Thoughts on Growth for Cardano in 2026 (Pentad Series)

Hi, this is Charles Hoskinson broadcasting live from warm, sunny Colorado. Always warm, always sunny, sometimes Colorado. This is the first in a new series of videos I'm going to make. I call it the Pentad series. These are whiteboard videos, or blackboard videos, or digital blackboard videos—however you want to call it.

The idea is that we're going to talk a little bit about how we achieve growth in 2025 for the Cardano ecosystem. First off, as we looked at the old roadmap, our goal was to reach a point of Voltater. The purpose of Voltater was to create a situation where the Cardano community is in the driver's seat regarding the direction of Cardano. The community gets to decide what the priorities are and how we think about Cardano and where we want to go. We always had this idea that a government needs a judicial, legislative, and executive function.

However, the executive function was always a bit murky. The reason being that if you're not careful and you don't have a strong enough legislative and judicial function, there is no one to keep the executive function in check and restrain it from taking over everything. So, you need some sort of structure in place. About a year has passed under CIP 1694 and the Cardano constitution, and now we have a very strong legislative branch and a very strong judicial committee. The DREPs act as a check and balance.

After the fork incident, we proposed creating a pentad structure, which consists of five entities: the Cardano Foundation, Emergo, Input Output Group, the Midnight Foundation, and Intersect. We thought, why not figure out a "try before you buy" for each other and for the community? The "try before you buy" concept is the Cardano critical infrastructure concept. There’s a long backlog of things we need—bridges, stablecoins, oracles, analytics, and so forth. These are critical for Cardano DeFi to operate and function on par with its neighbors, like Solana and Ethereum.

The critical infrastructure concept suggests that these entities are super expensive and run by very competent business people. If we're divided, they will divide and conquer, leading to a mess and high costs. So, why not put a pentad together? Why not have all these people talk with one voice and collectively negotiate, similar to collective bargaining? We need to start getting ink on paper, signing deals, and ensuring there are development teams, audit teams, and other resources in place to make sure these things get used.

It would be absolutely insane if we spent nine or twelve months working together and then said, "Okay, we're done. We'll just pack up and move home." For this to work, we have to establish a governance structure and a culture among these five entities where we are all one team, coordinating and collaborating on behalf of the Cardano ecosystem. What’s nice about this is it’s kind of pass/fail. Either we got these integrations, or we didn’t; they’re working, or they’re not.

This is a good test function for an emerging executive function. Once we have a working executive function, we can move on to a slightly more subjective and challenging conversation: growth. For the purposes of this video, we have three metrics: Monthly Active Users (MAU), transactions per day, and Total Value Locked (TVL). We can argue about whether these metrics are real or not. Jarro Moron set up a program with me, and we’re getting a lot of people involved to discuss a better set of KPIs.

I’m going to propose that once we have a final set of candidate KPIs, we submit an info action to make them the official ecosystem KPIs. We’ll put them all together and say these are the KPIs of the ecosystem. The legislative side gets to say "check," and then every budget moving forward has to be connected to growth in those metrics. For this video, let's start here. We have two issues: one is that we’re missing the commercially critical infrastructure, the integrations to even begin having the conversation about growth.

We’re basically an island, and we have to fix that. That’s what we’re doing as an ecosystem for both Midnight and Cardano. Above and beyond that, we have a list of about 10 to 15 DAPs that are showcases of the Cardano DeFi ecosystem. These are examples of what you can do on Cardano. If someone asks, "What can I do on Cardano?

" you hand them that list. However, those DAPs are underfunded and understaffed. They need more people, and they don’t have a lot of transaction volume or users. These three metrics directly impact the profitability of those DAPs. By profitability, we also mean their ability to list their tokens on tier-one exchanges.

Midnight acted a bull in a china shop and opened the door for Cardano native assets and all the big players. That was very hard work, but it’s done. This means there’s now an opening for these DAPs to reach the requisite size, scope, and scale to get listed and evolve to the next level. The first "try before you buy" is whether we can work together effectively to collectively bargain and get all these integrations done. The very next thing is to grow our DeFi ecosystem by 2026.

We have to figure this out. You start with a good set of KPIs, then sit down with a unified strategy. That strategy needs to improve what we already have. We need to solve the issues of being underfunded, understaffed, and unprofitable. We also need to improve UI/UX on both the DAP side and the wallet side.

