Hi, this is Charles Hoskinson broadcasting live from warm, sunny Colorado. Always warm, always sunny, sometimes Colorado. Today is November 11th, 2025. It is a wonderful day. It's been a long year with a lot going onālots of ups, lots of downs, lots of fun. But overall, we've achieved a lot together.
The Midnight Summit is coming up in six days. We're going to have it over in England, near London. We've rented a lovely place for it, and a lot of wonderful people are going to be there. We're going to talk a bit about where we've been, the launch of Midnight, and how to get Midnight actually into the market. It's a four-stage launch, and each stage is important. We'll also discuss all the partners that have come along with us, what Midnight is used for, and how you can all be part of it. We have a dedicated day for partner showcases, so people can show what they're building. I'm really excited about that.
It's like the birth of a second childāCardano was the first child, and Midnight is the second. It's super cool to see something come to life. It's the fourth generation of cryptocurrencies, and I really do mean that. If you think about the generations, it's a nice logical ordering that helps you understand where the market is, why it got there, and what big problems we're trying to solve. Bitcoin is the OG of OGs. It's become digital gold, but really, it was just trying to solve the movement of value in a decentralized way without middlemen getting involved. That was massive because throughout all of human history, we didn't have the ability to do that unless it was physical. In the digital world, it was not possible. We made it possible.
Then you look at Ethereum and say, "Well, we want transactions to come alive and be programmable." Transactions have assets and actorsāone-to-one, one-to-many, many-to-one, many-to-many. There's context behind why you're doing what you're doing. The metadata of the transaction includes the location and all this other stuff. There's usually a contractual relationship between people, and there's some understanding commercially of what the purpose of the transaction is. They tend to be nested within jurisdictions, so there are regulatory schemas. You can't do that in a fixed-function system. We knew that; Nick Szabo knew that; David J knew that. All the OGs knew that. So we created smart contracts and brought them to light, and that was awesome. It was like when JavaScript came to the web browser.
Then you look at Cardano, the third generation, and the people who followed it said this needs to work at scale for everyone. We also need to figure out how to upgrade the systems. We need governance. If you don't have upgradability, the systems frankly speaking just won't work. You need on-chain governance because the systems get exponentially more complex as you add more capabilities to them, and a centralized company can't manage a decentralized protocol. You need to have on-chain governance.
When we look to the fourth generation, we have three new properties: the concept of rational privacy, selected disclosure, and the idea of cooperative economics. You have to bridge traditional finance and DeFi together and create a new financial system. You have to get everybody working together. You can't have one token fighting another token. You have to have the ability to sort out what's private and what's public and who gets to know what. You have to reintroduce some concept of identity into these systems because they're identity-free. Everything in life usually has an identity attached to it. Otherwise, how do you get access to your medical records or your academic records? You need some notion of that inside the system that goes beyond primitive. It needs to have selective disclosure capabilities.
We've been working really hard at trying to scale up and improve these things to a point where theyāre industrialized and we can have millions of people use one system, come with whatever token they want, any network they want, whether it be legacy or DeFi, and basically be able to enjoy privacy and selective disclosure. I think thatās going to change the world. I think itās the last mile to actually get governments on a blockchain. I think itās the last mile to get all of the financial institutions on the blockchain. Itās going to take a lot of time and effort, but Midnight is the vanguard of all of that.
If you look at the scavenger hunt, weāre doing the calculations right now, but it looks like in 21 days, more compute has been expended on the scavenger hunt than in the first few years of Bitcoin. Iāll have the exact numbers at the summit, but thatās extraordinary. In just a few weeks, it shows that thereās more compute power thrown at Midnight than in the first few years of Bitcoin. Thatās just crazy when you think about it. The glacier drop participation was huge. We got another wave of drops from Gate and Kraken so that customers there can get their tokens. I hope Coinbase wakes up. Itās cool to watch all that happen and have these different distribution mechanisms, including a remorseful redemption pool. Itās nifty to watch that happen. Itās the fairest, largest distribution ever done when you look at the numbers. It beats Arbitrum, and itās fair in that no VCs participated. Nobody got first access to this stuff. The right of first refusal went to you, the people. Thatās how Iāve always lived my life.
Crypto, in my view, is a retail phenomenon. Itās okay to see BlackRock come in and Goldman Sachs come in and all the other big guys come in, but Iām an old-fashioned person. I believe they should play by the same rules that you and I play by. Thatās why Iāve always had some issues with asset-backed stablecoins because they introduce a character who doesnāt belong. I shouldnāt have to ask a centralized company for permission to deploy a decentralized product on my network. There should be an integration point, and it should be a software conversation. The fact that I have to go to a company, pay eight or nine figures, lay up a bunch of capital, and negotiate company to company to make a deal to get something on my network means that by its very construction, thatās not decentralized.
Whatās the point of all this as an ecosystem if we just hand the entire keys to the kingdom back to centralized actors? Honestly speaking, whatās the difference between this and banks? Itās just banks with a lot of extra steps and crypto in between and a little bit of token appreciation bred for the masses with their meme coins. It doesnāt make any sense to me. I signed up for a new financial stack, which is why I, Dan Lammer, and Stan were the first to create the algorithmic stablecoin back in 2013 with BitShares before any of these things. We also created the first DEX, and Graphene was one of the first blockchain builder kits. Thereās delegated proof of stake there. Thatās how old the legacy goesāmore than 12 yearsābecause we really cared about this concept of you being in the driverās seat and you controlling your data.
Now, I canāt solve every problem, but I think Midnightās a massive step forward and it solves a lot of problems. It really creates a reality where you are in control of most of your data and most of your transactions. Iād like to see private stablecoins, especially algorithmic stablecoins, on Midnight. Iād like to see private DEXs on Midnight. Iād like to see a lot of this infrastructure built. Thereās a ton of demand, as you see with the surge of Zcash and Monero. People are starting to wake up to the fact that if they donāt invest now in returning that capability to their day-to-day lives, itās going to be taken from them forever.
So, we as an industry have to do better, and I think we will do better. Itās just going to take a little bit of time, and we have to keep the faith and keep pushing through. I looked a lot younger in those pictures. Thereās an interview with me when I was still the CEO of Ethereum, back when we were getting ready to launch. Iām wearing the shirt and everything, and this gal is interviewing me. I looked at that and said, "Holy hell, I donāt recognize that person. Heās so young." Iāve gotten a little older, a little fatter, a lot more white hair in the beard, but the passion is still there, and the love is still there. I really do care about what we do, and Cardano reflects that, and Midnight reflects that.
Weāre one of the few chains that has the luxury of having our problems out in the public and open, as opposed to being behind closed doors where mommy and daddy will figure it out for the sake of the kids. Youāre treated like adults, given the full story, and youāre co-equal partners in the growth and evolution of these systems. Yes, itās hard, and yes, it takes time. We have to figure out where we make moral compromises and where we donāt. There have been a lot of disappointments this year. One of the biggest disappointments to me has been some of the actions of the Trump administration. As many of you know, I am conservative. Iām a libertarian at my core. I campaigned for Ron Paul and Rand Paul, and Iāve always fought for a small government, a humble foreign policy, and constitutional rights for all.
That means I donāt particularly care about wedge issues like gay marriage or other things. I just want people to love who they want to love and live the life they want to live. Get the government out of your life. Take the substances you want, marry the people you want, as long as youāre not harming anyone and as long as consent is involved. Obviously, kids canāt consent, which is why certain issues bother me, like gender reassignment for children because itās not consensual, and theyāre very easy to manipulate. If parents arenāt involved and states pass laws to take them out, thatās fundamentally wrong. Itās very different from a standard LGBTQ issue, which is just normally an expression of oneās love and desires. Itās very different; itās a medical problem.
For the most part, Iāve stayed out of government, outside of just saying the whole thing is crooked and corrupt. Now, the Democrats declared war on my industry. If youāre on the left and you canāt acknowledge that, then you wonāt understand how we got here. Many of the prominent leaders were either put under investigation or some were thrown in jail. Every U.S. exchange was sued. There was a desire to destroy the entire DeFi market, debank all the entities, and gradually bleed them dry, then find some charges to throw the leadership in jail. Thatās what was happening. Coinbase tried to come in and register, as Gary Gensler said, more than 20 times. They were ghosted every time and then sued at the back of it. We saw it again and again. We tried to pass laws. We said, "Okay, can we please pass some legislation so we can have some rules?" The mandate from the top was, "Donāt do it. The current laws are sufficient." Laws written in 1933 apparently are sufficient to regulate the cryptocurrency market of 2022, 2023, and 2024. Itās such an absurd thing. Itās like using laws on horses to regulate self-driving cars.
But thatās where we were at. So Trump came in and said, "Hey, weāre going to change everything." Initially, there was a great degree of optimism. The challenge for our market is that he launched Trumpcoin and World Liberty and these other things. The family has every right to do that; thereās nothing stopping them, and thereās nothing intrinsically illegal about it. But what it did was make a bipartisan issue political. It created a reality where for the Democrats, crypto equals Trump equals bad. He could have simply waited until the legislation was done to enter the industry under the new rules, which would have been co-authored by both Democrats and Republicans. He didnāt, and it created an environment that was very difficult. There hasnāt been, frankly speaking, a great degree of clarity floating around from the White House on the crypto market.
For example, we have not made any progress on the DeFi question, on the blockchain disclosure question. We have not made meaningful progress on a lot of things that are very meaningful to all of you. Now, this is not for lack of trying. The Senate and the House have worked really hard, and they deserve a lot of credit for the enormous effort theyāve put in to try to write some rules. The SEC has turned a page, and I will agree that theyāve done amazing things in reversing the horrible decisions of Gary Gensler and ending the war on crypto. Iām pretty happy about that, and I think thatās a great thing.
