Hi, this is Charles Hoskinson broadcasting live from warm, sunny Colorado. Always warm, always sunny, sometimes Colorado. Today is June 13, 2026. We're always positive these days, always feeling good. I wanted to do a live stream to talk to you about community management and how to bring people together in places with purpose. This will be a whiteboard video where we discuss a variety of concepts.
It's the first time in my life that I've ever mentioned anything Foucault created. I'm not a postmodernist; in fact, I'm probably the antithesis of it. However, he did come up with a really cool term: heterotopia. This concept is actually the reason we’re facing so many problems in Cardano right now.
If we take a look at Cardano, it mostly exists on X, which we call a broadcast channel. The purpose of a broadcast channel is to broadcast an idea, a message, or a conversation. The elation and dopamine addiction of a broadcast channel is speculation and spectacle. People are addicted to the spectacle; they want to see what’s going on. For example, Elon Musk, the edge lord trillionaire of our time, will say something like "woke evil," and then post some sort of rage bait. Because he has hundreds of millions of followers, many people engage with that content, getting angry and excited. It’s like the coliseum of old—spectacle and entertainment.
This makes broadcast channels seductive and addictive. They amplify various traits in people: ego, narcissism, and a sense of worth, creating a false sense of community. You might think that the mob, if it’s on your side, is your friend. Having been on both sides of it and being at a level of millions, I can tell you they’re not. They never will be.
There is real value in broadcast channels because they allow you to rapidly reach millions to billions of people and discover things that power structures are hiding. However, when we look at the concept of heterotopia, it has a variety of definitions. One I’d propose is that it’s a real physical space that functions as a counter-site capable of juxtaposing several incompatible sites or inverting the norms of the surrounding society.
What does that mean? Think of a library. Libraries have a purpose, don’t they? Would you go to a library if a group of people kept coming in, smashing pots and pans, or loudly playing things on their phones? It wouldn’t be a very good library. You’d say, “No, it has a purpose. It’s a place of quiet contemplation, study, and reflection.” That’s a heterotopia specifically for purpose.
So where is the Cardano community at? You might say, “We need to commercialize. We need to fund commercialization.” It’s funny because some of my biggest critics say, “Charles doesn’t know how to commercialize.” In the meantime, we have RealFi, which is the bank for the unbanked, and it’s a commercial venture. We have Pogan, which aims to bring billions of dollars of Bitcoin, XRP, Litecoin, Dogecoin, and Bitcoin Cash into our orbit for mutual benefit. We have Project Kaye, which is Block Frost, our ability to create decentralized infrastructure at a scale of billions of dollars. We have Midnight, and the success of any of these things brings transaction volume and millions of users into Cardano.
I’m putting my own money into these projects, and every time I’ve tried to say, “Hey, would you like to be part of it?” the governance system doesn’t seem to be able to get there. We say we want to commercialize, but when we do it in a broadcast channel, the spectacle of rage bait and tearing things down overrides legitimate conversations about whether this is a good idea or a bad idea. My argument is not about the people; it’s about the environment.
This is simply the wrong environment for strategy, goal setting, collaboration, and building. It’s a broadcast medium. What do you broadcast? You broadcast your vision, your strategy, your successes, and why you’re going to win. If we broadcast the dirty laundry of governance in a broadcast medium, governance becomes rage bait. It becomes a fight and a spectacle. Anyone who tries to bring something in will fail.
You tell me you like decentralization, but Dataliths failed. That’s the only full node in the entire Cardano ecosystem at the moment, and it hasn’t been funded because it’s the wrong channel. You need to create a bespoke heterotopia for discussions about strategy, governance, and collaboration.
Looking at the Midnight Discord as a case study, we currently have about 49,000 people in it, and it’s an amazing place. I do a weekly lecture with the Night Force, and it’s incredibly positive. Everyone showcases what they’ve constructed. There’s a lot of optimism and hope, and very little cynicism. More importantly, they’re asking pertinent questions. There’s a strong dialogue about our strategy to win, what goals we need to set, and how we can work together to make that happen.
What’s the parallel in the Cardano ecosystem? Where can you go to talk about Cardano’s strategy, what goals we should follow, and how we should do these things? I anticipated this when I pushed SIP 1694, assuming that this space, this heterotopia, would be Intersect. I thought, “Okay, Intersect will be the place where people naturally aggregate.” But I didn’t anticipate that we were missing a step.