Additionally, we need to work with them to develop Unique Selling Propositions (USPs) to ensure they’re competitive in their domains. We also need to work with aggregators of capital and people. We need a situation where, when we flip the switch, tokens from many ecosystems can flow into these DAPs, and there’s a reason for them to do so. We also want people from those DAPs to become sticky within the ecosystem. Any good strategy will include an aggregator strategy, which is where things like Bitcoin DeFi fit in, as it opens up channels for capital and people.

The same goes for the XRP ecosystem and any UTXO cryptocurrencies that lack native smart contract capabilities but want to earn yield. We need to improve the UI/UX and work on hybrid DAPs with Midnight, which helps because every Cardano DAP can also have a privacy angle—something current DeFi lacks. Part of the pentad strategy for phase two is to find an effective collaborative structure and, if people like what we do, start talking about DeFi growth. We need to identify the top 10 to 15 DAPs, fix their underfunding and understaffing, help them gain profitability, and get them where they need to be. Some of this involves building up the capital base so we can get XRP and Bitcoin on the ledger.

We need bi-weekly hackathons. We did this with Midnight, and the growth has been awesome. We can do this for Cardano, and there have already been wonderful wins, like End Maker, for example. Patrick organized one of the largest hackathons in Berlin, and there are others doing this. We need to do this bi-weekly to showcase that Cardano can compete with the best.

In addition to bi-weekly hackathons, we need better aggregators for people and better communication channels. Aggregators are essential for getting people into curated channels. For Midnight, we’re doing this in Discord, and we can create a Cardano Discord, but we need a different place for people to aggregate. Right now, it’s on X, which is probably the worst medium for community aggregation. It’s filled with bots, noise, and toxicity, and there’s no real way to curate community conversations.

We need tighter aggregation of people and more checkpoints with bi-weekly hackathons. There also needs to be outreach on the institutional side. We’re building a communications channel for major analytics firms, institutions, and VCs to give seminars about what’s going on with Midnight. We can do the same for Cardano, highlighting the cool things happening in the ecosystem. The number one thing I hear repeatedly is, "I didn’t know Cardano had X, Y, and Z.

" Many people think Cardano is a ghost chain or a dead coin because they get their information from aggregators like Messari or Electric Coin Capital. If we’re left out of reports or the numbers aren’t accurate, we appear to be dead. We need to change that narrative by directly communicating and showing the real numbers, pointing out the USPs. We need to aggregate the community and establish a consistent flow of hackathons. Once we have a single source of truth and broadcast that, we can control the narrative.

I previously mentioned the event strategy, where we try to replicate what we did at Token 2049 every year. The pentad could potentially handle this type of initiative. They can manage the DAP upgrades and all of this, but we can’t do it unless we figure out how to work together. This is my opinion as one member of the five, and it has to be ratified through them. If they have a different opinion, that’s completely valid.

A good governance structure means there’s discussion and eventually consensus. Emergo has a strong connection in Asia, especially in Singapore. Intersect is a member-based organization that brings up the entire community. I’d also like to see Pragma representation. Midnight is an incredibly hyperactive commercial arm that excels at negotiations and deal-making, and they want volume.

Hybrid DAPs make sense. Cardano Midnight will be its base market, and we’re an elite engineering firm that knows how to put these things together. With the right governance culture, we have everything necessary to make this happen. These are ongoing concerns. For our part, we’re restructuring our internal Cardano units at Input Output and considering creating a Cardano business unit.

This unit will aggregate our ecosystem side, engineering side, and all the governance work we do into one structure that represents Input Output in its entirety. The leadership there will be custom-trained to think with this growth mindset. We’re also investing heavily in horizontal capabilities and technologies. This means re-evaluating many of the languages and design decisions we made across every part of the stack. We want to achieve higher velocity, lower maintenance costs, and leverage the AI revolution.

For example, Google is writing about 30% of its code using Vibe engineering, and that number will only increase. Even if it’s slightly inferior to an engineer today, it’s like comparing vacuum tubes to transistors. Initially, transistors were worse than vacuum tubes, but it was clear they would win out. Over a 5 to 10 year period, Vibe engineering will become significant. We have a chance to amplify that business unit and significantly increase productivity, allowing us to catch up and deploy research faster to market.

We’re still doing formal methods and peer review; we’re just bringing something that would take a five or ten-year cycle into a one- to two-year cycle. We’ve done testing in Lace as non-critical infrastructure to start. Now we’re doing it in Acropolis, and after Acropolis, we can backport it across the entire business unit. This is stage two: let’s take care of what we have and think carefully about how we grow the engine systematically and deliberately. We have many touchpoints to grow that pie and excite people about why Cardano is special, from the institutional side to the developer side, and improve coordination.