But the challenge is that just because weāve gotten a brief reprieve does not translate to a long-term solution and long-term viability. The reality is that crypto has now been so heavily politicized and associated with the Trump family that if the Democrats return to power in 2027 or 2029, thereās a strong probability weāll be exactly back to where we startedāwith subpoenas, lawsuits, criminalization, and a weaponization of the Justice Department. Some people will get pardons before that; most will not. Weāre left in a difficult situation where we have to find a path to bipartisanship in an increasingly partisan environment where people refuse to talk to each other, listen to each other, or work with each other.
Every single person in America is an American. So why do we hate half the country based on our political opinions and view them as subhuman? I understand rivalries and teams. Iām a Broncos fan. When KC plays the Broncos, we have good-natured comments about that. But at the end of the day, I donāt view a KC fan as a subhuman person or rob them of their dignity. I donāt believe KC fans believe that of Broncos fans either. Just because we have different politics doesnāt mean weāre evil people. I donāt think weāve ever crossed that line except in certain cases where we do have a belief of genuine harm. If children are being manipulated and harmed, thatās a problem, and we have to speak up. The same goes for any other group where thereās actual physical harm being done to them.
The vast majority of people, regardless of where their politics sit, are utterly unaware of what the U.S. government does. Traditionally, when you want to fix that problem, you shut it down and start over. Historically, thatās happened when you get conquered. Look at Spain. It used to be the big empire, then it went through a multi-century decline and decay, and then they got conquered by the French. When Napoleonās people marched in, they were horrified to find that the Spanish Inquisition was still running in the 19th century. Think about thatāa longstanding medieval relic because the bureaucracy was entrenched and the decisions were entrenched.
Weāre not going to get conquered externally, which means that the system endures and persists, but it gets more bureaucratic, less accountable, less transparent, and more opaque. A real revolution is not electing a strongman and saying, "Well, now we have this savior, and heās just going to make everything better." A real revolution focuses on new systems, new processes, new procedures, and migrating people over to them, which is why Iāve always been a fan of blockchain technology. When I look at it, it just makes sense to me. The parameterization of a blockchain allows you to define an economic, political, and social system any way you want. You can build these systems in a way thatās fraud-free and corruption-free because you can have a situation thatās transparent to everyone, auditable to everyone, and immutable so nobody can change the records retroactively.
We can finally see where the money goes, who it goes to, and why those decisions were made. Paired with AI, we have a governance utopia that could come. Iād like somebody to be in the driverās seat who has the ability to implement this and the vision for this. We canāt trust Silicon Valley because theyāre accountable to no one, and they have become so narcissistic that they literally want to make themselves gods. If you really look at the core of Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, and Peter Thiel, they want to use technology to become immortal and become a different species than homo sapiens. They look down on the rest. You see it in books like "Homo Deus" and in a lot of their writings, the technoutopianism they espouse, or the worship of the singularity, which effectively is a god.
You canāt trust people like that because regardless of whether they have good ideas or not, they view themselves as superior to everyone else and will build a system to perpetuate that viewpoint. You have to build a system thatās egalitarian at its core, which has been my lifeās work. I donāt particularly care if I end up broke or in jail. I donāt particularly care if I end up one of the worldās richest men. Itās never mattered to me. I lived in an apartment. You guys saw me do these AMAs with giraffes behind meālittle stuffed giraffes. I had just as much, if not more fun, than I have here in my current situation. If I lost it all, it wouldnāt matter because at the end of the day, Iām here to do a job. That job is to get this technology into your hands, teach you how to use it, and make sure it works well, and then try to get that technology to rebuild and rewrite the fabric of society.
I donāt want to live in a world of endless cynicism, corruption, subjective truth, and chaos with no rule of law. I want to live in a world of enlightenment, rationality, and constitutional protections. Iāve always wanted that throughout my entire life, and I donāt particularly care about the money. I was just talking to my mom the other day, and she said, "Why are there so many people on food stamps? All these lazy people on food stamps." I said, "Mom, hereās the problem: your money is worthless." I asked her, "That house we bought in Hawaii when we lived there, how much was that house?" She said, "About $150,000." That house today is worth a million dollars. Thatās the real estate value. I said, "Okay, itās about seven times more expensive than when you bought it. Tell me, have wages gone up 7x?"
What about that car we drove, that Nissan Altima back in the '90s? How much did that cost? "Oh, we bought it used for about $3,000." That same car, used, upgrading for a modern model would be about $25,000. So tell me, have wages gone up 8x? No
Yeah, we could have bet big on risk five and pushed a little bit more aggressively into some of the zero-knowledge techniques and the outsourcable computation techniques that we see today. We probably should have written the whole thing in Scala. The only reason we didnāt was that Scala 3 wasnāt out at the time. We kept waiting and waiting. We talked to Martin Odersky and his team and asked, āMartin, whenās this coming out?ā Unfortunately, it was several years late. Had Scala 3 been available, we would have used that, and we probably would have used an account-based model.
In any R&D project, you always have a collection of failed attempts or things that didnāt quite work out. Ben Cohen still feels December will be the end of this bull run, hence no alt season. Well, heās stupid. I mean, we havenāt even passed the Clarity Act yet. Once that passes, itās going to bring a lot of money into the industry. Typically, you have a big buildup of Bitcoin, and then when Bitcoin reaches a ceiling, the value starts leaking into the altcoins. So, weāre only about halfway through the cycle. Weāre not falling apart.
Why the disregard for established stablecoins? I keep explaining it again and again. Two things can be true at the same time. If Cardano is a fully decentralized, permissionless system, there can be no barrier to any stablecoin deploying if they choose. I donāt oppose Circle, Tether, or others coming, and thereās an inevitability that someone will come of that ilk to our chain. At the same time, I can philosophically disagree with the existence of these things, given that all your transactions are tracked. They can be frozen at any time, and they have a centralized issuer who completely controls the distribution and market of it. Thatās not a cryptocurrency.
You guys keep pushing this lie that Charles Hoskinson stops these people from coming. I canāt stop anyone from building on Cardano. Itās an open, permissionless system. Everybody can build on these things. The entities responsible for negotiating and bringing these people into Cardano, the primary entity is the Cardano Foundation. Theyāve had over four years and a huge amount of money to allocate to figure this out, and they havenāt done it. If someone comes to me and says, āI need technology X, Y, and Z on Cardano to facilitate this integration,ā we just add it to the road and build it so that integration can be done. But weāre not going to go to Input Output and pay out of our pocket $20, $30, $40, $50, or $60 million and mint $100 million of a stablecoin when thereās an entity literally given 600 million ADA to go and do that. Donāt come to me; go to them. Or take the ADA back and give me some of that ADA to negotiate the deal. Those are your two options.
Honestly, I have a distaste for stablecoins that are centrally issued because everything is tracked. They can be frozen at any time for any reason, and thereās a central issuer, which means if they go out of business, the peg breaks, and the stablecoins become worthless. That is fundamentally incompatible with what cryptocurrencies exist for. Itās an over-glorified bank ledger with extra steps. People love them because theyāre economically efficient and they hold their value, as long as you believe in the issuer and the regulatory schema that the issuer lives in. Thatās where weāre at. Itās why we created Jed. Itās why we look at algorithmic stablecoins. And yeah, itās hard, but itās honest because your tokens canāt be frozen.
Are you getting it yet? Itās the same question for four years. You guys keep asking when itās going to be different. I keep telling you itās not going to be different. All of you going to the Cardano Foundation summit in Berlin should hold up your hands and say, āHey, whereās Circle at, and when are you guys going to get that done? Are you prepared to put $100 million on the table to make that happen?ā Theyāll say, āNo, just like our structure prevents us from.ā Why donāt you change your structure? Why is there no community representation on the board? Our structure prevents us from doing that. Why donāt you donate the money to a new foundation with a different governance structure? Canāt you donate money? Your structure prevents you from giving donations to another Cardano foundation in a different jurisdiction with a different leadership structure. This is how they lie again and again and again and change the topic, change the subject. No amount of birthday wishes changes that fundamental reality; the structure is poisoned. I did not set it up; Michael Parsons did. I tried to change it, but we were pushed off the board. Yes, we were pushed off the board. We were given a choice: either it goes into receivership and the Swiss government totally chooses it and controls it, or we mutually pick a board of Swiss people with these Swiss people that you tried to fire. Thatās how we ended up here.
You can change your language, but you canāt change reality. Thatās what happened. And thatās why Cardano fell behind with integrations. Midnight is fixing the vast majority of it. Weāre getting oracles from it, and weāre going to get all kinds of bridges from it. Yes, we will get stablecoins from it because the Midnight Foundation feels accountable and has a strong desire to get yield. Theyāre going to be sending out a lot of Knight tokens, and they would like to create DeFi yield for it. That alone means they need bridges, oracles, and stables.
You say, āWhen Chainlink?ā Well, if itās truly a decentralized network, we donāt have to talk to Sergey to integrate it through a supported network using a bridge, and thatās what weāre looking into right now. I have a team doing a prototype because itās insane to ask them to write native smart contracts when we can just use a trustless bridge and proofs and trust execution environments to ferry the information over. So weāll just go do that and make the SDK and the API the same. The interface is the same, and you pay in LINK. So yeah, itās a decentralized system. Thank you. So we can go and do that.
Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong believes thereās a real chance that the Clarity Act will be passed before the end of November, but the US government shutdown is currently happening. Well, the shutdownās going to end very soon. As for the passage, when we talked to the Senate, they released a version. There are still some issues in Umbridge, especially on the left, about the DeFi treatment and whether they try to solve it in the bill or push it to rulemaking. Weāve been pushing very aggressively for rulemaking because itāll make the process a lot easier, and it also gives us the time to properly discuss itālike two to three years as opposed to a month. Worst-case scenario, if it canāt get done in November, itāll get done in the first quarter of 2026 if the Democrats are willing to support it. There need to be 60 votes for it to pass. Republicans will all vote for it, so we need about five to six Democrat votes on that. We already have two, I think, out of the 53. So thereās a path, but horse trading has to happen, and theyāre in the horse trading stage.
See if Fred wishes you a happy birthday. I think you guys need to get in a room. We spent three years in a room. There was nothing but dishonesty, duplicity, lies, and manipulation and backbiting. We talked to them about Intersect. They went and funded and created Pragma behind our backs. We talked to them about the Linux Foundation for a members-based organization. They constructed a structure where Input Output is not allowed to join. We talked about the Cardano constitution. At the constitution, they tweeted they couldnāt support it and then had to walk it back. We asked them to do the right thing with ADA vouchers and tell the world that they know we didnāt steal the money. They said nothing. They said it was self-inflicted. Eventually, they produced an asinine statement and then moved on, trying to sweep it under the rug. At the core of all of it is their governance structure. The executives are rotten, and the board has no incentive to do anything.
What will fix this is if the board is community-elected because people will run on a campaign to use the money at the foundation to build up Cardano and solve Cardanoās problems. When those people are elected, if the executives canāt do it, the board will fire the executives. So the whole culture changes. All I ask for is to let the community run elections to control the foundation, and youāll get diversity of thought, accountability, and real KPIs for the ecosystem. What is me sitting in a room with people who are completely unaccountable, have lied for three years, and have done things to harm us going to solve? What more revelation and insight am I going to get? This is not a Charles Hoskinson hates the foundation issue. This is the foundation is accountable to KPIs in the ecosystem. Theyāve never defined them, and theyāve never built an oversight structure capable of holding them accountable to achieve them. Itās just that simple.
You will never get a change in governance. You will never get accountability unless people put on the ground these are the KPIs. This is what weāre going to do. This is when weāre going to do it. This is how weāre going to do it. The current board cannot do that. They have personal liability in the structure, so theyāll never take a risk. They have no incentive for achieving the KPIs, nor do any of the rank and file at the organization, and theyāre in an incredibly conservative jurisdiction and a fast-moving industry. So, how will that succeed? Itās the wrong structure. Itās the wrong governance structure. Itās the wrong leadership team. Move it to a new jurisdiction. Put a community-elected board in. Put some checks and balances if you want. Get a set of objective KPIs for the ecosystem and publish an annual roadmap for how to achieve those KPIs. If they donāt achieve them, the board fires the executives. If they do achieve them, the board awards the executives upside. Give them a million-dollar bonus. Give them a five-million-dollar bonus. I do this all the time in my business. I say, āGuys, if Midnight does this, if this thing does this, if this thing does this, you get X, Y, and Z upside.ā Then they wake up every day and say, āHow do I get there? Because I want life-changing money.ā You know, itās pretty simple, right? You donāt have to be a rocket scientist for this. Itās about governance. Itās about structure. Itās about incentives. Itās not about personalities. There are no friends and personalities in business and in politics. There are interests and incentives. We can be friendly and pleasant until the cows come home and love each other, go drinking every day. Scalia and Ruth Bader Ginsburg are a great example of that. Politically, they couldnāt be further apart. They would go hang out together and do cool stuff together. Theyāre friends because they could separate personal relationships from professional relationships. The institution of the foundationās job is to promote, grow, and get Cardano to the next level. Just that simple. But they didnāt even define what ānext levelā means in a way that the industry as a whole can understand.
If they really want to, there are nine different RA agencies that provide information in the cryptocurrency space, like DeFi Llama and Misari, and so forth. Go talk to them about KPIs that the industry as a whole accepts. Go talk to A16Z, go talk to Draper, go talk to ARC, go talk to Panta. Come up with a consolidated set of the top 10 KPIs of the ecosystem. Create a dashboard, publish it, allow everybody to see it, and say, āThis is our 2026 strategy, and hereās what we think we can do. Hereās what we can do unilaterally. Hereās what we need to do with the Treasury. Hereās what we need to do with you.ā The very existence of the summit is a phenomenal idea, a phenomenal example of this idea.
So, whatās a better bang for our buck? A $6 million vanity party in Berlin where you just go and have your awards ceremony, and all these people come in and wear their nice little tuxedos and have a good dinner, or going to the top four events one a quarter in different geographies with more than 20,000 people attending in the general industry, bringing the Cardano ecosystem there, having a strong booth, taking over the events, having an investor party, and having an afterparty? Which one gets us a bigger bang for our buck? Obviously, itās the latter. Itās the same price if you think about it, if you do it right. But there are no KPIs to hold you accountable. What post-growth did you have? And whereās the call to action for these types of things? Itās a leadership issue, an incentives issue, and an oversight issue. Solve that, and then weāre friends.
I donāt care what they said. I donāt care that they have these little parties and talk about how bad Charles is and how dishonest he is and how Lishin was right and all these other things. Good for them. It doesnāt matter. Itās business. At the end of the day, are you earning? Are you growing? Are you building? Are you doing your job? Some of my harshest critics are some of my closest relationships in this industry. Sebastian is the CTO of the Midnight Foundation. He has a long track record of being openly critical of decisions Input Output has made and decisions Iāve personally made. Weāre friends because weāre united in a common mission and have common goals and common incentives to achieve those goals. Itās okay to disagree, but you have to unite on the mission, the vision, and the KPIs. Thatās leadership. Then you have to rally people behind it and come up with a collective strategy that people believe in, that they actually think is going to achieve something and move forward with it.
Itās why they havenāt been able to get anything done because thereās no one there incentivized to take a risk. Thereās no vision. Thereās no mission. Itās more about the self-perpetuation of the institution.
How do I become a Midnight ambassador? We will have a signup list. We had our first wave of ambassadors who were on the DevX side. The next wave of ambassadors is going to be on the community side. I want to recruit 500 ambassadors next year. 500. I want to pay them a night, and I want 20% of their remuneration to be put into Midnight DeFi. Every ambassador should know how to use a wallet, know how to use Midnight DeFi, know the ecosystem end to end, go through some training courses to understand the USPs of the ecosystem, and be easy to access and very excited.
We have to answer the question: What does it mean to be a Midnight ambassador? What does it mean to be a Midnight community member? Itās different than a Cardano community member because Midnight welcomes people from eight different ecosystems. We have Ethereum people, Cardano people, and Solana people, and it has a different technological direction than Cardano. It does different things. The whole concept of cooperative economics makes Midnight like Switzerland; itās a neutral place and welcomes everybody. Thereās got to be something different about Midnight. The culture of Midnight is really going to be built up and defined by the Midnight ambassadorship, and itās going to bring a lot of new people in, a lot of new blood in, a lot of people that arenāt from the Cardano ecosystem. I want a diverse ambassadorship. That said, there are a lot of people in Cardano land who are really excited about Midnight. I want them too, and I think 500 is a good starting point. Maybe we can get bigger, but itās going to be expensive. Thatās okay. We have to bring that in because the goal is to grow Midnight. I want a TVL over a billion dollars by the end of 2026. I want tons of transaction volume. I want hundreds of thousands of monthly active users in Midnight DeFi. I want a ton of cross-chain transactions. I want transactions from Ethereum, Solana, Bitcoin, and Cardano. We just keep talking about how weāre going to get there. There are KPIs at the Midnight Foundation connected to those outcomes. They donāt get paid unless they achieve those outcomes. Alignment incentives come together, so weāll get it done.
Hey, Charles. Iām a German mathematician. Well, those are the best kind. Come on, Gauss. You answered my questions about your whiskey and solar equipment. What skills, programming languages, etc., are necessary to work on your Midnight project? The language compact is very close to TypeScript. If you are a German mathematician, my recommendation is to read the Magic Moon Math Manual. Sebās working on his own training course that uses algebraic geometry to explain these things. But start with the Magic Moon Math Manual; it teaches you about Groth 16 and R1CS. Itās not the same as Midnight, but it puts you in the neighborhood of the thing. The design of Midnightās core privacy system is Plon and Halo 2. There are seven parts to a ZK stack. At the very highest level, you have your setup; itās trusted or untrusted. So itās a transparent or trusted setup. The next level down, you have your languages. The programming language you use to write the circuits can either be circuit-specific languages or general-purpose programming languages, like Cairo and Noir versus Compact, for example.
Then you run a component of the whole thing on your personal computer; thatās called witness generation. Then you have your arithmetization, where you convert the program that youāve compiledāthe on-chain part of itāinto a mathematical representation, usually some polynomial representation. There are different arithmetization systems: R1CS, AIR, or Plon. You even have a customizable constraint system, which is an extension of RCS. That mathematical language translates the zero-knowledge program into solving a mathematical problem. Then you have the actual proof engine that solves that problem. In this case, for Midnight, itās Halo 2, soon to be Nightstream. Underneath that, you have the cryptographic infrastructure that permits all this stuff. So what are you usingālattices or hashes or elliptic curves? Then you have the actual blockchain infrastructure. In the proof engine and in the blockchain infrastructure component, you can have either a direct representation that runs on a script-by-script basis or a virtual machine
Midnight is much more involved because thereās a blending of hardware and software-based cryptography and a desire to unify the entire stack into one SDK. You have a layer 2 that serves as an acceleration layer and operates kind of off-chain in a network. This is where Google Cloud can make a lot of money, Azure can make a lot of money, and others, but they donāt get to see whatās going on. The layer one is the aggregation point where you settle a collection of these transactions over time, which means the system can infinitely scale. Over time, Midnight can process billions to trillions of transactions, but it only feels like a certain rate.
