Whale

Hi, this is Charles Hoskinson broadcasting live from warm, sunny Colorado. Always warm, always sunny. Sometimes Colorado. Today is July 21st, 2025. I'm making a quick video about something that makes me sad, and it shouldn't bother me as much as it does.

It just shows you that sometimes people can't get out of their own way. I wanted to share this real quickly. I saw this today posted on Twitter. It says, "This is Cardano Wales generic rationale. Under all of his votes, he no longer supports IOG because, quote, the founding entity has not delivered much for years and is requesting obscene amounts of funds to keep the same show of non-delivery going.

" I mean, Voltater got delivered a year ago. We had Genesis keys. Today, we have a constitution. We have a full on-chain government. The very fact you can even do that is an example of delivery.

Laos is doing well. Hydra delivered Hydra Doom. Hydra is also getting to a point of maturity where Midnight is able to do a 37 million person airdrop using Hydra technology. Markets are doing quite well. Bitcoin DeFi is growing at an extraordinary pace.

There's no diversity happening now, and obviously, there are tons of innovations down the pipeline, from the cryptographic innovations that Midnight brings to bear to innovations like Mithril and big Plutus upgrades, among other things. Does he really believe that we haven't delivered anything and we haven't done anything? He didn't mention it for years and years. He was actually quite a supporter until he got called out on Twitter for saying something absurd. What was the thing?

The thing was, "Hey, if we sell $100 million worth of ADA and convert it to stable coins in Bitcoin, it will collapse the price of ADA." Okay? I mean, go to Cardano. Today's volume is $2.5 billion worth of trading, and that's just on the public markets.

That's an aggregator of OTC transactions. There are tons of people floating around who want to buy ADA at the scale of $10 million, $15 million, $25 million packages. With the current trading going on, it would take less than 15 minutes to sell $100 million worth of ADA. I wouldn't move the market one bit. So, we have a Twitter dispute about it.

He has a position; I have a position. Mine is informed by history and facts and being in the space for 15 years and having these relationships. He's entitled to his own opinion, which he used ChatGPT to justify. Okay, so we agree to disagree. He moves on, and then he goes and says if you support him as a DREP, he's now going to auto-vote no on every IoG proposal and say our entire firm has delivered nothing.

Every single IoG employee delivers nothing, and we have a bloated budget apparently compared to what's going on in Solana, Ethereum, SUI, or Aptos, which are all considerably more expensive. They spend sometimes over a billion dollars a year. And compared to what is the delivery? A network that's been running for eight years straight, 24 hours a day, seven days a week. It's ego.

It's emotion. It's, "I got called out, and I'm angry, and I'm lashing out," ? It doesn't help the ecosystem. Governance is what you make of it, and there's a two-way relationship here. There's the DREP and the delegator, and it's a regulating function.

So when you see that DREPs are doing things that aren't in the best interest of the ecosystem as a whole, but rather out of ego and emotion, as a delegator, what you do is remind them that you can recall your stake, and it forces them back into a position of behaving rationally. They have to really ask, "Do I still want to be a DREP, or if I do, what am I prepared to concede with that?" Governance requires the consent of the governed, and we're still trying to learn this and figure all this stuff out. I've had so many people come to say just apologize to Wales. I will never apologize.

If I'm in a debate and I take a position, and people get offended by the position I take, it is factually true that if you divest $100 million worth of ADA the right way, you could do it both quickly and not disrupt the market. That's my position based on knowledge, experience, and relationships and talking to OTC desks on a pretty regular basis. If somebody disagrees with that, they have every right to disagree with that. But what they don't have the right to do is take their ball, go home, and say, "For the rest of time now, participating in governance, anytime you come to ask us to do something, I'm going to automatically vote no against it and say that your company delivers nothing." Because you got angry over a Twitter fight, now you're going to run away from Twitter.

And they said, "But he produces all this value." Why don't we look at the comments? They've been very caustic. They've attacked other ecosystems. They've created a lot of drama.

We have to make some decisions as we go into Rare Evo. We look at governance and think about, "Okay, how do we as an ecosystem want to be perceived externally, and what is the lived experience of people who want to participate in governance?" People want to hold others accountable for governance. A blanket no vote on every single thing that my company proposes because you're angry over a Twitter fight is not good governance. Just straight up.

And you have to make a decision. If you agree with that, show that by pulling delegation. Then moving forward, DREPs will realize that they have to set ego aside and look at things on a case-by-case basis and say, "Well, there are 39 things being proposed, so maybe I A, but I don't like B, and I think C is the right price, but I don't have transparency on D." There you go. But to say, "Well, this company hasn't delivered anything and is just perpetuating their nonsense," what you've done is stepped into general statements, and I've never made general statements about Wales.

I don't particularly care. There are some takes I thought were great; there are some takes I didn't think were so great. When those takes came into the Cardano sovereign wealth fund concept, which by the way, everybody in the ecosystem for more than four years has been begging for this idea of stable coin liquidity, getting stable coins on Cardano. How many people are running around saying, "When Circle? When Circle?

When Circle?" We need USDC; we can't have our DeFi ecosystem without it. Literally, probably a million tweets over the last four years. So then a proposal comes on the table and says, "Here's how we solve it," and then he shows up and says, "Well, that would destroy the price of ADA." The mere talking about it, which by the way, we've been up 50% since we started talking about it, will destroy ADA.