There needs to be a new ambassador program for 2026. The current ambassadors are great, but we need more and need to invest in them. The same goes for the influencer layer; we have to think through what we’ve learned from Midnight to enhance that layer. This is how we build up a strategy and measure its success. We said we would do an info action with KPIs.

We can look at some straw man metrics like monthly active users, transactions per day, TVL, and the consumption cycle. What is my definition of success for these 10 to 15 DAPs? If we can get them to a certain level of scale and safety, would I feel safe putting my own Night token or ADA into them to earn a yield? Yes or no? Cardano has an exclusive launch called RealFi, which excites me.

People always ask, "When Africa?" They think we abandoned Africa with false promises. We never left; I gave over a million loans to people in Kenya and Uganda, building out the real model that will become a DAP exclusively on Cardano. This DAP is built for a bear market; it’s the ultimate bear market DAP. If it’s a bull market, it does okay, but in a bear market, it’s likely one of the most popular apps of all time.

Why? Because the yield is off-chain and has nothing to do with the crypto market. Predictable returns from off-chain yield mean that even if all token prices drop 90%, the yields remain the same. When all markets decline, and DeFi yields plummet, people will seek out places built for bear markets. This is an exclusive opportunity, and it’s part of the philosophical core and mission of the Cardano ecosystem—banking the unbanked and bringing exciting new things to the table.

We just had to get Midnight out first. Next in line is Reali, and John O’Connor is scaling up for that. As a venture studio, we’ll keep launching these experiences or partnering with others to upgrade them. Hydra is another powerful piece of technology we have. It can handle a million transactions per second on a DAP-by-DAP basis.

The team at Delta DeFi has done a phenomenal job of being the first mover in the next generation of Hydra applications on the Cardano ecosystem. For the 10 to 15 DAPs in the showcase, we need to determine if there’s a path to upgrade them all to be Hydra-enabled applications. This means they can operate at Solana-level speed individually with an on-chain footprint of just a few transactions, costing almost nothing for the network while enjoying super-fast performance. We’re working to make the base network significantly faster with Hydra to enhance each DAP's speed. If we’re doing bi-weekly hackathons, we’ll have a much faster lead time on DevX improvements for Cardano.

Instead of big annual updates to Plutus, we’ll have lots of smaller updates to vastly improve the developer experience. We’re already seeing some of the DevX improvements with Star Stream and others. There’s a solid plan brewing here, but we’ve always lacked executive functions. Everyone asks, "Whose job is it?" This is an election, and I want to make it our job to accomplish certain things.

It’s not about asking for the whole world; it’s about seeing if we can work with all these people. I know I can work with the Midnight Foundation, Intersect, and historically well with Emergo. I believe there’s a path for productive collaboration with the Cardano Foundation because we’re aligned on transparent external goals. We start with pass/fail tasks that are necessary for a thriving DeFi ecosystem but not sufficient. Then we move to the next step and socialize a strategy that encompasses event strategy, institutional strategy, people aggregation strategy, DevX hackathon strategy, and upgrading 10 to 15 DAPs next year to get them into a killer state.

We’ll get them excited, get them on Hydra, access to Bitcoin DeFi, access to XRP, and ensure we have a killer UI/UX. The Midnight angle is to sprinkle some privacy on that because our competitors in Ethereum currently lack that. This gives us something unique and different from the standard DeFi ecosystem. I think that’s a solid strategy, but again, I’m just one of five in the pentad. As we build this out, we’ll socialize it horizontally across everyone.

I made this video in the interest of transparency. We don’t make decisions behind closed doors or in an ivory tower. I want to share where my mind is at. Ethereum was small back in the day, as were Solana, XRP, and Binance. Just because they’re big now doesn’t mean they’re invincible.

Cardano is pretty big, all things considered. Many cryptocurrencies would trade for us, and there’s no reason we can’t achieve exponential growth in this ecosystem. It comes down to whether the principles, philosophy, strategy, cooperation, governance, and coordination are right, and if we have the right entrepreneurial spirit. Honestly, I wouldn’t trade our DAP set for any other. When you look at teams like Sunday, Phil and Midgard, Minswap, and Strike, these are passionate, capable, and deeply technical people who are just missing certain things—maybe capital, strategy, or market access.

If we unify as an ecosystem, there are more than enough resources, even at these deflated ADA prices. Remember, we built Cardano on a $250 Bitcoin. Vitalik Buterin built Ethereum on a $250 Bitcoin. Solana built its ecosystem in the aftermath of FTX and the worst recession our industry has ever faced. There’s no reason we can’t reach for the stars and achieve our goals with the resources we currently have.

