Hello everyone. I want to make a very quick video to address something that has been floating around on various media sites and tweets. There has been a misreporting of something I said, and I want to be exceedingly clear about this because it is fundamentally dishonest.
From CryptoBasics, it says, "Cardano founder blames ADA users for DeFi woes. RTVL would be 5 to 10 billion minimum." The Cardano founder has highlighted his recent podcast to suggest that Cardano users are contributing to the struggles in decentralized finance. I never once blamed anyone from the Cardano ecosystem for the DeFi woes. I pointed out, and I’m sorry, crypto media, that you guys are just looking for clickbait headlines, but I have to point this out because it’s not okay. It’s not fair, and I will never allow this headline to propagate. You need to cut this out.
There’s not a single person in the Cardano ecosystem whom I am blaming for our DeFi situation right now. I pointed out in a video that there is a mismatch between the people who participate in staking and governance and those who participate in DeFi. If there were proportionality, if they participated on both sides, our TVL would be at least 5 to 10 billion. I’m not blaming them for not participating. I never once said it’s their fault, that they are bad people, or that they’ve done something wrong. The crypto media is being blatantly irresponsible by saying that I am. I never once said that. I said there’s a difference between one type of participation and the other.
There’s a very good reason why I’m pointing this out. The people who are measuring things are asserting that Cardano has only 10 to 50,000 actual users when there are 1.3 million who are using staking. You can’t say we only have 10,000 users in Cardano when there are 1.3 million users on the other side. For some reason, those users with their capital are not participating in DeFi. We, as an ecosystem, need to have a conversation about why that is. It could be slippage, fees, user experience, yields, safety concerns, education—there could be 150,000 different reasons for that. But we need to have that discussion.
Let me be very clear here. We have the users; they have the capital. The users and the capital are not deploying to the other side of the aisle, to the TVL side, to the DeFi side. I am not blaming them for this. To assert that I’m blaming the users for this is materially and factually wrong. In crypto media, you are being irresponsible if you say this. The record has been corrected. I’m just pointing out there’s a mismatch between users on one side and users on the other side. Cardano has a large population, a large wallet base, and a lot of users, as evidenced by the enormous level of participation in both governance and staking. We do not have a large number of people participating in DeFi. There’s a mismatch between those two sides.
We need to get to the bottom of that mismatch as an ecosystem and create some corrective measures for 2026 to make it more appealing for people to transition from A to B, because that alone can increase our TVL by 5 to 10 billion. If we embrace that, that’s the entire point of my statements—not that Cardano people have done something wrong or that they are bad. This is what happens in our crypto media: people say something very specific and targeted, and then it gets misinterpreted, leading everyone to judge based on the headlines.
I’m not going to allow the crypto media to put words in my mouth. I did not blame the Cardano ecosystem or the Cardano users for anything. I was very careful, guarded, and specific in what I said. If you continue to broadcast otherwise, you are lying to people. I expect that from the crypto media because they often sensationalize and create clickbait.
Let me be very clear again for the third time: there is a mismatch between the people participating in staking and governance, which is over a million people, and those participating in DeFi. We, as an ecosystem, need to ask why that mismatch exists and how we can correct it. As part of our 2026 governance agenda, we need to get some delegated authority, funding, and effort to address this. But I’m not blaming the Cardano users for that mismatch. I’m not saying it’s their fault or that they did something wrong. It could be fees or other factors—we don’t know. We need to get to the bottom of that and ask those questions.
I have my suspicions. I’ve been told by various people throughout the ecosystem about their frustrations, but we need to discuss it as a decentralized community and come up with one voice and one plan for how we’re going to systematically address it. If we resolve that problem, that alone will put us in the top ranks of TVL, in the top five to top ten. That’s my point. That’s what I was saying, and that’s what needs to be reported—not this misleading information from the crypto media.
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