Happy Sunday

Hi, this is Charles Hoskinson broadcasting live from Rough and Rugged Wyoming. Always rough, always rugged, sometimes Wyoming. Good to see everybody. Today is January 18th, 2026. It has been a very busy year.

We’re working hard, and there’s a lot going on right now. We’re having fun, but it’s crypto, and you have to drag crypto kicking and screaming through the streets. It’s tough, but we appreciate all the love and support, and we appreciate the fact that everybody’s fired up and excited to get out of this slump and into the mountains. It’s kind of funny when you think about a saw. Everybody looks at the tips, the very top, the point.

You need the valleys to make the saw because of those triangles. Every mountain needs a valley; otherwise, it’s not a mountain. So, crypto needs its downs to meet its ups, and we get through them. We had a lovely workshop where we talked about the roadmap of Midnight, and we went into exhaustive detail. It’s not just about privacy; it’s about creating universal construction for privacy-enhancing technology.

MPC, TE, and fully homomorphic encryption ZK are all important because everybody just builds the latest and greatest ZK system. “My ZK system is a little faster than your ZK system.” My proof size is a little more optimized, but that’s completely immaterial to privacy because privacy is your data. Privacy is your network stack. Privacy is the ability to lease something to somebody, have it for 24 hours, and then get a guaranteed eraser.

Privacy is your ability to have plausible deniability and to stenographically embed things in network messages. It’s a very rich and vibrant field. If you’re serious about privacy, you have to do the whole banana; you can’t just do one part of privacy-enhancing technology. We had a lovely conversation about PET and where PET meets abstraction. You have intents and wallet abstraction.

About 90% of all DeFi DEX transactions, by 2030, are going to be in an intent-driven format. Sixty percent are going to be DeFi. There are a lot of really cool and interesting things happening there. We had a long and fruitful conversation about the things we need to do to win and make sure that when trillions of dollars of intents are flowing, Midnight is the platform that routes all of them to the solvers. Of course, we also had a conversation about smart compliance, and there’s a lot of great progress there.

PETAD is doing really well too. The Intersect team actually came into the IO offices this week for a board meeting. We had a lovely conversation about their 2026 goals, where they want to go, and what they want to do. We’re in deep negotiation with all the CCI, moving the ball forward on tier one bridges and tier one stable coins. Negotiations are very fruitful there.

I keep saying, “Come on, guys, let’s get it on paper so we can announce a few things.” Things are looking good. There’s a lot of pessimism and cynicism that leaks its way in. People have gotten into this cycle of toxic learned hopelessness. They wake up every day saying, “If it’s not announced instantly right here, right now, it’s a scam.

It’s never going to happen. Everything’s horrible. The sky is falling.” One of the great lessons of being off Twitter for the last two weeks—now 18 days—has been to escape that cycle of learned hopelessness and toxic cynicism. I broadcast to Twitter, but you’ll notice there are no tweets, no engagement.

Why? Because I uninstalled the app. I have API access to push Streamyard, but I don’t go there. I don’t read the comments. What’s the point?

It’s really easy to sit and complain, saying everything’s going to be horrible, that we’re never going to achieve anything, that the price is always going to be low, and that everybody’s lost all their money. It’s over. What effort have you put in? What have you achieved? What have you built?

What have you contributed to the conversation? Nothing. Absolutely nothing. You’ve contributed nothing. You’ve built nothing.

You’ve achieved nothing. If that’s how you want to live your life and take that attitude into everything—“I want to lose some weight”—you’ll never do it. You’re a fatty. “I want to get a better job.” No one will hire you; you’re stupid.

“AI is going to take all our jobs away.” Imagine how miserable every waking moment would be. “I need to get a better relationship.” No one will ever date you; you’re fat, stupid, and poor. Imagine how miserable your life would be, and it is for many of you.

Hard work is not defined when it’s sunshine and rainbows and everybody’s doing well and feeling great. Hard work is when you have a gout attack, and you have to wake up and still hit the gym. Hard work is when you’ve committed to a long tour, you’re exhausted, you don’t have a lot of gas in the tank, but you still get on the plane. When you meet those people, you shake their hand, pretend it’s the best day ever, and smile and nod because they showed up for you. Hard work is looking at a roadmap for the 14th time and saying, “Let’s do it again and create a 15th iteration because it’s not quite good enough.

” That’s what hard work is, and that’s where greatness comes from. Success doesn’t come from sitting on your couch complaining about how bad things are. It comes from having enough agency to realize you have some ability to influence and change the world. I can’t change the markets. I’m deeply frustrated, and I’m also deeply frustrated that the embedded actors, every single time we seem to be making some progress, pull the rug out from underneath us.