So many people existed on X that it had total domination over the zeitgeist of Cardano, discussing strategy and governance. When Intersect formed, X overrode its ability to set goals and establish a narrative. A professional class of cynics, critics, and rage baiters formed. There are actually less than 100 of them, and they control most of the counter-dialogue and narrative of Cardano. They override our ability as an ecosystem to converge. They cite freedom of speech and decentralization, claiming “death to the founding entities” and that everything is a scandal.
Every time they cause harm or damage and are proven wrong, they play the victim and try to aggregate sympathy. There are numerous examples; they don’t need to be called out. Unfortunately, this prevented Intersect from forming that heterotopia specifically to discuss strategy, goal setting, collaboration, and other matters.
Upon reflection, a member-based organization that you have to join, with a ceremony and all that, isn’t well-suited to the social media world. It was naive to believe that there would be a natural migration and that these things would happen. The legitimacy of Intersect was also challenged by one of the founding entities, the foundation, not joining at inception and funding alternative NPOS. There wasn’t a consensus that this was the inheritor of governance, and we should all aggregate there as our heterotopia to discuss these types of things.
This created enough division that people could stay in the broadcast channel, which is not fit for purpose. Before we can get to commercializing Cardano, before we can grow Cardano and build executive function, we need representation, checks and balances, and, more importantly, effective conversation.
Effective conversation means that all parties involved have three characteristics: empathy, shared goals, and aligned incentives. Empathy means understanding each other's positions and being able to listen to recognize that everyone in the conversation has something they value. Shared goals mean that after we establish empathy, there’s some intersection of common ground. Aligned incentives mean that we can create a win-win scenario.
Once you have that, you can construct goodwill and trust, which is the basis of every negotiation, compromise, and ability to move forward in any political debate, corporate negotiation, or mergers and acquisitions. It’s not about splitting the difference. There’s a famous book called "Don’t Split the Difference" by Chris Voss, which discusses these types of things.
You’ll notice something when you look at those three lenses: you can’t achieve them in a broadcast mechanism. There’s nothing in Twitter or X that creates empathy; it’s quite the opposite. You broadcast your position and invite competition, saying your position is the only one that matters. Other people attack that position, and spectators view it as a win-lose game. This medium is always win-lose. There’s no compromise, no negotiation, because to win the game, your goal is spectacle.
Your goal is growth of followers, even by conflicting with Elon Musk. Whether you win that particular argument or not, he has so many followers that some will become yours in the process. By engaging in fighting, you go from 5,000 to 50,000 followers. Winning is defined as influence—how many followers you have inside that system.
Notice that we’ve made no progress, no growth, and no ability to understand each other. We’re incentivized to fight for spectacle and entertainment to gain influence because influence is the reward function, the dopamine function. You get more followers and conflate that with a false community.
If you have no empathy, how can you understand what that person is trying to achieve? You can’t. So you have no shared goals. If you have no shared goals, is it possible to align incentives? It’s not. By the very construction of the mechanism, you can’t have an effective conversation. If you can’t have a constructive conversation, you can’t set goals, develop a strategy to achieve them, and agree on how to collaborate.
If you can’t do GSC—set goals, create a strategy, and agree on collaboration—guess what? You can’t govern. It’s physically impossible. If you really understood what the Pogan proposal is, it’s the best deal you’ll ever see. You have this venture coming in that I’m already funding, and it’s near completion. I have a lot of VCs wanting to be involved. We’re going to aggregate a lot of capital, and Cardano can get a direct upside, making money every year from this, which will increase the treasury.
It was the same with the sovereign wealth fund, which would be up over 400% if we took it. But we couldn’t get to understanding it because there was no mechanism to establish empathy. The critics—these less than 100 people—engaged and attacked, creating spectacle and elation. DREPs sat on the outside and said, “Here’s the problem. I have a public vote, and it’s us versus them.”
The reality is if I vote for something Charles says, I’ll be established as a sycophant of Charles, a follower of Charles, a member of the cult. To show independence, I have to vote against the proposal, regardless of what the proposal actually is or its benefits, to show that I’m independent. Being independent is a higher social currency than being effective.
