Hello everyone. I wanted to make a video about an event that just happened today regarding Tap Tools. Let me read the statement they made:
"Today we are sharing one of the most difficult updates we have ever had to make. After years of building alongside the Cardano community, Tap Tools is preparing to begin winding down operations over the next two weeks. This is not the outcome we wanted. From day one, Tap Tools was never just about us. It was about Cardano. It was about helping builders get discovered, helping users understand a growing ecosystem, and creating tools, data, content, and infrastructure that made Cardano easier to explore and build on. That was always the mission.
What started as a small project between friends grew into one of the most widely used platforms in Cardano. Over the years, Tap Tools served more than a million users, supported hundreds of projects through our API, published hundreds of articles, generated hundreds of millions of social impressions, and helped bring visibility to countless builders, communities, and projects across Cardano. We are incredibly proud of what Tap Tools became.
But we also have to be honest about the reality of operating a platform like this. Earlier this year, we experienced the departure of two co-founders, our CTO and COO. We worked hard to adapt, and our back-end developer stepped into the CTO role to help carry the platform forward. For a time, we believed we had a path. We were actively working to reduce infrastructure costs, improve operational efficiency, develop new products, and move Tap Tools towards a more sustainable future. Unfortunately, our new CTO has now decided to move on as well. The technical knowledge required to responsibly operate and maintain Tap Tools cannot be replaced overnight. At the same time, the economics of running a platform like this remain challenging. Infrastructure costs are real, development costs are real, support costs are real. Operating a platform that serves the ecosystem at scale is expensive.
The question is not whether we want to continue; the question is whether we can responsibly commit to the future under the current circumstances. Right now, we do not believe we can. To everyone who used Tap Tools, integrated our APIs, supported us through pro memberships, read our articles, shared our content, or simply believed in what we were building, thank you. You helped turn a small idea into something that became meaningful to Cardano. To our team, past and present, thank you for the years of effort, sacrifice, creativity, and belief. Building through multiple market cycles is not easy, but our team showed up every day because they believed the work mattered.
If a credible path emerges through acquisition or through the resources necessary to sustainably continue operating the platform, we will remain open to those conversations. No matter what happens next, we're incredibly proud of what Tap Tools became. We built because we believed, we served because we cared, and we will always be grateful that Cardano gave us the opportunity to create something that mattered. Thank you for being part of the journey, the Tap Tools team."
So, they were good guys, and it was part of my daily ritual. Every day I would go to Tap Tools, take a look, and see what's going on. This is where we're at as an ecosystem. I said at the beginning of the year that we would see a lot of people collapse because the markets are really bad, and we need some way to bail out our ecosystem and get them the lifeblood they need to get to the next level. I came up with a plan for an index, but it did not get executed.
So, we've lost JPEG Store, we have Tap Tools, and I would suspect others are coming very soon. There's going to be a wave of failures in the ecosystem. Now, I could buy some of them, as I did with Nami and Blockfrost, and then we can try to take those and commercialize them. When we try to take them and commercialize them, you guys vote against it. Just the way it is. So, there doesn't seem to be a lot of community desire to spend the treasury to take these ventures to the next level.
We have Draper, who you've decided to give a large quantity of ADA, a lot of money. As I remind you, they're probably going to invest mostly in new things, not old things. Many of these old things are not in an investable state at the moment. This year is going to be very hard. In the second half of the year for Cardano, we're probably going to see more dApps and DeFi die and consolidation happen. I'm not exactly sure what my role or place is to resolve this.
I keep getting criticized relentlessly online. People post on my Twitter feed every single day about the price of ADA and blame me for its collapse. I would really like to understand what my agency is here. I don't have any special powers with Cardano. I don't have any governance keys, I can't initiate a hard fork, much less a protocol parameter change. I don't have access to the treasury. I don't even own the trademark for the name Cardano. All of the funding that was given for growing and governing the ecosystem was given to separate entities, and at the all-time high, it was billions of dollars. It was not given to me.
So, how can I influence and grow and solve this problem for you? I'm being honest here, and I really would love to see an answer. What power do I have? What control do I have over this? For months, if not years, I outlined various things we need to do as an ecosystem to prevent these issues. Firstly, I said let's create a sovereign wealth fund because the price of ADA is in a decent spot. Let's convert some of it to stable coins so we have a slush fund we can use as an ecosystem to make strategic investments to uplift our people. People like Cardano whale and others said, "No, that'll destroy ADA. Let's not do that." The subsequent fights led to their departure.
