Happy New Year and Farewell

Hi, this is Charles Hoskinson broadcasting live from rough and rugged Wyoming, up here at the ranch. It's about 10:17 p.m., and we're just about ready to say goodbye to 2025. What a year it was!

We had a lot of fun, but we also faced many challenges. Many of us didn’t get what we wanted this year. We didn’t see the rally we hoped for, and we didn’t get the regulation passed that we wanted. Many thought that the tough times under Biden were over and that we were entering a new age of crypto. One of the things about crypto is that it has to change, and we have to change.

We need to think differently, act differently, and ultimately go back to first principles. We must ask ourselves what the purpose is of why we’re here and what we do. We got so caught up in the success that we forgot to build something that can cash the checks we write as an industry. Crypto exists to change the economic, political, and social systems of the world. It exists to give you back your freedom of association, commerce, and expression.

Somewhere along the way, we lost our way. This isn’t because meme coins or NFT projects are bad or that any of these things are intrinsically evil or wrong. Like anything, if you overdo it, it becomes a problem. But if you lose focus, you lose your way. I’ve spent quite a bit of time here at the ranch in deep reflection about what this year meant to me, where I want to go, what I want to achieve, and ultimately how we can achieve the broader mission and what my role is in that mission.

To get this right off the bat, I’m not leaving the cryptocurrency space. I’m aware that every time I make a live stream or say something, it gets misconstrued, negative articles get written, and then it gets amplified by hostile groups like cryptocurrency Reddit. So, let’s just put that on the table: I’m not going anywhere. But the approach has to change. The reality of being a public figure is that we start with a strong desire to become accessible and broadcast who we are and how we live our lives.

We want to share our experiences in real time with the countless thousands, if not millions, of people who follow us. Unfortunately, that desire gets weaponized. The more famous you become, the less accessible you have to be. That’s a sad truth I’ve become aware of over the last few years, especially in these tough markets where people have become inordinately hostile and toxic. It’s not just about ignoring it.

Because of my presence and the way people perceive me, there are groups that will never participate in Cardano or Midnight. That’s not fair to the countless hundreds of thousands of people around the world who believe in these projects and want them to succeed. I have to moderate my desire for accessibility with the stark reality that guilt by association has become the standard way people handle the world today. We don’t ask what something does; we ask who made it, and then we try to figure out our relationship with them. If we love them, then that thing must be good.

If we hate them, then that thing must be evil and wrong. There’s no greater example of this than Trumpcoin. Many of us in the industry knew deep down that it should never have been done, but none of the major cryptocurrency founders spoke out against it, with the possible exception of Vitalik Buterin—kudos to him for that. The rest stayed silent, not because they agreed it was a good idea, but because they understood the consequences of speaking out as public figures. I see no integrity in that.

Either we’re here to speak our minds and speak the truth, or we’re not. How can we assert that we have the right to run the world, that we’re the rebels who will overcome the world financial system and build a better one, if we don’t have the courage to say when things are wrong or when we made a mistake? Cardano is the product of many of my personal mistakes and successes—some of my most brilliant moments and some of my least brilliant. Some of my most heroic and most regrettable moments of my life happened during the Cardano project. In reflection, especially as we enter 2026, I always ask, how can I be better?

How can I grow? How can I do things differently? In every dimension, you have to look at that. For example, I’ve outgrown X. So, it’s my farewell to that platform.

I’ll turn it over to curators and AI. It’ll go into silent mode for probably a few weeks to a few months as we build up that infrastructure because I have more important things to do. I’m going to uninstall the app and never think of it again. I just don’t have time anymore for that way of interacting with people, and I don’t have time to endure what they give. There’s just no benefit to it.

It’s noise. Instead, I’m going to focus on long-form writing, AMAs, live streams, new forms of communication, new platforms, and new media. I might even do a Twitch stream and talk while playing a game. I think kids today really love that. But you always have to be uncomfortable, have a beginner’s mind, and look at things from a new lens and a new perspective.

I want to keep up with the times and find innovative ways to communicate with people and show them that I have great ideas. I believe there’s a lot to contribute. I’m also going to go into deep focus. I’m at a product level and a level of specificity I haven’t been in for a long time. I spent some of this afternoon writing out a specification for a CKVM.

I worked on adding privacy to intents and discussing chain abstraction, reasoning about how the different layers—application, permission, solver, and settlement—work. I’m immersing myself in the latest and greatest ideas in the industry. And what? I was happy because I get to create things. I’m happiest when I have the ability to construct something to share with everybody, and I’m happiest when I see people use that and it wows them.

