Surprise AMA 11/17/2024

Hi, this is Charles Hoskinson broadcasting live from warm, sunny Colorado. Today is November 17th, 2024. The year is almost over, and Thanksgiving is on the way. We’ve accomplished a lot, and we’re starting to see a little bit of a rebound. The passion is coming back, the fire is returning, and people are really starting to get excited.

I believe 2025 is going to be a very good year. The community is coming together, and the constitutional convention is imminent. We’re only a few weeks away from going down to Buenos Aires to have lots of delegates talk to each other and get a lot of things done. We’re all pushing hard to close out the year strong. I think we will arrive at a great Constitution that will be a nice compromise of many different ideas, and then the on-chain government will be able to vote on it.

Chang Plus One is currently on testnet. People are playing around with it and having fun. The very first hard fork will be done by the Interconstitutional Committee, turning on all the decentralized services, thus establishing a full on-chain government. The budget process is underway, and a coalition is forming. We like to call it the Cardano Development and Ecosystem Cooperative, or Coalition.

We’re working on good terminology for it, but it includes all the people and love, along with a lot of exciting initiatives. Marketing is going to be really strong next year. We will definitely be in force if we can get the budget passed at all the major conferences, bringing the community along and showcasing all the wonderful things happening in the Cardano Innovation Division. I has kind of opened itself up. We've been doing a lot of internal innovation, and that continues.

Now we're opening up a bit and adding all kinds of things from the community end, such as Gummy Worm from Sunday Swap, Midgard from Anastasia, and ZK Fold. We're negotiating and talking with the teams, figuring out how to get them into the innovation process to accelerate what they already have so that they can bring their products to market a lot faster. We're fighting a good fight across the board and making sure Cardano gets fair and adequate representation. I have been making some strategic investments in various projects. I put some money into Maestro; I think those guys are amazing.

I'm hiring a dedicated person to focus solely on making Cardano the dominant platform for Bitcoin DeFi. We have a bit of competition there, but I believe we're best in class. I want to get that experience figured out end-to-end so that people in the Bitcoin ecosystem can just click a button and be ready to use Bitcoin DeFi powered by Cardano. That will bring a lot of volume and demand here. By the way, all those advancements to Hydra are starting to really come to fruition.

Hydro Doom has massively evolved the protocol. Gummy Worm and Midgard have also significantly evolved the protocol. We're starting to get practical with the protocol, and I think people are going to be blown away by the potential performance numbers that a Hydra-enabled application can achieve. We also have rollups; we're the best rollup system in the ecosystem because of extended UTXO. I'm really excited about that.

Ouroboros Leo prototyping is already heavily underway. We have a team of about six or seven people on it, and we'll keep growing and scaling that team up to speed up Ouroboros Leo's prototyping. There's already a fruitful conversation happening about the new Cardano node, in addition to the old Cardano node, to make that better too. We're all moving along. The emulator, as I mentioned before, is the Nintendo emulator that we want to develop on Cardano using Hydra.

That will be the next project after Hydro Doom. We'll move that team over, scale them up, and give them the resources they need. The DApp store is finally unblocked for Lace, and that's coming. The Lace team is under really good management with Brandon. It took a long time and a very serpentine road for us to get that project where it needed to be, but now we have a good team and significant progress is being made.

You may have noticed there's now a Nami mode for Lace. What this allows people to do is transfer their Nami wallet over to Lace. If they the Nami UX, they can leave it exactly the same; it looks exactly the same, only it has amazing code, an amazing backend, and all the reliability and quality that we've built in. They can also just click a button and suddenly they're in the full Lace experience, gaining access to everything. That's how you get things done.

We'll continue to make strategic acquisitions and build up that ecosystem, but 2025 is really going to be the year of Lace. It's finally unstuck, and a lot of cool stuff is coming, like multisig. We already have the paper wallet generator; generation two will include hardware support for that, so UB keys and other things can be used inside the development flow. I mentioned before the DApp store and then multi-asset, multi-chain integration to bring them all together. That's a hungry team; they're fired up and have their passion back.

