Hi, this is Charles Hoskinson broadcasting live from warm, sunny Colorado. Always warm, always sunny. Sometimes Colorado. Today is April 11th, 2025. I'm back home sitting in my office. You guys haven't seen this office before; I've done a little bit of construction. This is the home office.
I just wanted to make a quick video since I came back from Paris. I'm a little jet-lagged and tired, but I'm only going to be home for a few days before I travel again. This time, I'm going somewhere that is quite dangerous—so much so that there is a possibility of death. As a result, I wanted to make a video just in case. I’ve really admired and respected working with all of you. It’s been great to be part of this ecosystem. I anticipate everything will be fine, but you never know with these types of things, so it’s always good to make videos just in case.
For the past 10 years, I've been in the Cardano ecosystem, working really hard to build something on par with what Satoshi achieved. Satoshi constructed an ecosystem and left, allowing it to grow, flourish, and thrive. I wanted to build something where I could spend my entire life working on it, but I didn’t want to be a dictator or a king. I wanted to be a member of the ecosystem and continue to work on it my own way, building on that ecosystem.
Over the last 10 years, we’ve managed to grow from just an idea to something in 2025 that now has a fully decentralized government, thanks to Voltater. We have passed a constitution through both a constitutional convention and an on-chain ratification. We have passed an information action approving a roadmap. There are almost a thousand DREs registered, with an interesting distribution of power among them. There’s an interim constitutional committee with a hybrid elected committee, and elections will be held in the second half of the year to elect a full constitutional committee. Right now, there’s a vigorous debate about the budget, which will likely conclude within the next 60 to 90 days, depending on how quickly the DRAPs can perform their reconciliation.
Many institutions are vying for power and willing to work with people. In Paris, we were able to have the node diversity workshop, and it was a great honor to be with many of the Pragma members and other prominent node builders in the ecosystem, having robust conversations about where they want to go and what they want to do. The end result of those conversations is an assurance that we will have multiple independent implementations by independent teams in the Cardano ecosystem. I’d like to call out Pragma, TXpipe, Blink Labs, Harmonic, and many others for their remarkable work in parsing this complex protocol, simplifying it, and enhancing it in their own ways. It was impressive to spend time with them and see their progress.
It was also fun to go to Blockchain Paris and reconnect with old friends and meet new ones, seeing just how far we’ve come as an ecosystem. It’s become very clear to me that Input Output continues to have, and will have for the foreseeable future, a wonderful role in the Cardano ecosystem. Ultimately, you get to decide how prominent that role is and where it will be, whether it involves core infrastructure or simply building on top of the protocol. Midnight was very well received, and there’s a great degree of excitement there. We believe it’s going to bring millions of users into the Cardano ecosystem. The concept of hybrid applications—whether they be Bitcoin to Midnight, Ethereum to Midnight, Solana to Midnight, or Cardano to Midnight—is a net positive for the space as a whole.
Having been chained down for the last decade has taken a toll on my ability to live the life I wanted. I’ve truly enjoyed being solely in the cryptocurrency space, but as many of you have seen, I’ve diversified quite a bit in the last three years. I started a bison ranch, a clinic, and I’m heavily involved in synthetic biology. One of the companies I invested in brought back the direwolf, which has been a lot of fun. I’ve also been involved in the alien salvage expedition in Papua New Guinea, among dozens of other things.
I’ve tried to avoid things that are a bit dangerous or carry risk because so many people rely on me. However, there are things on my bucket list that I’ve always wanted to do, and this is no exception. I decided, you know, I’m not getting any younger—people like to remind me of that regularly. It’s about time I have some fun and go out and do some crazy things. This coming week, I’m going to do one of the most challenging things I’ve ever attempted in my life, far more so than anything that came before. I’ve been preparing for it for about a year. If you’re very astute, you may have noticed some of the crumbs I’ve left behind over the last year. If you put the pattern together, you can kind of figure out where I’m going and what I’m doing. Nevertheless, if I survive, which is very likely, I will record it and put it up on Twitter when I return. Then it’s back to business as usual.
