Surprise AMA 11/11/2025 📱

Hi, this is Charles Hoskinson broadcasting live from warm, sunny Colorado. Always warm, always sunny, sometimes Colorado. Today is November 11th, 2025. It is a wonderful day. It's been a long year with a lot going on—lots of ups, lots of downs, lots of fun.

But overall, we've achieved a lot together. The Midnight Summit is coming up in six days. We're going to have it over in England, near London. We've rented a lovely place for it, and a lot of wonderful people are going to be there. We're going to talk a bit about where we've been, the launch of Midnight, and how to get Midnight actually into the market.

It's a four-stage launch, and each stage is important. We'll also discuss all the partners that have come along with us, what Midnight is used for, and how you can all be part of it. We have a dedicated day for partner showcases, so people can show what they're building. I'm really excited about that. It's the birth of a second child—Cardano was the first child, and Midnight is the second.

It's super cool to see something come to life. It's the fourth generation of cryptocurrencies, and I really do mean that. If you think about the generations, it's a nice logical ordering that helps you understand where the market is, why it got there, and what big problems we're trying to solve. Bitcoin is the OG of OGs. It's become digital gold, but really, it was just trying to solve the movement of value in a decentralized way without middlemen getting involved.

That was massive because throughout all of human history, we didn't have the ability to do that unless it was physical. In the digital world, it was not possible. We made it possible. Then you look at Ethereum and say, "Well, we want transactions to come alive and be programmable." Transactions have assets and actors—one-to-one, one-to-many, many-to-one, many-to-many.

There's context behind why you're doing what you're doing. The metadata of the transaction includes the location and all this other stuff. There's usually a contractual relationship between people, and there's some understanding commercially of what the purpose of the transaction is. They tend to be nested within jurisdictions, so there are regulatory schemas. You can't do that in a fixed-function system.

We knew that; Nick Szabo knew that; David J knew that. All the OGs knew that. So we created smart contracts and brought them to light, and that was awesome. It was like when JavaScript came to the web browser. Then you look at Cardano, the third generation, and the people who followed it said this needs to work at scale for everyone.

We also need to figure out how to upgrade the systems. We need governance. If you don't have upgradability, the systems frankly speaking just won't work. You need on-chain governance because the systems get exponentially more complex as you add more capabilities to them, and a centralized company can't manage a decentralized protocol. You need to have on-chain governance.

When we look to the fourth generation, we have three new properties: the concept of rational privacy, selected disclosure, and the idea of cooperative economics. You have to bridge traditional finance and DeFi together and create a new financial system. You have to get everybody working together. You can't have one token fighting another token. You have to have the ability to sort out what's private and what's public and who gets to know what.

You have to reintroduce some concept of identity into these systems because they're identity-free. Everything in life usually has an identity attached to it. Otherwise, how do you get access to your medical records or your academic records? You need some notion of that inside the system that goes beyond primitive. It needs to have selective disclosure capabilities.

We've been working really hard at trying to scale up and improve these things to a point where they’re industrialized and we can have millions of people use one system, come with whatever token they want, any network they want, whether it be legacy or DeFi, and basically be able to enjoy privacy and selective disclosure. I think that’s going to change the world. I think it’s the last mile to actually get governments on a blockchain. I think it’s the last mile to get all of the financial institutions on the blockchain. It’s going to take a lot of time and effort, but Midnight is the vanguard of all of that.

If you look at the scavenger hunt, we’re doing the calculations right now, but it looks like in 21 days, more compute has been expended on the scavenger hunt than in the first few years of Bitcoin. I’ll have the exact numbers at the summit, but that’s extraordinary. In just a few weeks, it shows that there’s more compute power thrown at Midnight than in the first few years of Bitcoin. That’s just crazy when you think about it. The glacier drop participation was huge.

We got another wave of drops from Gate and Kraken so that customers there can get their tokens. I hope Coinbase wakes up. It’s cool to watch all that happen and have these different distribution mechanisms, including a remorseful redemption pool. It’s nifty to watch that happen. It’s the fairest, largest distribution ever done when you look at the numbers.

It beats Arbitrum, and it’s fair in that no VCs participated. Nobody got first access to this stuff. The right of first refusal went to you, the people. That’s how I’ve always lived my life. Crypto, in my view, is a retail phenomenon.

It’s okay to see BlackRock come in and Goldman Sachs come in and all the other big guys come in, but I’m an old-fashioned person. I believe they should play by the same rules that you and I play by. That’s why I’ve always had some issues with asset-backed stablecoins because they introduce a character who doesn’t belong. I shouldn’t have to ask a centralized company for permission to deploy a decentralized product on my network. There should be an integration point, and it should be a software conversation.

The fact that I have to go to a company, pay eight or nine figures, lay up a bunch of capital, and negotiate company to company to make a deal to get something on my network means that by its very construction, that’s not decentralized. What’s the point of all this as an ecosystem if we just hand the entire keys to the kingdom back to centralized actors? Honestly speaking, what’s the difference between this and banks? It’s just banks with a lot of extra steps and crypto in between and a little bit of token appreciation bred for the masses with their meme coins. It doesn’t make any sense to me.

I signed up for a new financial stack, which is why I, Dan Lammer, and Stan were the first to create the algorithmic stablecoin back in 2013 with BitShares before any of these things. We also created the first DEX, and Graphene was one of the first blockchain builder kits. There’s delegated proof of stake there. That’s how old the legacy goes—more than 12 years—because we really cared about this concept of you being in the driver’s seat and you controlling your data. Now, I can’t solve every problem, but I think Midnight’s a massive step forward and it solves a lot of problems.

It really creates a reality where you are in control of most of your data and most of your transactions. I’d like to see private stablecoins, especially algorithmic stablecoins, on Midnight. I’d like to see private DEXs on Midnight. I’d like to see a lot of this infrastructure built. There’s a ton of demand, as you see with the surge of Zcash and Monero.

People are starting to wake up to the fact that if they don’t invest now in returning that capability to their day-to-day lives, it’s going to be taken from them forever. So, we as an industry have to do better, and I think we will do better. It’s just going to take a little bit of time, and we have to keep the faith and keep pushing through. I looked a lot younger in those pictures. There’s an interview with me when I was still the CEO of Ethereum, back when we were getting ready to launch.

I’m wearing the shirt and everything, and this gal is interviewing me. I looked at that and said, "Holy hell, I don’t recognize that person. He’s so young." I’ve gotten a little older, a little fatter, a lot more white hair in the beard, but the passion is still there, and the love is still there. I really do care about what we do, and Cardano reflects that, and Midnight reflects that.