We're really ready to shoot on all cylinders. On the regulation side, I've been talking with a lot of different senators and definitely engaging with the right people. We'll see over the coming 60 to 90 days how things come together. I might go to DC next week; it just depends on the schedule and how things come together with other people. I already have some embedded people who have been in pretty deep conversations.

What we're trying to sort out is what can be done through administrative changes and rulemaking, what can be done through executive order, and what can be done through lawmaking. Lawmaking is the hardest but most permanent. Administrative changes are the easiest but very ephemeral, and executive orders live and die by the administration. The hope is to figure out a consolidated package of the three to make America the best place in the world for cryptocurrency companies so we can bring them all back home to the United States and create a multi-trillion dollar cryptocurrency industry onshore. That’s an all-the-above policy.

We also need to look at taxes, custody standards, and consumer protections. We need to ensure there's a Bill of Rights for crypto, including support for and defense of non-custodial wallets, and make sure we can use crypto the way we want to use it. We also need to get asset classification taken care of so we can get the SEC out of the insanity we've seen over the last few years and bring regulation through enforcement to an end. There are going to be a lot of great partners that I think are kindred spirits. As I mentioned, I had a wonderful phone call with Brad from the Ripple community.

He's a good CEO and a good guy too; I've known him for years. It feels good to be back on the same team and talking to each other. There's a lot going on right now, and he wants to get things done. I also reached out to Lehman B from Hedera, and we're currently in the process of getting a call set up. We've been going back and forth, and secretaries are working with each other.

I'm just working my way through a lot of the different cryptocurrency ecosystems. It's time we come together, speak with one voice, and get policy where it needs to be so crypto can reach the next level. There are trillions of dollars of real-world assets and trillions of dollars of potential business that could come into crypto; we just have to get over the regulatory hurdle we're currently facing as an industry. The good news is everybody's unified on this. The House, the Senate, and the presidency are all unified in wanting to pass crypto policy that cleans up this mess.

We're no longer talking about politics; elections are over. People are now in power, whether you like them or not, and they have to lead and get stuff done. You'll notice that I'm not tweeting about politics anymore, and I'm not talking about it. We're really focused and have that lupine energy now. We're fired up and ready to go, and the focus is going to result in getting a law passed in the next nine months.

We have to figure out how to make that happen. It's a very complicated and technical thing that takes a lot of listening and learning. A baseline has to be established for the industry as a whole. All the American crypto businesses need to get a survey and write down who they are, what they do, who their customers are, how they make their money, and most importantly, what's been going on with the US government and them. All that information feeds up to a single point, which can then be used to get the policy changes, executive orders, and laws needed to get the industry where it needs to go.

If we score it right, meaning we look at international regulation, whether it be the JFSA, the Singapore Monetary Authority, ADGM in Abu Dhabi, or VARA in Dubai, or we look at Switzerland and FINMA, we can say, "Okay, this is what they do, and this is what we're going to do post-law and post-changes." And guess what? We're going to be number one. That's the goal. This will bring trillions of dollars into the industry and get us to the next level.

Innovation is still churning along. There's a little bit of competition now for Midnight, but we're still going to win. It's nice to have good competitors; the Espresso team is incredible, and they have some of the best people in the industry. The same goes for the Alo team; they're very solid and come from A16Z, bringing a lot of bright minds. Mina is looking good too; people are really starting to upgrade to these next-generation programmable private smart contracts.

We're really starting to speed up on Midnight and learning a lot from what they brought to market, which helps us orient ourselves. I believe Midnight is going to be a leviathan in 2025 based on how it's being launched, how the ecosystem is coming together, the reception we've all gotten, and the combination of core technologies. The fact that Cardano can launch Midnight means you're decentralized from day one. You don't have to build a whole layer-one network effect or have governance keys; you're just decentralized from day one. That's how it should be.

VCs didn't come in and mess up the distribution, and those kinds of things make a huge difference. Midnight is a gift to the entire industry, and it's what will get us where we need to go. We need private smart contracts and identity to bring in all those real-world assets and security tokens. What's beautiful is that the same technology that enables Bitcoin DeFi on Cardano will also apply to Midnight. So, you have a tri-hybrid application: three blockchains—Cardano, Midnight, and Bitcoin.