Another reason I’m doing this is that I’ve launched a cryptocurrency ecosystem since 2017, and it’s very different in 2025. There needs to be an inflection point to get mentally prepared and ready for the long, brutal march ahead as we move toward the Midnight era and all the transitions that come with it. You should never restrict your dreams and the places you want to go and the things you want to do. I firmly believe that a life well spent is one where you do the things you want to do.
For 10 years, I’ve had the opportunity to travel the world, visit 75 countries, meet tens of thousands of people, and lead a company with over a thousand people at its peak. Across the six companies, I think we’ve exceeded that. I’ve done so many things that excited me, but there are also things I didn’t get to do because I had to set them aside due to obligations and responsibilities. If you’re not careful, you wake up quite old, and all the things you put aside never actually get done.
At 37 years old, I’m not young, but I’m not old either. I’m in that weird middle ground between the two states, and I still have enough life in me to do pretty much anything. I also have enough resources to do everything if I choose. In the coming years, that’s what it’s going to be like, and I’m going to try to divide my time accordingly. I’m still deeply focused on many of the technical things that matter most. In fact, recent changes I’ve made in how I’ve structured things at IOG have greatly amplified our ability to deliver, as many of you have noticed in our commercial relationships, whether with Book IO, Moneta, or others. We’ve really stepped up the game in terms of ecosystem development, commercialization, and relationships with people.
On the technical side, we’ve never been stronger. Our prototyping process has never been better, and our ability to work with people has never been greater, including those who strongly disagree with our coding practices and technical decisions. We can still collaborate with them, even cross-organizationally. In fact, that node diversity workshop even had someone from the Ethereum ecosystem come and speak about node interoperability because they’ve had client diversity for quite some time. That’s how it should be. You should have the ability to elevate great people and give them the resources they need to achieve even greater success, and that’s what we’ve tried to do.
I think I’ll survive, and it’s one hell of a journey. It takes a while to get there, and we’ve been prepping for it. I look forward to doing this type of stuff. There was a book I read a long time ago by a woman named Candace. She wrote something called "The River of Doubt." It’s about Teddy Roosevelt after he lost the 1912 presidential election. He was a bit dismayed because he didn’t know what to do, so he decided to go down to the Rio Negro, which ended up being named the Rio Roosevelt, with a whole host of people to map out rivers that had never been traversed by explorers before, alongside Candido Rondon, a very famous Brazilian colonel who worked with telegraph companies and was also a cartographer. It’s a wonderful book, and Roosevelt nearly died in the process. But it was the adventure of a lifetime, and these are the kinds of things that I think are quite fun—whether it be pushing the boundaries of space, going to Antarctica, or navigating the darkest jungles. There are a lot of stones left unturned, and a life well spent is about doing these types of things.
I’m getting pretty tired of the cryptocurrency cycle. It takes and takes and takes, and it doesn’t really give much back. Every accomplishment doesn’t matter, everything we build doesn’t matter, and everything is chained to whether the price goes up or down. You have no idea how thoroughly boring that has become over the past decade. It’s disheartening when you achieve great things only for them to be completely ignored because they don’t fit into a pre-planned narrative about growth. It makes people very one-dimensional.
Cardano has always been different, and the way we’ve approached the world has always been different. We care about the long term, we care about individuals, and we honor people’s stories, whether it be those in our own ecosystem who have passed on, like Vasel or Chang, or many great people who inspired millions, such as Voltaire, who were advisers to academics we worked with throughout the ages. Goen was the adviser to Gregori Rosu, who came up with the K framework, or poets who wrote beautiful things like Lord Byron. Those are the stories that keep us going because it doesn’t matter where the markets are at; it doesn’t matter the macro or the micro. In some way, it reminds us of our shared humanity, and I’d like to get back to that.
