Midnight, Unison, FBI, and Tweets :)

Hi, this is Charles Hoskinson broadcasting live from warm, sunny Colorado. Always warm, always sunny, sometimes Colorado. This is one of those okonomiyaki videos where I just talk about a little bit of everything. Back in the office, feeling good. I've got a colorful shirt on, so let's get right to it.

First things first, let me go ahead and show you this. This is from Ian, a wonderful guy and copywriter at Midnight Foundation. It's the state of the network for November 2025. This is kind of a recap now that the distribution event is over. When we say that the Midnight Glacier Drop was the largest distribution event in the history of cryptocurrencies, this is not puffery.

We have the numbers, and I'll just read some of these things off because it's actually still ongoing. Scavenger Mine, the second phase of the Night token distribution, closed at midnight on November 20th with over 4.5 billion Night claims registered across more than 8 million participating addresses. Eight million. The Glacier Drop distributed is currently the industry's largest based on participating wallets and claim volume.

The Midnight Glacier Drop multi-phase model for its native asset, Night, set a new standard for token distribution. The structure combines a broad community-driven allocation with mechanisms designed to increase fairness and systemic integrity. So, what's next? You have the redemption phase. Starting from December 8th, stuff starts thawing.

It's a total of 450 days, and that's basically how long it takes. There are going to be four equal installments. You have lost and found, so if you did not participate in the Glacier Drop but later find your private keys, you can still get some Night. By the way, this is a really creative mechanism to get exchanges involved because as Midnight goes up in value, they realize they can redeem on behalf of their users and do an exchange distribution and take their cut. It creates an incentive mechanism for exchanges to come in after the network launches.

Speaking of which, exchange-facilitated claims have been agreed upon by Kraken, OKX, Bit Panda, and NBX to distribute Night to qualifying participants. These are KYC users already inside the system, and collectively, tens of millions could potentially be viable. You start a multi-network drop scavenger hunt, and then with lost and found, add it all together, and it's millions of verified people. Now, regarding the Midnight network pulse, the ecosystem continues to see steady development throughout October. Developer activities maintained a consistent pace following a concentrated period that included three major hackathons in September and culminated in Midnight's largest-ever in-person hackathon on November 19th.

We had about 140 to 150 builders and advocates at the Midnight Summit. We live-streamed it and talked about the philosophy, the roadmap, and the architecture of how we're going to do it. The Midnight channel has a lot of great content; I highly recommend you check it out. We talked a bit about Night and Dust. Midnight is just explosive.

On December 8th, the token comes out, bringing a lot of great liquidity and amazing announcements, including tier-one listings for the first time ever for a Cardano native asset. Following that, in Q1 of next year, we will enter the next era where the federated mainnet is going to launch, which will have a larger set of partners and announcements. It's kind of a fan-out strategy, starting at a core and building everything up. The Discord is going to become the single source of truth. I am going to start, as of December, doing events personally in the Discord that are exclusive to the Discord.

We're also going to be adding a lot of tools and infrastructure into the Discord for things like NFT issuance, giveaways, hackathons, and other activities. Look for future statements about it. The ambassador program is already recruiting, and we have over 600 applicants in the pipeline. We're going to take the top 50 to start with, and at the same time, we're going to try to get the Midnight Shift podcast started sometime in December. We're pushing aggressively on this.

The whiteboard video has almost 4 million views. So, you have the largest distribution of all time, several million views on the foundational video, the token coming out soon, and the federated mainnet launching after everyone has had a chance to get used to it a little bit and all the partners come online. We have a hackathon going on every two weeks, and we have some incredible news about dual Cardano-Midnight integrations. We've been in deep negotiations with a lot of people. There's going to be a proposal coming, and you guys are going to see some really cool stuff soon.

I don't want to spoil the lead, but I think it solves a lot of the DeFi problems historically that Cardano has had, and it's going to finally unstick a lot of things that Midnight needs to move through. Now, there's also another cool thing, unrelated to Midnight, but it's a project I've been following for a very long time, and I just want to congratulate the Unison team. They've announced that they've reached version 1.0. Unison is a special programming language, basically like Haskell and Erlang and Nyx all had some sort of love child.

