Some End of Year Thoughts

Hi, this is Charles Hoskinson broadcasting live from warm, sunny Colorado. Always warm, always sunny. Sometimes Colorado. Today is December 15, 2025. We're oh so close to Christmas, and we have a lot going on—lots of cool things.

But I wanted to make a video to talk a little bit about the year in totality and where 2026 is going and beyond. This has been a really tough year for our industry as a whole. A lot of people are cynical, angry, pessimistic, and bitter because we were promised a pony, and what we got was a donkey with some duct tape on the hooves. We got a donkey. It was a donkey of a year, damn it.

It's not even a good donkey; it's an old donkey with a gas problem. We woke up in December of 2024, and everybody had a lot of hope. I was in discussions about the cryptozar thing, meeting with senators. We were looking to a new administration, a new way of looking at crypto. The end of the Gendler era and the American war on crypto was coming to an end.

We knew that four-year super cycle was entering another year, and we said, "A lot of liquidity is going to enter in." I was recently interviewed by either Discover Crypto or Altcoin Daily; I forget which one. I think it was Discover Crypto. They asked about what happened—why did we have such a bizarre market? Where did we go wrong in all of this?

First off, institutional money did come in, but they got locked into the Bitcoin layer. Because of the structure, they can't sell the Bitcoin and buy altcoins. So all that value accumulation that entered through the institutional side stuck to Bitcoin but didn't trickle down. We lost our trickle-down effect that we enjoyed in 2021 and 2017 and beyond. That was the first issue that was very problematic for us as an industry.

The second thing was that we all thought the Trump administration would be more serious about the industry than it was. The canary in the coal mine—I sent ten people to the inauguration. They were running around, having fun, and they ran into Jake Paul and Mike Tyson, who was giving Mike Tyson a piggyback ride. They were high on mushrooms. That day at the inauguration ceremony, they launched Trumpcoin.

At first, I thought it was a joke. I said, "Holy [expletive], Trumpcoin. What the [expletive] is this thing?" It was pretty crazy. We were like, "What?

What are we doing here? This is nuts." Okay, it came out. I guess it's a new administration; they just want to shake things up a little bit. Maybe it's a ham-fisted attempt to show endearment to the industry as a whole.

But then they launched Melania, and it was clear these were cash grab situations. We as an industry had to just take it on the chin because we were hoping for a more permissive regulatory structure. So we said, "All right, it is what it is. Let's just take the good and move forward." There were a lot of ebbs and flows.

The cryptozar they selected is also the AI czar. More than 20 people were interviewed for that cryptozar, and they just picked somebody who didn't interview, who’s best friends with Elon Musk, was an operating officer for him, and is kind of a podcast bro in Silicon Valley. He has no real significant connections to the industry as a whole, didn't build anything in this industry, and just buys stuff in the industry like Solana and so forth. Then they were supposed to have a crypto commission, and Bo Hines was going to be the executive director. Members of the industry who weren't selected to be cryptozar would come in to be on that commission.

They decided to get rid of the commission. We were supposed to meet with the president, but then invitations got rescinded. They had these White House meetings, which were supposed to be many, but they only did one, and it didn't produce the effect they wanted. Then there was going to be a reserve, and ADA's in it, and Solana's in it, and XRP is in it, and Ether's in it, and Bitcoin's in it. Then it became Bitcoin only, but we're going to tweet it anyway, right?

Bump, bump, bump, and we got the Genius Act done. It was very hard to get that over the line. We started working on clarity in earnest, and a lot of things came here. But the problem was that because of World Liberty Finance and Trumpcoin, it created an environment for the Democrats where crypto equals Trump equals bad. Everything that was bipartisan in December was not bipartisan by about June or July.

The bills became a referendum on ethics as opposed to good policy for the industry. That was tough; that was really tough. It created a lot of unnecessary strife and bad blood. The macro was also very uncertain. We had tariffs come down the road.

Are we in a trade war with China? Are we not in a trade war with China? Are we headed to a recession? Are we not headed to a recession? We also had a lot of wealth accumulation at the top—the millionaire and billionaire class—and an extremely stagnant recovery for the blue-collar people in the sub-millionaire class.

