Hi, this is Charles Hoskinson broadcasting live from warm, sunny Colorado. Always warm, always sunny—sometimes Colorado. Today is Thanksgiving, November 27th, 2025. It has been a long year with a lot that has happened. There have been many ups and downs, but we’re all here, and we’ve all survived.
Thanksgiving is one of those days in America where we try to bring everyone together—people we like, people we don’t like. We try to set those differences aside for one day to be a family, have a conversation, and genuinely empathize with each other. We check in on how the family and friends are doing. There’s always some wedding to talk about, some funeral, some graduation. There’s a lot of news, especially if you have an Italian family like I do. My mom had five brothers and a sister, so there’s a large group of people.
We recently had a soft fork in the Cardano ecosystem and a long-chain reorganization. The good news is we’ve recovered and come back stronger than ever. However, we’ve also faced social forks that are philosophical in nature, creating differences that at times felt irreconcilable. Everyone has grievances, and we all have our sins, myself included. For my part in all these things, I am sorry. At times, I can be a rigid and principled person, and when I see things I don’t like, I get angry. That approach can work sometimes, but often it fails. The reality is that in disunity and division, this ecosystem cannot succeed, regardless of philosophical differences.
The times ahead are going to be difficult because our industry as a whole has to fight for the soul of the world. Over the next five years, there will be two philosophies in the cryptocurrency space. One philosophy is to rebuild Wall Street, making it a little faster, better, and cheaper, while preserving the fundamental control structures and power groups that allow the middleman to rule your life. The other philosophy is to fully embrace the vision that Satoshi Nakamoto gave us, which came from the cypherpunks and freethinkers who believed that no entity should be so powerful that it decides your freedom of association, commerce, and expression. Instead, we should work together to figure that out, with no one person greater than another.
As an ecosystem of ecosystems, we cannot assert that we can deliver such a future to humanity if we can’t work together ourselves, regardless of our differences and disagreements. Within our own ecosystem, which we have control over, we must come together. Thanks to the hard work of Philip from Emergo, Fami from the Midnight Foundation, and Jack from Intersect, we came together today to discuss how all five entities—the Midnight Foundation, Intersect, Emergo, the Cardano Foundation, and IOG—can work better together for the greater good of the Cardano ecosystem.
In the coming days, weeks, and months, there will be proposals, but that’s for another time and another discussion. Here on Thanksgiving, I want to express my optimism that we can find a way to work together not only in the short term but also to establish a permanent governance structure where the entities can collaborate for the greater good of Cardano as a whole. The future is ours to earn and to win.
We have layoffs coming, Hydra starting to wake up with Delta DeFi and other applications, amazing innovations like Starream, and great ecosystems like Midnight leading the charge for commercialization. We also have Bitcoin DeFi to open up completely new markets. If we work together in unity as one voice, we can correct the things that need fixing and aggregate enough capital to get through this period in Cardano's history. This will leave us with two choices: Do people want to work with an ecosystem capable of doing great things for the greater good, or do they want to return to the days of Wall Street, division, centralization, and control?
I believe Cardano, Midnight, Bitcoin, and others that embrace unity, inclusive accountability, and equality will prevail. We are the good guys. Every day, we wake up and fight for every person to have a seat at the table. Even when it’s difficult to get them there, and even when we don’t want them there, we recognize their right to be there simply because they are human.
By popular demand, we cleaned up our mess and came back together. In the coming weeks, there will undoubtedly be some griping and social frictions. There’s no lost love in many circles, and there’s understandable anger. Harsh things were said and done, and there’s bitterness. However, we cannot move forward if that’s all we talk about, nor can we assert that we have the right to lead if that’s our focus.
From my perspective, I’m not going to dwell on the past anymore. I will focus on the new governance structure moving forward. If what I have said has been hurtful or harmful, or if you feel it’s unfair, you have my apologies. Please understand it came from a place of passion and love, but I also recognize that what we do and say can be hurtful. I want this ecosystem to succeed. I want Cardano to be the largest cryptocurrency in the world and the one that runs the world.
Every day, we need to reset, try new strategies, find new allies, and improve our existing relationships. We must start with ourselves. Ultimately, all I have control over is myself, so my approach must change, and this ecosystem's approach must change as well. I still have absolute faith in the design decisions made, the scientists who got us here, and the engineering that brought us to this point. Occasionally, incidents occur that reinforce that faith.
What happened recently with the soft fork was not a demonstration of Cardano's failures; it was a demonstration of its strengths. No other proof-of-stake system could survive an attack of this nature without physically shutting down the chain and manually resetting it. Only because we had a Nakamoto-style proof-of-stake algorithm and remarkable protocol engineering were we able to recover organically without significant disruption or loss, preserving Genesis and all the infrastructure and tooling.
This has happened to Bitcoin more than 3,000 times. Orphan blocks occur repeatedly, and the chains find a way to reconcile when there’s competition. Occasionally, this means people lose Coinbase rewards, and some transactions get dropped. That’s the magic of what Satoshi designed. It’s a feature, not a bug. It creates internal resilience so that a network, no matter how hard it’s hit, has a mechanism to recover to the longest chain over time. The network will heal itself.
Cardano taught me something I had forgotten: that no matter how big the fork, there is a way for two chains to become one. Today, we figured that out. In the coming weeks and months, you will see announcements, collaborations, pictures, joint efforts, and a reset in all relationships. We will move forward with one voice to accomplish what we need in 2026. There’s a lot of work ahead, and every single entity must do its part. The young newcomers like the Midnight Foundation, those with collaboration but dissonance like Intersect, the outsiders like Pragma that need to be integrated because they serve a critical role, and the old guard, including IOHK and the Cardano Foundation, all have a part to play alongside the community as a whole.
This time next year, we will be ten times stronger than we are today, and I already feel we’re pretty strong today. To all of you listening, if you’re in America, happy Thanksgiving. To those abroad, this is what Thanksgiving is all about. We all brought some turkey today, enjoyed it, and realized that what holds us together is much stronger than what drives us apart. Thank you so much, and God bless.
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