get our vision back and give people a reason to care about and love this project again. We need everyday people saying, "You know what? Cardano's got a bright future."
So, let's do that. Go to the polls and vote. If you want us still around, vote for us. After that, I'll figure it out. Maybe I become a D-rep; who knows? But we have to get past this. We need to get through this as an ecosystem. I know it's been hard. No one has lost more money than I have here—over 2 and a half billion. It's been terrible, and we've all been let down. I get it. In December 2024, we said, "Finally, our time is back." And what did we get instead? We got Trump coin, winter mutant, Binance, and all this nonsense. We got all this horrible stuff instead. I feel it every day, and I've had to sell a lot of things. I've had to fight hard and shut down things near and dear to me and my family so I could stay focused and be here.
I know how hard it is when you feel like we haven't had a win for a while and just keep taking hits. I really do understand that. Don't think for a moment that I don't. But it has to be more than price. There has to be a reason that if Cardano succeeds, the world is a better place. We have to believe that. Right now, we've lost our ability to believe that, which is why everybody has turned to hate.
So, let's get through this weekend. Let's win. Let's reset. Let's come together and create another vision—a better one. Let's have another roadmap, a good one, one that's multi-year, with new names on it and a new path forward. We need to get people excited again and say, "You know what? Cardano's got it figured out. We're going to be okay."
Let's do that. Or not. It's up to you. You have the choice. I stayed out of this. I didn't become a D-rep. I didn't vote with my ADA. I just gave you the options. So, you have to decide. Do you still want a vision? Do you still want a roadmap? Do you still want a founder? Or do you not? It's up to you. It's not a threat; it's just called growing up. You have to make decisions in life, and sometimes they're tough ones. You have to decide what you need in life.
After ten years of my life, I can see it both ways. I've already pointed out that there are plenty of things I'm passionate about, and I'm going to do those things with or without Cardano. I'm not going to let Cardano get in the way of those things. I've told you what I need and what my company needs. You, the voters, have to decide. If you think there's a different approach, a different vision, a better path, then take that vision and take that path and don't look back. Be proud of the fact that, unlike many things in life, at least you had a choice.
But do understand that there are one-way doors in life. Once you close that door, once you walk through it, you can't come back two years later or three years later and say, "Well, we made a mistake." Because the caravan has moved on. Things have moved on. So, you have to really think hard. Not everyone is evil. Not everyone is against you. Not everyone should be torn down. Not everyone is corrupt. Not everyone is bad. Yes, people can be wrong. Yes, people can disagree with you. And yet you wake up the next day, and they're still your friend. They still have your best interest at heart.
Yes, people can make mistakes. Yes, things can be delayed. Yes, things cannot happen the way we want them to. But you wake up the next day and realize that it's better to have these people around than not. If you're so addicted to burning things down every step of the way, you'll never get anywhere in life. So, it's your choice. And that's what this voting is a referendum on. We'll see where everything ends up. Regardless of how it ends up, things have to change. We all know that. Governance has to change. We all know that.
We have made some progress, but we're not where we need to be yet. So, we'll get through this. We'll all take a little bit of a break, relax a little bit, and then we'll see where the cards fall and make decisions from there.
1:07:35
26:05
26:19