Every day I wake up and ask, “How do I build something a million people can use?” Then I ask, “How do I build something a billion people can use?” Right now, I’m thinking about strategy for Midnight over the next five years. I’m asking, “How can I write a strategy down that will have a billion users and a trillion dollars of transactions on the platform by 2030? What would that take?

What technology would we need? Where would we get them from? How many would come from the legacy world? How many would come from Web 3?” That’s what makes me happy.

That’s what I enjoy. I also love working with amazing people. I’ve been incredibly privileged over this year and the many years before it to work with incredible people. It doesn’t matter if it’s the president of my company, Tam Hass, or an intern from some university no one’s ever heard of. Each person contributes something.

When I have the ability to work with them and they take their job seriously, it makes my day better because they bring something original, creative, and new that I couldn’t come up with myself. This increases our chances of success and realizing our goals. 2025 has been probably the hardest year of my life. I entered it thinking I was going to lose a bunch of weight. I was ready for the bullet ant ritual.

I had the courage to take my shirt off on the internet, even though I don’t look so good, and I tried earnestly to lose the weight. But the stress and biochemistry got in the way. I traveled for more than 260 days. I averaged only five and a half hours of sleep a night. It’s not sustainable.

If I keep doing this, I won’t look 50; I’ll look 70. Metabolically, I’ll also be the same. No amount of stem cells is going to fix that. So, it’s clear to me that I have to make some changes. After Japan and Hong Kong, in addition to not having Twitter, I’m also not going to travel as much.

I’m going to stay on my ranch or my farm, get reacquainted with getting back in shape, and eat right. I’m going to spend a great deal of time in calm reflection and read more. There are so many things I enjoy reading, so many books I love, and so many ideas I want to dissect. I studied mathematics. My critics love to remind me that I never finished a degree in mathematics, despite taking dozens of advanced courses, undergraduate and graduate.

I probably have a library of 400 or 500 math books, and I’ve read most of them. I run one of the largest research groups in the world with 168 scientists and over 250 papers on dense mathematics. The truth is that by a technical term, I am not a mathematician, but I am a math enthusiast. I deeply enjoy the art of problem-solving. Mathematics is a game where you have something you want to be true, but you have to discover the path to get there.

People who love that are never bored, never alone, and never have a bad day. No matter how hard it gets, they can always take a moment to think about one of those roads they have yet to travel and imagine if that road will get them to a place they want to be. The saddest days are when you solve your old friends, when you finally get there. The Japanese have this saying called Yūgen. Alan Watts talks about it, as do others.

It’s the idea of pondering what’s on the other side of the mountain. You can’t see it, but you wonder about it. If you wonder too deeply, you ruin it. But if you reminisce on the potential beauty of it, it’s magical. Writing proofs in mathematics is much the same.

When you look at that, it’s life in general. When you’re young, you never see behind the mountains because you have never climbed a peak. As you get older, it gets harder to climb peaks that aren’t familiar to you. You start valuing creativity and originality, and you start valuing genuinely new things. I’ve been to 75 countries.

I’ve launched cryptocurrencies that have reached a value of over a hundred billion dollars. I was a billionaire at the age of 33. This isn’t bragging; it’s a consequence of being very lucky and fortunate to be in the right place at the right time, to have met the right people, and to have worked relentlessly toward an end. I’m proud of that. But I also reflect on the fact that if I keep doing the same thing over and over, there’s no more joy and excitement.

There’s no more originality or creativity. So, 2026 has to be about returning to something new—a year of originality, creativity, and doing different things in different ways. If I get there, I’ll feel young again, and I won’t look so old or be so stressed. That’s the journey. It’s not measured in minutes or hours, days or weeks, or even months.

It’s a journey of a lifetime. You just wake up with the mentality that you have to keep pushing forward. Even if you don’t get everything done on your to-do list, every now and then you accomplish something, and that’s enough. I was driving one of the back roads with my brother when we saw that lightning had struck one of the trees. I said, “I’ve never used the winch on these new UTVs.

Let’s clear that tree off the road.” We tried not to get ourselves killed by snapback in the process. So, we cleared it. Then we thought, “That tree is a fire hazard just being there, dead on the side of the road. Let’s grab a chainsaw and have some fun.

” We found a chainsaw, chopped it up, and I still have all my fingers. I’m a lucky man. But that really is the meaning of life, if you think about it. When you look at the mountains, you smile over the prospect of what’s behind them. When you find the tree sitting over the road, you take a side quest to clear it.

If you do these things, you have a good day. If you do these things every day, you have a good life. How many of you listening, how many of you addicted to social media drama and the vices and problems of others, can honestly say you found a tree today, metaphorically or physically? And how many of you can say you truly lived in the moment? Maybe you did, and you’re lucky, or you lived your life this way.