We’re one of the few chains that has the luxury of having our problems out in the public and open, as opposed to being behind closed doors where mommy and daddy will figure it out for the sake of the kids. You’re treated like adults, given the full story, and you’re co-equal partners in the growth and evolution of these systems. Yes, it’s hard, and yes, it takes time. We have to figure out where we make moral compromises and where we don’t. There have been a lot of disappointments this year.

One of the biggest disappointments to me has been some of the actions of the Trump administration. As many of I am conservative. I’m a libertarian at my core. I campaigned for Ron Paul and Rand Paul, and I’ve always fought for a small government, a humble foreign policy, and constitutional rights for all. That means I don’t particularly care about wedge issues like gay marriage or other things.

I just want people to love who they want to love and live the life they want to live. Get the government out of your life. Take the substances you want, marry the people you want, as long as you’re not harming anyone and as long as consent is involved. Obviously, kids can’t consent, which is why certain issues bother me, like gender reassignment for children because it’s not consensual, and they’re very easy to manipulate. If parents aren’t involved and states pass laws to take them out, that’s fundamentally wrong.

It’s very different from a standard LGBTQ issue, which is just normally an expression of one’s love and desires. It’s very different; it’s a medical problem. For the most part, I’ve stayed out of government, outside of just saying the whole thing is crooked and corrupt. Now, the Democrats declared war on my industry. If you’re on the left and you can’t acknowledge that, then you won’t understand how we got here.

Many of the prominent leaders were either put under investigation or some were thrown in jail. Every U.S. exchange was sued. There was a desire to destroy the entire DeFi market, debank all the entities, and gradually bleed them dry, then find some charges to throw the leadership in jail.

That’s what was happening. Coinbase tried to come in and register, as Gary Gensler said, more than 20 times. They were ghosted every time and then sued at the back of it. We saw it again and again. We tried to pass laws.

We said, "Okay, can we please pass some legislation so we can have some rules?" The mandate from the top was, "Don’t do it. The current laws are sufficient." Laws written in 1933 apparently are sufficient to regulate the cryptocurrency market of 2022, 2023, and 2024. It’s such an absurd thing.

It’s like using laws on horses to regulate self-driving cars. But that’s where we were at. So Trump came in and said, "Hey, we’re going to change everything." Initially, there was a great degree of optimism. The challenge for our market is that he launched Trumpcoin and World Liberty and these other things.

The family has every right to do that; there’s nothing stopping them, and there’s nothing intrinsically illegal about it. But what it did was make a bipartisan issue political. It created a reality where for the Democrats, crypto equals Trump equals bad. He could have simply waited until the legislation was done to enter the industry under the new rules, which would have been co-authored by both Democrats and Republicans. He didn’t, and it created an environment that was very difficult.

There hasn’t been, frankly speaking, a great degree of clarity floating around from the White House on the crypto market. For example, we have not made any progress on the DeFi question, on the blockchain disclosure question. We have not made meaningful progress on a lot of things that are very meaningful to all of you. Now, this is not for lack of trying. The Senate and the House have worked really hard, and they deserve a lot of credit for the enormous effort they’ve put in to try to write some rules.

The SEC has turned a page, and I will agree that they’ve done amazing things in reversing the horrible decisions of Gary Gensler and ending the war on crypto. I’m pretty happy about that, and I think that’s a great thing. But the challenge is that just because we’ve gotten a brief reprieve does not translate to a long-term solution and long-term viability. The reality is that crypto has now been so heavily politicized and associated with the Trump family that if the Democrats return to power in 2027 or 2029, there’s a strong probability we’ll be exactly back to where we started—with subpoenas, lawsuits, criminalization, and a weaponization of the Justice Department. Some people will get pardons before that; most will not.

We’re left in a difficult situation where we have to find a path to bipartisanship in an increasingly partisan environment where people refuse to talk to each other, listen to each other, or work with each other. Every single person in America is an American. So why do we hate half the country based on our political opinions and view them as subhuman? I understand rivalries and teams. I’m a Broncos fan.

When KC plays the Broncos, we have good-natured comments about that. But at the end of the day, I don’t view a KC fan as a subhuman person or rob them of their dignity. I don’t believe KC fans believe that of Broncos fans either. Just because we have different politics doesn’t mean we’re evil people. I don’t think we’ve ever crossed that line except in certain cases where we do have a belief of genuine harm.

If children are being manipulated and harmed, that’s a problem, and we have to speak up. The same goes for any other group where there’s actual physical harm being done to them. The vast majority of people, regardless of where their politics sit, are utterly unaware of what the U.S. government does.

Traditionally, when you want to fix that problem, you shut it down and start over. Historically, that’s happened when you get conquered. Look at Spain. It used to be the big empire, then it went through a multi-century decline and decay, and then they got conquered by the French. When Napoleon’s people marched in, they were horrified to find that the Spanish Inquisition was still running in the 19th century.

Think about that—a longstanding medieval relic because the bureaucracy was entrenched and the decisions were entrenched. We’re not going to get conquered externally, which means that the system endures and persists, but it gets more bureaucratic, less accountable, less transparent, and more opaque. A real revolution is not electing a strongman and saying, "Well, now we have this savior, and he’s just going to make everything better." A real revolution focuses on new systems, new processes, new procedures, and migrating people over to them, which is why I’ve always been a fan of blockchain technology. When I look at it, it just makes sense to me.

The parameterization of a blockchain allows you to define an economic, political, and social system any way you want. You can build these systems in a way that’s fraud-free and corruption-free because you can have a situation that’s transparent to everyone, auditable to everyone, and immutable so nobody can change the records retroactively. We can finally see where the money goes, who it goes to, and why those decisions were made. Paired with AI, we have a governance utopia that could come. I’d like somebody to be in the driver’s seat who has the ability to implement this and the vision for this.

We can’t trust Silicon Valley because they’re accountable to no one, and they have become so narcissistic that they literally want to make themselves gods. If you really look at the core of Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, and Peter Thiel, they want to use technology to become immortal and become a different species than homo sapiens. They look down on the rest. You see it in books like "Homo Deus" and in a lot of their writings, the technoutopianism they espouse, or the worship of the singularity, which effectively is a god. You can’t trust people like that because regardless of whether they have good ideas or not, they view themselves as superior to everyone else and will build a system to perpetuate that viewpoint.

You have to build a system that’s egalitarian at its core, which has been my life’s work. I don’t particularly care if I end up broke or in jail. I don’t particularly care if I end up one of the world’s richest men. It’s never mattered to me. I lived in an apartment.

You guys saw me do these AMAs with giraffes behind me—little stuffed giraffes. I had just as much, if not more fun, than I have here in my current situation. If I lost it all, it wouldn’t matter because at the end of the day, I’m here to do a job. That job is to get this technology into your hands, teach you how to use it, and make sure it works well, and then try to get that technology to rebuild and rewrite the fabric of society. I don’t want to live in a world of endless cynicism, corruption, subjective truth, and chaos with no rule of law.