But why are there sides? If you take a moment and step back to look at these three things, do I have an aligned incentive with the Cardano ecosystem? My entire brand, reputation, ability to raise capital, and pursue goals are tied to the success or failure of Cardano. I’m still one of the largest ADA holders, and I care about this ecosystem. I want to see it grow, and I’ve made considerable sacrifices for it.
So if I’m making a proposal, maybe it’s in good faith to try to make the ecosystem succeed. But if you live in a situation where it’s always a fight and adversarial, the only interpretation of the proposal is “Charles wins, we lose.” Win-lose. If I win, someone loses. We can’t have a win-win conversation; it’s not possible.
You have to have an effective conversation to establish the ability to set goals, create a strategy, and then collaborate. The next question is: with whom? Who are the people with whom we have that effective conversation? Is it just community members? DApp builders?
The next concept is called social physics from Alex Pentland, which came from a lovely book he wrote years ago. Sandy Pentland talks about idea flow. You want a mixture of people within and outside your core group. Your core should consist of people with the strongest aligned incentives—your decision core. But you also want hooks into your decision core so that external ideas are welcome and can flow into the system.
There are cognitive tools you can use to create that idea flow. For example, a premortem. You’ve heard of a post-mortem, where you analyze what happened after a failure. A premortem assumes it failed in the future, and you try to predict why it failed. This challenges assumptions and prevents groupthink.
You can invite advisors and third-party people with diverse roles and personas. The more idea flow you have, the greater the probability of success of the endeavor. There’s no exception to this rule as long as you have a decision core. The people who have the ideas don’t necessarily get to decide what to do with them, but the ideas enter.
If you have an attitude of empathy, you can understand what’s relevant in the idea and what’s not. Just like this conversation here: I really dislike postmodernism. I think it’s communism in another form, a dark and terrible way to go. But Foucault came up with some good ideas or at least good thought experiments, like heterotopias and liminal spaces. These are specialized spaces for certain activities, whether they be rituals, learning, or governance conversations.
You can entertain that idea and hold it as something useful, despite disagreeing with the philosophy as a whole. Your space must allow for appropriate idea flow while having a core group of people. You determine that by whether they share goals and have aligned incentives. If they share goals and have aligned incentives, there’s a way for them to succeed.
Effective conversation allows you to set goals, develop a strategy, and collaborate. What makes conversation more effective is idea flow. You build a whole set of cognitive levers or idea pumps, which gives you the ability to come up with great ideas. Tear-downs are a technological mechanism for this.
We have no external tear-down capability. You financed it when you supported ARC, which was the IR proposal. One of the things my applied research and creative engineering division does regularly is fork cryptocurrencies. We’ve forked Near and other cryptocurrencies, running them privately to tear down their technology. We analyze their consensus protocols, transaction models, and how to build DApps.
We gain incredible ideas from this process because other cryptocurrencies may have done something novel and interesting. These tear-downs are valuable for research because we may realize that a problem has already been solved, so we don’t need to build a completely different solution. Instead, we can borrow from these open-source, patent-free projects.
Tear-downs are a very valuable engineering mechanism for effective conversation, especially if there’s a goal. Implicit goals also involve establishing KPIs. One of the biggest lies that the podcast medium tells everyone about me is that I have no concern for the price of ADA. They manipulate my words to create drama and chaos.
Of course, I care about the price of ADA. The price of ADA is directly connected to the security and utility of Cardano. The nuance is that I say the goal should not be maximizing the price of ADA because it’s unachievable. It means you’re throwing away all the other things that make Cardano special and unique.
For example, what if Google comes out of nowhere and says, “We love Cardano’s technology. We want to do a hard fork and integrate it into all our infrastructure, but we’ll control all the consensus.” The entire ledger becomes centralized, but Google will integrate it into all their products. ADA will be the currency of Google.
If your KPI is price maximization, it’s the best deal in the world; the price of ADA will go up. Is that a good deal? Some people say yes, who are speculators, but the reason Cardano exists is to be decentralized infrastructure. No person should run the show.
So my KPI is growth of the ecosystem, which entails growth of the value of the ecosystem, reflected by the token price, within the principles of the ecosystem. Growth with principles is very different from growth of the token price. I’m principled; that’s my negotiation and bargaining position.
