Happy New Year

Hi, this is Charles Hoskinson broadcasting live from warm, sunny Colorado. Always warm, always sunny, sometimes Colorado. Today is January 9th, 2026. We're not sleeping; we're working. We're pushing hard, getting things done, and having a lot of fun.

It's really good to return to first principles, write code again, think about how the world works, and get things done. Midnight is just an incredible project. We have an amazing series of workshops next week, and everybody's getting ready for it. We're also preparing for the Japan tour, and we're super excited, fired up, and ready to go for Japan. We're going to Hokkaido all the way down to Okinawa, walking the entire Japanese archipelago and kind of kicking Japan a little bit to wake it up.

We have something new coming: fourth generation is here with rational privacy, chain abstraction, and smart compliance. We have some cool stuff, and we're fired up. Then, of course, we have Consensus Hong Kong right on the back of that, so we're ready to go. We're fired up for that too, and we have some amazing announcements and special surprises for people there. There are some cool things we're going to be able to show you.

The Pentad is working really hard. Obviously, Christmas slowed everything down because we were ready to sign some contracts, but the other side was like, "We're taking Christmas off." We were like, "We want to sign stuff. We want to announce some things about integrations for Cardano." Those haven't been forgotten.

We're really excited about some bridges, more oracles, stable coins, and analytics, so look for those soon. More listings are coming too. Overall, the KPIs have been set in stone, and we told everybody this is the standard. You've got to grab the boat and carry the boat. There are no excuses.

There's no, "I just didn't have the time," or "I didn't know how." To be honest, I've been staying up until about 2:00 or 3:00 in the morning every night and getting up at about six o'clock in the morning. I'm not sleeping much, but I don't care because we have things to do and places to go. This is our year; 2026 is going to be a good year. It's a year where we've been promising and saying as an industry, and to be frank, we've been writing checks as an industry we cannot cash.

I'm so tired of that as an industry, and you're tired of that as an industry. We don't want to do this anymore. What we want is real-world adoption, real-world assets, and real-world utility. We want every business on a blockchain. We want every ecosystem on a blockchain.

We don't care where it comes from; it's got to get done. Full stop. Overall, I'm pretty excited about the process and the people. When we go to Japan, we get to talk about the fourth generation for the first time ever in earnest with lots of people around, refine the messaging and the language, and get people excited about what's coming and why it's interesting. It's especially cool and really exciting to have applications with privacy embedded inside of them.

The Pentad structure gets to have all these commercially critical integrations, and Cardano is no longer an island; it talks to everything and works with everything. Liquidity, users, TVL—all that stuff can flow freely. The next stage after Pentad phase one is the exciting stage. I'm going to propose that we take the top 15 to 20 dApps on Cardano and get them upgraded to Bitcoin DeFi, XRP DeFi, and Midnight. We also need to get them tier one listings, get them aboard, and incubate and accelerate them so we can 10x their TVL, their users, and their transaction volume.

Let's take care of our own as an ecosystem. There's a lot more infrastructure we need to build, and we have to get the CCI done. That's the first order. It's not long after that we can start turning the crank and get these guys upgraded. A lot of people ask me how Cardano DeFi will be competitive.

It's not going to be competitive by being slightly better, slightly faster, or slightly cheaper than Ethereum or Solana. That's just not going to happen. Others have tried that, and it doesn't work. You can't beat MapQuest by building a slightly better MapQuest. You beat MapQuest by having Google Maps on the iPhone, and then everyone's like, "Holy crap, let's get that done.

" You beat those guys by doing something that no one's ever seen before. When you add privacy and get private stable coins, that's going to be sexy. Show private prediction markets and private DEXes; you're bringing something new to the conversation. If you have all the bridge infrastructure and the stable coins, you're bringing it to Solana, Ethereum, Bitcoin, XRP, BNB, Avalanche, and the rest of the industry. All those users will be like, "Hell yeah, we want some of that.

" That's how we get the TVL up and the transactions up. Everybody's doing their job; they're fired up and ready to go. We're writing code, working 24/7, and working weekends. I think JJ's gone to Argentina like 26 times at this point. I think he has a girlfriend there, maybe two.

He's getting his ass kicked, and that's exactly the way it should be. You have to wake up every day and carry the boat. The same goes for Fami Say and everybody at the Midnight Foundation. They're working their asses off too. I've never seen a group of people work as hard as them.

The same goes for the Cardano Foundation; they're working harder than they ever have. The same for Emergo and Intersect. Everybody in the ecosystem wants to win. We're inspired to win, and I fully appreciate how hard times have been. 2025 was the worst year in the history of crypto.