It's a split economy. If you're in my economic class, you're doing really well; you're making money. If you're in a normal person's economic class, you're stagnant or declining. Then we looked at a lot of the tech investments, and we are in an AI bubble. That AI bubble is evident by the fact that Nvidia is worth more than Australia and Canada combined.

One company that's not sustainable. We understand there's great value there; we understand the AI revolution is interesting, and there are a lot of value propositions to what AI is doing. I'll even show you guys a video that's pretty dystopian. But you can't have more than 1% of the entire US GDP committed to something that's not sustainable. We don't have as a nation the will and the budget to build 50 power plants a year.

We don't have the will and the budget to invest a trillion dollars a year in data centers. We're not China. This is not what we do. We don't have that central top-down planning. When you look at the investments and the expectations of those investors, that's not sustainable either, and a lot of people know that.

So the markets are a little soft and spongy and weak. We were promised Russia would stop attacking Ukraine; that didn't happen. It's still going on. A little bit of peace in the Middle East, but it's not really what we want. Now we're starting a new conflict in Venezuela, committing act after act of war, taking their tankers and blowing up their boats.

A lot of people believe regime change will occur within six to twelve months. Some friends of mine, including some people on my detail, have been activated to train people in Taiwan. There's a lot of discussion about a potential kinetic conflict with China in 2027. As an industry, when we take a look at the industry as a whole, the biggest problem is that retail did not return. The answer I give to that is: why should they?

What has this industry offered retail to return? Retail showed up in 2021; they were excited, enthusiastic. The cab driver was there, the waitress was there, the construction worker was there—everybody was excited about crypto. Then they got screwed. They got screwed again and again and again.

They got roped into buying NFTs, like that million-and-a-half-dollar banana picture NFT and all this other garbage. 2022 decimated and wiped out a lot of people, making them very disgusted and angry with the industry as a whole. So there was always this question: do we learn our lesson as an industry, and do we try to build something better and more sustainable? Instead, the answer was memecoin mania, doing a memecoin of a memecoin of a memecoin. Every time I post a picture, someone creates a memecoin and spams my Twitter, hoping they too can get rich by dumping on retail.

Even legitimate projects like Midnight had a lot of people trying to short-sell them. In fact, negative 800%. It was insane when you looked at some of these things on the market and the short selling because they’re pre-programmed in this mindset that everything is a scam. Everything is dumping tokens on people. Of course, they got burned because it's not.

The trading volume erased them, which makes me happy. But this is the mentality that people have. In 2025, we did not restore trust and credibility in retail as a whole. A lot of people said if the president of the United States can issue a memecoin twice, including Melania, then this is not a serious market. It's just a parody of the financial market and a protest against the excesses of Wall Street as a whole.

So that's where we're at in 2025. There's been great technological progress. A lot of amazing new protocols have come out, and a lot of great code has been written. Congratulations to the Solana ecosystem on Fire Dancer; there's amazing progress there. They hit a lot of their KPIs.

You look at the rank and file on the engineering, you look at the rank and file on papers and protocols—it's impressive to see what's been achieved. The product market fit for retail? Not so much. It's been devastating. Now we're looking to 2026.

The question is: are we offering the same thing we offered in 2025, or are we going to do something different and new as an industry? I can't control the macro as the CEO of one company that builds one or two protocols. But what I can do is offer some advice. The advice has to be a return to first principles. No government is coming to save us.

No large company is coming to save us. No large investor is coming to save us. There is no cavalry coming to save us. We are on the island, and we as crypto have to decide whether we want to make a compelling case to bring people up or bring people down. It starts with the vision of the future.

Here is what the billionaire class is offering you: they want slaves. They found a legal way to get them back. It's not AI. This is a real video from a real company, showcasing the armies they're building. When I was younger, you may remember this scene from I, Robot.

It was fantasy, it was science fiction. Well, guess what? Now it's reality. They're building that right now. In five years, maybe ten years, no later than fifteen years, every delivery driver in America, every construction worker in America, every office job, every fry cook—this is who's going to be serving you.

It'll have the McDonald's color on it or all this type of stuff. That's what's coming. And then they say, "Oh, we'll solve it with UBI." Who would you trust to distribute UBI? A government or blockchain?