I saw it in October and a hundred times before, again and again. Just get back up and do it again. Keep working, keep building. The reality is, when you look at what we’re building with Midnight and for Cardano too, it’s never been done before. A universal PET primitive lattice base folding to actually bring folding to the entire industry and combine it with the intents revolution to have a real shot at automated compliance, settlements compliance, one global market 24 hours a day, seven days a week, trillions of dollars of transactions, and things settling.

They say, “You’ll never do it in Cardano. You’ll never do it in Midnight.” Why? Because you don’t have it right now. Well, Ethereum didn’t have it in 2014 because it hadn’t even launched.

Bitcoin didn’t have anything in 2008 because it hadn’t even launched. So now they’ve permanently won forever. They have a monopoly forever. They’re going to win forever. Why?

Because God said so. Monopolies are so permanent in technology. Pull out your Blackberry phone, boot up Internet Explorer, go reset your password for your MySpace account using your good old AOL email. Go do that for me. Then post about how permanent monopolies are.

Even the most permanent of the permanent, Windows—where’s that at? If you’re a Silicon Valley entrepreneur, we have a Windows-first strategy. Maybe we’ll come to the iPhone and Android devices later on because that’s where all the customers are. Yeah, good luck getting funded. Monopolies aren’t permanent.

Nothing is permanent. Life isn’t permanent. Life is wavy. Life is uncertain. The only certainty is change.

You lose today, you win tomorrow. Win tomorrow, lose tomorrow. That’s how it works. You miss a train, you wait for the next train. You pick that up.

You have to do something new and different. It can’t be, “We’re better, faster, cheaper.” You have to bring new experiences. Did that on Midnight we figured out how to make the damn thing work? All you need is just a phone.

You don’t need a wallet or any of those things. Just your fingerprint and a pin code. Boom. You’re using crypto. How’s that?

That’s different. It’s new. It’s exciting. You’ve got to think differently. I spent two weeks over Christmas revising all the product roadmaps, talking to everybody.

It was exhausting. I was up to 3:00 in the morning every night. My dog was angry with me. He said, “Dude, you need to sleep because I want to win. I want to have some agency in it.

” And I think you do too, deep down inside. Or else you just live that miserable, horrible life where you go from one failure to another and then spread that toxicity to everyone else. Why would anybody want to be your friend or be around you if that’s all you have to offer to the conversation? Honestly speaking, grow up, change, have some agency, and believe you can actually win. The same goes for Cardano.

There’s no reason, after we upgrade Bitcoin DeFi and to Midnight, that Cardano DApps can’t be some of the most competitive, largest, and aggressive DApps in the entire industry because they can do new and different things for new and different communities that are untapped and quite valuable. That’s how we win. There are a lot of Cardano DApp builders who say, “what? I want to do that. I’m fired up about that.

Let’s go make it happen.” They say, “But we don’t have stable coins, and we don’t have this, and we don’t have that.” Well, we’ll have them. “No, it’ll never happen.” Why?

How are you so certain? Because everybody hates us. We’re all just horrible human beings, and everybody in the space is in a giant combined conspiracy against Cardano. Here’s the news flash: nobody cares. Charles said a mean tweet three years ago, four years ago.

Nobody cares. what? They care about money. That’s all. All these service providers care about is money.

It’s all one big negotiation. At some point, you reach a conclusion, shake a hand, get ink on paper, and all that mean stuff, all that rivalry, it goes away. You turn a page, you move on. It’s just that simple. That’s why you don’t bet your future on mercenaries and service providers.

Because while times are rich, they’re your best friend. When times are poor, they are not. It’s that simple. You have to bet it on something else. You have to create strong economic moats.

That’s where leadership comes in. That’s where collective bargaining comes in. That’s where strategy comes in, and all these other things. We’re making great progress on it. It’ll get done.

It should have been done a long time ago. But why is everybody a historian? “You said this. You said that.” Well, we tried.

It’s not the meetings didn’t happen. It’s not the negotiations didn’t occur. Turns out lots of things were occurring. Scary Gary was trying to destroy the markets. Everything was in freefall.

Luna collapsed. FTX collapsed. ADA went from $3.25. We were no longer the pretty girl.

Plenty of other things came up. Roadmap delays. Governance was significantly more complex and difficult to get out. Then we had to rebuild the DevX of Cardano three or four times. Did we give up at any step of the way?

The last four miserable, horrible years—did we come and say, “what? It’s too hard. We can’t do it. We’re going to go home”? No, we actually survived.

We’re here. We did all of it. We honored the commitments and promises. Laos exists; it’s being implemented. Cardano governance has been implemented; it’s fully there.

We never gave up. We kept pushing forward even when people said things that weren’t true. Yes, there was some bitterness. Yes, there’s some resentment. There’s some acknowledgment that for the rest of time, I can never be fully objective about certain things.