I want to live in a world of enlightenment, rationality, and constitutional protections. I’ve always wanted that throughout my entire life, and I don’t particularly care about the money. I was just talking to my mom the other day, and she said, "Why are there so many people on food stamps? All these lazy people on food stamps." I said, "Mom, here’s the problem: your money is worthless.

" I asked her, "That house we bought in Hawaii when we lived there, how much was that house?" She said, "About $150,000." That house today is worth a million dollars. That’s the real estate value. I said, "Okay, it’s about seven times more expensive than when you bought it.

Tell me, have wages gone up 7x?" What about that car we drove, that Nissan Altima back in the '90s? How much did that cost? "Oh, we bought it used for about $3,000." That same car, used, upgrading for a modern model would be about $25,000.

So tell me, have wages gone up 8x? No Yeah, we could have bet big on risk five and pushed a little bit more aggressively into some of the zero-knowledge techniques and the outsourcable computation techniques that we see today. We probably should have written the whole thing in Scala. The only reason we didn’t was that Scala 3 wasn’t out at the time. We kept waiting and waiting.

We talked to Martin Odersky and his team and asked, “Martin, when’s this coming out?” Unfortunately, it was several years late. Had Scala 3 been available, we would have used that, and we probably would have used an account-based model. In any R&D project, you always have a collection of failed attempts or things that didn’t quite work out. Ben Cohen still feels December will be the end of this bull run, hence no alt season.

Well, he’s stupid. I mean, we haven’t even passed the Clarity Act yet. Once that passes, it’s going to bring a lot of money into the industry. Typically, you have a big buildup of Bitcoin, and then when Bitcoin reaches a ceiling, the value starts leaking into the altcoins. So, we’re only about halfway through the cycle.

We’re not falling apart. Why the disregard for established stablecoins? I keep explaining it again and again. Two things can be true at the same time. If Cardano is a fully decentralized, permissionless system, there can be no barrier to any stablecoin deploying if they choose.

I don’t oppose Circle, Tether, or others coming, and there’s an inevitability that someone will come of that ilk to our chain. At the same time, I can philosophically disagree with the existence of these things, given that all your transactions are tracked. They can be frozen at any time, and they have a centralized issuer who completely controls the distribution and market of it. That’s not a cryptocurrency. You guys keep pushing this lie that Charles Hoskinson stops these people from coming.

I can’t stop anyone from building on Cardano. It’s an open, permissionless system. Everybody can build on these things. The entities responsible for negotiating and bringing these people into Cardano, the primary entity is the Cardano Foundation. They’ve had over four years and a huge amount of money to allocate to figure this out, and they haven’t done it.

If someone comes to me and says, “I need technology X, Y, and Z on Cardano to facilitate this integration,” we just add it to the road and build it so that integration can be done. But we’re not going to go to Input Output and pay out of our pocket $20, $30, $40, $50, or $60 million and mint $100 million of a stablecoin when there’s an entity literally given 600 million ADA to go and do that. Don’t come to me; go to them. Or take the ADA back and give me some of that ADA to negotiate the deal. Those are your two options.

Honestly, I have a distaste for stablecoins that are centrally issued because everything is tracked. They can be frozen at any time for any reason, and there’s a central issuer, which means if they go out of business, the peg breaks, and the stablecoins become worthless. That is fundamentally incompatible with what cryptocurrencies exist for. It’s an over-glorified bank ledger with extra steps. People love them because they’re economically efficient and they hold their value, as long as you believe in the issuer and the regulatory schema that the issuer lives in.

That’s where we’re at. It’s why we created Jed. It’s why we look at algorithmic stablecoins. And yeah, it’s hard, but it’s honest because your tokens can’t be frozen. Are you getting it yet?

It’s the same question for four years. You guys keep asking when it’s going to be different. I keep telling you it’s not going to be different. All of you going to the Cardano Foundation summit in Berlin should hold up your hands and say, “Hey, where’s Circle at, and when are you guys going to get that done? Are you prepared to put $100 million on the table to make that happen?

” They’ll say, “No, just like our structure prevents us from.” Why don’t you change your structure? Why is there no community representation on the board? Our structure prevents us from doing that. Why don’t you donate the money to a new foundation with a different governance structure?

Can’t you donate money? Your structure prevents you from giving donations to another Cardano foundation in a different jurisdiction with a different leadership structure. This is how they lie again and again and again and change the topic, change the subject. No amount of birthday wishes changes that fundamental reality; the structure is poisoned. I did not set it up; Michael Parsons did.

I tried to change it, but we were pushed off the board. Yes, we were pushed off the board. We were given a choice: either it goes into receivership and the Swiss government totally chooses it and controls it, or we mutually pick a board of Swiss people with these Swiss people that you tried to fire. That’s how we ended up here. You can change your language, but you can’t change reality.

That’s what happened. And that’s why Cardano fell behind with integrations. Midnight is fixing the vast majority of it. We’re getting oracles from it, and we’re going to get all kinds of bridges from it. Yes, we will get stablecoins from it because the Midnight Foundation feels accountable and has a strong desire to get yield.

They’re going to be sending out a lot of Knight tokens, and they would like to create DeFi yield for it. That alone means they need bridges, oracles, and stables. You say, “When Chainlink?” Well, if it’s truly a decentralized network, we don’t have to talk to Sergey to integrate it through a supported network using a bridge, and that’s what we’re looking into right now. I have a team doing a prototype because it’s insane to ask them to write native smart contracts when we can just use a trustless bridge and proofs and trust execution environments to ferry the information over.

So we’ll just go do that and make the SDK and the API the same. The interface is the same, and you pay in LINK. So yeah, it’s a decentralized system. Thank you. So we can go and do that.

Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong believes there’s a real chance that the Clarity Act will be passed before the end of November, but the US government shutdown is currently happening. Well, the shutdown’s going to end very soon. As for the passage, when we talked to the Senate, they released a version. There are still some issues in Umbridge, especially on the left, about the DeFi treatment and whether they try to solve it in the bill or push it to rulemaking. We’ve been pushing very aggressively for rulemaking because it’ll make the process a lot easier, and it also gives us the time to properly discuss it—like two to three years as opposed to a month.

Worst-case scenario, if it can’t get done in November, it’ll get done in the first quarter of 2026 if the Democrats are willing to support it. There need to be 60 votes for it to pass. Republicans will all vote for it, so we need about five to six Democrat votes on that. We already have two, I think, out of the 53. So there’s a path, but horse trading has to happen, and they’re in the horse trading stage.