The delta is whether we can coordinate and work together. This video is about the brewing executive function that has the potential to collaborate. We inked a deal today on integrations, which we’ll announce later this month. It’s just an appetizer for what’s to come. I have no reason to believe we can’t quickly onboard all the tier ones.

We need to stage them in order; smaller ones come first, and then the larger ones later, but they’re all necessary for our next steps. We’ll build up the Cardano DeFi ecosystem and get these things where they need to go. This obviously has to be socialized horizontally and vertically. There’s a nice debate process involved. We’re a little loose right now because it’s a pass/fail situation, and everyone understands that these things are under NDAs and expensive.

We know the success criteria: either they’re built or not built, either they come or they don’t. We can start measuring deeper KPIs, like 26 hackathons. If it’s bi-weekly, we can set a target of wanting a million people in Discord by a certain date and measure engagement. We can look at institutional seminars, create a master list, and determine if we held four major events. We can then figure out what to do with the Cardano Summit, especially since it’s now in Singapore around the same time as Token 2049.

We can take the top 15 DAPs, objectively measure them over a 180-day retroactive rolling average, and implement an accelerator program. We’ll clean all this up, build capital aggregators, and integrate everything with our proprietary tech, like Hydra. We’ll ensure these DAPs have incentives to stick around and progress. I’m going to keep launching applications, including Reali, which will be another glacier drop. It’s a DAP on Cardano built for bear markets, which is exciting as we launch it in 2026 while still in a challenging environment.

Midnight will lead the charge Ultimately, you've asked for a compelling reason why people should choose Cardano over Ethereum and Solana. This proposal is the beginning of answering those questions. If you vote no because you don't have 100% of everything answered, do understand that what you're effectively saying is that unless we have perfection, we can't do anything. In which case, none of this makes sense. We should just pack up shop and go home.

Vitalik Buterin didn’t have all the answers when the DAO hack happened; he just went with it and figured it out. Anatoly didn’t have the answers when FTX collapsed; he just figured it out. Brad Garlinghouse didn’t have the answers when the Securities Exchange Commission sued them and personally went after him, Chris, and the others. Bill Gates didn’t have all the answers when he got a phone call from IBM and they were angry because the people they sent to build their operating system decided not to sign the NDA. They had to scramble and buy DOS to fix it.

Steve Jobs didn’t have the answers after Lisa was a failure. All great ecosystems and leaders don’t have 100% of the answers upfront. Entrepreneurship is about the right governance structure, the right mindset, and the right agility to get where you need to go. When you look at a plan like this, you're saying, "We know for a fact we need these things." The question is, can we get it done or not?

Who else, besides the largest entities in the ecosystem that collectively control all the software, can do this? We're the only ones. ADAP can try, but the odds are they’re going to get taken advantage of, and they can’t make guarantees about roadmap items. Whereas collectively, because all the engineers, influence, and capital are nexus-tier, we have the best shot to get that done. If we’re successful there and we’ve built the right governance structure, we can create a much more elegant and beautiful strategy about how to put things together.

That’s the time to haggle and negotiate. But once it’s done, it’s done. Then you have clear KPIs. For example, we can set targets like wanting $250 million worth of Bitcoin on Cardano’s ledger by a specific date, or the same for XRP. We can look at the DApp and DeFi ecosystem and say maybe one of our KPIs is that half of the showcase DApps are listed on at least one tier-one exchange.

It’s a negotiation; it’s a back and forth. We can religiously track these KPIs as a dashboard: the monthly active users, the total value locked (TVL), the transactions, and then you have these things to aggregate. You can measure how many new engaged active developers we have in our ecosystem every month, every quarter, every six months, and every year. That’s how you get things done. When you look at this stuff, it’s the same when you look at a Discord or another aggregation point.

Why do we aggregate in a channel we own? Because then we can broadcast to everybody. Maybe we build a decentralized one using PubSub; that’s okay too. Maybe somebody wants to take the lead, and we give delegated authority to them. But the point is, once it’s there, there’s a single source of truth, and then there’s a great culture for all of this.

This is a strategy, and this is a compelling reason because you’ll notice that this strategy doesn’t require the election of a king. It’s delegated authority on behalf of the governance that can be revoked at any time, built in consultation with the totality of the ecosystem as a whole. Unlike Steve Jobs with the Lisa recovering to the Mac, unlike Jeff Bezos at the collapse of the dot-com boom and bust trying to figure out how to restore Amazon, and unlike Bill Gates scrambling to solve a problem about operating systems, there’s not a single person at the top saying, “I hope he figures it out.” It’s a collaborative endeavor with checks and balances, and enough actors are involved that everybody is a member at the end of the day. You can join Intersect and be a member of that organization.