If this language had existed in its current state with this level of maturity and the ability to pair it with Rust through an FFI, I would have built Cardano in it. You identify a definition by its actual content, not just its human-friendly name. Everything is immutable in reference inside the system. You change one little thing, and it's a different thing. This is an awesome model for distributed programming, and it's everything I wanted from Cloud Haskell.

The backend of Unison is Haskell, and it's just really cool. I wanted to congratulate the team and say, "Hey guys, you did a good job." They've been working on it for a really long time. In fact, if you scroll down, there are 26,000 commits, 3,400 PRs, 152,000 library downloads, 139,000 Unison definitions, and 1,300 authors. The programming language has really grown.

I think a lot of people are starting to realize this is kind of the template for a lot of your business logic for DAOs and smart contracts, especially if you pair it with Rust for high-performance tasks. For the first time ever, the Solana account now follows me and tweeted something about me. You do understand what I do for a living. I'm literally a decentralized financial platform and rebuilt Wall Street on a blockchain. This is in reference to one of my tweets that's going viral.

The tweet is kind of the Rorschach test of Charles Hoskinson. If you're a fan, it was tongue-in-cheek. It's just an example of the absurdity of the internet as a whole. If you're not a fan, then you take a bad faith interpretation that it's the pinnacle of narcissism and ego. Having fun with the Solana crowd, I tweeted back "Karen Charles," which is also a meme generated when there was an FBI complaint against the hacker on the Cardano network.

Twitter certainly heated up quite a bit. What's really amazing is that the discussion on Twitter about Cardano has changed from the Cardano soft fork and the hacking incident to me specifically, our involvement with federal authorities, and my tweets, which is actually quite good for the Cardano ecosystem because nobody's talking about the software anymore. Mission accomplished. The news cycle has changed, and there's more virality right now with this decentralized central bank tweet than with anything about the Cardano incident, which I think people in Cardano probably appreciate, giving us plenty of time to clean things up. The internet's the internet; tweets aren't reality.

People have good fun, and it was really a lot of fun to see the Solana ecosystem play into it. It's good-spirited. When I was posting pictures of blowing the Nintendo cartridge and putting it in and out, it was good-spirited. That's the way I take it, and I think that's the way they take it. The reality is we're all friends now.

We're already talking about Midnight on Solana for privacy for Solana contracts and all types of RWAs that can enjoy the liquidity and DEXes in their ecosystem. There's a lot of cooperation starting to occur behind the scenes. We're a little lagging in integrations, but it's a high-priority item. It's horrendously expensive, but we'll take our fair share of it and submit a Treasury proposal as a bundle for a whole bunch of things you guys have been asking for to just get it done. In 6 to 12 months, they'll all get in, and it will no longer be a conversation.

We actually have to build real things and get real things done. What's been refreshing about Midnight is that we've had a chance to grow viral content, work with influencers, and get an ambassador program set up. We've had a chance to get a Discord finally as a single source of truth. We've also had a chance to do hackathons every two weeks, learn an enormous amount, work with partners in real time, and get those partners very excited. Overall, that's been very educational for us.

It's shown where our people, processes, and procedures are strong and where we're weak and slow. We're just kind of working our way through it, and every step of the way makes Cardano better because if it's a Midnight integration, it's a Cardano integration. I firmly believe that Midnight was the McGuffin to bring Circle, Tether, bridges, and oracles to Cardano and get all that done. I'm glad we were finally able to get past that hump, and we have a lot of things that are going to bring a ton of TVL to the Cardano ecosystem. If anything, just understand that the Midnight Foundation will be an active participant in DeFi, unlike the Cardano Foundation.

That alone is going to bring a lot of TVL, especially with real-world assets to match that. Reali is the sleeper that I don't think people fully understand. I'll be at Abu Dhabi for Abu Dhabi Finance Week. I'm speaking there; it's the largest fintech conference in Abu Dhabi for the year. All the kings and big players will be there, along with trillion-dollar sovereign wealth funds.

John O'Connor is also going to be there and speaking, and he's going to be talking about Reali. We did over 1 million loans in Kenya and Uganda with my money just to test our credit model and our MFI relationships and how we process these types of things—fast 30 to 90-day loans. It's being translated with help from Sunday and others into the DeFi world to be launched on Cardano, and the TVL and yields will exist there. A lot of really cool things are happening in that side of the space, and we're really excited to get that done. That's launching next year, and I think it's going to be the single biggest driver along with Midnight for TVL and transactions in the Cardano ecosystem.