See if Fred wishes you a happy birthday. I think you guys need to get in a room. We spent three years in a room. There was nothing but dishonesty, duplicity, lies, and manipulation and backbiting. We talked to them about Intersect.

They went and funded and created Pragma behind our backs. We talked to them about the Linux Foundation for a members-based organization. They constructed a structure where Input Output is not allowed to join. We talked about the Cardano constitution. At the constitution, they tweeted they couldn’t support it and then had to walk it back.

We asked them to do the right thing with ADA vouchers and tell the world that they know we didn’t steal the money. They said nothing. They said it was self-inflicted. Eventually, they produced an asinine statement and then moved on, trying to sweep it under the rug. At the core of all of it is their governance structure.

The executives are rotten, and the board has no incentive to do anything. What will fix this is if the board is community-elected because people will run on a campaign to use the money at the foundation to build up Cardano and solve Cardano’s problems. When those people are elected, if the executives can’t do it, the board will fire the executives. So the whole culture changes. All I ask for is to let the community run elections to control the foundation, and you’ll get diversity of thought, accountability, and real KPIs for the ecosystem.

What is me sitting in a room with people who are completely unaccountable, have lied for three years, and have done things to harm us going to solve? What more revelation and insight am I going to get? This is not a Charles Hoskinson hates the foundation issue. This is the foundation is accountable to KPIs in the ecosystem. They’ve never defined them, and they’ve never built an oversight structure capable of holding them accountable to achieve them.

It’s just that simple. You will never get a change in governance. You will never get accountability unless people put on the ground these are the KPIs. This is what we’re going to do. This is when we’re going to do it.

This is how we’re going to do it. The current board cannot do that. They have personal liability in the structure, so they’ll never take a risk. They have no incentive for achieving the KPIs, nor do any of the rank and file at the organization, and they’re in an incredibly conservative jurisdiction and a fast-moving industry. So, how will that succeed?

It’s the wrong structure. It’s the wrong governance structure. It’s the wrong leadership team. Move it to a new jurisdiction. Put a community-elected board in.

Put some checks and balances if you want. Get a set of objective KPIs for the ecosystem and publish an annual roadmap for how to achieve those KPIs. If they don’t achieve them, the board fires the executives. If they do achieve them, the board awards the executives upside. Give them a million-dollar bonus.

Give them a five-million-dollar bonus. I do this all the time in my business. I say, “Guys, if Midnight does this, if this thing does this, if this thing does this, you get X, Y, and Z upside.” Then they wake up every day and say, “How do I get there? Because I want life-changing money.

” it’s pretty simple, right? You don’t have to be a rocket scientist for this. It’s about governance. It’s about structure. It’s about incentives.

It’s not about personalities. There are no friends and personalities in business and in politics. There are interests and incentives. We can be friendly and pleasant until the cows come home and love each other, go drinking every day. Scalia and Ruth Bader Ginsburg are a great example of that.

Politically, they couldn’t be further apart. They would go hang out together and do cool stuff together. They’re friends because they could separate personal relationships from professional relationships. The institution of the foundation’s job is to promote, grow, and get Cardano to the next level. Just that simple.

But they didn’t even define what “next level” means in a way that the industry as a whole can understand. If they really want to, there are nine different RA agencies that provide information in the cryptocurrency space, like DeFi Llama and Misari, and so forth. Go talk to them about KPIs that the industry as a whole accepts. Go talk to A16Z, go talk to Draper, go talk to ARC, go talk to Panta. Come up with a consolidated set of the top 10 KPIs of the ecosystem.

Create a dashboard, publish it, allow everybody to see it, and say, “This is our 2026 strategy, and here’s what we think we can do. Here’s what we can do unilaterally. Here’s what we need to do with the Treasury. Here’s what we need to do with you.” The very existence of the summit is a phenomenal idea, a phenomenal example of this idea.

So, what’s a better bang for our buck? A $6 million vanity party in Berlin where you just go and have your awards ceremony, and all these people come in and wear their nice little tuxedos and have a good dinner, or going to the top four events one a quarter in different geographies with more than 20,000 people attending in the general industry, bringing the Cardano ecosystem there, having a strong booth, taking over the events, having an investor party, and having an afterparty? Which one gets us a bigger bang for our buck? Obviously, it’s the latter. It’s the same price if you think about it, if you do it right.

But there are no KPIs to hold you accountable. What post-growth did you have? And where’s the call to action for these types of things? It’s a leadership issue, an incentives issue, and an oversight issue. Solve that, and then we’re friends.

I don’t care what they said. I don’t care that they have these little parties and talk about how bad Charles is and how dishonest he is and how Lishin was right and all these other things. Good for them. It doesn’t matter. It’s business.

At the end of the day, are you earning? Are you growing? Are you building? Are you doing your job? Some of my harshest critics are some of my closest relationships in this industry.

Sebastian is the CTO of the Midnight Foundation. He has a long track record of being openly critical of decisions Input Output has made and decisions I’ve personally made. We’re friends because we’re united in a common mission and have common goals and common incentives to achieve those goals. It’s okay to disagree, but you have to unite on the mission, the vision, and the KPIs. That’s leadership.

Then you have to rally people behind it and come up with a collective strategy that people believe in, that they actually think is going to achieve something and move forward with it. It’s why they haven’t been able to get anything done because there’s no one there incentivized to take a risk. There’s no vision. There’s no mission. It’s more about the self-perpetuation of the institution.

How do I become a Midnight ambassador? We will have a signup list. We had our first wave of ambassadors who were on the DevX side. The next wave of ambassadors is going to be on the community side. I want to recruit 500 ambassadors next year.

500. I want to pay them a night, and I want 20% of their remuneration to be put into Midnight DeFi. Every ambassador should know how to use a wallet, know how to use Midnight DeFi, know the ecosystem end to end, go through some training courses to understand the USPs of the ecosystem, and be easy to access and very excited. We have to answer the question: What does it mean to be a Midnight ambassador? What does it mean to be a Midnight community member?

It’s different than a Cardano community member because Midnight welcomes people from eight different ecosystems. We have Ethereum people, Cardano people, and Solana people, and it has a different technological direction than Cardano. It does different things. The whole concept of cooperative economics makes Midnight like Switzerland; it’s a neutral place and welcomes everybody. There’s got to be something different about Midnight.

The culture of Midnight is really going to be built up and defined by the Midnight ambassadorship, and it’s going to bring a lot of new people in, a lot of new blood in, a lot of people that aren’t from the Cardano ecosystem. I want a diverse ambassadorship. That said, there are a lot of people in Cardano land who are really excited about Midnight. I want them too, and I think 500 is a good starting point. Maybe we can get bigger, but it’s going to be expensive.