The consensus algorithm Midnight 2 that weāre moving to is a revolution of Jolian. We have the first safety proof and are currently working on the liveness properties. Itās 5,000 TPS and sub-second block time, which is more than sufficient for the proof aggregation component. Then you build up the outsource layer of the system.
Would it be possible for the Cardano protocol to build a bridge to Midnight? Itās already coming in the box. When Midnight fully ships, the last part is a bidirectional recursive SNARK bridge. On the Cardano side, we added BLS support, while on the Midnight side, we havenāt. Both sides will have trustless bridging capability, allowing you to move a transaction over to Midnight and back from Midnight state trustlessly. Thereās no bridge operator because itās recursive SNARKs on both sides.
Whatās really cool about it too is that with Orborās Paris, thereās fast finality on both sides. Right now, Midnight and Cardano are instant because itās a BFT protocol. Cardano is a slower protocol for settlement, but Paris makes it fast. You should be able to move quickly between Midnight and back for assets and instantaneously for state information.
I never understand why a guy with your means chose to live in a hole like Laramie, Wyoming. I donāt live in Laramie; I live in Wheatland. And second, if you donāt get it, you donāt get it. Maybe the hole is where youāre from.
How was your trip and experience in Greece? Did you enjoy Athens most or Thesaloniki? I liked Thesaloniki a little bit more, but Athens was, of course, a lot of fun too. We had a really great time talking to the professors and the infrastructure. We went to the Elen and Philip IIās tomb. Weāre looking for a place to put the campus. The venture studio long-term of IO is going to have a hub and spoke model. On the hub side, thereās going to be a campus that has a program to teach people how to start businesses, grow them, and take them to the next level. The spokes are where you deploy the businesses after you learn all the skills and build up the product-market fit.
Weāre already starting to build out the spokes. We have one in Abu Dhabi, and weāve set up one in Argentina thatās actually one of our flagship offices. Weāll have four or five more set up throughout the next 24 months. The hub will then deploy into the spokes, which are where the companies grow. Greece is where weāre looking for the campus. Itās really now more of a question of the right fit: Athens or Thesaloniki. We could still pivot somewhere else, but weāre very interested in Greece for a variety of reasons.
Fundamentally, how does Midnight increase ADA value and usage? Midnight exists as a smart contract on Cardano, the Knight tokens. If you want to move them, at the end of the day, it consumes ADA. Babel fees can be paid at night, but there has to be ADA at the end of the rainbow. If Midnight is heavily used and traded, moving around and going multi-chain, the Cardano contract has a tremendous amount of transaction volume, which creates ADA usage. Midnightās staking algorithm pays Knight to SPOs on Cardano, so you make ADA and Knight, and the Knight gets carried through to the ADA wallets of ADA holders. This increases the decentralization of the system, improves the profitability of the SPOs, and increases the transaction demand on Cardano.
Midnight also bridges Cardano to all of the cryptocurrency space, oracles, wallets, and bridges. Why? Because Midnight needs it for its DeFi ecosystem. Being a Cardano native asset, it has to bridge Cardano by default. The list goes on and on. I see this question a lot: that Midnight is killing Cardano. Honestly speaking, you create more demand for the token, get tier one listings for Cardano native assets, link Cardano into the rest of the industry, and create a DeFi ecosystem. You give a reason for Bitcoin to come over because it gets privacy. You get more revenue streams for stake pool operators and an airdrop as an ADA holder. Itās just crazy. I get asked the same question again and again. Itās like you guys expect a different answer. Either youāre not getting it, you donāt believe it, or youāre not understanding it.
Will bridge fees be free? No. You have to pay a transaction fee at the very least to the network to process the transaction.
What are you sipping on? Big dog coffee? I think I need to start pouring some whiskey inside my coffee. [laughter]
Oh lord. I kind of wish Charles was more optimistic. Iām pretty damn optimistic, man. Iām still here after all these years. I should have retired a long time ago. Just meditate every day, live on a mountaintop, and do remote viewing.
Why did Trump exclude you from the round table meeting earlier this year? You think that? Well, first, I didnāt donate enough. Second, I tweeted something about XRP donating to Trump, and I used that as the official excuse. Third, he tweeted about ADA being in the reserve, and Sax wasnāt aware of it because he only thought it was going to be Bitcoin. So he retaliated and disinvited as many people as he could for that. Welcome to White House politics. The left hand doesnāt know what the right hand is doing. Itās not about merit for these types of things; itās about connections and patronage.
Look, it is what it is. I can separate these things. Again, there are no friends in politics, no friends in business. There are only interests and incentives. We as an industry have a strong interest and incentive to see success in this agenda. Weāre all going to work together, and weāre going to get it done one way or the other. Iāll think, āOh yeah, you get invited to the White House.ā My ego was hurt. I wasnāt part of the party. Oh no. Oh no. [groaning and screaming] Shut up. Who cares? Does clarity pass or not? Yes or no? If it passes, is it useful or harmful to the industry? Thatās what I care about. I do not care if Iām in the room or not. I donāt care where I have to go. I donāt care if I have to go to a lumberjack festival in Wisconsin and oil their abs. I will do that if necessary. I donāt care if I have to go down to Arkansas and talk to the head of the Senate and make a deal with him in Walmart, okay? And ride little Walmart ponies in Bentonville. I donāt give a damn. If it means it passes and itās useful for the industry, thatās what we do.
People need to grow up. Itās all just TV and vanity. āOh, this personās in the club, this personās not in the club.ā Power is fleeting. It wasnāt too long ago that we had a cancer dementia puppet as president. Before that, Trump; before that, Obama; before that, Bush. There will be a new president after Trump, and there will be a new president after them. The Securities Exchange Act of 1933 was passed when FDR was president. JFKās dad was the first chairman. Ninety-two years later, itās the law of the land today. How many presidents have we had since then? Huh? FDR, Truman, Eisenhower, JFK, LBJ, Nixon, Jimmy Carter, Gerald Ford, Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton, George Bush, Barack Obama, Trump, Biden. Thatās 20.
The ephemeral concern of fleeting power of the day is immaterial to what you establish as a long-term precedent. The bill, once passed, will be a foundational concern for regulators and the industry for decades to come. Thatās what matters to me. Thatās what I care about. Iām not going to say it nicely, and Iām not going to be a nice guy. Iām a results-oriented guy. We got to go get it done.
Oh my lord, he did read the book FDRās Folly. If you go to the lumberjack festival in Wisconsin, Iāll go with you. You see, some people really do like the lumberjack and the oiled abs.
Charles, can you explain from a developer perspective what use case or adapt types would necessitate the development of hybrid Midnight or Cardano app?
Letās talk about Uniswap and Midnight as a case study. Uniswap would like to list more asset classes, and currently, all assets are treated equally. Theyāre fungible in that system. You trade Ether for Bitcoin or Ether for an ERC20 token on Uniswap. Great. What if you have an asset with a regulated policy and it has a disclosure regime? Meaning you canāt just buy it; you have to meet some disclosure. Currently, what Uniswap would have to do is either figure out a way in Solidity to build an entire privacy system, build a layer two to introduce some sort of privacy system, or centralize the compliance component. Every time you want to trade a regulated asset listed on their exchange, you have to go to Uniswap directly, the company behind it, and actually have them approve the transaction. Thatās a lot of work.
Or you could have a hybrid application with two deposit flows: one for the non-regulated and one for the regulated. The regulated goes first through Midnight. Midnight as a stack takes care of all the automated compliance through selective disclosure and keeps all of your KYC, AML, and suitability guidelines and all the transaction information about ownership private. It only discloses to the requisite people, maybe the issuer of the RWA or the regulators. Once it gives the go-ahead, then settlement is compliant. If it settles in the Uniswap contract and the money is there, we know itās good to go. Uniswap never saw any of it; they didnāt deal with any of it, and they paid the transaction fee in Ether, even though all the magic of regulation occurred on Midnight.
You getting it? All of a sudden, Uniswap increased its TAM from just cryptocurrencies to the $10 trillion RWA market. They did not have to upgrade their smart contract significantly. All of their standardized trading and liquidity and their resistance and all their other stuff stays exactly the same. They didnāt have to build a layer two, and they didnāt have to get involved in the compliance game. They just had to write a compliance contract on Midnight using OpenZeppelin and Solidity, and then it just rolls through. The user doesnāt experience anything; they have no idea that theyāre going from Ethereum to Midnight and back. Itās just a routing flow, just like when you use a web service and call an API on the back end.
So when you use your little AI application for image generation, itās calling ChatGPT, but you donāt know it, you donāt feel it, you donāt see it. Thatās whatās happening under the hood. And thatās how it should be. There are millions of patterns like that with medical records, supply chains, and private stablecoins. Maybe a private DEX you want to trade privately. So Uniswap creates a clone of itself on Midnight, and all the trades in the order book are private. Nobody knows what youāre buying, and you can route liquidity and users from one to the other seamlessly through capacity exchange and multi-chain signatures. Thatās why we built it. Otherwise, every single time for every single application, youād have to rebuild a privacy stack.
Make it efficient, make it scalable, make it work well, and make it secure. Large teams can do that. You have these layer twos like ZKSync and Starkware, and they do some of it, but mostly theyāre focused on scalability rollups and getting things recursively to a smaller form. They tend not to have functional privacy and donāt think about the whole privacy ecosystem, the off-chain components of privacy, proof generation off-chain, and data custody. We do. We think about the whole banana and all the privacy-enhancing technology. So, Midnight is the future. Itās the next generation, and itās made to work with all these other guys.