For the first time ever, Bitcoin will have a privacy layer for private smart contracts. I can't wait to collaborate with the Bitcoin community on that. We have a lot of work to do. The Bitcoin education project is coming back, and we're definitely going to discuss what makes Bitcoin special and unique, as well as what makes Bitcoin the dominant cryptocurrency. There's a lot of good philosophy there, and it's great to be reading and thinking again in that sphere.

We also want to explore things that extend that mindset while still staying in the Bitcoin ecosystem and maintaining the Bitcoin guarantees. We're also going to try to put it through the innovation group. Some backfilling has to be done on the security model. I really want to ensure a solid academic paper gets written about the innovations we've made. We've done this once before; Satoshi created Bitcoin, and then our scientists wrote GKL 15, which is the foundational model proving Bitcoin is secure.

It went from an intuitive and heuristic viewpoint to a formalized, rigorous viewpoint, which is pretty cool. It shows how brilliant Satoshi was to intuitively come up with something that years later was proven not only to be right but also a dominant model in many respects. Hopefully, we can do the same for Boss. If there's anything to clean up, it will get cleaned up, and then we're off to the races. But anyway, enough about me talking.

There's a lot more to say, but I can't mention things about NDAs and ongoing conversations. Of course, I want to talk to you guys; it's an AMA, and that's what makes AMAs fun. Okay, Charles, what was in your SpaceX bag? I went out to Hawthorne and saw the facility. They're building a rocket every two days; these guys are unbelievable.

You see mechanics constructing engines, big rocket bodies, 3D printers going off, and advanced machines using ultrasound to scan carbon fiber. It is one of the most incredible manufacturing facilities I've ever seen in my life, and the staff was just fired up. The bag they gave me had a t-shirt, a pen, and a notebook. It's a very nice swag bag. Charles, what was it really like to live in the body of a wolf?

It's incredibly disorienting. First off, your entire proprioception, your whole notion of body mechanics, changes because you're on your hands and legs, crawling and walking with four legs instead of two. You have this tremendous sense of smell and really nice visual clarity. The first thing that hit me was the sense of smell; I could smell miles away. Running was a bit disorienting and stumbling, but really exciting.

There are so many comments coming through. What is Midnight? Midnight is a fourth-generation cryptocurrency being built to augment all of the cryptocurrencies. It's a meta chain instead of just a blockchain, so it works with Ethereum, Solana, and Cardano. We're negotiating with other ecosystems to see how we can bring it in.

In fact, it would be really cool to announce a few things in the coming months about that. The goal is to add private smart contracts, which would allow for private state to public state. Currently, smart contracts in crypto only live on the public side, and all the private stuff is done somewhere else. By having private smart contracts, you can add identity and create a selective disclosure regime. Imagine a company as a disclosure engine: some people get to see the HR files, most people don’t; some people get to see payroll, most people don’t; some people know the secret projects the company is working on, most people don’t.

So, there's a private side and a public side. If you're running a DAO on-chain, you need that capability. Or if you have a security token, for example, there's a private disclosure regime that relates to the broker-dealer and the mechanics of the security, including the voting of the security. But then there's a public part of it, like who owns it, where it is, where it's trading, and its public value. Midnight adds the private side in a decentralized way for the entire cryptocurrency ecosystem, but it's best on Cardano and launched by Cardano.

When are hair implants happening? I have a story about this. I'm losing my hair, as We're starting to get into stem cells and going to try some stem cell treatments to see how effective they are. You guys can watch my head; if my hair comes back, it means the stem cells work, and I'll be able to write a blog post about it. Is Midnight going to be airdropped to ADA holders?

Yes, there will be a glacier drop; that's the distribution mechanism for Midnight. You're eligible, and you won't have to mine to produce it. Cardano will be the largest distribution, and we'll talk about that later, but we're getting very close. Charles, what video games have you been playing lately? Lately, none, because I've been incredibly busy.