That’s okay. We have to bring that in because the goal is to grow Midnight. I want a TVL over a billion dollars by the end of 2026. I want tons of transaction volume. I want hundreds of thousands of monthly active users in Midnight DeFi.

I want a ton of cross-chain transactions. I want transactions from Ethereum, Solana, Bitcoin, and Cardano. We just keep talking about how we’re going to get there. There are KPIs at the Midnight Foundation connected to those outcomes. They don’t get paid unless they achieve those outcomes.

Alignment incentives come together, so we’ll get it done. Hey, Charles. I’m a German mathematician. Well, those are the best kind. Come on, Gauss.

You answered my questions about your whiskey and solar equipment. What skills, programming languages, etc., are necessary to work on your Midnight project? The language compact is very close to TypeScript. If you are a German mathematician, my recommendation is to read the Magic Moon Math Manual.

Seb’s working on his own training course that uses algebraic geometry to explain these things. But start with the Magic Moon Math Manual; it teaches you about Groth 16 and R1CS. It’s not the same as Midnight, but it puts you in the neighborhood of the thing. The design of Midnight’s core privacy system is Plon and Halo 2. There are seven parts to a ZK stack.

At the very highest level, you have your setup; it’s trusted or untrusted. So it’s a transparent or trusted setup. The next level down, you have your languages. The programming language you use to write the circuits can either be circuit-specific languages or general-purpose programming languages, like Cairo and Noir versus Compact, for example. Then you run a component of the whole thing on your personal computer; that’s called witness generation.

Then you have your arithmetization, where you convert the program that you’ve compiled—the on-chain part of it—into a mathematical representation, usually some polynomial representation. There are different arithmetization systems: R1CS, AIR, or Plon. You even have a customizable constraint system, which is an extension of RCS. That mathematical language translates the zero-knowledge program into solving a mathematical problem. Then you have the actual proof engine that solves that problem.

In this case, for Midnight, it’s Halo 2, soon to be Nightstream. Underneath that, you have the cryptographic infrastructure that permits all this stuff. So what are you using—lattices or hashes or elliptic curves? Then you have the actual blockchain infrastructure. In the proof engine and in the blockchain infrastructure component, you can have either a direct representation that runs on a script-by-script basis or a virtual machine Midnight is much more involved because there’s a blending of hardware and software-based cryptography and a desire to unify the entire stack into one SDK.

You have a layer 2 that serves as an acceleration layer and operates kind of off-chain in a network. This is where Google Cloud can make a lot of money, Azure can make a lot of money, and others, but they don’t get to see what’s going on. The layer one is the aggregation point where you settle a collection of these transactions over time, which means the system can infinitely scale. Over time, Midnight can process billions to trillions of transactions, but it only feels a certain rate. The consensus algorithm Midnight 2 that we’re moving to is a revolution of Jolian.

We have the first safety proof and are currently working on the liveness properties. It’s 5,000 TPS and sub-second block time, which is more than sufficient for the proof aggregation component. Then you build up the outsource layer of the system. Would it be possible for the Cardano protocol to build a bridge to Midnight? It’s already coming in the box.

When Midnight fully ships, the last part is a bidirectional recursive SNARK bridge. On the Cardano side, we added BLS support, while on the Midnight side, we haven’t. Both sides will have trustless bridging capability, allowing you to move a transaction over to Midnight and back from Midnight state trustlessly. There’s no bridge operator because it’s recursive SNARKs on both sides. What’s really cool about it too is that with Orbor’s Paris, there’s fast finality on both sides.

Right now, Midnight and Cardano are instant because it’s a BFT protocol. Cardano is a slower protocol for settlement, but Paris makes it fast. You should be able to move quickly between Midnight and back for assets and instantaneously for state information. I never understand why a guy with your means chose to live in a hole like Laramie, Wyoming. I don’t live in Laramie; I live in Wheatland.

And second, if you don’t get it, you don’t get it. Maybe the hole is where you’re from. How was your trip and experience in Greece? Did you enjoy Athens most or Thesaloniki? I liked Thesaloniki a little bit more, but Athens was, of course, a lot of fun too.

We had a really great time talking to the professors and the infrastructure. We went to the Elen and Philip II’s tomb. We’re looking for a place to put the campus. The venture studio long-term of IO is going to have a hub and spoke model. On the hub side, there’s going to be a campus that has a program to teach people how to start businesses, grow them, and take them to the next level.

The spokes are where you deploy the businesses after you learn all the skills and build up the product-market fit. We’re already starting to build out the spokes. We have one in Abu Dhabi, and we’ve set up one in Argentina that’s actually one of our flagship offices. We’ll have four or five more set up throughout the next 24 months. The hub will then deploy into the spokes, which are where the companies grow.

Greece is where we’re looking for the campus. It’s really now more of a question of the right fit: Athens or Thesaloniki. We could still pivot somewhere else, but we’re very interested in Greece for a variety of reasons. Fundamentally, how does Midnight increase ADA value and usage? Midnight exists as a smart contract on Cardano, the Knight tokens.

If you want to move them, at the end of the day, it consumes ADA. Babel fees can be paid at night, but there has to be ADA at the end of the rainbow. If Midnight is heavily used and traded, moving around and going multi-chain, the Cardano contract has a tremendous amount of transaction volume, which creates ADA usage. Midnight’s staking algorithm pays Knight to SPOs on Cardano, so you make ADA and Knight, and the Knight gets carried through to the ADA wallets of ADA holders. This increases the decentralization of the system, improves the profitability of the SPOs, and increases the transaction demand on Cardano.

Midnight also bridges Cardano to all of the cryptocurrency space, oracles, wallets, and bridges. Why? Because Midnight needs it for its DeFi ecosystem. Being a Cardano native asset, it has to bridge Cardano by default. The list goes on and on.

I see this question a lot: that Midnight is killing Cardano. Honestly speaking, you create more demand for the token, get tier one listings for Cardano native assets, link Cardano into the rest of the industry, and create a DeFi ecosystem. You give a reason for Bitcoin to come over because it gets privacy. You get more revenue streams for stake pool operators and an airdrop as an ADA holder. It’s just crazy.

I get asked the same question again and again. It’s you guys expect a different answer. Either you’re not getting it, you don’t believe it, or you’re not understanding it. Will bridge fees be free? No.

You have to pay a transaction fee at the very least to the network to process the transaction. What are you sipping on? Big dog coffee? I think I need to start pouring some whiskey inside my coffee. [laughter] Oh lord.

I kind of wish Charles was more optimistic. I’m pretty damn optimistic, man. I’m still here after all these years. I should have retired a long time ago. Just meditate every day, live on a mountaintop, and do remote viewing.