Through Midnight, you can bridge through. Letās say Uniswap wants to talk to the Solana DEX. They probably should do that through Midnight because itās going to bridge on both sides and has a proof engine on both sides so it can verify and validate the state of both Ethereum and Solana as a folded state proof. When transactions go through, they carry proof on the wire, so you know that theyāre right. You know the state of Solana and the state of Uniswap are synchronized. Itās a great bridging infrastructure too between different chains.
Itās about liquidity, people. ISO 222 compliance is like the inside joke that we all have. Itās a format. Anything thatās programmable supports the format. Itās not a core USP, but you guys just really love it. Itās a big thing, so we talk about it from time to time.
Why are you trying to explain physics to a third-grade math student? Because if you canāt explain physics to a third-grade math student, then you canāt explain physics to a fourth-grade student. Eventually, you canāt explain physics to anybody. No matter how complex a topic is, you must strive to make it simple for everybody to understand it. Otherwise, the topic will die. This is what Feynman talked about in physics. He did everything in his power to take some of the most complex physics concepts and make them understandable for regular people. The process of doing it helps you better understand it yourself. When I explain it to you guys, I learn. Thatās how I stay sharp. Thatās how I grow. Thatās how great mathematicians do it. Itās how great physicists do it. Itās how great computer scientists do it. You always need to be teaching, and you always need to be teaching the non-technical, or else itāll never make any progress.
Do you see the new IRS staking rules? Looks like Cardano was made for them because we bet, right? We bet on the future, yo.
If remote viewing is real, does this mean alternate universes could exist? Yeah. With or without it, theyāre orthogonal to each other. Vitalik is working on his privacy chain called Noonday. [laughter] He invented it, right? Oh lord. It was funny. Somebody asked him at an event, āWhat do you think of Midnight?ā He says, āI donāt know anything about it. I donāt follow Charlesās projects.ā Wait, if you donāt know anything about it, how do you know itās a Charles project? Youāre paying attention. Youāre watching.
Charles, most privacy coins have little to no TVL. Yeah, because theyāre not smart contract systems. Their transaction privacy like Zcash and Monero doesnāt do smart contracts. Midnight will absolutely change this, 100%. I think weāll have a billion in TVL before the end of 2026. Weāre going to work hard for it.
Recommend some good books for my 2026 list. I would highly recommend "We Are Electric" from Sally D. Itās a wonderful book that changes your entire view on electricity in the electrome.
Does Cardano have an EMBA strategy? We do. Itās called RealFi. Iāll show you guys right now. Itās going to be a huge thing next year, a massive launch right after Midnight. Itās going to be equal or greater in size, and this is going to be the TVL monster for Cardano and Midnight alike. Thatās RealFi.
People say, āWhat happened to Cardano in Africa? Where did it go?ā Well, thatās where John OāConnor went. Weāve been working on this for a long time. Microfinance on a blockchain in Africa, South America, and Southeast Asia. Lower the rates, make them peer-to-peer, and create a great lending market. Billions and billions of dollars. Believe me, billions of dollars. Nobody gets more. Nobody. Billions.
Itās like you guys just assume that if we donāt make announcements 24/7, nothingās been done. Theyāre literally writing the smart contracts right now for the launch of RealFi for next year. Weāve been working on it. Everybodyās gotten together. Itās a big thing.
What about new DApps on Cardano? This gives Cardano DApps a new way to express themselves with the privacy layer. If the Ethereum DApps and Solana DApps are slow to adapt, Cardano DApps can use this as a competitive USP against their Solana and Ethereum counterparts because they now offer the privacy channel, which allows them to track more local and external TVL.
There are a lot of Cardano DApp developers that want to build into Midnight. I think the C swap guys are doing it, among others, and it gives them an ability to differentiate themselves and do new things that other people donāt have, as are the Sunday guys and others.
What do you say to people who say Midnight will be your favorite child and youāll slowly abandon Cardano with the problems of the founding? No, you just hold Cardano accountable for being a kid that grew up. You never abandon your children; you just fundamentally change your relationship. If your kid is living in the basement at 30 years old, smoking pot and doesnāt have a job, and you have to pay for everything, are you a good parent?
Cardano has grown up. It needs to go to college. It needs to get a job. It needs to be sustainable. Iām still the father. Iām still there. I still love it. I still care about it. I still have a relationship with it. But you have to change the relationship. You canāt be a steward forever, a custodian forever. You canāt be paternal forever. Cardano has to make its own decisions and its own mistakes.
Now, thereās wisdom and guidance. You always go to the dad and say, āHey, dad, Iām thinking about getting married. Iām thinking about doing this.ā You solve that problem. But that doesnāt mean you abandon your kids. It means you give them the space they need to become their own men, to become
If I market the other person, Charles is marketing that person because he has a secret deal with them. Charles is marketing that person because he owns the token, and he's just pumping his bags. Charles is doing this, Charles is doing that. Look at my lived experience launching Midnight on Cardano. For heaven's sake, do the glacier drop. It's not good enough. You're incompetent. You're stupid. More than a million people participated; it looks like the largest drop in the history of our industry. More work was done with the scavenger hunt than in the first few years of Bitcoin in three weeks. It brought new people in. About half of the distribution was non-Cardano holders entering our ecosystem.
If you look at the commentary from the Cardano community, there's so much negativity, criticism, and attacks for literally free money. If you treat me this way, don't you treat the builders this way? Then you ask, why donāt builders come here? Why donāt we have more adoption? Why donāt we have more TVL? Honestly speaking, look at yourself in the mirror. Take a moment. Step back, you entitled children with this attitude, and understand that what you're doing is destroying the ecosystem, not building it up. If you want something fixed, talk about who needs to be in the room and how to incentivize them to fix it. If someone is building something that will create benefits for your ecosystem, you embrace and welcome those people. You get excited about them. You market those people.
How many tweets have come from the Cardano Foundation about Midnight? Look at their timeline. How many discussions do they have about it? It's the single largest, most exciting, and relevant project in the history of the Cardano ecosystem. If itās successful, it proves that Cardano can launch a $10 billion cryptocurrency. There is nothing more significant commercially going on in Cardano in 2025 and beyond than that project right now. Yet, the people who profess to be pushing for the adoption, growth, brand, and reputation of Cardano wonāt talk about it. Theyāre just cutting it off. Thatās the culture weāre sitting on right now. If you want to change it, change it. Iām doing my part. I stayed out of governance. Iām doing my part. I stay out of commenting on structural things. We got the Constitution. We got the on-chain government. We pulled back. Iām giving you guys the space to have agency, the space to grow up and be your own people.
But you have to have adult conversations about these things. You have to talk about KPIs in the future. You have to talk about what growth means. Yes, the token price isnāt great, but there are 25,000 cryptocurrency projects that would trade for us right now because weāre in the top 10, and weāve been there for eight years. If you want to compare it to Solana, XRP, and BNB, sure, theyāve had a better cycle so far, but in 2021, we went from 15 cents to $3 in a single year. Thatās a 20x increase. Things move quickly in this industry. People on top collapse, and people on the bottom go way up. Itās the roll of the dice. In many cases, we have no control over the macro.
So, you have to focus on fundamentals and ask: Are we getting more decentralized? Are we getting more resilient? Are we becoming a more obvious choice for people to build? What we can focus on is the technology, the culture, and how we treat each other because we canāt control when Trump tweets, when a tariff comes, when a war breaks out, or when a pandemic happens. We canāt control those factors, but we can control how we treat each other. We can control whether itās a pleasant, fun, exciting experience to be in this ecosystem or a miserable, disgusting, horrible experience. Thatās what we have agency over. If you want growth in the long term, be chill, be good, be friendly, be happy.
In 2026, there needs to be a cultural reset. We have to take a chill pill, calm down, and get along. Stop the nonsense. Honestly speaking, people in this community accused the founder of rewriting the blockchain without evidence and stealing $600 million without evidence. They propagated this and formed cabals to spread it. Founding entities in this ecosystem, even though they knew it didnāt happen, said nothing, hoping that the scandal would drive me out. That is 2025 in a nutshell. That is my lived experience in a nutshell. You expect me just to smile and be happy and go on? Most people would leave and retire. But I love my kids. I do. I care. I want them to grow up happy and successful. Part of that is knowing when to have tough love and when to embrace. Right now, some tough love is needed. Honestly speaking, it is.
We need to grow up and culturally change as an ecosystem. We need to be better about this stuff. You have all these advantages: a loyal community, great geographic distribution, no regulatory problems, phenomenal technology thatās getting exponentially better, Bitcoin DeFi, and the partner chains model. You have a gradually growing diverse client ecosystem, independent teams, and a great member-based organization with Intersect. Yet, every time I list these things, some of you listening say, āYes, butā¦ā Fix it. You have a problem with Intersect? Fix it. You have a problem with Bitcoin DeFi? Fix it. If youāre cynical about something, list where itās problematic and fix the problem. Take accountability and agency for it.
There is no reason we canāt be successful. There is no reason why the TVL canāt go up 10x or 20x, and we canāt find some clever way to integrate here. Thereās no reason at all. Thereās no divine command that says Cardano must fail. Take the learned hopelessness out. Shut up and do the work or get out. Youāre poisoning and killing the ecosystem. You want to do nothing, but then you want to stay and criticize the people who do something until those people get so fed up they donāt want to do it anymore. Then you see the canary in the coal mine when your OGs retire because of the toxicity. My God. No one wants to be held accountable. You say stupid things, and people will criticize you for those stupid things. Grow a thick skin. I say stupid things all the time. Iām still here. I still deal with it.