If you bring something to the table that can grow Cardano without disrupting decentralization, I view that as a net good because it increases the utility and influence of the ecosystem. If you come to me with something that decreases decentralization and enhances control to one actor, I’ll reject that, even if the token price goes up. That’s my negotiation position.
If we’re having an effective conversation, we understand each other. A podcaster isn’t going to understand this nuance; they don’t care to understand it because they’re playing a different game. They want rage bait, spectacle, clickbait, controversy, angst, anger, and destruction.
It’s important to have a space where you can have these conversations, where ideas flow in, and where you create a baseline of principles. You might say, “Charles, we can’t create a baseline of principles for Cardano.” Well, we actually did. That was one of the hardest things to do. We wrote down and had a constitutional convention. We created a constitution that’s ratified on-chain, with basic principles about what it means for Cardano to be.
We have to ask if those principles are suitably aligned for growth. If the answer is no, then what do you do? You go from Constitution One to Constitution Two and add in growth principles. That’s the next iteration of governance. You need a space to discuss these types of things.
Once you figure out those growth principles, you now have KPIs. Then you can start developing strategies through tear-downs of other cryptocurrencies and their strategies, using analogy, AI, and other tools. Once you have a strategy, you decide on collaboration.
The single biggest component of the decision to collaborate is the budget process. Why is budget chaos? Because we skipped the goal setting and the definition of growth. We skipped the strategy setting and went straight to budget. Why? Because the budget was originally designed with Intersect being the heterotopia for conversation.
When the CF came in and said, “We don’t like this idea because we think it’ll be the Charles Hoskinson show,” or “Our goal is to make it so toxic that Charles leaves and we can take over,” they damaged our ability to create common goals and strategies to grow the ecosystem.
The hijacking and destruction of the legitimacy of Intersect and the inability to move the conversation meant we lost a core capability. By the way, I didn’t put a number on this process. Did I say only 10 people get to do this? Did I say 100 people? Did I say 1,000? There’s no limit. You’re constrained only by the efficacy of your conversation tools.
There’s a different governance and social fabric that exists in this structure, which can be very decentralized in nature compared to what exists on-chain. When I mention Discord, I’m not saying we abandon broadcast channels; it’s the opposite. There are plenty
It's either let's burn this party down or make it so unbearably bad that the party leaves the ecosystem and there's nothing to replace them. Here’s the thing: if all your governance lives here, you have to ask a question. This is an empathy exercise for all the people.
Imagine you’re on the outside looking in. What do you see? You see a dumpster fire. You see flames, destruction, and chaos. Now, ask yourself a very simple question: would you join? Do you want to be part of that? Would you invest your money, your time, your effort? You look at that chaos and destruction and think, "Would you build your business on that?" There are over 18,000 options. This is just one of them.
So, if the whole thing is scandal A to scandal B to scandal C, and everybody's goal in life is to prove that the people who built the system are evil and terrible, and everything is going to hell, and everyone involved in governance is fatigued and leaving, and every DAP on Cardano is failing, would you still say, "Yes, I want to join that. Yes, I want to put my money in that. Yes, I want to build my business on that?" If you are a sane human being, your answer is right here: no. I want nothing to do with this. This is a train wreck.
The analogy is that you’re a therapist, and you have a woman who’s been married eight times and has ten kids from nine different guys. She goes on and on about how it’s not her fault. At the end of the session, she asks, "Hey, you want to grab a drink?" No, that’s a train wreck. I want nothing to do with that. Ethics aside, my God, that’s crazy.
So, when I say let's move to Discord, what I mean is let's move the governance conversations to Discord. Let’s build an effective social fabric there. We can have our fights and figure all this stuff out. We can build empathy with each other, come up with shared goals, and then update the constitution to incorporate those growth goals, add in executive functions, checks and balances, and all these other things. Then we can all agree on a strategy.
We can have one budget, and then we have an up or down vote. It gets approved, we move on, and we grow. Nowhere in there did I say that this whole thing is just five people in an "I pick them" scenario. But you’ll notice something: the people here in the fire said that because deep down inside, they know they’re probably not going to have a seat at the table. Honestly speaking, what are they contributing? What are they doing for your bags? What are they doing to grow the ecosystem? They’re the woman on the couch talking about the baby mama stuff. That’s what they’re doing.
