Hi, this is Charles Hoskinson broadcasting live from rough and rugged Wyoming at the new office in the new clinic. It's a beautiful place. My birthday is November 5th. Remember, remember the 5th of November. Anyway, let's get to it.
From time to time, there are criticisms and critiques that have a hint of fairness but lead to deeply unfair conclusions. This one I’m going to talk about because Pi got involved in it, and it seems that he’s endorsing this, which I don’t think is his intent because the conclusion is blatantly wrong. Good old Justin Bonds is a weird guy because some days he loves us and some days he hates us. In his whole tweet thread, he says that Cardano is not a serious competitor with a max capacity of 23 transactions per second. Then he goes on and on about batching, block size, speed, feed markets, and Hydra, claiming that Hydra doesn’t count. He states that IOHK has failed to deliver on the promises it made to the community for years and now seems to have shifted its focus to launching a new chain instead. According to him, it’s now up to a grassroots community to make Ada Dream happen.
You’re entitled to an opinion, but you’re not entitled to your own facts. Let’s take a look at the facts here. I have right here the SIP for Ouroboros LaaS. This is the product of years of work and a collaborative effort. Many people worked on this, and we have a full end-to-end design for Ouroboros now. We did not have that last year. Papers had to be written, assumptions had to be made, a strategy had to be laid out, and an upgrade path had to be decided. The more ambitious and complex the protocol, the more things break. The less ambitious the protocol, the less throughput it has. So, what do you do? You have to find a sweet spot.
Through the meticulous work of literally dozens of people throughout this entire year and part of last year, they wrote this exhaustive design and blueprint, step by step, showing everything required to build Ouroboros LaaS. When people assert that we abandoned the community, the effort, or the process, it is blatantly insulting to all the people who are working every single day, including Pi, who I guess helped write that tweet on this initiative. Literally millions of dollars and dozens of people have put in years of effort. Why? Because we want a network that doesn’t shut down every 15 minutes. We want a network that gets more decentralized over time, not less. We want a network that’s economically sustainable. It turns out that no one has actually designed that at scale across the entire cryptocurrency space. There are plenty of people who claim this, but when you look behind the curtain, it’s centralized. There are five guys running powerful nodes on Amazon Web Services, Azure, or Google Cloud doing something to actually build something that’s maximally decentralized, economically sustainable, and increases its throughput over time. It’s never been done. It’s called the blockchain dilemma. Well, guess what? THIS SOLVES IT. This roadmap, this path solves it. It’s not empty promises and empty dreams. It’s reality. It’s math. It’s code. It’s there. This is the hard work of years of paper writing, prototyping, simulation, and building consensus amongst the community. Every single step is detailed in exhaustive detail.
Is there any reference to this? Is there any reference to the monthly update meetings that are public? No, absolutely not. It’s as if we just gave up and ran away, and now other people have to show up and solve the problem. It’s just pathetic. Honestly, it is. This is what people do. They say we’re engaging in good faith, write a bunch of stuff down, and make it look like they’ve actually done their homework. Then they reach an absurd conclusion and ignore key details that would destroy their entire argument. You can’t discount Hydra from the scalability of Cardano. You can’t. It’s live. It’s on the network. If you used the Glacier drop, you used Hydra. 33.6 million accounts were loaded into that thing, and we were able to operate without any problems at all. It continues to evolve and get more advanced, and you can’t discount the progress made with LaaS. It has been remarkable.
It’s gotten so ridiculous that I told Tim we need to create a website to show the daily updates of LaaS as we march towards it because the closer we get, apparently the louder the critics get every day, claiming that we’re not making any progress at all. What is it? We don’t have enough capacity, or it’s a ghost chain. Which one is it? We need a 60x, a 600x, a 6,000x, but we’re a ghost chain and no one’s going to use it. Get your arguments right, for heaven’s sake. Honestly speaking, get your arguments right. Either we’re underutilized and no one cares about us, or we’re at capacity and the network is failing because there are so many transactions in it. Which is it, Justin?
Our biggest need was decentralization and governance. We didn’t set LaaS aside. It was a lie to say that we just shut down all scalability. Papers had to be written. Formal specifications had to be written. The SIP had to be written. The entire ecosystem had to be coordinated behind this initiative and effort because now we have multiple clients, and they have to agree to this too. But then you put it on my feet and say that Input Output let the community down. We failed the community, and you go to Pi and somebody else to get validation for that, thanking him for working on your tweet when you know damn well that every day we work towards implementing this. You know damn well we’re currently hiring for 24/7 implementation, a follow-the-sun model to get LaaS out in the market faster. Yes, it will ship in 2026. No ifs, ands, or buts about it. It’s going to ship. It has to ship. There are no excuses. Any single person on our side that said no, we’re not going to do it, we fired. We said this is existential. Absolutely. There are no excuses for it. There exists a SIP. We have the blueprint. We know how to do it. This was hard-fought. This blueprint was hard-fought. There were so many design trade-offs, so many careful considerations that had to be made. It’s an enormous house of work, one of the technological marvels of our industry because we’re literally solving the blockchain dilemma.