Most of you probably didn’t if you’re being honest, myself included. When I spend too many days without finding that tree, I know I need to make a change. That’s what growing up is about. Looking to the future, I think 2026 is going to be a great year. There are new faces, new ideas, and new people.

The old people are a bit wiser and more humble, and they know how to work with those new people. I can see a world where Midnight has a remarkable year, Cardano has one of its best years ever, and our industry as a whole grows up and changes things. I can also see a world where we continue to be dragged down by greed and avarice, where we remain in conflict with each other. But why buy into that? If that’s the outcome, that’s the outcome.

Let’s choose not to believe that will happen. Let’s choose to believe that the better angels will persevere. If we want a bull run, we’ll create one. If we want crypto to be adopted, we’ll create that too. At the end of the day, we’re selling stories and hope.

If people bite, we create a movement. With a movement, you can actually change the world. There’s no reason why crypto can’t be successful unless we, as an industry, choose not to make it successful. There’s no reason why crypto can’t ascend, get billions of users, and be involved in everyone’s life unless we choose for that not to happen. What’s the alternative?

Federated networks of banksters who rob us every year and politicians who rob us every year? They go from one war to the next, debasing our currency, and we’re heading toward a $500 trillion global debt that will never be repaid. All of you will be wage slaves, owning nothing and being miserable as a robot eventually takes your job, living off UBI table scraps from a trillionaire. That’s the alternative. That’s what we’re fighting against.

The greatest con, the greatest scam ever perpetuated on humanity, is to convince the mainstream populace that they’re powerless. It’s to take your agency from you, to rob you of the ability to ask why, to say, “I didn’t consent to that,” and to say, “I’m going to change that.” It is unreasonable to sleepwalk into a system where mankind is placed in bondage, where the few dominate and rule the many. It’s utterly unreasonable to be told to work hard your whole life only to have everything you’ve saved become worthless. It’s unreasonable to be told that you’ll own nothing, rent everything, and your only existence is to be a slave to the few.

These will never be reasonable things. Anyone who tries to convince you that you have no agency in changing them is either part of the machinery inflicting this upon you or delusional. The purpose of crypto is to give all of us the freedom to imagine that we can make a difference. It’s not to launch meme coins or NFTs, as magical and amazing as these things can be. It’s much more fundamental.

It’s to tell you that you have the right to dream big dreams and to be a big person. I came from nothing. There was nothing in my background, education, or connections that would have given me any ability to do these things in the conventional legacy world. I had been laughed out of every room. The same is true for every entrepreneur in our space who is worth something and wasn’t implanted by some bank to form an enclave to perpetuate control over us for generations.

We came from nothing. That’s why I don’t care if I return to nothing. You can’t take it with you. It doesn’t matter if I go from broke to billionaire to broke. What matters is that I get to look at myself in the mirror and say, “I chose to do something different, new.

I chose to be something different. I chose not to consent and to bring people along and say, ‘We’re just going to go our own way.’” That’s how I live my life. As Musashi used to say, you have to build that inner house that rules you. He wrote about this while dying of stomach cancer in a cave.

Remember, he was a Ronin, wandering around Japan, masterless, sometimes sleeping outside in the rain, sometimes in a stable, sometimes in a house, broke, going from duel to duel, thinking, “This could be my last day.” How do you stay happy and calm when you live a life like that? You build an inner house so that no matter what the external circumstances are, you’re happy there. The core of that house is integrity. Never let people rob you of your integrity.

Never let circumstances do so. Have the courage to do the right thing, say the right thing, and accept the consequences when you do things wrong. My inability at times to work with people and how I’ve treated them has created unfortunate circumstances that have limited my opportunities. Despite these things, I’ve achieved great things and gone to great places. But imagine how much greater it could have been had I acted differently.

You don’t obsess about it; you just don’t do it anymore. You change, you move forward, and you become a different person. Are we so cynical and pessimistic as a society that we rob people of the right to grow, to redeem, to become different? What does that say about ourselves? It’s as good as it’s ever going to get.

Enjoy your misery. Empathy, love, and hope are some of the most magical gifts we have. If there’s any proof of divinity, if there’s any proof of a creator, it’s those things. There’s no biological reason why such things should exist the way they do, but because they exist, they enrich and make life meaningful. Some of the best moments of your life—and certainly mine—have been in service to others, in love, and in empathy.

As we look to 2026, we have to ask ourselves: Do we live in a world of empathy, compassion, and love, or do we live in a world of hate, cynicism, pessimism, greed, and division? Where does that start? It starts with you, the listener.