Hi, this is Charles Hoskinson broadcasting live from Rough and Rugged Wyoming. Always rough, always rugged, sometimes Wyoming. Good to see everybody. Today is January 18th, 2026. It has been a very busy year. We're working hard, and there's a lot going on right now. We're having fun, but you know, it's crypto, and you have to drag crypto kicking and screaming through the streets right now. It's tough, but we appreciate all the love, support, and the fact that everybody's fired up and excited to get out of this slump and into the mountains.
It's kind of funny when you think about a saw. Everybody looks at the tips, the very top, the point. You need the valleys to make the saw because of those triangles. Every mountain needs a valley; otherwise, it's not a mountain. Similarly, crypto needs its downs to meet its ups, and we get through them.
We had a lovely workshop where we talked about the roadmap of Midnight and went into exhaustive detail. It's not just about privacy; it's about creating universal construction for privacy-enhancing technology. MPC, TE, and fully homomorphic encryption ZK are essential because everyone just builds the latest and greatest ZK system. My ZK system is a little faster than yours, my proof size is a bit more optimized, and that's completely immaterial to privacy. Privacy is your data, your network stack, the ability to lease something to someone for 24 hours and then get a guaranteed eraser. Privacy is having plausible deniability and the ability to stenographically embed things in network messages. It's a very rich and vibrant field. If you're serious about privacy, you have to do the whole banana; you can't just do one part of privacy-enhancing technology.
We had a lovely conversation about PET and where PET meets abstraction. You have intents and wallet abstraction. About 90% of all DeFi DEX transactions by 2030 are going to be in an intent-driven format, with 60% being DeFi. A lot of really cool and interesting things are happening there. We had a long and fruitful conversation about what we need to do to win and ensure that when trillions of dollars of intents are flowing, Midnight is the platform that routes all of them to the solvers.
We also discussed smart compliance and made great progress there. PETAD is doing really well too. The Intersect team came into the IO offices this week for a board meeting. We had a lovely conversation about their 2026 goals, where they want to go, and what they want to do. We're in deep negotiations with all the CCI, moving the ball forward on tier one bridges and tier one stable coins. Negotiations are very fruitful, and I keep saying, "Come on, guys, let's get it on paper so we can announce a few things." Things are looking good.
There's a lot of pessimism and cynicism that seeps in, and people have gotten into a cycle of toxic learned hopelessness. They wake up every day saying if it's not announced instantly, it's a scam, and everything's horrible. One of the great lessons of being off Twitter for the last 18 days has been escaping that cycle of learned hopelessness and toxic cynicism. I broadcast to Twitter, but you'll notice there are no tweets or engagement. Why? Because I uninstalled the app. I have API access to push Streamyard, but I don't go there, read the comments, or deal with it anymore. What's the point? It's easy to sit and complain about how bad things are and say everything's going to be horrible, but what effort have you put in? What have you achieved? What have you built? If that's how you want to live your life, it will lead to misery.
Hard work is not defined when it's sunshine and rainbows. It's when you have a gout attack, and you still hit the gym. It's when you've committed to a long tour, you're exhausted, and you still get on the plane. Hard work is looking at a roadmap for the 14th time and saying, "Let's do it again," because it's not quite good enough. That's where greatness and success come from. It doesn't come from sitting on your couch complaining. It comes from realizing you have the ability to influence and change the world.
I can't change the markets, and I'm deeply frustrated, especially when embedded actors pull the rug out from underneath us. I saw it in October and a hundred times before. Just get back up and do it again. Keep working, keep building. The reality is that what we're building with Midnight and for Cardano has never been done before. A universal PET primitive lattice base folding to bring folding to the entire industry and combine it with the intents revolution gives us a real shot at automated compliance and settlements. They say, "You'll never do it in Cardano. You'll never do it with Midnight." Why? Because you don't have it right now. Ethereum didn't have it in 2014 because it hadn't even launched. Bitcoin didn't have anything in 2008 because it hadn't launched. So now they have a monopoly forever? Why? Because God said so? Monopolies aren't permanent in technology.
Pull out your Blackberry phone, boot up Internet Explorer, and reset your password for your MySpace account using your AOL email. Then post about how permanent monopolies are. Even the most permanent, Windows, where's that at? If you're a Silicon Valley entrepreneur, you have a Windows-first strategy, maybe you'll come to iPhone and Android devices later on because that's where all the customers are. Good luck getting funded. Monopolies aren't permanent. Life isn't permanent. Life is wavy, uncertain. The only certainty is change. You lose today, you win tomorrow. You miss a train, you wait for the next one. You have to do something new and different.
