Some Thoughts

Hi, this is Charles Hoskinson broadcasting live from rough and rugged Wyoming. Always rough, always rugged, sometimes Wyoming. Today is September 14th, 2025, and I wanted to make a video about something I saw on Reddit. I understand this sentiment very well, and I understand the frustration that the poster is having. I wanted to read it out because I think there's some context I can add, some words I can share that may help us get through it.

The post says, "Overwhelming negative sentiment outside of our community. It’s really tiring that every time I say anything good about Cardano anywhere outside this sub, my post and replies just get dunked on by tens of replies about how it’s the most useless, slowest trash blockchain without a single person that would agree that Cardano is any good or for anything. Everyone treats me an absolute crazy person. Like, 'Are the TPS or projects built on Cardano in the room with us right now?' It feels demoralizing, feeling the entire world outside our community is a lion’s den that apparently hates Cardano with passion and ridicules you for believing in it.

I often feel I’m the only person out there who even dares to speak anything good about Cardano. Even when I keep replying with the map of the ecosystem, they dismiss it they’ve never heard of it, so it must be some fake and ghost projects. Even if I reply that input endorsers are coming with layouts and boost TPS by 100x, it seems to be completely ignored as if it’s slow now and it’ll be slow forever. When I say that a million TPS is for L2 and not L1 because L1 should care more about security and decentralization and not sacrifice that for speed, and Cardano’s L2 can handle smart contracts too, 99.9% of the world believes that if something is not released yesterday, then it’s garbage and will never work.

Do we really need to stay in the shadows for five more years until we have all the scaling solutions in place and the entire ecosystem running on Hydra so that people could even believe it’s not a trash blockchain? By then, everyone would already be on other chains. The negative sentiment would be so rooted in 99.9% of people that even true arguments that it’s 'ready and amazing now' would fall on deaf ears. How could it be any good now after I replied explaining how TPS is for L2 and the good reasons for that?

They just replied they won’t even entertain reading my reply and that a million TPS must be a must-have for an L1, and there are no good reasons for that. Critics will just run away, stick their heads in the sand, and refuse to even read your counterarguments after they fling their opinions around. Really, how are we supposed to get going when the outside sentiment is this negative, and everyone is already convinced that Cardano is and always will be the most garbage, most useless ghost chain for years? Those opinions are so deeply rooted that it’s pretty much impossible to break through them. Would even voting in Catalyst to get some extreme marketing once we have everything in place be enough to break through the ice?

This sentiment is shared by many podcasters, crypto influencers, and people in the know for Web 3. I know it well, and I feel it. It sucks. It sucks to go to cryptocurrency Reddit, and no matter what you say or do, you’re criticized, demeaned, and attacked. It sucks that you can never seem to get out of the hole.

The reality is that the goalposts continue to be moved. When I signed up for the cryptocurrency space, the entire purpose of cryptocurrencies was disintermediation and decentralization. Decentralization as a means to the end of resilience and censorship resistance. We wanted in this industry when it began—because I was there pretty close to the beginning—I can tell you 100% of the people wanted to live in a world where there were no middlemen, and we disintermediated all of these big organizations, whether they be banks, SWIFT, or big tech companies, from having control and dominion over your voice, your life, your money, your opinions, and the information you see. Time and again, we were proven right that we needed these things, whether it be the great censorship of social media, the government’s response to COVID, the mass printing of money, the 2008 financial crisis, or all the things we’ve seen recently.

Then the goalposts moved. The goalposts moved from disintermediation and decentralization to, "Well, let’s build high-performance systems, and we don’t particularly care if those systems are resilient or decentralized." In fact, when they collapse and turn off and have to be manually turned back on by a small cabal of people, that doesn’t matter because we’re faster. That’s a different design goal. Then it moved to, "Let’s create tokenomics that benefit large banks and venture capitalists.

" Instead of having a token system that’s owned by the people who built it and all the people that got it where it needed to be, let’s have a group of moneymen and insiders basically own and control it forever. Let’s centralize the control layer in a way that over time you could put OFAC compliance and consensus alongside a litany of other things. The goalposts moved in that direction, and then all of a sudden we saw all these people move in—fat after fat. There was NFT mania. You guys remember that?

Metaverse and GameFi mania. Memecoin mania. And now we’re headed towards RWAs, which by their very construction will always be just like stablecoins—highly centralized vehicles. So what happened to the original dream of decentralization and resilience? What happened to the original dream of building systems that run forever and cannot, by their design, be co-opted by the few at the price of the many?

Well, Cardano is still around after 10 years now. We’ve beat that drum and built protocol after protocol, doing things the right way—not the sexy way, not the VC-friendly way—but doing it the way that it was promised in the very beginning by the cypherpunk movement. For decade after decade, many people have chased this dream that we can push power to the edges and enjoy a world where the economic, political, and social systems are by the many, for the many, never controlled by the few. That’s what Cardano is. When you’re a member of the Cardano ecosystem, you’re not here to talk about TPS.