Every single day, I'm blamed for that, even though we didn't win. We didn't get the Cardano sovereign wealth fund. Then we brought the pentad together and tried extremely hard to bring new commercial integrations in. There was a commitment that stable coins would be minted, but they weren't. I had no power to stop that from happening; that was a different entity. I tried really hard to say, "Hey, we need to get things done there," and of course, the price goes down, so we had fewer resources to work with. The actions of the pentad were harshly criticized, even though they succeeded in getting layer zero and Circle and other things you've all asked for for years.
Then I said we need to create an index. As we started working on it, a VC came in and got a large amount of funding. One of the pentad members pushed for this, but it didn't really do much for us, and now we don't have a bailout fund to take care of all these people that are going out of business. So then I try to acquire some of them. Every time I do, you say I'm destroying the ecosystem or consolidating it. I want to control the ecosystem. So then I don't buy them, and you say, "How dare you not help these people and bail them out?"
It's pretty frustrating because I care. If I didn't care, I wouldn't be here. I wouldn't even be making this video. I could just do a standard corporate PR tweet and say, "Well, Tap Tools, best of luck. Thank you for all the fish. You guys were great people." But when I see something like this go, it hurts me. It hurts my soul. It hurts everybody here. This is a lose-lose for everyone in the ecosystem. It's predictable. We knew these types of things were coming. I don't have the agency to stop it.
I try really hard to give advice about what we're supposed to do and where we're supposed to go. When you don't follow the advice, we live the consequences of it. There's a deranged psychopathy that has infected Cardano. You can see it at the bottom of each of my tweets now. There are people who are legitimately deranged. Their only purpose now is to kill me. That's it. It's the only reason they even log into X. Every video I make, every tweet, every output, it's the same. It used to just be Josephine and Monad, but it's a growing chorus.
To what end? First off, I don't have the agency and power to influence the ecosystem in a meaningful way, and it's evident when we see things like this. I tell you we need to do things, and they don't get done, and then we live the consequences of it. If I were to leave, it would only exacerbate the damage already done. What do they want to achieve? Where do we go with all of this? Is it just to destroy Cardano for the sake of destroying it, to say that they were right, Cardano was bad?
Tap Tools failing is not just Tap Tools failing. It's years of people's lives who cared about the mission, the vision, the path forward, and wanted Cardano to work. They wanted to create something special. Now our reward is this year, every week, every two weeks, every month, we're going to read another tweet like that one from another project. These deranged individuals, every time it happens, I guess it's my fault. I try really hard to get people to invest in these things, and you, the voters through your D-reps, decide not to do it. It's a waste of money. We don't have the money. We're not going to do that.
I don't understand how this is a sustainable or tenable thing. I just don't. I don't know where we go from here if this is the culture. You don't want commercialization, but then you want to punish everybody when commercialization doesn't occur. You say that we're not a ghost chain, but the things to prevent us from being a ghost chain, you don't care about.
This video is to the D-reps who vote against these things, and this video is to all the people who keep fighting so hard against any attempt to commercialize Cardano. Take a moment to set your egos aside, reflect deeply, and ask yourself, what's the plan? What incentives does anybody have to make it work? What's at stake here? We delivered on the technology. At the end of the year, you're going to get Leos, and there's all this amazing stuff that's unparalleled. We delivered. That's a fact. But that's not enough. We need a strategy for the levels above it.
You've been given snippets of it. You have to be honest about where we go from here. If you're telling the people who delegated to you that your only strategy is to hold on to the ADA in the treasury because it's going to be worth magically more in the future, what are you going to be building with exactly? When all these people go out of business and the number of dApps on Cardano continues to die and utilization continues to die, where do we deploy it? Brand new ventures?
We have to find more passionate people, and we have to convince those passionate people they'll be treated differently than the passionate people who came before them. They'll walk into a rat's nest, a den of vipers who can't wait to burn them to the ground the minute they say or do the wrong thing. That is where we're at.
You need to pick a leader. You need to pick a vision. You need to pick a strategy and fix it. Or you can let it die. That's your choice. This is a teachable moment, Tap Tools. Don't reply. Don't immediately react. Don't look for someone to blame. Just take a week and think about it. Look at it. Dig into it. Really try to understand how we got here and how we're going to get out of here. If you don't know, that's okay, but don't then go burn down everybody else who's trying to help.
As a community, we have to have a schism. We can no longer admit people whose only purpose is to burn the entire ecosystem down. I'm sorry. It's the builders versus the non-builders, the doers versus the pessimists and cynics. There are those of us who still want to do something and build something. I just don't want to be in the same room with the people who don't. Not anymore.
People are going to have to make some decisions, and a non-decision is a decision. It's a toxic hellscape, and no builder in their right mind would want to enter into something like this. These deranged people have caused so much harm. I've had people in the KOL side reach out to me and say they're afraid to even market their proposal because they've been so attacked. Every single person who's tried to utilize the treasury for some commercialization to help push it along gets brutally attacked.