They'll solve it with higher taxation so the taxes can go to corporate welfare for the billionaire class, pay for some more wars. Is it really going to go to the poor people? There's a lot of this coming, and there's also the question: should these AI models that these things run be controlled by individuals or companies if they become a public good? If they're a public good, how do you regulate a public good? How do you control a public good?

Blockchain. That's the point of it. It's a payment system, a trusted bulletin board, a ledger, and a controlling function for a shared resource. In the case of Midnight, computational privacy; in the case of Bitcoin, digital gold and the payment system thereof. But it's a controlling resource for a shared public good.

AI is one example of that. AI has yet to meaningfully enter the blockchain space. We've been trying, as has Near and others, but it's been difficult for a time. In 2026, we can look to the future of advertising, the future of artificial intelligence, the future of money. We return to first principles and say, "Let's look to the year 2030, the year 2035.

" We have to ask ourselves: what do we want as a society? How you bring retail in is you convince them that you have a vision where you can build a better world. You build a better world by showing them what the world could look like versus what it will look like if we do nothing. In the spirit of Christmas, there was a Christmas movie where the protagonist gets to imagine a world where he didn't exist and all the impact it would have on people's lives. It's the same here in blockchain.

Remove it from the equation for a moment. How does globalization work? How does robotics work? How does AI work? How does the digitization of money work when we get rid of cash and go to all CBDCs?

How does any of that work? What you'll find is it's a dystopian hellscape. That's just the way it is. And that's what we have to deal with. We have to ask ourselves: are we personally comfortable with that as individuals?

Most people would say no because they don't have any agency. They feel like there's nothing they can do, no influence they can have, no meaningful way they can approach this. That's how you bring retail back: you show them the vision. You give them agency. You say, "what?

Let's all come together and figure this one out together as an industry, and we're going to solve these problems systematically." What we've done as an industry, especially in the last four years, is say your goal in the industry is to buy at price point X and sell at price point Y, with Y higher than X. The delta is your profit, where you go back to the legacy system, which you're supposed to be out of, and then you're going to use that to buy stuff—maybe stuff you need, maybe stuff you don't need, maybe pay off debts, whatever. But financial freedom—that's what you're selling. How can you sell that and not have it be a scam?

How is that possible? It's a rigged system. Ninety-nine percent of people will lose their money. If that is what you're selling, Gendler has a point. There's no path forward for value appreciation to occur unless you've created a utility or service that creates natural consumption.

You have to have something on the other side of the rainbow where people are using it not to speculate but to solve a real problem that couldn't be solved before. Yet for four-plus years now, year after year since 2021, the narrative has been: what is the next 10x, and how soon can I dump? When people lose money, it's a scam. That's the narrative. There's no vision, no mission, no greater good or common good.

There's no enemy that we're beating or slaying. It's just avarice. Whether something's a good project or a bad project is completely connected to the token price on Coin Market Cap. What's the point of this? Why are we here?

Why take the abuse? What's the difference? You've taken every single thing that makes what we are special and the problems we can solve, and you've reduced it to "number go up" or "never go down" as an industry. Then you ask: why is retail not coming back? Because retail is smarter now.

You screwed them. You dumped on them. You hurt them. You made them look like fools to their wives, husbands, parents, and children when they lost their life savings. Now you want them to come back so you can do it again?

Will they? No. No, they won't. No human being should have to endure that type of punishment a second time. Come on, grow up and mature.

No one is coming to save you. Either you make the case that the utility is worthwhile, that you're solving a major existential problem in the future, that you have the ability to actually change things for the better, or you don't deserve to get rich. Everybody wants to be rich; they want to be the big entrepreneur. You're wannabe entrepreneurs. You have to do the work; you have to make the change.

That's why 99% fail after it's all said and done. They don't really want to build the product; they don't want to embrace the chance of failure. The vast majority of people will fail in any business endeavor. But the ones who succeed do so because they did something new, different, and special, providing real value to others over the long term. So when we look to 2026 as an industry, we know the problems.

We know AI is coming; we know the robots are coming. We know the global financial system is a Ponzi scheme. It's 338 trillion in global debt that is unrepayable, heading to 500 trillion globally. That is an astronomically large amount of money that no one can ever repay. It's just one Ponzi scheme where they shift things from one side to the other.