You’re not here to talk about the hype train of the week, the flavor of the week. You’re not here to talk about the latest and greatest VC investment. If you’re a member of this ecosystem, you’re here to talk about how humanity has a mandate to reinvent itself to new economic, political, and social systems that, by their very core, can’t be evil. Now, this requires new protocols, massive amounts of R&D, and brand new governance systems. This requires an absolute fanatical commitment to doing things the right way the first time.

That’s what we’ve done: extended UTXO, liquid non-custodial staking with Ouroboros telescoping protocol, so we can upgrade it step by step, the hard fork combinator, complete end-to-end on-chain governance, on-chain treasury. If you take a look at how we’ve designed things, the interoperability with Bitcoin, DeFi, isomorphic state channels, the partner chains paradigm—every step of the way we innovate, and we come up with new and exciting ideas. We’re able to take the best of all the ideas in the space, but never once have we compromised on who we are. Every year, Cardano continues to get more decentralized, more resilient, and every year, Cardano continues to prove that it’s self-determining. It doesn’t necessarily require the rest of the cryptocurrency ecosystem to survive.

If we did, we’d already be dead. So, when we look to the future, how do we win? Well, we can never forget who we are, just like Bitcoin can’t forget who it is. That’s the first thing. We can never give up the dream of decentralization.

We can never give up the resilience of the protocols that we’ve invested in and bled for. Number two, we have to get Cardano into the homes of everyday people, not Web 3 enthusiasts and not the people of our industry. Frankly speaking, the people of our industry don’t really care for things that don’t resemble the 100x ponzinomics that they’ve come to know and love. We have to physicalize Cardano. We see this with the Hydra vending machine that will work its way into point-of-sale systems and ATMs.

We have to get Cardano into the world of privacy so that we have rational privacy for all. We see this with Midnight. We have to get Cardano to become the best place to launch a new blockchain, and we see this with the investments in partner chains, making Cardano the most secure and best AVS experience in the space. We have to get Cardano to partner with ecosystems that are principles-first, like Bitcoin, for example, which, by the way, still has all the value and liquidity. It’s larger than all the other altcoins combined.

So when these A16Zs and others run around and talk about how great they are for moving value from one token to the other, they seem to forget that principles are still valuable. We’re doing this with Bitcoin DeFi. We have to continue building up our decentralized governance system and using it to make great decisions about how we, as one voice and one ecosystem, can systematically follow a roadmap that points to growth and continues to invest in the base protocols of our system. The reality is that Laos is now in a SIP. This is the last stage before implementation.

As that SIP finalizes, all the people who are building nodes will have an opportunity to contribute to it. In short order, it will be implemented and integrated. It’s not just one SIP; it’s the foundation of a scalability agenda that is endless, which means that we will always be able to keep up with the needs of the network, especially when co-developed with Hydra, which is starting to enter its second generation over the coming years. These two technologies together, alongside the investments in Mithril and all the advancements in zero-knowledge technology, will mean that Cardano has infinite scale just in time to absorb the needs of the economic, political, and social systems abroad and at home. When we look at our amazing progress in Argentina, Cardano actually has the largest footprint of any cryptocurrency outside Bitcoin in that nation.

In fact, Input Output is the largest cryptocurrency office in the country. You have Google’s old office in Buenos Aires, and every two weeks we host events with a great reputation down there, continuing to grow throughout Latin America. Not once have we given up on Africa. In fact, the dream of real is almost ready to roll out. This is the culmination of 10 years of work, and now we stand looking to 2026 to turn on the ability to bring economic identity to the millions, eventually billions, who don’t have it.

That will be Cardano first and always. It takes time to change the world, and you’re not popular for being a person who wants to do that. You’re popular for chasing the popular trends. But we forget about them—the pet rocks of the past. To be truly a visionary, you have to accept that you have to go alone sometimes into the wilderness, in uncomfortable places with no roads to guide you and no stars that are familiar.

We’ve done that for 10 years. Yet, we’ve been proven right again and again. We’ve been proven right with liquid non-custodial staking. We’ve been proven right with extended UTXO. We’ve been proven right with privacy.

We’ve been proven right with our layer 2 model that’s non-parasitic. We’ve been proven right with our governance model, which left no one behind and allowed the ecosystem as a whole, instead of fragmenting and shattering into a thousand pieces, to speak with one voice for all of you. This allows us to converge to a budget, ratify a constitution, and hard fork the chain. These are not small things to do with decentralization and not compromise the liveliness and safety of the system. We are the only chain in the history of the cryptocurrency industry to do this.

Will this be valued by Web 3 enthusiasts? No, because it doesn’t easily map to a TVL number. It doesn’t easily map to a TPS number. It doesn’t map to a token price. Philosophies can never map to these things.