And they know that if this thing happens, they lose the followers. They don’t have the rage bait anymore. They can’t be provocateurs anymore. You might ask, "Doesn’t that violate free speech?" Okay, would you go to a library where every day people show up with pots and pans? Of course not. So ask yourself this: should one person be able to veto the entire ecosystem? Of course not. That’s centralized.
Should the dialogue of a small group of people be able to hold the entire ecosystem hostage? For two years, you’ve seen the end results: chaos, fatigue, angst, the inability to coordinate, and attempts to burn the founders to the ground. Even when we are commercializing like Real Fi, Pogan, Kaye, and Midnight, and trying to bring them in, what do these rage baiters do? They say that’s bad for Cardano—a token that brings in TVL users and connections to other ecosystems and a new narrative to help bring people in.
What are you saying to this guy? Would you build your business? They say, "If I get the Midnight treatment, no." Absolutely not. This is nuts. I don’t want to be part of that. That’s a train wreck.
So, do we keep the broadcast mechanisms? Yes, we do. After you’re done with these guys, talk about marketing Cardano. That’s what you broadcast. That’s your brand. Look at all the amazing things being built on Cardano. Look at the amazing progress Cardano has made. Look at our ten-year vision and our goals. This is what happens if we win. We’re the good guys. That is marketing, and people get excited.
Now you’re here, and you’re saying, "Do I build on this thing?" If it’s compelling, you say, "Yeah, these guys are a rocket ship. I want them to win. I believe in that vision." That makes sense. I’m going to be part of that ecosystem.
Now, notice something here: I didn’t say a lack of fights. You will have enormous fights, passion, and all kinds of mean, nasty stuff inside this governance channel. But guess what? It’s kept in the channel. It stays there. There are codes of conduct. It’s like Fight Club; you don’t talk about it. You have the conversation there, create common ground, and once we’ve created that common ground, we exit unified.
When you exit unified, that’s what the people see. If you have the fights up here, this is what the people see. So that’s what I mean by moving to Discord. That’s what I mean about getting these things done. It’s the next step because the step prior was derailed by politics, pettiness, and stupidity.
Now, you’re free to disagree with all this, but the burden is on you to not just disagree but propose an alternative structure. You don’t get to just disagree anymore; you’re part of the problem. If all you do is post and talk negatively without proposing any solutions, you’re rage baiting. You’re a nobody, and you deserve to have no voice in governance. You have to disagree with a viable alternative and explain to the entire community why your idea is better.
If it is, then we do that. This is not my ego; this is me having a real and frank conversation with you about how every successful enterprise in human history has had to operate. You have to have a space for people to create trust, negotiate, and create goals and strategies. It can be a board of directors, a political process, or an elected executive committee. There has to be a space for that to occur.
What I’m trying to tell you is if you leave it to X, you get what you pay for: nothing. We’ve spent two years with governance there. What is the price of ADA? What is the success of our ecosystem? Are we growing or losing people? That is objective reality. If every person says to leave it there, then ask them directly how this medium is going to make it better for us. What tools promote collaboration, trust, and sharing in negotiation?
People have to give stuff up. All these people pushing allegations—what are they giving up? What incentive do they have to make your business better or your token go up? Nothing. They have nothing at stake except for the influence they gain by seeing the world burn to the ground. That’s the harsh reality.
You have to think carefully about it. Do we want to be controlled by the tyranny of the pot smashers in the library, or do we want to create spaces to have conversations? Once we do that, guess what? You have rapid progress. I absolutely love the Midnight Discord. It’s my favorite place because every time I go there, we’re talking about how to make Midnight bigger, better, and greater. Every person can’t wait to show me what they’re working on, their passion, and their excitement. It’s special. There’s no negativity, no cynicism, no debating or attacking. It’s just a happy place because it’s moderated.
In the early days of the Discord, some people came in and said, "I’m going to create a cancer where my only purpose is to broadcast how Charles Hoskinson is evil." We banned them. They cried, "You violated my free speech!" But then the population of the Discord went from 11,000 to 49,000 people. Our ambassador group grew by five times, and we have more people building. Somehow, everyone’s just getting along and having fun, and I don’t own any equity or tokens in their ventures.