By living a diverse life and doing non-crypto things, and by going through some struggles and challenges, you learn and grow in the process. You gain something from it, and it gives you the time to reflect on what the next steps are and where the next opportunities lie. I think Cardano’s roadmap is the best it’s ever been. Bitcoin DeFi is a leviathan. Turning Cardano into a very successful AVS system via Minotaur and watching the dawn of Midnight is going to be very good for all of us and bring in so many users. Having the first telescoping scalable protocol, taking Prowse and turning it into Laos—however long that takes—makes sense to me. Fully exploiting the powers of Hydra are things we’ve planned for a decade as an ecosystem, and it’s nice to watch them actually become real.
It’s also nice to see the Vanguard be people who don’t just work for me but work for dozens of companies with their own hopes and dreams. It gives me a belief that no matter what, the roadmap is where it needs to be, and it’s going to get done. At times, the budget can be stressful and adversarial, often unnecessarily so. But that’s a necessary evil if one cares about decentralized governance. People will discover how to get along out of necessity or simply because it’s the right thing to do. Living a diverse life, taking on adversity, and going through challenges allows all of us to grow and reach the next level.
In the coming decades, humanity is going to face some of its greatest challenges. We’re flirting with the lucidity trap. Exponential technology is fundamentally changing the world around us, and our own humanity is being called into question because of AI. The definition of truth is fading. Our faith in institutions is at an all-time low, and our politics don’t seem able to resolve or save us from these issues. Thus, it makes sense for us all to take the time necessary to embrace a bit of stoicism and become somewhat philosophical. Ultimately, we have to ask ourselves, what is all this about? Why do we do what we do? Where do we want to go, and how do we manifest reality accordingly?
I’ve chosen to manifest a reality of my own making. Cardano is the product of the sheer willpower of many people who were told it couldn’t be done, but we did it anyway. My companies reflect that as well. My clinic in Gillette, Wyoming, a town of 35,000 people, isn’t supposed to have a world-class medical facility on par with the Mayo Clinic and physicians at that level. But we did it anyway, regardless of whether it was a good idea, because we were determined to make it work. When people look back a decade later, they’ll act as if it was a foregone conclusion that it was supposed to happen that way. The reality is we just manifested it; we made it happen.
That’s why sometimes you have to go through struggles and do dangerous things. I believe it all works out in the end. I’ve become friends with so many of you, and I’ve met so many of you that you’d miss me if I was gone, and I’d miss you if I was gone. So, I wanted to take the time to make a video to say I love all of you and I care about all of you. Your hopes and dreams are just as meaningful to me as my own. I want each and every one of your hopes and dreams to be honored, and for you to find your own manifestations to achieve your own dreams and goals. After all, that would make the world a better place, wouldn’t it?
There’s too much cynicism, too much division, too much hate, and too many people lobbying for us to live in a world where everybody’s bad, everybody’s a scammer, and everybody’s evil. There is no basic decency or goodness. I can’t understand how that leads us to a place we’d want to live in. I think it’s just a reflection of people’s self-loathing and their own lostness, for lack of a better term. There are so many people adrift these days, and they don’t have to be. Sometimes you just have to take a step back and realize that the world can be basically good if you perceive it that way. Your agency, or lack thereof, is a manifestation of your beliefs.
I choose to believe that I can do great things, and thus I have. You have to make that decision for yourself. If you choose to believe that, and I choose to believe that despite how crazy it is what I’m about to do, that I’m going to survive, then it probably will happen. We’ll see. If not, it was good times.
Thank you all for the 10 good years. I expect to return, and when I do, we have a lot more work to do. If I don’t return, there are more than enough people to get it done. What we have built will always stand the test of time. Cardano, like Bitcoin before it, is durable. It’s here to stay. All elements of centralization have been removed and skewed. That was my life’s work, and I’m proud of that. Now, I’d like to see it get to the next level.
Thank you all for your time. I’ll see you guys on the other side. Cheers.
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