Here’s what’s going to happen, Twitter folks. When we ship, it’s not going to be good enough. It’ll be a 60x on average from what he’s claiming, but it’s not going to be good enough because blockchain XYZ has a vanity metric 10 times higher than that. You can’t win. You honestly can’t with this. What do we care about in this industry? Do we care about decentralization or not? Do we care about the blockchain dilemma or not? Do we care about decentralized governance or not? If you care about those things, building a protocol that preserves and protects those things, including 50% Byzantine resistance, is insanely hard. It has never been done in any project in the entire industry. It hasn’t been done in Bitcoin. It hasn’t been done in Ethereum. It hasn’t been done in Solana. It hasn’t been done in Aptos. They’ll tell you it has, but when you actually study this stuff, you’ll find the backdoor where they compromise somewhere for the sake of throughput so they can get adoption and figure out decentralization later.
But here’s the problem: you can never get to decentralization because once you’ve locked into the protocol and everybody’s become addicted to cheap, free transactions and high throughput, there’s a huge hardware cost for that. The people running the hardware have an oligarchy, and they’re making lots of money. No one has any incentive to change the status quo for how the system operates. You either care about decentralization or you don’t. You either care about the upgradability of the system or you don’t. You either care about the 24/7 updates. So read the SIP. It’s public, and there will be a website before the end of the month showcasing all the magic of LaaS, all the news of it. Our people will update that again and again. We have a lot of great partners we work with on this. There are more than a dozen companies actively engaged in implementing LaaS and getting it to market. I only control my node, but I can tell you that in 2026, we’re going to find a path to get linear LaaS on Cardano. We’re going to work ourselves to death for that. For the other loads, we’re going to do everything in our power to get them to upgrade to that in a timely manner and to the network. Do not adopt those nodes if they don’t have LaaS. Hold off on the adoption so that we can turn this on and put this goddamn thing to bed.
It’s a rallying cry of our critics: LaaS. They said broken promises, failed promises. After 10 years of delivering promise after promise after promise, yes, it takes a little longer sometimes. It turns out that cryptography is hard. It turns out that distributed systems are difficult to operate. It turns out that every single person is trying to bring the network down 24 hours a day, seven days a week, and you have to engineer against that. It turns out that people cheat. They lie. They say they are something when they’re not, and they take advantage of the competitive ability of being centralized. When you actually have integrity, it takes a long time to get there, as you can see. Otherwise, it’s just all this made-up. All this work made up, all this simulation made up, all this code made up. Again, there was no reference to the SIP, no reference to all the things we’ve done, all the things we’ve built, all the documentation here. Just that we abandoned the ecosystem, and it spreads. When it turns out to be false, is there any accountability like the ADA vouchers? Absolutely not. Because there’s no good faith. There’s no good faith in these things.
Our problem is not our technology. Our problem is not our velocity. Our problem is not our roadmap. Our problem is not our bets on how the dev model works. Our problem right now is marketing and adoption, deal-making, and partnerships. That’s our problem. We allocated as an ecosystem hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of millions of ADA to one entity and over a billion to another entity. It was their job to go out there and get those partnerships, to get that marketing, to get that adoption. Every time we asked them to do it, it’s pulling teeth. Our competitors? It’s not pulling teeth for them. They spend the big bucks and the big money. That’s our problem.
I can build anything, guys. We aggregated the largest group of scientists in the world for cryptocurrency, 168 of them. We wrote more papers than anybody else. We aggregated the largest group of engineers you could imagine. We’ve been number one, number two, or number three for GitHub commits for about eight years straight. We invented new technologies for this ecosystem to get things done. Are we as fast as we need to be? Sometimes no. I’m frustrated at times. I say, “That’s it. Just try a different approach.” But every single day, people wake up early in the morning, go to bed late at night, and their only pursuit is Cardano. Their only desire is to make Cardano better. We started doing things to try to build up the ecosystem because no one else was doing it. The very thing he said we abandoned the ecosystem for is the thing that brings the tier one CEX listings into the ecosystem. The very thing he said we abandoned the ecosystem for is the one that brought hundreds of integrations into the ecosystem and has the best chance of bringing tier one stables into the ecosystem. There’s actually a foundation that cares to provoke adoption, feels accountable to it, wants the TVL to go up, and wants the transaction volume to go up. As a Cardano project, it’s not optional to integrate Cardano. They have to.