We can't possibly entertain the idea of a divestment of $100 million worth of ADA, even though there are billions of dollars worth of the asset traded on a daily basis. Instead of saying, "Well, here's a small-scale experiment, and if it goes well, let's go do that," it was, "This can't happen, and anybody who disagrees with me is wrong." And then the minute that I disagree, he plays the victim, runs away, withdraws from Twitter, says I'm a horrible person, tries to rally popular support, and now as a DREP is lashing out, voting against all of our proposals. It's less about Wales; it's more about conduct. We're going to have a governance workshop at Rare Evo.

What you get is what you want. The constitution is going to be updated. There are questions about the 2026 budget process. There are questions about how we work with DREPs and constitutional committee members. As the elections are coming soon for the replacement of the constitutional committee members, meaning that we will no longer be an interim member.

This means IOG has no governance role whatsoever, and actually, the majority of the Intersect board will be community-elected by the end of the year. That's my understanding from Jack's latest communication, which means that it's a total reset on how we do things in this ecosystem. We have to make decisions about what we tolerate and what we don't tolerate and what we want our DREPs to do and what we don't want them to do. If you want them to be dramatic and flashy and use broad superlatives, lash out at people they don't and use ego and emotion in the way that they vote, that's what you'll get. If you pull stake from people who do that and give it to people who are rational and well-balanced and take things on a case-by-case basis, that's what you get.

I'm staying out of it. I have a lot of ADA, but I haven't delegated it to myself or to anyone. I've allowed the network to just kind of choose its own destiny without my influence. But I do have an advisory capacity, and part of that is saying to everybody listening, what you see is what you get. Everything requires participation.

The people who show up at the governance meetups at Rare Evo are probably going to have a pretty big say on proposals that get pushed through to update the constitution. Pretty simple. They showed up, they did the work, they talked to people. The people who don't show up will have less of a say. It's participatory merit-based governance.

And then when we talk about these things, we always have to have an eye on what problem we are trying to solve. I would argue that we have to win the narrative fight. What is Cardano going to be about over the next five years? It can't be the Ethereum killer. That was last cycle's narrative.

We need a better narrative as an ecosystem. We have some with Midnight and Bitcoin DeFi as examples. We can take that road if we want to or we can take a different road. But we have to decide that. Then we have to define upfront the KPIs to hold the ecosystem as a whole accountable because right now, external people are looking at TVL, transaction volume, DApp engagement, and all these other things, and we're not looking so good when they measure those things.

We can say they're all bad people, but what? If the VCs read that and the investors read that and all the big deciders floating around read that and they think that that's a credible metric set, we've already lost the game. So either we have to win those metrics or choose different metrics and convince people that those are just as meaningful, if not more so. And you have to have a strategy behind that. These are the conversations that matter.

My role is still to help try to facilitate and push those together, as we saw today with Wales' votes. He basically said that we produced nothing, contributed nothing, and our bloated bureaucracy didn't do any of this. I guess all these conversations, the hundreds of workshops, just magically materialized and self-organized. Again, it's ego. Your leadership has to decide that, and you get what you want.

If you get the right leaders in the room, you give them the right authority, and you hold them accountable in the right way, I believe that Cardano will be bigger than Ethereum. If you don't have the right leaders in the room, Cardano will die. It's just true. Decentralization doesn't mean there's no leadership. Decentralization means you can pick them, you can fire them, and you can change direction as a network as a whole, and no one person has carte blanche to decide these types of things.

That's what decentralization ought to mean. If it means total chaos and we can never coordinate and every single thing is direct democracy, guess what? We've already died because you can't outcompete protocols that are able to coordinate more quickly because they have to adopt technology too. We have to get a lot of stuff done. There are tons of things that have made me deeply uncomfortable over the last year with the governance process, but I've held my tongue on a lot of them because they're not productive.

I've tried very hard to have those conversations in closed rooms with the particular people, negotiate, and try to find ways to cooperate. Sometimes it's exceedingly hard because they operate in very bad faith, and at other times they operate in good faith. There's just not a meeting of the minds, and that's okay too. But what I don't have time for is childishness and ego. I don't because it doesn't produce any value.

It doesn't create a strategy, and it collapses the entire network into a collection of personalities fighting. It's reminiscent more of a Jerry Springer episode than it is actually a product. We have no place and purpose for these types of things. So as a network, this is a great teachable moment for us, and we have to make some decisions about what we want to do and where we want to go. You, as a casual listener, based on your delegation decisions, should make some choices about what you expect from your DREPs, the level of seriousness they take in the role, and whether they put ego in the role or not.

Anyway, I'll see everybody at Rare Evo. It's in about two weeks. There are going to be a ton of great conversations and a lot of amazing things happening. Cardano is growing by leaps and bounds. We're finally back in the game, and I love the velocity.

I love the community, and there are a ton of wonderful builders who are hungry, and they finally have the tools and capability. We just need to get them the funding and give them the mandate. what? Get out of their way and let them get it done. It's been a lot of fun, and it's been very challenging this year.

It's been a big year of transition, and it's been very hard from a certain dimension, watching things go in strange places and having to have strange conversations. On the other hand, it's fun to watch the ecosystem grow up and become its own thing. There are a few last ceremonial things I'm going to do this year to help get the network where it needs to go. But the reality is Voltater is mostly speaking a complete and unabridged success. We are now the most decentralized cryptocurrency on the planet, and we have the most vibrant and diverse government on the planet.

It's up to all of you to keep it that way, and it's up to all of you to demand that it's both effective and efficient. Thanks for listening.