But we are still making video games. In fact, I purchased a video game called Crystal Mines with my brother way back in the day. Crystal Mines is a Nintendo game that came on a blue cartridge and was released in the late '80s or early '90s for Nintendo NES. We bought all the intellectual property and have been rebuilding the game from the ground up. That's one of the things that gets me very excited about the Nintendo emulator.

Once we have that running on Hydra and we have a DApp store, we will have a distribution place for homebrew games in the NES and Super NES world, which is actually quite large. We're already preparing for a launch title, and tentatively, we think the game will be done next year around July, with a whole bunch of upgraded features. We took the base game and completely rebuilt it in a programming language designed specifically for the Nintendo, making it much easier to develop. We don't have to write assembly; we have a high-level language that compiles down. We're adding a save function and an inventory system, and we've written a whole plot for the game and a litany of other things.

There's a small team currently working on this in Gillette, Wyoming, across the entire homebrew community. There will be a lot of that, and I'd like to get to a development cadence where we can launch an NES title every three months. Charles, are you optimistic with RFK? As far as I'm concerned, he's not just a figurehead; he's the boss of the boss of the boss, the HHS Secretary. That's the whole healthcare apparatus, and you bet I'm very excited about that.

It's kind of funny; all these people run around saying he's anti-science. Let me get this straight: the sickest, fattest country that spends the most on healthcare is getting sicker and fatter while spending more on healthcare, and they're worried that the guy coming in is going to change directions? Maybe we should talk about seed oils or what's in our food. You go to Europe, and you read the label, and it looks like food. You go to America, and it has a bunch of ingredients you can't pronounce.

In some places, they use sugar in food; we use high fructose corn syrup. In other places, fat is fat, while here they take it all out and replace it with a bunch of junk. Everybody's getting diabetes and neural problems now. There's this amazing video showing two rats: one with a normal diet and the other with an American diet. They put them in a tank of water to see if they can swim to safety.

It only takes five seconds for the normal rat to get there, but the rat that’s been eating American food can't even get to the ledge; it has brain damage from the American diet. It's just not healthy at all, so we need to make some changes. I'm really excited that we're going to make America healthy again. You have to work out. Since the CAB retreat, I've been working out every day.

I ran 30 miles last week and did a whole bunch of calisthenics. I'm starting to get into handstands and all that stuff. I've gained four pounds of muscle and lost a few pounds of fat. I'm pushing through two days of fasting a week; the other five days are eating days. It's working really well, and I'm feeling great.

Charles, what was the last whiskey you had, and what is your favorite? I really like Glenmorangie and Macallan, but my favorite whiskey is Hibiki. The best drinking whiskey for value is Hibiki Harmony. That was the last I had in 2023; I haven't drunk anything all year. It's a dry year for me.

Why is Charles talking about calisthenics? Because I'm thinking about it. One of these days, you're going to see me do a handstand, and you'll be like, "What's going on, man?" I'll be like, "Yeah, start with the frog stand, work your way up to the handstand, then do handstand push-ups." It's going to take about a year, I think, but I'm getting there.

The mobility and flexibility are coming back. I'm going to get one of those EMS Catalyst suits that shocks you while you work out and makes you do a two-hour workout in 20 minutes. You're always optimizing; always got to be optimizing. On what level do you think Cardano and XRP can work together? I think we can add amazing DeFi components to XRP.

They can add a lot of liquidity and a wonderful stablecoin layer. Bridges would definitely be super cool to see if there's a path to get Midnight working with XRP. I'm meeting with David Schwartz here in a little bit; I've been texting him back and forth. His people are talking to my people. I sent him some of our papers and the code for Midnight, and we'll see where that goes.

They're nice people, and I've known them forever. It's great to have them back in the family, and we're going to figure this out as a group. Best books you've read this year? Right now, I'm reading "The River of Doubt." It's about Teddy Roosevelt.