Certainly, other people will get a halo effect, and there are going to be a lot of sleepers that come out next year. People who are building right now, like Ion and others, have a really bright future. We're not out of it. Tomorrow, we also launch the Laos dashboard because we are working 24/7 on Laos, and we keep adding and adding. That team is building up faster than any other team we've had.

I told the guys we have to get Laos out next year; there's no ifs, ands, or buts about it. We also had a great meeting with Kyle, Adam Dean, and Sam Leathers about how we can unify the Hydra community and ecosystem together to take the Hydra project to the next level. You may have noticed Hydra is now in mainnet with Delta DeFi, the Glacier Drop, Hydradoom, as well as the vending machine project that Sam and friends did. We need to take it to the next level so we can have DAP-by-DAP acceleration. StarStream will add a lot of new language features, and of course, Plutus V4 will add a lot along with Aken.

Then you have Laos at the base ledger to speed things up tremendously. It's a really fertile world, and a lot of cool things are coming. There's a question here that I wanted to address: Why isn't Coinbase supporting the Midnight airdrop? A lot of exchanges have, and there's been a lot of discussions about how to get them involved. I think the usual suspects have done a phenomenal job coordinating with us.

Coinbase has a competing product they invested heavily in called Alo, so they're always going to be a little slow at the gate because hundreds of millions of dollars have gone into something else in the same category. I believe there's a path to get Midnight on Coinbase, but it's not one of the launch sets. This is the reality of when exchanges take positions in projects; they lose a little bit of neutrality, making it more challenging. That said, there's been a lot of discussion about potentially doing some stuff with Base, and we have a lot of things we think would benefit the Coinbase ecosystem. It's never a no; it's more about the stages of the life cycle of the network.

Is it right at launch with the smart contract track as a Cardano native asset? Is it when mainnet launches in a federated form? Is it when mainnet launches in its final form? There's a lot of that stuff. But I think we have a great launch on December 8th to get the party started.

Throughout the end of this year and next year, every six weeks, stuff is happening. Partners are coming online, new technologies are being introduced, and new exchanges will come online, gradually escalating to larger and larger ones. It's kind of a managed, curated launch. The first 90 days will be crazy because there's a frenetic pace with all these things, and we'll have a ton of things to say at Consensus Hong Kong that I think people will be very excited about. Some were with us in the early set, and some weren't.

Coinbase was one that wasn't, but the ones that are are quite large, prominent, and recognizable. You'll see it. What's really cool is that Midnight is just going to keep growing and evolving. This is especially true when you look at the bridge infrastructure. When we say that the essence of Midnight is that it's a layer two to everybody, that's not instantly all at the same time.

You have to give breathing space for each ecosystem to catch up. As we go through that roadmap, it will be like every two months, one of those bridges opens and creates a hybrid DAP for each one. Launch partners can be attached as they go through it, giving each ecosystem a chance to showcase some really cool stuff. It's kind of Cardano native, then Cardano and Midnight, and then Midnight in the rest of the ecosystem. Every time that happens, you open up users, liquidity, transaction volume, partnership opportunities, and these types of things.

You get a nice constant news cycle with the product as it rolls through, and it also gives you a chance to test things as you go. Right now, we're really focused on making sure everything on the smart contract side is right, then making sure the base Midnight network is all right, then focusing on the ITN and getting all the stake pool operators in, and finally, hard forking it to Jorlan. We're really focused on bringing all that together end-to-end with a trustless recursive bridge structure. We have some really cool stuff on the layer two side with the layer one on Midnight as well. We learned our lesson: you co-develop these things.

You don't develop one and then two years later develop a Hydra. You co-develop them to make them fit hand in glove so you can build acceleration and all kinds of crazy stuff. We have a really amazing product that we'll talk about at Consensus Hong Kong that showcases it. It's going to blow everybody's mind. From a marketing perspective, it's ten times better than Hydrodoom, and Hydrodoom was amazing.