Why did Trump exclude you from the round table meeting earlier this year? You think that? Well, first, I didn’t donate enough. Second, I tweeted something about XRP donating to Trump, and I used that as the official excuse. Third, he tweeted about ADA being in the reserve, and Sax wasn’t aware of it because he only thought it was going to be Bitcoin.

So he retaliated and disinvited as many people as he could for that. Welcome to White House politics. The left hand doesn’t know what the right hand is doing. It’s not about merit for these types of things; it’s about connections and patronage. Look, it is what it is.

I can separate these things. Again, there are no friends in politics, no friends in business. There are only interests and incentives. We as an industry have a strong interest and incentive to see success in this agenda. We’re all going to work together, and we’re going to get it done one way or the other.

I’ll think, “Oh yeah, you get invited to the White House.” My ego was hurt. I wasn’t part of the party. Oh no. Oh no.

[groaning and screaming] Shut up. Who cares? Does clarity pass or not? Yes or no? If it passes, is it useful or harmful to the industry?

That’s what I care about. I do not care if I’m in the room or not. I don’t care where I have to go. I don’t care if I have to go to a lumberjack festival in Wisconsin and oil their abs. I will do that if necessary.

I don’t care if I have to go down to Arkansas and talk to the head of the Senate and make a deal with him in Walmart, okay? And ride little Walmart ponies in Bentonville. I don’t give a damn. If it means it passes and it’s useful for the industry, that’s what we do. People need to grow up.

It’s all just TV and vanity. “Oh, this person’s in the club, this person’s not in the club.” Power is fleeting. It wasn’t too long ago that we had a cancer dementia puppet as president. Before that, Trump; before that, Obama; before that, Bush.

There will be a new president after Trump, and there will be a new president after them. The Securities Exchange Act of 1933 was passed when FDR was president. JFK’s dad was the first chairman. Ninety-two years later, it’s the law of the land today. How many presidents have we had since then?

Huh? FDR, Truman, Eisenhower, JFK, LBJ, Nixon, Jimmy Carter, Gerald Ford, Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton, George Bush, Barack Obama, Trump, Biden. That’s 20. The ephemeral concern of fleeting power of the day is immaterial to what you establish as a long-term precedent. The bill, once passed, will be a foundational concern for regulators and the industry for decades to come.

That’s what matters to me. That’s what I care about. I’m not going to say it nicely, and I’m not going to be a nice guy. I’m a results-oriented guy. We got to go get it done.

Oh my lord, he did read the book FDR’s Folly. If you go to the lumberjack festival in Wisconsin, I’ll go with you. You see, some people really do the lumberjack and the oiled abs. Charles, can you explain from a developer perspective what use case or adapt types would necessitate the development of hybrid Midnight or Cardano app? Let’s talk about Uniswap and Midnight as a case study.

Uniswap would like to list more asset classes, and currently, all assets are treated equally. They’re fungible in that system. You trade Ether for Bitcoin or Ether for an ERC20 token on Uniswap. Great. What if you have an asset with a regulated policy and it has a disclosure regime?

Meaning you can’t just buy it; you have to meet some disclosure. Currently, what Uniswap would have to do is either figure out a way in Solidity to build an entire privacy system, build a layer two to introduce some sort of privacy system, or centralize the compliance component. Every time you want to trade a regulated asset listed on their exchange, you have to go to Uniswap directly, the company behind it, and actually have them approve the transaction. That’s a lot of work. Or you could have a hybrid application with two deposit flows: one for the non-regulated and one for the regulated.

The regulated goes first through Midnight. Midnight as a stack takes care of all the automated compliance through selective disclosure and keeps all of your KYC, AML, and suitability guidelines and all the transaction information about ownership private. It only discloses to the requisite people, maybe the issuer of the RWA or the regulators. Once it gives the go-ahead, then settlement is compliant. If it settles in the Uniswap contract and the money is there, we know it’s good to go.

Uniswap never saw any of it; they didn’t deal with any of it, and they paid the transaction fee in Ether, even though all the magic of regulation occurred on Midnight. You getting it? All of a sudden, Uniswap increased its TAM from just cryptocurrencies to the $10 trillion RWA market. They did not have to upgrade their smart contract significantly. All of their standardized trading and liquidity and their resistance and all their other stuff stays exactly the same.

They didn’t have to build a layer two, and they didn’t have to get involved in the compliance game. They just had to write a compliance contract on Midnight using OpenZeppelin and Solidity, and then it just rolls through. The user doesn’t experience anything; they have no idea that they’re going from Ethereum to Midnight and back. It’s just a routing flow, just like when you use a web service and call an API on the back end. So when you use your little AI application for image generation, it’s calling ChatGPT, but you don’t know it, you don’t feel it, you don’t see it.

That’s what’s happening under the hood. And that’s how it should be. There are millions of patterns like that with medical records, supply chains, and private stablecoins. Maybe a private DEX you want to trade privately. So Uniswap creates a clone of itself on Midnight, and all the trades in the order book are private.

Nobody knows what you’re buying, and you can route liquidity and users from one to the other seamlessly through capacity exchange and multi-chain signatures. That’s why we built it. Otherwise, every single time for every single application, you’d have to rebuild a privacy stack. Make it efficient, make it scalable, make it work well, and make it secure. Large teams can do that.

You have these layer twos like ZKSync and Starkware, and they do some of it, but mostly they’re focused on scalability rollups and getting things recursively to a smaller form. They tend not to have functional privacy and don’t think about the whole privacy ecosystem, the off-chain components of privacy, proof generation off-chain, and data custody. We do. We think about the whole banana and all the privacy-enhancing technology. So, Midnight is the future.

It’s the next generation, and it’s made to work with all these other guys. Through Midnight, you can bridge through. Let’s say Uniswap wants to talk to the Solana DEX. They probably should do that through Midnight because it’s going to bridge on both sides and has a proof engine on both sides so it can verify and validate the state of both Ethereum and Solana as a folded state proof. When transactions go through, they carry proof on the wire, so that they’re right.

the state of Solana and the state of Uniswap are synchronized. It’s a great bridging infrastructure too between different chains. It’s about liquidity, people. ISO 222 compliance is the inside joke that we all have. It’s a format.

Anything that’s programmable supports the format. It’s not a core USP, but you guys just really love it. It’s a big thing, so we talk about it from time to time. Why are you trying to explain physics to a third-grade math student? Because if you can’t explain physics to a third-grade math student, then you can’t explain physics to a fourth-grade student.

Eventually, you can’t explain physics to anybody. No matter how complex a topic is, you must strive to make it simple for everybody to understand it. Otherwise, the topic will die. This is what Feynman talked about in physics. He did everything in his power to take some of the most complex physics concepts and make them understandable for regular people.