But again, a lie. Another lie and a lie and a lie and a lie. I’m never going to stop fighting, and I’m never going to stop being pissed and having fire in me because this has to work. Cardano has to work. This ecosystem has to work. We’re one of the few left carrying on our backs the original dream of Satoshi. I don’t think people get it. This is not about a token, and it’s not about price. This is about living a dream where you’re in charge of your identity, your political system, and your money. I watch as our industry slips into oblivion. All the banks used to be the enemies; now they’re buying everything up. Everybody’s blindly cheering as ETFs get approved, as stablecoins become the dominant economic medium, and they’re centralized and controlled by three companies, building a cabal with BlackRock and Goldman Sachs and all these other organizations. They cheer on regulation that bans non-custodial wallets and privacy coins because they think tokens will go up. Is this really my life’s work? To be part of an industry that puts the chains on humanity for the rest of time?
Everything we’ve done with Cardano was to preserve and protect the founding intent that this be a decentralized ecosystem, which means everything is harder. Partnerships are harder, governance is harder, it’s harder to build the consensus protocols, and yes, it takes longer. Everybody has to work with weights on their legs because the easy road is never available to them. But this is it. This is one of the few ecosystems that actually has the ability to deliver upon the dream that Satoshi had—that we’d be free. That’s why it takes a little longer. When people cynically say that we’ve abandoned the dream, then what the hell have we been doing? Go to our GitHub repos. Look at our papers that we publish. Look at all the effort, the workshops, the hundreds of people who wake up every single day working hard to make that dream a reality. Do they not matter? Do we not care about them? When you say something like this, you’re saying a “f*** you” to all of them and to every single person who still believes in the dream and still fights for the dream with no accountability because when you’re proven wrong, you just go on to the next thing.
2026 is going to be a transformational year for our industry, and we have a choice to make. Do we embrace the people who truly care about decentralization, resilience, your economic identity, and killing the middlemen? Or do we hand this entire industry over to the very people we built the industry to get away from? It’s a foundational choice. It’s a fundamental choice. And we have to make it. When you look at Cardano, every day we wake up and we’ve already made our choice. We’ve already chosen the hard path and the hard road. We chose it because we honestly believe there’s a path to victory. It’s this way right here. It’s not sexy. It’s not fun. It’s not easy. It’s just good old-fashioned work. Hard work every day. Enormous amounts of writing, enormous amounts of research, enormous amounts of writing code, building consensus, talking to people, forming alliances, and eventually turning it on.
When we turn it on and it preserves and protects and does everything it’s supposed to do, we fully accept that we don’t get any accolades. We don’t get any pats on the back. But that is the nature of the labor. That’s what we’ve done for 10 years. That’s why we’re still here. That’s why we’re still alive. That’s why we have such a loyal community after these 10 years. I’ve made my choice. Absolutely, we wake up every day. I take great umbrage at people who say that we’ve abandoned the ecosystem. I take great umbrage when those people take my friends who are actively working with me on building this ecosystem and try to say that what they’ve said has been endorsed by them or legitimized by them or reviewed by them. You could reach a conclusion that we’re not going to succeed for a variety of good reasons, but you can’t reach a conclusion that we care and we abandoned what’s going on. You can’t. We’re here every single day. We fight every single day, and we’re not going to give in. We’re not going to give up. We’ll keep going until our feet are bloody and our hands are bloody, and then 10 minutes after that, just to be sure. Don’t give in. LaaS is going to ship. It’s a real thing. It exists. Look at SIP 164. Reference it. Every single time you see a piece of crap troll on the internet that says it doesn’t exist, it’s vaporware, you show them that work.
When we turn it on, they’ll move the goalpost, and it will be something else. When we turn that on, the next thing will move the goalpost, and it will be something else. But every step of the way, we get a little stronger. Every step of the way, we get a little bit more united, and we get a little closer to that dream. We’re right at the precipice, and we have to now focus on getting this over the line. Then we have to focus on making sure we maximize our marketing and adoption next year. We’re ready for it as an ecosystem. We have the technology. We have the ecosystem. We just have to invest heavily in that. And we will, and we’ll get it done. We have the strategy for it.
1:07:35
26:05
26:19