Overall, Cardano is really healthy. We've recovered, and everybody's just getting used to the fact that we've recovered. Everything's okay. Pi had a wonderful write-up; if you didn't have a chance to see it, it discusses what happened. We're on the other side of it, and we're in cleanup mode.

There's a lot of little stuff to do, including seminars with exchanges and post-mortems. I did a video about chain integrity; I'd highly recommend you take a look at that, as it discusses the wet code and dry code concepts of integrity. Overall, Cardano is going to finish pretty strong towards the end of the year. In terms of KPIs, there were some we hit very strongly, the launch of Midnight, getting the Treasury done and the first payout, getting the constitutional committee fully decentralized, and getting the constitution ratified. A ton of social metrics were hit.

We lagged behind in integrations and the growth of the DeFi ecosystem; it just couldn't get coordinated and done. It seemed we were never really ready for that. But with the existence of Midnight, it's forcing the conversation in 2026. There’s no optionality; it must get done. An exceedingly aggressive organization is basically forcing that to happen, whether people it or not.

There’s also been a lot of interpersonal strife and drama across the ecosystem, and we've all gotten caught up in it. I miss the light-hearted days. Moving forward, you can either choose to take things in a light-hearted way or take them negatively. Crypto media has been particularly strange, often taking a bad faith interpretation of any event without bothering to do due diligence—calling people, talking to people. The ADA voucher example or the FBI example is just one of many.

I don't know why they do it; clicks equal drama, and drama equals clicks. But we just have to move on. When we look to 2026, I think everybody's really tired of perpetual drama. We're all at the burnout stage and exhaustion, and it's about time for a return to a light-hearted normalcy. What does that mean?

It means that Midnight's going to kill it next year. Laos is coming next year. We're going to see great progress on the DeFi side, both on Midnight and on Cardano, and also a return to the original founding principles of Cardano—banking the unbanked. Real FI is the aggregation of ten years of careful thinking about how to do this, and we think we know how to do it at scale, given that we've given a million loans that were very transformational and changed the lives of many people. I put my own money on the line to test out the model in high-risk markets like Kenya and Uganda.

I had a call with Fami, and I said, "Fami, I think there's a path where the Midnight Foundation can work with the Cardano Foundation on the Reeve project." Reeve has just entered version 1.2. One of the things that Reeve is missing is a selective disclosure and privacy layer. There's just no reality that an organization is going to put its books on the blockchain completely.

I like that they have an ERP adapter; it's written in Java and is a very smart application. It has an identity system, but it needs a selective disclosure layer and a privacy layer. That's a match made in heaven, and it's a really good foundational project for the Cardano Foundation and the Midnight And by the way, you just saw TX pipe with the super node concept. People are starting to realize that these things should be put together. We want to run that across the entire organization and all future projects, including what we’re doing with Midnight.

I think you’re going to see a massive increase in coding velocity without a decline in quality. We learned a lot from the recent pig chain and chicken chain incident. The Canary net is something that I’ve made a priority for 2026, and we’re going to figure out a path to get that done. PubSub has to get done as well. We need to be much more integrated, cooperative, and light-hearted.

For those of you who have privately messaged me or mentioned it publicly, I’m doing okay. Thank you so much for asking about my physical and mental health. I appreciate it. It means the world to me that many of you care. This has been an incredibly tough year.

I’ve traveled more than 200 days and gone to many places. I’m still getting on a plane, heading out to Abu Dhabi next. I’ve had four deaths close to me this year, and I had to deal with all of those. I was leaving London after one incident, going to a funeral, and then coming back to work. It’s just endless with all these things, and I’m running many businesses at the same time, the clinic we just opened and the expansion.

I have to deal with all that, along with stuff in the construction company and at the ranch. It adds up, and it really does keep you busy. There are certainly weeks and days where I’m just not at optimal levels. One of my goals for 2026 is to reduce the cognitive load so I can focus on the things that are important to me and really go deep on various topics. There are some transformational, pivotal things in privacy-enhancing technology.

It was fun to be with Agalos last week because we got to talk about a lot of these things, like whether a whole blockchain can possess a private key and under what circumstances that can be made trustless and non-interactive. These are next-generation capabilities that are going to fundamentally transform the space. It’s good to have headspace to think about those things emotionally. Everybody wants to be an armchair expert on my integrity, psychology, and stability as a person. What’s extraordinary is that the input into all of that comes from Twitter posts, and somehow those are seen as a representative sample or an impression of history.