We're headed towards a global collapse. We know we're headed towards strife, conflict, and war. We know that the rule of law doesn't matter anymore. We really know that in our hearts, the fiction of the rule of law is gone. We now have structural parallel economies where the millionaires and billionaires live really well, consuming and having fun, while everyone else is basically forgettable until they can be totally replaced with robots.

Then what do we do with these giant piles of people floating around? We know that's coming. All you care about is "number go up" so you can try to get into the other group. You're not going to be in the other group. Ninety-nine percent of you won't be.

So do something different. Opt out of the old system and into the new system, and opt into new systems with values where you have a voice, sound money, and agency over the custody of your funds. You control that, and only you control that. Opt into something that can actually run the economic, political, and social systems of the world and preserve and protect your liberties—your freedom of association, commerce, and expression. Then you get to say, "At least I have something in my life that they can't mess up.

At least I have something real. At least I said, 'No, I'm not going to sit here and wait five years for a goddamn robot to replace me.' I'm not going to wait five years to wake up and find out that my job has been replaced with an AI that sounds a lot smarter than me, never calls in sick, and costs a dollar a day of electricity to run. I'm sorry; I'm not going to wait for that. I'm going to go ahead and do something else and go to a different system.

" That's been the arc of my entire career. Every day I wake up and try to find new and creative ways to enable that reality—new methods of distribution, new ways of dealing with these markets. There are a thousand compromises you have to make. Every step of the way, there's some value extractor, some horrible person, or some reality of these markets and the mentality that people have that tries to It's not fun for anyone in our ecosystem, in our industry. It's not okay.

It's manipulation. It's damaging, and it causes harm. We ride the roller coaster up, we ride the roller coaster down, and we never have any seat at the table. I'd rather just be left alone to our own devices. I'd rather not be mentioned because then we can just do the retail work, wake up every day, and build Reali and Midnight and all kinds of interesting and exciting experiences like Quantum Hosky.

Not to mention the hundreds of entrepreneurs in the Cardano ecosystem, the Iagons, the Sunday Swaps, the Midgards, who want to do interesting and new things. I'd rather just focus on that, build those types of things, and not get caught in this miasma of all this stuff because those are my people. They’re not prestigious. They don’t command national attention. The media doesn’t write about them.

The New York Times doesn’t run exposés and articles. They’re everyday people just like me, just you. We’re equals in one revolution. We wake up every day, go, and get the work done. We do this not because we want to make big fortunes, but because, legitimately speaking, we don’t want to live in an alternative world.

Who wants to live in a world where every single person who serves you is a robot? Every interaction you have is with an AI. Every email you read was written by a robot. Every connection you have is curated. Every picture you look at on Tinder is AI-generated.

Every human being is modified or augmented in some way. There’s no objective reality or truth; it’s all just slop. Every asset is owned by some heartless international company, or an apartment building is owned by BlackRock or Blackstone. There are more private equity companies than McDonald’s in the United States now—19,000 versus 14,000. Who wants to live in that world?

And then you wonder, why am I depressed? Why do I feel lost and alone? Why do I feel like all meaning is bereft, and all you can do is just sit on Twitter and post? That’s about it. Social media’s only purpose is to complain and empathize about everything.

I don’t want to live in that dystopian hellscape. I want to live in a world where I can verify someone’s a human being. I want to live in a world where, if I want to pay to interact with a human being, I pay to interact with a human being, not a robot. I want to live in a world where the money in my pocket can’t be debased by politicians because they can no longer be trusted. They’re dishonest people, and they will always be dishonest people.

Fool me once, fool me twice, fool me how many times now? Come on. You can’t trust them. They’re basically diapers; you’re just waiting for them to be filled. Some take a while, some right after they put the diaper on.

But guess what? It’s going to be full. That’s what a politician is, and I’m tired of it. You’re tired of it. Let’s stop it.

Let’s move on. Let’s not have this happen anymore. Let’s grow up as a society. That’s what I want to do. That’s what you want to do.

So, 2026 is a return to first principles if we so choose it. Midnight was the beginning of that retail-only distribution. We traded $1.5 billion worth of Knight token today. The market cap flipped Algorand.

How about that as a new entrant? There was no ICO, there were no VCs lurking around. It was just giving the people something new and different and seeing what happens. People are excited about it. what?