Did you know that on Midnight we figured out how to make it work? All you need is just a phone. You don't need a wallet. Your fingerprint and a pin code, and boom, you're using crypto. How's that? That's different, new, and exciting. You have to think differently. I spent two weeks over Christmas revising all the product roadmaps, talking to everybody. It was exhausting. I was up to 3:00 in the morning every night. My dog was angry with me, saying, "Dude, you need to sleep." But I want to win; I want to have some agency in it, and I think you do too, deep down inside. Otherwise, you live that miserable life, going from one failure to another and spreading toxicity to everyone else. Why would anybody want to be around you if that's all you have to offer?
Honestly speaking, grow up, change, have some agency, and believe you can win. The same goes for Cardano. There's no reason that after we upgrade Bitcoin DeFi and Midnight, Cardano DApps can't be some of the most competitive and aggressive in the entire industry. There are many Cardano DApp builders who say, "I want to do that. I'm fired up about that. Let's go make it happen." But they say, "We don't have stable coins." Well, we will have them. "No, it'll never happen." Why? How are you so certain? Because everybody hates us? Here's the news flash: nobody cares. Charles said a mean tweet three years ago. They care about money. It's all one big negotiation. At some point, you reach a conclusion, shake hands, get ink on paper, and all that rivalry goes away.
That's why you don't bet your future on mercenaries and service providers. While times are rich, they're your best friend, and when times are poor, they are not. You have to bet on something else. You have to create strong economic moats. That's where leadership, collective bargaining, and strategy come in. We're making great progress on it. It should have been done a long time ago. But why is everybody a historian? You said this, you said that. We tried. It's not like the meetings didn't happen or the negotiations didn't occur. Lots of things were occurring. Scary Gary was trying to destroy the markets. Everything was in freefall. Luna collapsed, FTX collapsed, and ADA went from $3.25. We were no longer the pretty girl. Roadmap delays and governance were significantly more complex. We had to rebuild the DevX of Cardano three or four times. Did we give up? No, we survived. We honored our commitments and promises. Laos exists; it's being implemented. Cardano governance has been implemented. We never gave up. We kept pushing forward even when people said things that weren't true.
Yes, there was some bitterness and resentment, and I acknowledge that I can never be fully objective about certain things. But I didn't lose the mission, the vision, or the desire. I choose to be here. It's very expensive, and some days it feels like life is draining out of me. Other days, it feels like I should throw in the towel, but I keep moving forward because I want this to exist. Many of you have avaristic goals. You got on the boat because you want a 10x return to pay your bills. I look at you with sadness. You're no better than Judas trading Jesus for silver.
Here's the brass tax about what's at stake. You have AI, tech oligarchies, and your entire life connected to this device that tracks everything you do. You've outsourced everything to these tech oligarchs, and with AI, they will know everything about you. They're going to put a number on your head, just like the number of the beast. Your entire experience as a human being will be based on whether that number is high or low. That's the system you're sleepwalking into as you complain about paying your car payment and bills. Do you really want to live in a world where everything you say, think, and do is monitored? Where your entire value as a human being is a number that an AI agent has stamped on you? Because that's what you have with the legacy financial system, and no one is going to save you.
The whole reason our industry exists, with its avarice, chaos, stupidity, meme coins, and everything else, is that it's the only thing humanity has invented to avoid that dystopian hellscape of a future. You judge the success and failures of the industry solely based on coin market cap and whether people got a 10x or not. That's how they won. They convinced you that's the game. They changed the goalpost and made it a game about money. Once it's a game about money, it's easy to win using the same old techniques. That's the harsh truth, and deep down inside, you know it. You see it every day when people get deplatformed, when you see China and social credit, and how invasive and pervasive all of this feels. You see it every day as you're being robbed blind and have no agency over it.
Tell me, how much do $100 buy you in groceries compared to what my dad bought or my grandfather bought? How much does $1,000 pay for your rent compared to what your dad or grandfather had to pay? Your money is decaying, debts are going up, and do you feel any control over it? So, what you want to do is make a 10x to run back into the financial system? Change your lifestyle. Take agency in it. It's easy for you to say, "You're rich, Charles." I wasn't. When I started this journey, I was broke. I might go broke again. Do you think I care? I don't want to be a billionaire in a world where I'm not allowed to say what I believe. I don't want to be a billionaire in a world where I can't travel, express myself, and be myself, and I have to perpetuate a power structure that's pure evil. I'll give it all up if that's what it comes down to. Because at least I can say in the mirror, I tried.
I have luxuries; they come and go. You feel sadness when you try to hold on to things. The world changes. You're on top of the mountaintop one day and down in the valley the next. Does it bother me that I have something today and won't have it tomorrow? No, because you can still have a good day and live well. What matters is when I look in the mirror, I can say I was a good person, honest, and told people the truth.