The majority of the board of Intersect is community-elected, which means Intersect is a community organization. It’s out of its transition phase. That’s the difference between us and Ethereum, Solana, and even Bitcoin. Bitcoin is anarchy; there’s no governance structure at all, so it’s frozen in time. The best it can do is be a giant pool of value, and that’s fine, but it’s never going to be a smart contract stack.

It needs someone else to do that for it, which is why Bitcoin DeFi exists. Ethereum is still heavily reliant on the brain trust of a small handful of entities, and there’s no on-chain governance structure to replace them if those entities let the ecosystem down. In this structure, the pentad is elected, and it does things. If it doesn’t do the right things, then we know it’s not going to work. We can pivot and change because ultimately, the power is vested in the DREPs.

The constitution is very clear about this: you can give delegated authority to somebody, but the ultimate authority always belongs to the ADA holder in the structure. I think that’s the way we should do it. It was the bet that I made. We have the funds to do this as an ecosystem, and we can give people a good reason to believe that Cardano can grow tenfold in terms of its community size, in terms of its monthly active users, and in terms of its TVL. It’s not a technology problem.

Vitalik today wants Solidity to look like Haskell. He’s wanted liquid non-custodial staking for a while. If a chain split happened on Ethereum, there would be billions of dollars in losses of bonded Ether. There are zero dollars of loss for the pledge for Cardano because of the way our proof-of-stake protocol works. We can recover from massive incidents as if they never happened.

This is a unique selling proposition of our ecosystem. The more people learn, the more in love with the technology they’re going to become. Ultimately, I think people are going to realize that Cardano is the way to go. But we need the commercially critical integrations. We absolutely need to take care of those who put their careers and livelihoods on the line for Cardano.

We need to do a better job as an ecosystem elevating them up because they’re going to be the number one source of jobs. They’re going to be the number one group of people at the events broadcasting and advertising our ecosystem. Ultimately, they’re going to be the ones who take care of the protocol long-term. If you have 15 great DApps and we take care of them, we can mandate that they have to provide one or two full-time engineers to take care of core technology. If 15 turns to 50, you have 100 full-time engineers from the community to take care of the technology.

They’ve got to pay it back. Just like Snack took a loan, they’ve got to pay it back. We can do the same in that strategy. I think we can figure this out together. I want to figure this out with you all.

This is what it means to grow up and focus on first principles. We have to say what makes us special, what makes us unique, and where our source of power comes from as an ecosystem to make ourselves different. This would never happen with Vitalik and Ethereum; it’s just not how they operate. This would never happen with Solana; it’s not how they operate. They have these conversations behind closed doors, in very obscure meetings.

Even if they’re open to the public, they’re not really saying things in such a frank way. Here, I’m just straight up broadcasting, and everybody can listen. Everyone can see, and they can all have an opinion. Some people are right, some people are wrong, some people are critical, and some people aren’t critical. what?

The sun comes up. People have already voted no on the pentad structure. That’s their prerogative and their decision. There’s no retaliation; there’s no “how dare you do that.” It’s just their opinion, and their DREPs can decide if the principled stance is what they stand for or not.

But we’re just moving forward and saying, “Look, we need to get this done.” The Midnight Foundation is barreling down, and they had a choice: Is it midnight only or midnight in Cardano? We found a structure to make it midnight in Cardano, and now I want to find a structure to supercharge the Cardano DeFi ecosystem and make it the fastest-growing DeFi ecosystem of 2026. The technology is ready for it. When you look at Lace, Hydra, and Starstream, we have all the unique selling propositions there.

I think we can focus on a lot of these long-tail markets, and we can wake up to be a leviathan by the end of 2026. We’ll exit the year super strong, and this executive function is sufficient to get us there. Then we need to negotiate with the other pentad partners, and I think we can get them on board. Ultimately, it’s a voluntary thing; people have to agree that this is a good idea. So, food for thought—digest it, ruminate on it.

We still have plenty of time for the current pentad proposal. I’m not slowing down, though. We’re negotiating deals and getting them done. You’re going to see some announcements this month. I’ll be in Abu Dhabi; maybe we’ll have an announcement there at Finance Week.

That’ll be fun. More to come. I’m not going to stop until we get these integrations in because we need them as an ecosystem. It’s long overdue, but that’s necessary, though not sufficient. We need to do more to get the ecosystem where it needs to go.

So, look for that.