I'll write up a thing for you guys on my blog; I love writing. "The River of Doubt" is about what happened in Teddy Roosevelt's life. He was President right at the turn of the 19th to 20th century E-bodies, and it happened before he was born, so that guy's not young. Probably more than 60 years ago, we've encountered these things, and they have capabilities beyond our technology. They also have the ability to disable our nuclear weapons and other such things.

It blows my mind. I think during the Trump Administration, something's going to come out, and we're finally going to know what all these UAPs are about. What's your opinion on Keystone? I assume you're referring to the Keystone Wallet, not the Keystone Pipeline. I'm going to get one of them and talk to the team.

It’d be real cool to do a Twitter space with them to get to know more. It's nice to have some competition; it makes people move a little faster and be a bit more honest. Farming Simulator would actually be pretty cool, a Farmville. Nike is running a farm; we could do a whole Animal Farm thing. Remember, remember the fifth of November.

Are there any updates on major stablecoins for Cardano? I think we're making great progress in that area, and there's more to come. It’ll be kind of the little and big; little are things like homebrew stuff in Cardano, and big are the name-brand stablecoins. We're working and firing on all cylinders there, but I’ll have more to say in a few weeks. What's your daily routine like?

This is the life hack: get up at 3:00 in the morning, get hit in the nuts, then lay on a bed of nails while cobras bite me. After that, pour acid on my face just to see if it heals. No, so I get up around usually 4:30 to 5:00 a.m., depending on whether I have calls to Europe.

I get up a little earlier for calls because I need to be in the office by 7:00 a.m. for that; otherwise, I’m usually in the office by about 8:00 a.m. I work out, meditate for about 45 minutes, then I go into the office.

I spend a lot of time doing deep work and calls. Sometimes I throw in a cold plunge, and lately, I’ve been doing a lot of stuff with shock tea nails. Then, a lot of reading. After maybe 2 or 3 p.m.

, I free up and sometimes take a nap. I bought the condo upstairs, and we changed it over and called it the Naptor, so I just take the elevator up and go into the Naptor to get some sleep. If I have a workout session with my personal trainer, Fen, I’ll work out on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. Otherwise, I go back to the house and grab some dinner. Not the most glorious of things—lots of reading, a lot of work, meditation, exercise, these types of things.

I do have an Immortal Chamber, which is a pretty cool device. Let me show you guys. Just opening up the website for it. Yeah, so let me go ahead and share my screen. [Music] Alright, let's see here.

Present, share. There we go. So it’s a really cool device. Basically, you have red light here, this is vibro-acoustics and PEMF. Here, that is molecular hydrogen nasal cannula, and they have speakers there and there and there.

So it’s four or five modalities altogether. That’s what the coils look like; it vibrates your whole body. It’s a very relaxing experience, actually, and there are different programs. For deep recovery, the Immortal Chamber works incredibly well. We’re starting to get into vibro-acoustics already for medical applications.

One thing that I’m super interested in is pineal gland stimulation to decalcify and also create endogenous DMT. Basically, you target the pineal gland with vibrations, and over time, it actually starts releasing DMT. You might even be able to get it to release a burst and knock you into a psychedelic state. So, super cool stuff. We have a research program that we’re starting at the clinic next year to begin investigating the technologies and modalities required for that, and I’ll let you guys know more when we have more to say.

Will the ADA treasury be used for marketing Cardano? Well, what? If the budget passes, my belief is yes, because that’s part of the current budget discussion—how do we do that? So, vote yes on the budget. Is the Immortal Chamber hot?

It’s not terribly hot. Hey Charles, what’s up with Crypto Bison? We gave it to Roman, the CTO of IOG, and he’s putting a team together to launch it. This was always his passion project, so we’ll see it work its way through. If not, we’ll put it into the Nintendo game rotation.

Charles, is the $36 trillion national debt the elephant in the room? That’s not the elephant; that’s the blue whale in the room. That’s the blue whale and the three cousins of the blue whale and their friend the sperm whale in the room, all sitting there, and we’re just pretending to ignore them as they go. That’s why we have the Doge now—the Doge of America. Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy are basically going to try to cut $2 trillion off of our $6 trillion.