Cardano whales are a phenomenal example of that. They said stupid stuff. They were provably wrong. There are billions of dollars worth of ADA turned around every week. You can divest in a matter of a week, $50 million, and not move the market. Thereās depth for that. Weāve seen it again and again. Theyāre just wrong. I know theyāre wrongāfactually wrongābut they couldnāt take it. Was it their way or the highway? Pack up and go home. And they did it in two stages. First, they left Twitter, as theyāve done multiple times. Then, as a DREP, they voted against IO, against everything we do. They wanted to defund Laos, defund our research group, and all these other things because they were angry that they were held accountable. Thatās childish behavior.
And then you still worship them. Gosh, if only we could get the whale back, everything would be better. That was part of the toxic culture. That was part of the culture of us or nothing. Weāre better than everybody else. Letās not work with people. Letās not cooperate with people. With Midnight, we get a reset. We bring all these new people in. What are they going to see? A welcoming environment or a hostile environment? We flip the switch soon. What are they going to see on Cardano? Iām not being emotional. I care. Youāre hearing concern and love. Itās not hate; itās love. Itās anger over love. You donāt get angry over things you donāt care about. If I didnāt care about Cardano, Iād be numb and be like, āWell, it is what it is.ā
You go to a bank, and some person is pleading emotionally, āPlease donāt take my home.ā The banker has no relationship with the person. āIām sorry, Sally. Thatās just the way it is. You didnāt pay your loans. Weāre going to have to take the asset. Have a nice day.ā They move on and never think about Sally again. They donāt care about Sally. There are no emotions there. When you care about something, there are emotions. When you care about something, thereās anger. True hate is not hate; itās disinterest. Itās dispassionate. Itās numbness. Itās coldness. The lowest layer of hell isnāt on fire; itās frozen because itās so far from Godās love. That was Danteās point in Danteās Inferno.
Iām emotional about the state of Cardano in many respects because there are so many self-inflicted wounds that are completely unnecessary. For our part, we wake up every day and try to fix it. We admit fully and freely that many mistakes were made on the IO side, and Iām ultimately accountable for that. For the rest of the ecosystem, they canāt do the same exercise. Thereās a lot of stagnation, and itās deeply frustrating to me because Iām trying to push things along, trying to get the kids to get the job done, to the next level. Itās frustrating because we have all the advantages. We bet right on liquid non-custodial staking. We bet right on the interoperability model. We bet right on the L2 model. We bet right on partner chains. We bet right on extended UTXO and Bitcoin DeFi. We bet right on all these things.
We have a tremendously talented team, but they need to focus and apply themselves. As a parent, Iām sitting here saying, āPlease, Johnny, please donāt do this. Be better.ā Hey, emotional reaction? No, absolutely not. Then, Charles, youāre at fault. Itās your problem. If youāve never cared about anything in your life, thatās your problem. Youāve never loved something so much and wanted it to succeed so much. I get passionate because I care. You donāt care. You create these little frameworks. Take a time out. Take five seconds. Take ten. Iām Italian; we love things. We care about things. Why does Italy make beautiful things? Because they love things. They put love into the art, the sculpture, the building, and the food.
Itās why we get fat. You put love in the pasta, and you eat the pasta. Youāre like, āAh, itās so good. How do you make it that good?ā Itās not PGO, okay? Itās not high fructose corn syrup. Every part of the chain, the tomatoes, the tomatoes are beautiful. Why are they beautiful? Because the farmer goes up to that tomato vine every day and says, āYou know what? Tomato vine, come here. Go ahead, hug me.ā That tomato gets filled with love. Then they process it. The chef has that tomato in his hand and says, āI know you are loved. You will love a lot.ā He puts it in the sauce. Then the waiter brings it out and says, āNothing makes me happier.ā
Then why should you take that bite? Come on, just take the bite. They take the bite, and youāre like, āHoly [__], itās the best [__] pasta Iāve ever had.ā Heās like, āI told you. You got the love in your mouth. Thatās why itās awesome.ā You have to get passionate about stuff. Every line of code matters. Every part of Cardano matters. Every single thing, every blade of grass in the backyard, it matters. You have to be passionate about this stuff, or else youāll never get anything done. Nobody cares, guys. If youāre dispassionate, itās just technology.
So, whatās the difference between Cardano and Sui, Aptos, and Solana? Well, we have all this technology. Theyāll have technology in 18 months. Once they have the technology, whatās the difference? Itās user metrics and network effects. So, what if your network effect isnāt very good? Why would anybody care for Cardano to survive? Itās just technology. Itās just a protocol, just a token. If it has love in it, thereās an emotional connection to it. You say, āI love this place. I want this thing to be successful.ā If Italy was just a collection of administrative policies, tax rates, and quality of life metrics, the minute those look bad, people just leave.
Why do they stay? They stay because they love the place, they love the people, and they want it to succeed. They put money into it. It wasnāt rational to build a 70,000-foot clinic in Gillette, Wyoming. The economics donāt work. Itās an insane project. It was so hard to build; you have no idea what we had to deal with and the insanity of it. But we built it anyway because we love the community, we love the people, the 17,000 people. You go to my clinic in Gillette, Wyoming, you walk those halls, and you see the people there. Every single one of them has smiles on their faces. They like the place. They really do. Google Hoskinson Health and Wellness. Look at the Google reviews. Look at the happiness people have there. They really care. They really think, āGosh, this is something special.ā
You have to have love in your heart. You have to have passion and joy in the things you do, and you will do those things for life. Thatās definitely true. Get some tacos. Love those tacos. The technology is getting better, but the problem is quantum computers are going to be here probably by 2033. Unfortunately, weāre all going to have to put those weights on and start training with them. First, the market there is going to have a huge advantage over the rest. So, we have a two-year strategy on Midnight to get there. Midnight will be kind of the petri dish to backport it into Cardano.
Have you abandoned World Mobile Token, or are you cooking? I still want to build an Earth node. You know, Iāve remained relatively the same. You always have the greatest sense of humor. Youāre always up for a laugh. Hey, Charles is the life of the party and always knows how to make people smile. Oh yeah, you know I do. Do you have any cool stuff written on the wall behind you? Actually, yeah, itās super cool. Are you satisfied with the development of the stuff IO company since you became part of the story? They got William Shatner. How about that? I never thought I would do an X-space with William Shatner. It was one of those surreal moments where Iām on the X-space, and William Shatner is there. Weāre talking, and Iām just like, āThis is amazing.ā
Heās going to monetize his content and pass it through multiple blockchains. Thatās so cool. I grew up watching those movies. I saw the Wrath of Khan and the Undiscovered Country, and I watched TJ Hooker. Oh man, it was on reruns late at night in the 90s. Terrible show. You watch like five episodes and think, āIs this going to get better?ā But William Shatner is great. Boston Legalāremember Denny Crane? Itās cool because Bill reached out to me and said, āHey, Iām thinking about doing something. Where should I go?ā I said, āThe stuff guys are great.ā I handed them the deal. They called him, talked to him, and got the deal. I had nothing to do with it after I handed it off. I just said, āHereās Bill William Shatner.ā They made it happen. I was like, āWhoa, those guys are good.ā
Nothing makes me happier than a competent company. You hand them a great opportunity, and they find a way to make that opportunity a reality. Ben and his team are doing a wonderful job at Stuff IO, and itās going to continue growing by leaps and bounds. Shatner just did a video with Altcoin Daily. Yep, there you go. Charles, whatās your definition of artificial general intelligence? Do you think it would be reached with an LLM?
Itās kind of a red herring when you look at intelligence in general. I tend to look at intelligence in a very reductionistic view and say, āOkay, intelligence is an entity or organismās ability to influence its environment towards a goal, either in the short or long term.ā When you look at it from that lens, bacteria can be hyper-intelligent, and humans can be very intelligent. Animals can be very intelligent. If this entity, living or non-living, has the ability to influence its environment to pursue an end, what are you really saying here? It understands how the world around it works, and it has some internal desire to pick and pursue a goal.
Human beings are really bad at intelligence up and down the stack. When you look at a human rating another human, you can say, āWell, that personās very smart or that personās dumb.ā But when you go up the stack and a human interacts with a super intelligence, it may not be the case that the human is actually able to discern that that thing is very, very smart. They may even think itās not smart; they may think itās dumb because it canāt understand why it does what it does. It may just appear as a non-intelligent entity.
When you go down the stack, itās hard to understand more primitive life. Why do cells do what they do? Thereās no spatial information in DNA. When you fertilize an embryo, it starts dividing and becomes a person. It has two hands, two eyes, and two legs. How does it know where those hands, eyes, and legs go, and how does it figure out all that stuff? Thereās some form of goal direction implicit within the medium, and we discount it. Weāre just like, āWell, thatās not the same as our intelligence.ā We exist only because of that emergent intelligence.
If we had a nuclear war and wiped out all of humanity, Iām willing to wager bacteria would still be around, doing just fine, and adapting to the radioactive environment. They can even live in space in certain circumstances. How is that not intelligence? When you talk about AGI, youāre really talking about a collection of things. First, can you build a world model so that an AI agent can understand an environment similar to or the same as our world? Then,
Now, you can argue that nobody knows about Aken outside of Cardano, and that's why they've discounted it. But now you're not talking about a Plutus problem, are you? You're talking about a marketing problem. That's what you're discussing. So, we can have that conversation. Aken needs better marketing. That's fair.
So, how would we do that? Well, if we had a functioning foundation, they would recognize that and say, "You know what? We need to do hackathons. Let's do one every two weeks across the world. Put a few million dollars into the budget, go on a roadshow, and show people that they can build with Aken." Instead of having a vanity party in Berlin, bringing together less than a thousand people and spending six million of the community's money, maybe we should do that at Token 2049, Consensus, and Bitcoin, and these other conferences that have 20, 30, or 40,000 people.