Magically, they seem to have a lot of influence too because the medium is not about grievances with me or anyone else. The entire purpose of the medium is to create empathy so we can understand each other, create shared goals, and grow Midnight. If Midnight succeeds, they succeed. Their business succeeds. Their endeavor succeeds. They get the value proposition of Midnight.
That’s the purpose of the medium. So that’s my recommendation: create a shared space like that for Cardano, and you’ll rapidly get a happy, positive place for governance and great conversations. If any of you think this is dodging tough questions, what are your tough questions? They’re not tough questions. You’ve already made up your mind. You’ve already decided who the villains are and who the angels are. Your tough questions are meant to convince others of the villains. You don’t care about the answers or the dialogue.
So guess what? I don’t care about you. The minute you adopted that, you died to me. You don’t matter to me, and I’m never going to cooperate, participate, or work with you because there’s no possibility of empathy. Would you go start a business with your ex-wife who hates your guts and has spent the last five years torturing you? No. Under no circumstances would anyone ever do something like that.
So would you participate in a dialogue with a person whose only goal is to expose you as the evil, horrible human being you are? That vendetta has nothing to do with the growth of Cardano or the ecosystem. It’s scapegoating, pure undiluted narcissism. It’s my beliefs matter so much that everyone else must suffer for those beliefs to win. That does nothing for anyone anywhere.
So they have no place in that dialogue or communication. You ban them, they cry about it, and the broadcast medium gets ignored because all the action is in the place they have no access to. Then you make great decisions, especially if you have good idea flow. That’s what prevents groupthink. Those great decisions build great products, grow the ecosystem, and make it a place that people want to build on.
It becomes a place that people want to be part of and are excited about because there’s a real mission, a real vision, and real accomplishments. I never ran away from banking the unbanked. It’s right there. I never ran away from making Bitcoin better. It’s right there. That’s how I got started in my career. I never ran away from a full commitment to decentralization. It’s right there. I never ran away from privacy as a human right, and your freedom of association, commerce, and expression shall not be infringed. Verifiable reflexivity is the biggest value proposition: the building of trust.
That’s where my money went. Yes, I have luxuries. When you get paid 54,000 Bitcoin and join the cryptocurrency ecosystem in 2011 as a founder of Ethereum and advisor to many projects, you accrue a few luxuries from time to time. But the overwhelming majority of my resources and my company’s resources were spent here to make the world a better place. That’s the transparency. You see it, you feel it. A lot of people are connected to that.
So we didn’t lose the mission. The success of these types of things means that Cardano is the kind of place that can build those kinds of things. What does it tell this guy? I can do that too. I can change the world too. Or you can have this. It’s a time for choosing. Sometimes you have to fire your patients, and sometimes you have to fire certain community members. It’s part of growing up.
If you have a toxic relationship, you have to leave it because, at the end of the day, you have to ask yourself what you’re going to do with the finite time you have. I’ve spent more than ten years of my life here building and building. Like a lot of those people leaving Twitter, I’m saying the same thing: if this is what you want, I don’t have any place or role in it. I want nothing to do with it; it will fail. Before it fails, it will take everything it can from me and then move on like a cancer somewhere else.
If this is what you want, not only do I want to be part of it, I think I can be a great leader in that structure and help you guys not just get back to the glory days, but beyond them to make Cardano the number one infrastructure. I believe that, and a lot of other people believe that too and would get excited about it.
Now, it’s not easy. There’s a lot of work to be done, but it’s your choice. It’s a decentralized ecosystem. My job is to give you the options and tell you that, and you just have to accept them and decide. If there is another option, a third option, someone else should make a video and tell us what that is. If it’s better than this, I’ll be excited about it too because my three rules are: we can have an effective conversation, we can set a strategy with it, and we can work together to accomplish it. That’s what I want. Then we succeed, then we grow.
Or you can go back to the toxic hellscape that we currently have. It’s really that simple. I’m happier than I’ve ever been leaving X. I’ll broadcast to it because it’s a broadcast mechanism, but I’m not on it. I don’t engage with it. I just get reports on trends and relevant commentary, but I’m not there anymore. Why? Because it doesn’t give me anything. It’s a dopamine hack. It distracts and robs you of your time and feeds the worst parts of your soul, allowing them to grow unbounded in dark ways.
I’d rather be here. That’s where I’m happiest—creating, building, collaborating in a place filled with love. You have to make a decision about it too. Thanks, everyone.
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