I’m never going to heal. Congratulations on that. But I didn’t lose the mission. I didn’t lose the vision. I didn’t lose the desire.

I choose to be here. It’s very expensive, and some days it feels like life is draining out of me. Some days it feels I should just throw in the towel, but I keep moving forward because I want this to exist. So many of you have these avaristic goals. You got on the boat because you want to get a 10x because you want to pay your bills.

I look at you with so much sadness. You’re no better than Judas trading Jesus for silver. Here’s the brass tax about what’s at stake. You’ve got AI, tech oligarchies, and your entire life connected to this device that tracks everything you do. It goes with you everywhere.

You’ve outsourced everything to these tech oligarchs, and with AI, they will know every single thing about you. They’re going to put a number on your head, just the number of the beast. Your entire experience as a human being is going to be based on whether that number is high or low. That is the system you’re sleepwalking into as you complain about paying your car payment and your bills. Do you really want to live in a world where everything you say, think, and do is monitored?

Do you really want to live in a world where your entire value as a human being is a number that an artificial intelligence agent has stamped on you? Because that’s what you have with the legacy financial system. No one is going to save you. The whole reason our industry exists—with its avarice, chaos, stupidity, meme coins, and everything else—is because it’s the only thing humanity has invented to avoid that dystopian hellscape of a future. That’s it.

That’s the whole reason it exists. You judge the success and failures of the industry solely based on coin market cap and whether people got a 10x or not. That’s how they won. They convinced you that’s the game. That’s how they took it over.

They said, “How do we beat these guys on philosophy?” You can’t. So, let’s change the goalpost and make it a game about money. Once it’s a game about money, it’s easy to win. Just use all the same old techniques we’ve had from the past.

That’s the harsh truth. Deep down inside, it. Deep down inside, in your soul, it because you see it. You see it every day when people get deplatformed. You see it every day with China and social credit.

You see it every day with how invasive and pervasive all of this feels. You see it every day in these systems. They know a scary amount about you, and they’re getting to know more and more every day. You see it every day as you’re being robbed blind, and you have no agency about it. Tell me, that $100—how much groceries does that buy you versus what my dad bought versus what my grandfather bought?

Tell me that $1,000—how much of your rent does that pay versus what your dad had to pay, your grandfather had to pay? Your money is decaying. The debts are going up. Do you feel any control over all of that? So, what you want to do is go make a 10x to run back into the financial system.

You say, “I got bills to pay.” Change your lifestyle. Honestly speaking, take agency in it. It’s easy for you to say, “You’re rich, Charles.” I wasn’t.

When I started this journey, I was broke. what? I might go broke again. Do you think I honestly care? I don’t want to be a billionaire in a world where I’m not allowed to say the things I believe.

I don’t want to be a billionaire in a world where I’m not allowed to travel, express myself, and be myself, and I have to perpetuate a power structure that’s pure evil. I’ll give it all up if that’s what it comes down to because at least I get to say in the mirror, “I tried.” Yes, I have luxuries. They come and go. Do you feel that sadness when you try to hold on to things?

The world changes. You’re on top in the mountaintop; you’re down in the valley. Does the fact that I have something today and won’t have it tomorrow really bother me? No, because you can still have a good day. You can still live well.

What matters is when I look in the mirror, I say I was a good person. I was honest. I told people the truth. It’s why 2025 was so hard—dealing with the Trump administration in this miasma of chaos, idiocy, lunacy, and dishonesty, seeing people jockey for position by forking over millions of dollars, and every single thing was just a popularity contest. “Are you in or out?

” The whims and wills of a murial boy king and armies of adoring fans. Why? Because we hate the other guys so much that we just have to tolerate this. We can tolerate neither. We’re better than this.

I watched a slow train wreck as we barreled down toward clarity. what the current bill has in it? 137 amendments later, it hands the entire keys to the cryptocurrency kingdom to the Securities Exchange Commission, and you have to beg and plead for them to make it not a security. All new projects are securities by default. How is that any better than what Scary Gary gave us under Biden?

Did you vote for that? The hundreds of millions of dollars of donations and lobbying to pay for everything from the inauguration to the east wing of the White House and all the stuff in between—the family’s crypto assets—all these things, one year later, and what we got is Elizabeth Warren wrote the bill. That’s leadership we can believe in. You still have people like Brad saying, “Well, it’s not perfect, but we just got to get something. It’s better than no clarity.

” Hand it to the same people who sued us. Hand it to the same people who put us out of business, who subpoenaed us, who put us in jail. That’s better? That’s what we fought for? That’s what we voted for?

Tell me, how do we change it? we changed the Securities Exchange Act of 1933. Ninety-three years later, have we been able to change it? No. You pass it, you own it forever.

Sorry, Brad, it’s not better than chaos. Take the chaos and fight for what’s right. Fight for integrity.