It was the year when the US government rug-pulled us. They teased us a lap dance, but we didn't get to seal the deal. We didn't get to first base. They said they were going to do all this stuff—the Reserve, the Clarity Act—they were going to adopt crypto, buy crypto, and integrate crypto. They didn't do any of that.

Shame on us for trusting them. It's just the way they've always been. We're not going to win because the US government tells us we're going to win. We're going to win because we're the good guys, and there are billions of us. The world deserves crypto; it's a global product.

There's no such thing as an American cryptocurrency, and there's no shortcut to being an American cryptocurrency. You're a global cryptocurrency, there for everyone, everywhere, all the time. Stop believing otherwise and stop getting caught up in the miasma of things. It's good to be off Twitter. I'm still broadcasting to it, but what?

I haven't read a comment in nine days, and I'm healthier and happier than I've ever been. Even though I'm only sleeping three hours and writing code until 3:00 in the morning, I'm having fun. I'm enjoying it again. It's good to be back, to understand how all these systems work, to read code, to go through repos, and to read papers. It's good to think and be done with this drama.

I was in the Midnight Discord today, and all these people were coming in, saying, "Oh, the price is going down. It's all over." I said, "Get the hell out of the Discord. If you want to complain about it, go home. Go to X, go to YouTube comments, go somewhere else where people care.

We don't care here." The whole point of that Discord is to ask, "What are we going to do to make Midnight better? How do we make Midnight better? When are we going to do that? Who wants to partner?

Who wants to build?" I have time to work with you to get your stuff done, but I don't have time to pump your bags. We're here to change the world. Yeah, the markets are going to be stagnant for a little bit longer, and all kinds of challenges are just going to keep coming down the pipe. We've gotten so used to it that let's not let it bother us as an industry.

Let's get back to business. We have a new generation to build, a new narrative, and we're going to 10x the population of cryptocurrency. We're going to 10x the assets under management in the cryptocurrency space. If we play our cards right, the vast majority of securities will be traded on cryptocurrency rails, not in exchanges, by 2030. If we play our cards right, you can use cryptocurrency from your cell phone.

You won't need a wallet; it just works. Tap to pay, and it's instantaneous, damn near free, and it works everywhere for everyone. It will cost nothing by 2030. Let's go do that. Are you tired of losing?

Let's go win. We have the technology, the people, the brilliant minds, the engineers, the community, and the decentralized governance. We have the decentralized network. We've put in all the hard work—ten years of grinding. What do you think this means?

We didn't just do nothing. We weren't all just McDonald's waiting for the ice cream machine to get fixed. That will never happen. I can promise you anything in the world, but I can't fix the McDonald's ice cream machine. That's not what we're doing here.

We're changing the world. So before I go home and eat my ice cream, my one little vice, I wanted to make a video to tell all of you this is going to be a good year. No matter if you want it or not, we're going to drag your ass kicking and screaming to the finish line, and we're going to have fun. You're going to love every minute of it. So stop whining, stop complaining, and enjoy life.

These are the best times ever. There are so many cool things and wonders, and we have agency. We're in charge, and we can win. We have a great game plan with Laos and Hydra. We have a great thing going with the Pentad.

We're getting those integrations done. Midnight launched and it launched more valuable than Leo, ZKY, Starkware, and Mina combined. So stop crying; it's doing good, and what? It's going to do better. The Japan tour is going to be phenomenal and incredible.

Hong Kong is going to be phenomenal and incredible. Then the rest of the year, every two months, a bag of goodies comes. That's the cadence; it's the death march. The team knows it. They're sad that they have to do all the work, but they're happy that they have the privilege to make it happen.

I'm very glad how many of you have stepped up to be ambassadors. There's an overwhelming number of people who applied, and I'm finally going to be able to meet a lot of them in person. We're making a big shakeup at IO. We're adding some people and getting rid of some people to rebuild our social media, to rebuild our Discord strategy, and change the way we interface with people. Every two weeks, I say, "What have you done for me lately?

" That's the rope we give. It's not long anymore because we have a lot to do, and we measure things quickly and get things done. We haven't lost the formalism. In fact, we have even more rigorous formalism thanks to our good friend LLMs. We can check things at levels that have never been checked before.

I'm designing a new model called IMO, which stands for intention models and oracles, that I think is going to become the gold standard for testing ZK systems, especially if it's a canonical executable specification oracle. You'll see that in the repo if you want to start it. In fact, I'll give it to you. Why not? I'm working out every day, getting it done.

I need to start the cold plunges again next Monday. Ready to go. I have the dog watching me while I'm in the water, like, "What are you doing, man? That's crazy. You don't go in there.

" I said, "Sorry, got to get it done. It's just what we do now." Happy New Year! Be careful what you signed up for. You signed up for a revolution, and guess what?

You're going to get one. Good night, everybody.