It’s something much more meaningful. It’s social software to redefine the reality of our lives. Every single person who’s a member of this ecosystem has to work together on that mission as one voice and one group. Now, there have been many frustrations. I absolutely wish we could have moved faster in certain areas.

I wish we made slightly different decisions about the ordering of the roadmap. I wish that the people responsible for making partnerships would have taken their jobs seriously. I wish that we were better able to navigate the Web 3 industry so that we could work better with them and unify them. But just because things in the past didn’t work out as well as they ought to have doesn’t mean that we stopped trying to do new things. The existence of Midnight allowed us to get more than a hundred partnerships that we didn’t have previously that weren’t just Midnight partnerships; they were Cardano partnerships.

Its commercial success will bring hundreds more, if not thousands. The massive upgrades we’ve made to the extended UTXO model and the development languages down to it have made Cardano the best ledger to build UTXO-based smart contracts and, with Bitcoin DeFi, the preferred ledger to build Bitcoin applications. That sacrifice in time and those initial difficult, high-friction steps will pay dividends later on. The same for Hydra. We try better every single year.

We wake up and say, "Can we keep doing things better? How do we change things?" We don’t follow one static philosophy or strategy, but rather, as one ecosystem, we try to reset every year and augment and change things. Now, these people outside the ecosystem don’t see it. And why would they have some empathy for the fact that the world is a busy place?

Unfortunately, people live in a world of first impressions. While looking at Twitter and reading some of the comments—which is always a dangerous thing to do—I’m still inundated every day with people, mostly from the Ethereum ecosystem, saying I stole $600 million, even though a forensic audit came out giving complete exoneration to us. Whose fault is it? Well, they don’t have time to read a 128-page report, and the crypto media seems utterly uninterested in publishing articles about it, even though they were very interested in publishing articles about the allegation. So, we can market millions of dollars to try to convince them, but even so, people will just come up with vain excuses to ignore it.

Or we can just accept that the asymmetries of information sting long, hard, and unfortunately take years or decades to undo. Sometimes you lose a crowd of people. For better or worse, Cardano is not going to get along with many in the Web 3 space or with cryptocurrency Reddit. While that seems it’s a catastrophic thing, the reality is that less than 5% of the world is in the cryptocurrency space. So why do we particularly care about a minority of a minority when there’s a big wide world out there?

The response to that Reddit thread is not how do we convince the unconvinced who have already made up their minds with almost a religious-like zeal. It should be, how do we get the other 95% of people to love Cardano and make it their first cryptocurrency? How do we rally our base that already stands on such firm and pure principles and get them interested and involved to bring their fellow neighbor into the ecosystem? With an on-chain government, we can provide the ample funding necessary to execute a strategy in that direction. In the next 24 to 36 months, Cardano will be in a position where it’s the fastest, most secure, and frankly speaking, the best platform from many different lenses to build anything at scale for anyone, whether it be an individual or a nation-state.

That’s because of the evolution of Laos, our development model, the integration of Midnight, as well as the evolution of Hydra, and the rapid progress we’re making on the programming language side. There’s no reason we couldn’t absorb that other 95%. So, we need to wake up every day and find a path to them. There’s going to need to be a lot of business and partnerships made. There’s going to need to be a lot of creativity.

But I see it in every conference I go to. When I go to places like Rare Evo, I don’t see a beaten, forgotten, dismayed, and frankly defeated people. I see a passionate group that wants to win, that wants to change, that wants to share who we are with so many other people. I see them wanting to build great things. They need resources.

They need partners. They need developers. They need people to lift them up. But they have the passion, and if given that help, they can get where they need to go. To those of you in the governance of Cardano, let’s forget the past and look to the future.

We’ve spent too long bickering over old fights. We’ve spent too long fighting when the real fight is how do we get the other 95% who’ve never seen or cared about crypto before? We get them by taking care of our entrepreneurs. We take care of the young and bold. We give them what they need to get to the next level.

On the infrastructure side, we have what we need to make Cardano more competitive than any other cryptocurrency. We have the roadmap. We have the vision. We have the execution. And frankly, we have the time.

We don’t need any more. We’ll do what we need to do. The focus now has to be on the next generation, the entrepreneurs who will bring in countless millions to tens of millions to hundreds of millions of users seeking to change their economic, political, and social realities. We see this in Argentina. That’s the next journey.

When we look to the roadmap of 2026 and 2027 and beyond, when people say, "Why Cardano?" they’ll say, "Because Cardano leads the way with the principled coins." And Cardano will never fail. The people don’t leave. They dig in.

They fight hard. They show up year after year and get it done. All the fair-weather people who are only here for avarice, who are only here because it sounds smart to be part of one ecosystem or the other, will soon leave the minute a sexier thing occurs. Those people will all be gone.