The process of doing it helps you better understand it yourself. When I explain it to you guys, I learn. That’s how I stay sharp. That’s how I grow. That’s how great mathematicians do it.

It’s how great physicists do it. It’s how great computer scientists do it. You always need to be teaching, and you always need to be teaching the non-technical, or else it’ll never make any progress. Do you see the new IRS staking rules? Looks like Cardano was made for them because we bet, right?

We bet on the future, yo. If remote viewing is real, does this mean alternate universes could exist? Yeah. With or without it, they’re orthogonal to each other. Vitalik is working on his privacy chain called Noonday.

[laughter] He invented it, right? Oh lord. It was funny. Somebody asked him at an event, “What do you think of Midnight?” He says, “I don’t know anything about it.

I don’t follow Charles’s projects.” Wait, if you don’t know anything about it, how do it’s a Charles project? You’re paying attention. You’re watching. Charles, most privacy coins have little to no TVL.

Yeah, because they’re not smart contract systems. Their transaction privacy like Zcash and Monero doesn’t do smart contracts. Midnight will absolutely change this, 100%. I think we’ll have a billion in TVL before the end of 2026. We’re going to work hard for it.

Recommend some good books for my 2026 list. I would highly recommend "We Are Electric" from Sally D. It’s a wonderful book that changes your entire view on electricity in the electrome. Does Cardano have an EMBA strategy? We do.

It’s called RealFi. I’ll show you guys right now. It’s going to be a huge thing next year, a massive launch right after Midnight. It’s going to be equal or greater in size, and this is going to be the TVL monster for Cardano and Midnight alike. That’s RealFi.

People say, “What happened to Cardano in Africa? Where did it go?” Well, that’s where John O’Connor went. We’ve been working on this for a long time. Microfinance on a blockchain in Africa, South America, and Southeast Asia.

Lower the rates, make them peer-to-peer, and create a great lending market. Billions and billions of dollars. Believe me, billions of dollars. Nobody gets more. Nobody.

Billions. It’s you guys just assume that if we don’t make announcements 24/7, nothing’s been done. They’re literally writing the smart contracts right now for the launch of RealFi for next year. We’ve been working on it. Everybody’s gotten together.

It’s a big thing. What about new DApps on Cardano? This gives Cardano DApps a new way to express themselves with the privacy layer. If the Ethereum DApps and Solana DApps are slow to adapt, Cardano DApps can use this as a competitive USP against their Solana and Ethereum counterparts because they now offer the privacy channel, which allows them to track more local and external TVL. There are a lot of Cardano DApp developers that want to build into Midnight.

I think the C swap guys are doing it, among others, and it gives them an ability to differentiate themselves and do new things that other people don’t have, as are the Sunday guys and others. What do you say to people who say Midnight will be your favorite child and you’ll slowly abandon Cardano with the problems of the founding? No, you just hold Cardano accountable for being a kid that grew up. You never abandon your children; you just fundamentally change your relationship. If your kid is living in the basement at 30 years old, smoking pot and doesn’t have a job, and you have to pay for everything, are you a good parent?

Cardano has grown up. It needs to go to college. It needs to get a job. It needs to be sustainable. I’m still the father.

I’m still there. I still love it. I still care about it. I still have a relationship with it. But you have to change the relationship.

You can’t be a steward forever, a custodian forever. You can’t be paternal forever. Cardano has to make its own decisions and its own mistakes. Now, there’s wisdom and guidance. You always go to the dad and say, “Hey, dad, I’m thinking about getting married.

I’m thinking about doing this.” You solve that problem. But that doesn’t mean you abandon your kids. It means you give them the space they need to become their own men, to become If I market the other person, Charles is marketing that person because he has a secret deal with them. Charles is marketing that person because he owns the token, and he's just pumping his bags.

Charles is doing this, Charles is doing that. Look at my lived experience launching Midnight on Cardano. For heaven's sake, do the glacier drop. It's not good enough. You're incompetent.

You're stupid. More than a million people participated; it looks the largest drop in the history of our industry. More work was done with the scavenger hunt than in the first few years of Bitcoin in three weeks. It brought new people in. About half of the distribution was non-Cardano holders entering our ecosystem.

If you look at the commentary from the Cardano community, there's so much negativity, criticism, and attacks for literally free money. If you treat me this way, don't you treat the builders this way? Then you ask, why don’t builders come here? Why don’t we have more adoption? Why don’t we have more TVL?

Honestly speaking, look at yourself in the mirror. Take a moment. Step back, you entitled children with this attitude, and understand that what you're doing is destroying the ecosystem, not building it up. If you want something fixed, talk about who needs to be in the room and how to incentivize them to fix it. If someone is building something that will create benefits for your ecosystem, you embrace and welcome those people.

You get excited about them. You market those people. How many tweets have come from the Cardano Foundation about Midnight? Look at their timeline. How many discussions do they have about it?

It's the single largest, most exciting, and relevant project in the history of the Cardano ecosystem. If it’s successful, it proves that Cardano can launch a $10 billion cryptocurrency. There is nothing more significant commercially going on in Cardano in 2025 and beyond than that project right now. Yet, the people who profess to be pushing for the adoption, growth, brand, and reputation of Cardano won’t talk about it. They’re just cutting it off.

That’s the culture we’re sitting on right now. If you want to change it, change it. I’m doing my part. I stayed out of governance. I’m doing my part.

I stay out of commenting on structural things. We got the Constitution. We got the on-chain government. We pulled back. I’m giving you guys the space to have agency, the space to grow up and be your own people.

But you have to have adult conversations about these things. You have to talk about KPIs in the future. You have to talk about what growth means. Yes, the token price isn’t great, but there are 25,000 cryptocurrency projects that would trade for us right now because we’re in the top 10, and we’ve been there for eight years. If you want to compare it to Solana, XRP, and BNB, sure, they’ve had a better cycle so far, but in 2021, we went from 15 cents to $3 in a single year.

That’s a 20x increase. Things move quickly in this industry. People on top collapse, and people on the bottom go way up. It’s the roll of the dice. In many cases, we have no control over the macro.

So, you have to focus on fundamentals and ask: Are we getting more decentralized? Are we getting more resilient? Are we becoming a more obvious choice for people to build? What we can focus on is the technology, the culture, and how we treat each other because we can’t control when Trump tweets, when a tariff comes, when a war breaks out, or when a pandemic happens. We can’t control those factors, but we can control how we treat each other.

We can control whether it’s a pleasant, fun, exciting experience to be in this ecosystem or a miserable, disgusting, horrible experience. That’s what we have agency over. If you want growth in the long term, be chill, be good, be friendly, be happy. In 2026, there needs to be a cultural reset. We have to take a chill pill, calm down, and get along.