There’s a good reason why the Goldwater rule exists in psychiatry. It’s a really bad idea, with a shallow layer of information, to psychoanalyze a person and think that you have everything figured out. Just the other day, I saw a tweet where someone took the backdrop of my home office and diagnosed me with narcissistic personality disorder based on that backdrop, using Grock as the armchair psychiatrist. It’s extraordinary that we live in a time where people feel empowered to presume such things. I’m doing okay.

I am. I take the time to try new things. I went to the Amazon and did the bullet ants. Some things worked out; I went to the darkness retreat at Sky Caves, which didn’t work out. I’m always trying new things.

My biggest frustration this year, health-wise, has been my weight. I tried really hard to lose weight and lost about 25 pounds, but then things got extremely stressful, and I put it all back on again. It’s been a problem I’ve had for more than 10 years because I like food. I enjoy eating, as you’ve seen on my Twitter feed. Like many millions of Americans, I suffer from obesity.

It’s not morbid obesity; my pants still fit, but it’s there. If I stay in one location, I naturally lose weight week by week. It’s the travel and the stress. When you have an up-and-down sleep schedule, super high cortisol levels, an inconsistent diet, and you can’t connect to a gym, it’s ridiculously hard to create stability. So, another thing in 2026 is that I’m going to travel less and really try to stay in one location as much as possible.

I usually get invited to more than 200 to 300 events a year, of which I attend maybe 30 to 50. I’m probably only going to attend somewhere between four to eight events next year. It’s a massive reduction in travel. My jet crew is going to be very sad because when I don’t travel, I charter it. They’re going to be going pretty much 24/7 for other people, but it’s going to be much better for my health.

You’ll see day by day, week by week, the weight dropping off, and it makes you feel better. Another thing is that I really enjoy meditation and altered states of consciousness. I went to the Monroe Institute this year and had a great deal of fun learning about remote viewing and their gateway program—things I’d read about years ago but never had a chance to engage with and see if they are real or at least if I perceive them to be. So, more of that next year as well. I think it creates a lot more holism.

Part of it is just to slow down a bit, create more cognitive space, and let AI do its thing. For platforms that are taken over by AI, let AI fight with AI. For platforms like Discord, we can ensure they’re real people and give them the space and time they need to be there. People come and go. We had a resignation of an IIO employee, and I still can’t quite understand the argument about the FBI thing, but people are allowed to have a difference of opinion.

Roman is a really smart guy— a little weird, but really smart. He’s going to find all kinds of cool things to do, either in our ecosystem or in other ecosystems. Let him do his thing; I’m sure he’ll be working on Star Stream or the next version of Plutus or other projects, or he’ll end up in an adjacent ecosystem like Midnight and do great work there. Part of this job is letting go. You have to accept that people come and go; they sometimes come back, and sometimes they don’t.

You just move on. You have to keep returning to first principles every month and remember why we’re here. It’s just like meditation. Your mind seems calm, and you’re doing the breathing thing, but suddenly you’re thinking about groceries, your gas tank, what you’re doing tomorrow, and the next meeting you have. You have equanimity; you let the thought pass.

You take a breath through your nose, in for four, hold for a second, out for six, and return to that. That’s the nature of ecosystems—people come in and out. Twitter does that too. You just take a breath in and out. You have to express calm.

Some weeks are easier than others, and some things are easier than others. As a final point, this year has been very challenging for me on the integrity side because I saw things happening in Washington, D.C., that made me deeply uncomfortable. I tried, for the sake of the cryptocurrency ecosystem, to just get along with those things.

However, I’ve reached a point where I can no longer stay silent about them. It is deeply distasteful to me to live in an ecosystem where any politician, from the president on down, issues a memecoin. It’s not helpful and doesn’t add value to our ecosystem or the conversation. We all did our best to accept that as a fact of life, but it changed the narrative from a bipartisan narrative to one that equates crypto with Trump, which is bad. I don’t want that to be the perception of what we do or why we do it in this space.