We could have hackathons there with a million-dollar prize in Aken, and then people would say, "I thought I had to know Haskell to write smart contracts on Cardano." No, no, we changed that. You donāt have to do it. "Oh, well, thatās super cool. I want that million dollars. I'm going to go learn and tell all my friends about it. Wow, Cardano is so awesome. Extended UTXO is actually not that hard. I didnāt know. Iām going to go tell all my developer friends." Thatās a good idea.
So, is it a Plutus problem or is it a talking about Aken problem? What is it? Itās a talking about Aken problem.
Will Midnight use a proof of use as a mining method? Oh man, I would love to find a path for Midnight to do that. I really would. It would be so cool. We're working on it. I think there is a path for that.
Charles, can Midnight replace Zcash completely? Midnight is a superset of Zcash. It does everything Zcash does and more.
Charles, how do I put my hat in the ring and be one of the Midnight podcasters? Weāll get back to you.
Well, of course youāve heard of Aken. You created it, you son of a [expletive]. This is Lucas right here. Heās like, "Iāve heard of Aken." This guy. [laughter]
Uh, this guy. Yeah. Now you play the victim. You clutch your pearls. Youāre [crying] called me out for my opinion. Ah, I clutched my pearls. Oh no. Play stupid games, win stupid prizes, man. Take it on the chin. You have to be precise with your language. You have to say, "Is Aken the problem or is it talking about Aken?" Weāre not talking about Aken. Thatās the problem. So, letās go talk about it.
Hereās what you do: go to Catalyst and say, "I want $50,000 worth of ADA to spend the next year of my life traveling the world as Captain Aken, and Iām going to go tell everybody about Aken. Iām going to wear the Aken suit like big A on my head. Iām going to walk around like Hare Krishna people at the airport. Hare Krishna, come for a free feast." Youād be like, "Aken, come for a free feast." You could guest lecture with Lucas and Casey, these other guys. You see, you could do that, and then weāve solved our Aken problem because you are now an Aken ambassador.
There we go. Iām Aken for Aken. Yeah. Yeah. This guy, this guy, he gets it now. Heās Aken for Aken. How about that? We use Aken for the Atrium profile. And thatās one of the best smart contracts of 2025. Very complex, very hard. You know, the big pace guys. [panting and sighs]
Stop trying to appease him. He likes being [expletive]. You still havenāt told me why Iām schizophrenic. Iām waiting for you, man. Youāve got to come in. Youāve got to tell us. Everybodyās here. Youāve got 12,000 people listening live from warm, sunny Colorado. Youāve got to go tell them.
You called me out for talking about many people. Again, precision in language. Letās be more precise and concise. Some people say Plutus is the problem. Why do people have that perception? Thatās very different from saying Plutus is the problem. See, precise and concise, no disrespect tone, but you know, some people say that youāve got a little bit of an ego problem, tone. And you know, as your consigliere, Iām supposed to tell you, tone, that maybe you need to tone it down a little bit.
Did you talk about microtubules yet? Oh lord, no. Although those dish brain computers, we can use that to verify if you can create a biological quantum computer. Thatād be fun. Thank you. I want to thank you for Midnight. My claims on Lace were seamless, and my scavenger mining is moving right along finally.
Ah, that one guy, everything worked for him. Thank you, sir. Thank you. And on behalf of the team, we thank you. Colorado is too warm and too sunny lately. You can never be too warm and too sunny, except for the times you can be.
Hypothetically speaking, if you had a chance to be an executive producer on a Sam the Bull Sopranos-like series, would you take that offer? I know Sammy personally; I can make that happen. Nah, Iām going to stay out of the Kosinostra stuff.
I called you a schizo because now itās like the Sopranos. It just cuts to black. See it again. It goes back to the [expletive] Sopranos, man. Weāre all waiting with bated breath. Weāve got 12,000 people. 12,000 people.
Actually, letās go ahead here, you know. Letās see. Okay. What are the symptoms ofāhere we go. All right. All right. Weāre getting perplexity involved here viaā
All right. All right. So, here are the common symptoms. Can you tell the audience which ones I have? So we have hallucinations frequently involving hearing voices, seeing, smelling delusions, strong beliefs unsupported by reality such as paranoia or grandiosity. Examples include thinking youāre being spied on or having superpowers or believing you are a famous person.
Disorganized speech and thinking, you know, trouble focusing, jumping between thoughts, speaking in jumbled or incoherent ways. Abnormal behavior like repetitive motions, unusual postures, periods of immobility. Negative symptoms like the loss of normal functioning such as a lack of motivation, reduced emotional expression, difficulty planning ahead, social withdrawal, poor hygiene and self-care, changes in social interaction.
Yeah. So, you got anything for me? Letās see. Letās look through the list. No, I donāt see him saying anything. Oh, well. You just look at that list. You think about that. Okay. You come back and let me know which one of those things I have. Is it delusions, disorganized speech, abnormal behavior? I mean, you could say delusions, delusions of grandeur, you know, all that stuff. But I kind of did a lot in my life. You might not like it or think itās valid, but I do. And a lot of people do.
Youāre listening to me on a [expletive] Tuesday at goddamn 11:35 in the morning. 12,000 people are with a million followers. So maybe, just maybe, I did something. I donāt know. Maybe, you know, I donāt know the hallucinations. I donāt have those hallucinations. Although, how would I know? Because to me, itās real.
I donāt know. Is there a pathway to increase ADA staking rewards? Yeah, itās called partner chains. All [snorts] of the above. There we go. Just buy ADA up, bro.
Yeah. Yeah, we can. Well, [expletive]. Let me see what I got in my Lace wallet right now. All right, got it. I have $2,443 worth of assets in the wallet. Holy [expletive]. I got $1,200 worth of Kaju inside that wallet. You guys want to see my little Lace wallet? All right, let me share my screen here. You ready?
All right. One is the loneliest number. Letās see if we can open that up. Oh, it doesnāt show you. So, I have to actually make it a full tab. Yeah, here we go. All right, hereās the balance. We got $2,400, and we got about $297 worth of Cardano in there. A little ADA. We got about $1,200 worth of Kaju. Got about $491 worth of USDM, the only values-based coin. Got a little bit of Strike, a little bit of Cornucopias. We got some ION. I still owe those guys the unboxing. I got the thingy actually over there. We got a Charlie 3 in there. We got some Iagon. What else we got? We got some Jed. Got like 10 bucks worth of Jed. And then a whole lot of stuff. Whole lot of stuff. Whole lot of stuff.
Oh my god. Charles Chaplin. I donāt know any of this stuff. A whole lot of stuff. People just send me [expletive], man. Itās pretty crazy. Yeah. And you just buy some ADA. There you go. Buy ADA, bro.
Ah. And letās take a look at our DApp center. All these different DApps. Got Wing Riders and JPEG and Danzo, Fluid Tokens, Liquid Finance, Indigo, Splash, OpenJet. Holy [expletive]. Thereās a lot of stuff here you can do on Cardano, huh? Thatās pretty cool.
You know what we should do? Every week we should just use the DeFi application on Cardano. I donāt know. Would that be something you guys want to do next year? I will give you 3,8 Charles. Youāre poor. Well, I mean, if you want to, sure. I mean, Iām not going to complain.
Here, let meāif you want to send me something, let me just go ahead and post that for you. There you go. Just leave that up there. Anything you want to send. [laughter]
Oh, heās playing the victim again. Just remember, Char, guys, if you donāt agree with everything Charles says, youāre an idiot. I guess Vitalik is an idiot too. Iām the victim. Iām the victim. Ah, clutch my pearls. Iām the victim.
Itās a generational thing. You disagree with somebody, you immediately play the victim. You go and shout it out. Iām out. I canāt see him in this state any longer. Again, you havenāt really answered the whole schizophrenia thing. Weāre all waiting. There are 12,500 people now. We are waiting. We are waiting, sir. We just really want you to answer the question. You levied the allegation. You couldnāt get there.
Have you ever visited the Boneyard in Alaska? That sounds familiar. Is that in Anchorage? With bated breath? EXACTLY. THIS GUY. THIS GUY GETS IT. Bated breath.
Show us how to create a Bitcoin wallet on Lace. Yeah, great idea. New DeFi app every week. Yeah, weāll do that for 2026. I think weāre going to do a rejiggering of the whole podcast thing.
Iām loving it. Are you going to build a DC office for government affairs with Rare Evo? No, I already have a government affairs office, and weāre making great progress. Once weāre done with clarity, we move on. Pearl clutchers do.
Oh, whatās this? The Boneyard, Alaska, is a private mining claim near Fairbanks, Alaska, that has yielded a massive concentration of well-preserved Ice Age fossils. Well, [expletive]. You learn something new every day. I also think thereās a restaurant in Alaska called the Boneyard. We will look into that. We will get the best people on that. But now Iāve got to go to the Boneyard. Thereās probably like mammoth bones and [expletive] there.
Charles, why donāt you do a hair transplant? [laughter] Charles, why donāt you call people idiots and liars when youāre on CNBC in front of Congress and nation-state leaders when they ask stupid questions? I have, [laughter] which is why they donāt invite me back to the party. Ah, now youāre starting to understand. Itās all starting to come together.
Oh, Lord. Do you think there are tunnels under the pyramids? There probably are. I currently own 30,000 ADA. I hold only ADA. Good. Get it in DeFi. Put it in Cardano DeFi. Letās get it working. Get it working for you.