2025 was so hard, dealing with the Trump administration in a miasma of chaos, idiocy, and dishonesty, seeing people jockey for position by forking over millions of dollars. Every single thing was just a popularity contest. Are you in or out? The whims of a murial boy king and armies of adoring fans. We can tolerate neither. We're better than this. I watched a slow train wreck as we barreled down towards clarity. You know what the current bill has in it? 137 amendments later, it hands the entire keys to the cryptocurrency kingdom to the Securities Exchange Commission, and you have to beg and plead for them to make it not a security. All new projects are securities by default. How is that any better than what Scary Gary gave us under Biden? Did you vote for that?
The hundreds of millions of dollars of donations and lobbying paid for everything from the inauguration to the east wing of the White House. One year later, what we got is Elizabeth Warren wrote the bill—that's leadership we can believe in. You still have people like Brad saying, "It's not perfect, but we just have to get something." Hand it to the same people who sued us, put us out of business, subpoenaed us, and put us in jail. That's better? That's what we fought for? Tell me, how do we change it? Like we changed the Securities Exchange Act of 1933. Have we been able to change it 93 years later? No. You pass it, you own it forever. Sorry, Brad, it's not better than chaos. Take the chaos and fight for what's right. Fight for integrity.
I didn't sign up to hand the revolution to 15 banks, to live in a world where everything is a custodial wallet, every transaction is KYC, and everything is mutable and reversible. I signed up for freedom. I signed up for a revolution. The leaders in this industry want that money. It's so tasty. They want the private jets and the lifestyle. They've handed the revolution off and taken their silver to be part of a new oligarchy, thinking the leaders of this oligarchy will treat them better than the serfs. It's not what I signed up for. It's not what you signed up for. It's not what this revolution was built on. It's not what Cardano was built on. It's not what Bitcoin was built on. It's not the doctrine of Satoshiism. It's a lie. When people live a lie for too long, it eats them from the inside out, decaying them as people.
How many zombies do we have in government? How many zombies do we have leading Fortune 500 companies? How many zombies do we have in all the faiths these days? We can't let it happen. So when you ask why Midnight, when you ask why Cardano, yes, there's amazing technology, an army of engineers and scientists, a beautiful commercial strategy, and an adoption strategy. Yes, groups of people wake up every day and ask what assumptions are wrong and how to change to win. But the big difference is the people behind it. As long as I live and breathe, and have some influence on the matter, I will have integrity.
I remind them every single day that we don't take the easy road; we take the right road. Every day, I remind them there's a revolution here, and we're not done until you have your freedom of association, commerce, and expression back. We're not done until you're in charge. The evidence is the last ten years; we said what we were going to do, and we did it. We said we were going to build a decentralized government, and we did. We said we were going to build a decentralized protocol, and we did. We said we were going to use formal methods, and we did. It was not easy every step of the way. Hundreds of people said you can't do this or that. It was a fight, a hard fight, with backbiting and challenges.
You know what? I don't care. I got up and said, "I don't give a damn. We have a mission. We have to get it done. We have to fight." Now we look at Midnight, and it's ten times harder because we have to do it for everyone everywhere, not just Cardano, the whole industry. We have a unified PET; it's never been unified before. But you know what? It's a challenge worth fighting because it can give us a money system that's honest. It can give us our privacy back and break up the tech oligarchies.
Is it risky? Sure. Is there a chance of failure? Of course. But as long as at least one person believes we can do this, they can pick up the torch and make forward progress. What we can't do is say mission accomplished the minute some savior parachutes down, passes a bill, and hands it over to the power structures of the past. The only reason technology can save us is that it's the only place where we're allowed to throw away the past and do new things. The monopolies of the financial world can persist for centuries. The monopolies of the tech world seldom last more than a decade. That gives me hope that if we innovate from that side, we can do new things, and even the big guys can't stop us.
But we have to keep the faith. That's what Sunday's about. We just have to keep moving forward. Tomorrow is a holiday, and I'm going to be working. I'll wake up, go into the office, get stuff done. We have papers to write, code to write, meetings to hold, and things to plan. The work continues. No matter how loud the dog barks, the caravan has to move on.
What gives me solace in closing is all of you. As loud as I can bark, you're the ones who drive the caravan. You're the ones who are going to get us there. It's an honor to be with you and fight alongside you. I know how hard it is. Life is getting harder every day. It's harder to pay your bills, keep a stable job, and there's so much uncertainty. Everybody's angry, filled with hate, and scared. We don't get out of this by succumbing to the worst parts of our nature. We get out of this by realizing we're all in this together.
We have to work together despite our differences. We speak different languages, believe different things, come from different cultures, and have different values. But we share a universal value: we want to be free and live in liberty. We want a world of objective reality and integrity. The only way we get back there is by embracing the technology to get us there. The road ahead is long and painful, but it's worth taking because it's the only road that leads to a good place. All the other easy roads don't. Never forget that in the coming weeks, months, and years as we encounter challenges. But also never forget that we will get to where we want to go.
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