Say what you will about family businesses; I don’t particularly care. I think people are independent and have the right to do those types of things. As long as there’s a firewall, it’s not necessarily problematic, but it certainly creates a lot of errors. There are other issues, the bombings in Venezuela. I have been a strong opponent of these actions since Anwar Alaki was killed by Obama, and I’ve spoken out against it repeatedly.

It’s wrong when Democrats do it; it’s wrong when Republicans do it. That’s why people like Mark Kelly speak up and say, “You have the right not to follow illegal orders.” It’s equally wrong to reactivate the commission of American heroes who were astronauts and court-martial them for having an opinion and saying something that’s in the uniform code of justice. It’s just straight-up wrong. If you’re going to prosecute the director of the FBI or a former director, maybe you should have a competent prosecutor so the case doesn’t get dismissed.

You should have a strong case, with evidence that they’re dead to rights—caught in the basement with one of the crime families of New York, on tape taking a bribe, and found with the cash. That’s the level of scrutiny needed to go after officials of this scale. I find that MAGA has transformed into a club that’s getting smaller by the day because there’s a purity test: you have to agree with the president 24/7, never break ranks, and never have an opinion of your own. Some of the strongest adherents, like Marjorie Taylor Greene, when they break with the president over whether we should be transparent about the worst child sex ring in American history, get exiled, deplatformed, and destroyed. I can’t live in a system where that’s the standard.

I’ve tried my best to navigate things with Article 2, meaning living as a creature of the Senate and the House. I made some decisions about engagements; I was supposed to have a meeting with Mike Johnson, but I canceled it. I just don’t want to take it if he thinks it’s okay for members of the Senate and the House to be punished for telling people not to follow illegal orders. I’m sorry, but we need more backbone and character about these things. I appreciate that you have to toe the party line, but enough is enough.

I’m tired of the shell game when they pass a law, and suddenly investigations are opened up. Were those investigations not relevant two months ago when you gave us a memo saying that Epstein acted alone and molested a thousand children by himself? Now they’re here, and because they’re active investigations, you don’t have to reveal any files by law. There’s no integrity anymore, and don’t for a moment believe the Democrats are any better. I’m politically disenfranchised, and I’ve been that way for most of my career.

I’ve thought a lot about whether there’s a path to build a major political party. Maybe there’s room for minor political parties that don’t run but aggregate a lot of voting power and, based on an endorsement system, can wield that influence for certain negotiations, like appointments and voting in certain ways. I don’t know; I’ll put my thoughts down at some point, but I just don’t want to be part of that or be stained in that way. I have integrity, and when I see something wrong, I speak out about it. This is why I believe in blockchains—blockchains, blockchains.

Integrity comes from process, system, and rule of law. You have to have different laws at different levels of the stack, but no one should be above reproach. Some of my harshest critics come from within the Cardano ecosystem, as evidenced by the conflict with the Cardano Foundation. Yet somehow, we all exist in one place, and we’re able to move forward. They can be critics one day, but then we can work together in a war room the next day for the greater good.

That’s how leadership should work, and that’s how our free society should work. I will never tolerate the U.S. government descending into a totalitarian mindset of being either on team A or team B. No one is irredeemably evil.

Let me be very clear: no Democrat is irredeemably evil if you’re on the MAGA side. If you’re on the Democrat side, not every MAGA person is a Nazi. Not every person who has traditional family values or believes in traditional marriage or lifestyle is the enemy of society and must be destroyed in some way. So, in 2026, we have to make a philosophical decision. Do we return to light-heartedness and collaboration, or do we continue to descend into this maelstrom of madness?

It’s a personal choice you make minute by minute, hour by hour, day by day. Salana tweeted a parody of something I tweeted. I could take that as an insult, or I can take that as a good-hearted joke. There’s no difference. The event has happened.

It’s not I get $50 for one and $100 for the other. It’s up here. When you look at society, you realize that the things that keep us together are much closer than the things that draw us apart. Looking to 2026, we’re going to be much more focused. We have our eye on the prize.

We know our KPIs, we know what to do, and we know how to get it done. We have wonderful products like Midnight, Lace, Real Fight, and Cardano to represent that. Each of them has its own maturity, purpose, and ecosystem. We have the technology, protocols, and philosophy in place. We can do anything if we put our minds to it.