It has new things it brings to the table: private smart contracts. What’s that about? It feels different. We can take all these DAOs and all this money, and they keep saying we can put a business on a blockchain. We can put a business on a blockchain.

Reali is going to have a co-op with it, and I want to put that co-op on the blockchain. We’re going to take Reeve and modify that thing a little bit and add a privacy layer to it. Let’s find a path to have a cooperative run and have an actual DAO for the first time ever really be on a blockchain. Why not? Let’s do it.

Let’s put our money where our mouth is. Let’s try something different, new, and interesting. It might fail; it might not fail. But you have to be willing to fail to succeed. You have to take a chance.

You have to believe that people are going to show up and get things done. Every single time I’ve said, “Hey, do you want to do something new and different and interesting?” all of you showed up. The retail showed up, and you said, “Yeah, why not? Let’s take a shot.

Let’s take a chance.” So that’s what 2026 for us is going to be defined as. We tried the flashy stuff; it’s just not who I am. I tried. I tried to put on the suit.

I tried to play nice with all these political people. I tried so hard to fit into that crowd, and I just don’t. I won’t. I’m the guy with the lobster on the mic. I’m the guy with the bee on the mic.

That was a gift from someone who gave me a honey hive. I had trouble putting it together. That’s who I am at my core. I wake up every day, read papers, read books, think about weird things, opine on the future, and join X spaces in the middle of the night. I wake up every day and just do the work.

I did it when I was poor, and I do it when I’m rich. I don’t care if I go back to poor; I just do it from an apartment. It’s what I love doing. I enjoy it. I like being in the driver’s seat.

I like having some semblance of agency because it makes me feel better about the future. It makes me feel like maybe, just maybe, we can actually have a say in all of it. I’ve seen what’s on the other side of the curtain. I’ve seen the greed, the avarice, the sociopathy, and the disdain that these elite people have for the common man. I’ve also seen where they want to take this.

They want to make you useless and then get rid of you because you’re no longer needed. I don’t want to live in a world where there’s a group of people that think that’s okay. I want to live in a world where everybody matters. Is that it? It’s pretty simple, huh?

So, 2025 was a tough year. I feel your pain. I really do. It was tough for me. It was the hardest year of my life.

I traveled more this year than anything else—one place after another, one interview after another, one thing after another, one launch after another launch. We had to deal with everything. The perfect day was when I was in executive workshops talking about how we’re going to make everything work in 2026, and then they called me in for the soft fork. We were dealing with that, and then we had a workshop with RealFi all in the same day. It’s a 26-hour day; you just do it.

And we got it done. We pushed through. We do it for you. When we look to 2026, though, it’s going to be a better year because it’s the reset. The nonsense is over.

We’re back to work. We’re back to where we were. We’re back to first principles, and we’ll see where it goes. Maybe good, maybe bad; I don’t know, but it’s going to be different, and different is good. Thank you all for listening.

I wish you a Merry Christmas and happy holidays. Take some time; social media is not reality. Spend time with people in reality—friends, family, even if it’s just yourself; that can still be good too. But don’t spend it online. Take time off.

Get off Twitter, get off Facebook, get off all these platforms, and reset a little bit. The world needs to calm down. We all need to calm down. Have some more empathy, have some more love in your heart, have some more compassion, and understand the world is filled with a lot of people just trying to figure it out. The next five years are filled with a lot of wonders and magic, and there are a lot of really cool and interesting things down the pipe.

But they’re also going to be filled with a lot of pain and heartache, and a lot of people are going to go through some difficult times. Understand that just because you’re not one of them right now doesn’t mean that you won’t be in the future. There’s a karmic cycle that we go through, and we really need as a society to take a step back and realize that all of our problems are our problems, and we’re only going to get through it together. So in 2026, it’s a return to first principles. In 2026, it’s a return to retail, and we showed that with the launch of Bitnight.

We’re going to continue showing that with Cardano, Midnight, and Bitcoin DeFi, and we’ll see where it goes. I, for one, believe in you, and I, for one, need your help. So, we’re all going to work together, those who are willing, and hopefully, we can celebrate 2026’s Christmas with a slightly bigger smile than this one. Good night, everyone, and God bless.