Is the Midnight Open Summit open to everybody? Yes, it is. Please come to the Midnight Summit. Dude, you have so much money. Do a hair transplant. You look like a confused professor. Maybe I just donāt care. Maybe my physical appearance or lack thereof is not my problem.
Ah, schizophrenia, poor hygiene. Damn [expletive]. We are starting to rack up the symptoms, arenāt we? Look at that. Where do you get your cat shirts? I saw them online. Iām like, I need to get some cat shirts.
Charles, Iām balding. Howās the stem cell treatment at your clinic coming along? I tried it for a little while. Didnāt grow any hair, unfortunately. So, back to the drawing board. Chapter two. Why does my hair not grow?
Seems like Midnight is the only privacy token that can pass the market structure bill. This guy gets it. We built it for everybody: institutions, Fortune 500, and retail. Not just retail, not just institutions. The little guy and the big guy alike. For everybody, layer two for everybody. We do not discriminate.
Whatās your position on the Palestine conflict? Iāve never heard you talk about the situation because itās one of those untouchable situations. There is no way to engage in a conversation about that issue thatās reasonable. Itās just not possible.
Things happen that become wells of controversy, and they become so ingrained. Opinions get so passionate, and they get so interconnected you canāt discuss it. When a person asks that question, thereās not a single person in good faith asking that question on one side or the other. Theyāre asking to either embrace or demonize, and the minute you do, youāve taken a position, and everything goes to hell. Thereās no way to engage with it. Itās just not possible.
Lex Fridman tried when he brought people together, tried to have a conversation. The realities are so far apart between the two parties. I have personal opinions. Iāll never share them because itāll just do harm and damage. And thereās not a single live stream I do where I donāt get asked about it.
Exactly. Midnight is a beast already. You get that, sir. Midnight is a beast. Itās growing. Itās building. Weāre very excited about it.
Youāve been very circumspect about Trump. You know, I was just eating a meal the other day, and I said, "You know, this is the first year where I felt like Iāve done something that really does violate my internal integrity because I just always either stay silent or I tell people how it is."
If I see something that I think is wrong, I say it. And I think there are some things that have happened this year that are wrong. And I felt like there are consequences if I say stuff about those things. I donāt think itās productive that Trumpcoin exists right now. I donāt think itās productive that World Liberty Finance exists right now.
Itās not that theyāre bad people or theyāve committed a crime. Theyāve done something wrong. Itās created a difficult situation for us as an industry where something that should be neutral, nonpartisan, bipartisan, and created a clear set of rules has become political theater. Itās the truth.
It really is, and there shouldnāt be consequences for saying something about that. And itās been difficult for me because I was told by all my advisers to just stay silent, donāt do anything, donāt rock the boat, donāt do these things. And I think thatās been the problem this yearāthat thereās a disconnect between how I feel and what I say.
Whenever that exists, I canāt be real and connect with people, and people canāt trust you. You have to just say how it is. There are certain issues that have been going on for a really long time, and thereās no sense to even talk about them. Abortion, the Israel-Palestine conflict, these types of things. You canāt have a meaningful dialogue about these types of things because the sides are so dug in, and theyāre so certain with their opinion, and thereās really no way to move them one edge.
But there are other things that are situational that have just come up that are conduct-oriented. Iām a big fan of leadership, especially presidential leadership, and learning about it and saying, "Did they make good decisions or bad decisions?" And as a leader myself, small or large, I have to make decisions. And I have to think, "Am I doing the right job or not doing the right job?"
We donāt have clarity as a nation right now. What the hell does it mean to make America great again? What does that mean? Itās like Obama with his vacuous hope and change. Hope and change. Itās unaccountable gobbledygook speech.
You know what I care about? Health care, education, your ability to pay your bills. Go down the list one after another. Letās look at the world and rank every country. Whoās number one in each category according to some objective set of metrics? Where is America versus the rest of the world in each category? Somewhere number one, somewhere number 50.
Itās not about politics. Itās an objective reality. Letās measure it. Once we measure it, wherever that report
They say these things and enact policies that put me at a disadvantage because historically, I've been at an advantage. They deny science regarding biological differences in the sexes. Thereās nothing good about that philosophy. They also have no respect for property rightsāzero, zilch, none. You have these democratic socialists elected who come in and say, "We need to seize the means of production because theyāre unfair." No, whatās unfair is that the Republicans and Democrats didnāt want to raise taxes to pay for their excess, corruption, and graft. So, they destroyed the money, and the poor people had to pay. Now the poor people are rising up and want to take the means of production because their money is worthless. The problem is that when you do that, you destroy your entire economy. We need a return to sound money. Thatās the solution. As painful as that return is, Mom Donnie is just a symptom. You get Mom Donnie when people feel the social contract is broken, and he says the right things to make people think he has all the answers and solutions.
You know what Mom Donnie is going to do? Heās going to be the best real estate agent in the world for Florida. All the rich people are going to leave because they donāt want their means of production to be seized; they can vote with their feet. If those people leave and commercial real estate falls through in New York, theyāll have mega deficits, and the whole city will turn into a welfare state. They absolutely did.
Bernie Durnney, dude, you have 500 in here. I have 13,558 people when I factor in X and YouTube. Good X. Take a look at it. Million followers there. Charles is best friends with a Chinese billionaire, acting like a regular guy. I grew up with CZ. He was poor. We were both poor. We werenāt rich before this thing. Yeah, we were all the same, man. Binance was one of the first exchanges to list ADA, along with Bittrex, and it was the smaller of the two back in 2017. Thatās how long itās been. So, yeah, I have a soft spot. I know him very well. Heās a good man, and heās had a lot of ups and downs. Heās a vicious businessman and makes decisions to increase the value of his company and holdings. You would expect him to act any differently in this type of environment and culture. The man sits on an empire with 400 million users, and he did that from nothing. He came from nothing. Thatās really impressive. So yeah, I do look up to him.
Iām not talking about CZ. You know what? Thatās the only Chinese billionaire I know. Which other one do you have for me? Give me a name. The businessman you introduced to Vitalik? Well, there was Lee Shao and Bo Shen. Lee knew Bo, and Bo and Lee were part of Bitshares after I left. Bo built a partnership with Vitalik called Fenbushi, but Bo never gave me any money. They never invested in Cardano; they actually sat out because they took the investment in Ethereum. I know Bo got new teeth, and I know Lee. Lee gave me the first quarter million for establishing Invictus Innovations. Lee was also the other guy who pushed for me to get bought out from Invictus Innovations. It was Lee as the middleman, Dan and his family, and me. I didnāt want to do an ICO, and Lee wanted to do an ICO. He wanted to do angel shares, but I thought it was an unregistered securities offering. So, I took a buyout, went and did Ethereum, and of course, I still had the relationship. I introduced Vitalik to him, and he learned Chinese, moved to China, and actually became their best friend. I stayed in Wyoming. Thatās a different Lee.
Whyād you leave Ethereum? You donāt know? Depends on who you ask. I was pushed out. A contract existed. Well, then publish it. [laughter] Oh, youāre one of the XRP Ethgate guys. Okay. All right. Now I know where youāre coming from. Yeah, youāre one of those guys. Sorry, youāre going to have to bark up the wrong tree. No, no, no, no. It wasnāt a few weeks late. Scholar 3 was several years lateālike five years late on the schedule. Theyāre slower than we are. Likely what would have happened is we would have built the account side before the UTXO side. It would have been scaled down a little bit because there would have been a different engineering team, and the functional-first guys were very UTXO friendly. I saw it from both directions, UTXO and account-based, and it was really a question of the right account-based system and whether we could do the right gas model. Thereās a lot of stuff you can do, Scholar, that was really sensible. But we would have always had some UTXO system; the question was the level of expressiveness and interoperability between the UTXO system and the account-based system. Even today in Cardano, there is an account-based system. Itās very subtle, but if you look into the ledger design, itās part of the reward. So when you withdraw your staking rewards, itās an account system. Thereās more nuance to all of this.
Do you have a good relationship with Gavin Wood? I donāt not have a good relationship. I mean, I like Gavin. Heās a smart guy. Weāre very much alike in that we have very strong opinions about things. So, there we go. Turkish oil wrestlingāthatās how weāre going to sort out Polkadot versus Cardano. Itās about the only way.
Are Nightstream and Starream quantum resistant? Yes, thatās one of their defining characteristics, and itās an asset, not a liability. All right, well, letās see if we can get one more good one. One more good one. Love this AMA. Well, I love you too. Trumpās literallyāyou XRP guys with the Ethgateāhe built on Ethereum. [laughter] His kids are saying buy Ether, and itās going up. Heās digging up the skeletons of Ethgate, the corruption of Ethereum, but heās building on Ethereum and buying and holding Ether. [laughter]
All right, save me, Hapus. Save me, Hapus. Here we go. Thereās Hapus. Heās saving me. Heās right here. Heās floating around. Heās Hapus. Oh no. Oh no. OH NO. OH NO. OH GOD. THE INTERNET made him Satus. No, Satapus. Ah, heās going away. Heās going away. And now he doesnāt have the light of God. Oh, now heās coming back. Heās coming back as Angryus. AH, HEāS VERY ANGRY. Look how pissed off he is. Oh, God. No. No, Angryus. Why? H, letās not go there. Letās go to the Hapus land. Appleus. Apple bus. Thatās what we have to do.
All right, kids. Itās been three hours long. Happy Veterans Day. Itās been a lot of fun. Letās return to the center. Midnight is going to be a Leviathan next year, and Cardano, by extension, will enjoy the benefits. As we look to the future, weāre going to be okay. Everythingās going to be okay. Itāll be a little painful. There are always ups and downs, but you know what? When you widen the aperture, all in all, we did all right.
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