We just have to make that choice every day when we get up. Which tweet do you take? When you find that relationships are no longer productive and toxic, you have to get rid of them or change the nature of the relationship. Politics and Twitter are exactly the same. We all have an unhealthy relationship with them to the extent that it’s driving us insane.

It really is. It’s making all of us mentally ill. In 2026, we have to make a decision: do we engage or not? If we do engage, do we do so with safeguards? Just like if your ex-wife or ex-husband has custody of the kids, even though you don’t get along, for the sake of the kids, you find a way to be civil.

Similarly, we don’t really get along with our political parties anymore, but we have to find a way to be civil in the relationship and hopefully find a path forward to change that relationship. I still believe that the Clarity Act will pass. We’ve said what we’ve said about it, and the vast majority of the heavy lifting will be done through rulemaking with faceless bureaucrats. There are plenty of ways, directly or indirectly, to engage, and I’ve put an enormous amount of personal time into this, as have Brad Garlinghouse and dozens of others in our industry. Brian Armstrong and they’re heroes in this fight.

They represented the industry really well, and Texas is in a good state. We just have to get it to a bipartisan state, and there’s some horse trading to make that happen. This means the horrors of Gary Gensler are over the minute that’s done. We have new challenges that transcend the body politic of the executive branch in this particular presidency. We wish him well and hope for their success, but I would like to get back to a time where people have depth, character, and genuinely want everyone to succeed.

You have to understand that in every product I build, if a person uses it, in every protocol I build, if a person uses it, I want that person to be successful. If you come and build on Cardano, I want you to have a great experience and outcome, which is why I get so defensive when people attack the system. I do everything in my power to try to prevent that from occurring at every level of the stack. I’d a political system that has that same mentality—that everybody should succeed in the system, not just the people I like or politically agree with. I can’t support parties that have a viewpoint that only half the people are there.

So, it doesn’t really make me much of a Republican, and it doesn’t give me much to say with the Republicans, but it certainly doesn’t make me much of a Democrat right now. I was encouraged to see Donald Trump and Mike Pence together at the White House. You could not find people more diametrically opposed philosophically and generationally, but somehow they were able to talk to each other. The media did everything in its power to spark a fight or create division. The whole purpose of the meeting was to find what they had in common, but every question attempted to focus on what drives them apart.

Not only do we need better leaders and leadership, but we also need better sources of information. One of the reasons I built Midnight was to create a foundational layer of better sources of information, better social networks, and better media. That is unfinished business. If I achieve anything in my life, it will be to create protocols that put all these disinformation sources out of business and finally bury those rotting corpses of lies. Lies of omission or lies.

Unchained Lara’s hack job published that Cardano went down 16% after the hack on a day when the cryptocurrency markets lost nearly half a trillion dollars, and every single cryptocurrency from Bitcoin on down was down a comparable amount. Maybe, just maybe, that’s factually relevant to the story, but it’s omitted because they’re not interested in truthful dialogue and reporting. If you start collaborating, cooperating, and actually having conversations, it terrifies them because they understand their entire business model relies on us hating each other and being divided. What will they report about if we’re happy, harmonious, and getting along? The weather?

We need to kill that. The only way we do this is through innovation. We’re nearly done reconciling the legacy world and the DeFi world. I firmly believe we’ll get it done in the next five years, with things like Midnight leading the charge alongside Cardano and Bitcoin. Beyond that, we now need to move on to information and make AI our friend, not our enemy.

We need to create marketplaces for truth and a new form of journalism and social engagement that fundamentally transforms people into cooperative equilibria instead of competitive ones. That will be my life’s work after we get Midnight out the door. People ask what the next product after that will be, and we’ll distribute it with a glacier drop—just the 2.0, 3.0, or 4.

0. We learn from these types of things; it will probably be a partner chain. Cardano will have its fair share, and we’ll bring the rest of the industry in. Every time we do, it gets larger and larger. I’m here to stay, which is why I need to work out and lose some weight.

I’m here to stay, which is why I need to take some time to reduce the load and try to get back to a better place. But I couldn’t do this without all of you listening. I take great strength and solace from all the well-wishes and friendships and from the fact that you give me purpose and meaning. I wake up every day and ask, “How can I do good for all those who have done good for me?