Every program we have to strong-arm and push through is an enormous lift to get to that two-thirds voting. The vast majority of people don't have the political power or will or grit to get through the process. Even after you get funds, you're brutally criticized on the other side of it. It's not sustainable. That is the core we have to fix.
Maybe it means an exodus. Maybe it means something else. I don't know. You tell me. I can't solve this problem anymore for you. I've made a lot of recommendations, a lot of advice. Some has been taken, some has not. I'm just trying my best to push us forward. I know how to deliver the technology, and I know how to build and grow an ecosystem. The ones that welcome me, I'm more than happy to do that. The people that follow us, we try to take care of them.
Cardano has to make some decisions. They have to decide how much they value the builders and how many of these tweets they want to see every week, every two weeks, every four weeks. You, the delegators, have to get engaged and look at whether your D-reps are part of the problem or part of the solution and how they voted. Some of them have done reprehensible things and have no business being in power if the desire is to build a happy, cohesive ecosystem.
To the perpetual cynics, at some point, we have to cut them out of any meaningful participation and dialogue. Their only purpose is to destroy what has already been built because of personal vendettas. You talk about your bags going down; their goal is to make your bags go to zero so they can say, "See, Charles failed." That's it. That's all they want. Will they stay to help rebuild? No, they'll move on and say, "I told you so." That's the reality.
So why do they have any political representation? Why do they have any voice? Why does anyone fear them in the ecosystem and their criticism? They need to go, and they need to be exiled. We've got to get rid of them. There are options, by the way. It's not just me talking. We could launch a new Cardano and have a proof of burn. That would be the most extreme but powerful option. All of those people who think we're incompetent and incapable of doing things wouldn't migrate. They would be left behind in a toxic hellscape they created themselves, with no market, no volume, no commercialization.
That's the nuclear option. There are other options as well. The core entities have to make some hard decisions. We have to commercialize the platform, which means we have to create incentives and investments to do so. We can't just say it. We can't just say we support them. Words mean nothing. Cold hard money in the bank, financial commitments that are honored—that is the only way to move forward.
Let me be clear: I'm so tired of diplomacy. I'm tired of the nonsense. I'm tired of tweets saying, "Let's all get along and be happy with each other." Unity means nothing if there are no commitments on the other side. Unity means nothing if people aren't willing to put money on the table and get things done and grow things.
Another advantage of a proof of burn would be that there would be different tokenomics and different endowed entities. Just food for thought. Perhaps the existence of such an option will finally convince certain people that they need to change the strategy.
What I do know is we're getting real tired of managing a decline. That's what I know. I'm getting real tired of being blamed for all of it. It's not my fault. I don't have the power to change it. I don't have the governance keys. I can't influence the chain directly. I don't have direct access to the treasury. I don't own the trademark. I don't have the endowed funds for growth and community. You must understand this. If I did, blame me, but I don't.
So, we need to change the way we do things. You need to pick some leadership group. You need to pick executive function. You need to pick a strategy, some path forward, and endow within that strategy the actual money and execution ability to move it forward. Because right now, no one has any power. No one can move forward. It's a miasma. The entities I tried to create to endow power so you could use them to move forward have been attacked. The allies of those entities are starved of funds and authority.
We have to make some decisions here. We, as an ecosystem, have no reason to lose. We have the technology, we have the philosophy. We've survived for ten years in the trenches. We have a brand. There are good people every day, but we're losing them week by week. No, it's not Charles Hoskinson driving them out; it's the economic reality. That is what's causing this.
Every time I fight for it, the counter-punch is the same. You have this professional victim class. They attack, and when they get punched, they complain that "Charles hit us back." Put yourself in our shoes: ten-plus years of your life invested in building something you care about. You want it to win. You're pushing a philosophy or strategy to make it happen. Then the people who try to kill that strategy complain when you fight back.
There are stakes here. If we fail, they go out of business. If we fail, billions of dollars are lost. If we fail, years of people's lives are wasted. If we fail, the vision and mission fail. So yes, it's worth getting passionate about. It's people's careers, the best years of their working lives, their nest eggs, their business future. This is a big deal for millions of people around the world.
So, yes, we get passionate. Yes, it matters. And I'm really upset because they didn't need to go out. They didn't. But who's going to save them? The CF can't even get Catalyst back together and provide funding for people.
So, everybody take a week and just think about it. Talk amongst each other, look at the leaders you have, and the direction you're going in. This is a call to action, and my only request is that you get tired of it and say we need a change. There are many things we can do to change—constitutional changes, executive function changes, changes to the way the treasury works. We can make changes as dramatic as forking the protocol. There are so many ways we can move
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