Stop the nonsense. Honestly speaking, people in this community accused the founder of rewriting the blockchain without evidence and stealing $600 million without evidence. They propagated this and formed cabals to spread it. Founding entities in this ecosystem, even though they knew it didn’t happen, said nothing, hoping that the scandal would drive me out. That is 2025 in a nutshell.

That is my lived experience in a nutshell. You expect me just to smile and be happy and go on? Most people would leave and retire. But I love my kids. I do.

I care. I want them to grow up happy and successful. Part of that is knowing when to have tough love and when to embrace. Right now, some tough love is needed. Honestly speaking, it is.

We need to grow up and culturally change as an ecosystem. We need to be better about this stuff. You have all these advantages: a loyal community, great geographic distribution, no regulatory problems, phenomenal technology that’s getting exponentially better, Bitcoin DeFi, and the partner chains model. You have a gradually growing diverse client ecosystem, independent teams, and a great member-based organization with Intersect. Yet, every time I list these things, some of you listening say, “Yes, but…” Fix it.

You have a problem with Intersect? Fix it. You have a problem with Bitcoin DeFi? Fix it. If you’re cynical about something, list where it’s problematic and fix the problem.

Take accountability and agency for it. There is no reason we can’t be successful. There is no reason why the TVL can’t go up 10x or 20x, and we can’t find some clever way to integrate here. There’s no reason at all. There’s no divine command that says Cardano must fail.

Take the learned hopelessness out. Shut up and do the work or get out. You’re poisoning and killing the ecosystem. You want to do nothing, but then you want to stay and criticize the people who do something until those people get so fed up they don’t want to do it anymore. Then you see the canary in the coal mine when your OGs retire because of the toxicity.

My God. No one wants to be held accountable. You say stupid things, and people will criticize you for those stupid things. Grow a thick skin. I say stupid things all the time.

I’m still here. I still deal with it. Cardano whales are a phenomenal example of that. They said stupid stuff. They were provably wrong.

There are billions of dollars worth of ADA turned around every week. You can divest in a matter of a week, $50 million, and not move the market. There’s depth for that. We’ve seen it again and again. They’re just wrong.

I know they’re wrong—factually wrong—but they couldn’t take it. Was it their way or the highway? Pack up and go home. And they did it in two stages. First, they left Twitter, as they’ve done multiple times.

Then, as a DREP, they voted against IO, against everything we do. They wanted to defund Laos, defund our research group, and all these other things because they were angry that they were held accountable. That’s childish behavior. And then you still worship them. Gosh, if only we could get the whale back, everything would be better.

That was part of the toxic culture. That was part of the culture of us or nothing. We’re better than everybody else. Let’s not work with people. Let’s not cooperate with people.

With Midnight, we get a reset. We bring all these new people in. What are they going to see? A welcoming environment or a hostile environment? We flip the switch soon.

What are they going to see on Cardano? I’m not being emotional. I care. You’re hearing concern and love. It’s not hate; it’s love.

It’s anger over love. You don’t get angry over things you don’t care about. If I didn’t care about Cardano, I’d be numb and be like, “Well, it is what it is.” You go to a bank, and some person is pleading emotionally, “Please don’t take my home.” The banker has no relationship with the person.

“I’m sorry, Sally. That’s just the way it is. You didn’t pay your loans. We’re going to have to take the asset. Have a nice day.

” They move on and never think about Sally again. They don’t care about Sally. There are no emotions there. When you care about something, there are emotions. When you care about something, there’s anger.

True hate is not hate; it’s disinterest. It’s dispassionate. It’s numbness. It’s coldness. The lowest layer of hell isn’t on fire; it’s frozen because it’s so far from God’s love.

That was Dante’s point in Dante’s Inferno. I’m emotional about the state of Cardano in many respects because there are so many self-inflicted wounds that are completely unnecessary. For our part, we wake up every day and try to fix it. We admit fully and freely that many mistakes were made on the IO side, and I’m ultimately accountable for that. For the rest of the ecosystem, they can’t do the same exercise.

There’s a lot of stagnation, and it’s deeply frustrating to me because I’m trying to push things along, trying to get the kids to get the job done, to the next level. It’s frustrating because we have all the advantages. We bet right on liquid non-custodial staking. We bet right on the interoperability model. We bet right on the L2 model.

We bet right on partner chains. We bet right on extended UTXO and Bitcoin DeFi. We bet right on all these things. We have a tremendously talented team, but they need to focus and apply themselves. As a parent, I’m sitting here saying, “Please, Johnny, please don’t do this.

Be better.” Hey, emotional reaction? No, absolutely not. Then, Charles, you’re at fault. It’s your problem.

If you’ve never cared about anything in your life, that’s your problem. You’ve never loved something so much and wanted it to succeed so much. I get passionate because I care. You don’t care. You create these little frameworks.

Take a time out. Take five seconds. Take ten. I’m Italian; we love things. We care about things.

Why does Italy make beautiful things? Because they love things. They put love into the art, the sculpture, the building, and the food. It’s why we get fat. You put love in the pasta, and you eat the pasta.

You’re like, “it’s so good. How do you make it that good?” It’s not PGO, okay? It’s not high fructose corn syrup. Every part of the chain, the tomatoes, the tomatoes are beautiful.

Why are they beautiful? Because the farmer goes up to that tomato vine every day and says, “what? Tomato vine, come here. Go ahead, hug me.” That tomato gets filled with love.

Then they process it. The chef has that tomato in his hand and says, “I know you are loved. You will love a lot.” He puts it in the sauce. Then the waiter brings it out and says, “Nothing makes me happier.

” Then why should you take that bite? Come on, just take the bite. They take the bite, and you’re like, “Holy [__], it’s the best [__] pasta I’ve ever had.” He’s like, “I told you. You got the love in your mouth.

That’s why it’s awesome.” You have to get passionate about stuff. Every line of code matters. Every part of Cardano matters. Every single thing, every blade of grass in the backyard, it matters.

You have to be passionate about this stuff, or else you’ll never get anything done. Nobody cares, guys. If you’re dispassionate, it’s just technology. So, what’s the difference between Cardano and Sui, Aptos, and Solana? Well, we have all this technology.

They’ll have technology in 18 months. Once they have the technology, what’s the difference? It’s user metrics and network effects. So, what if your network effect isn’t very good? Why would anybody care for Cardano to survive?

It’s just technology. It’s just a protocol, just a token. If it has love in it, there’s an emotional connection to it. You say, “I love this place. I want this thing to be successful.

” If Italy was just a collection of administrative policies, tax rates, and quality of life metrics, the minute those look bad, people just leave. Why do they stay? They stay because they love the place, they love the people, and they want it to succeed. They put money into it. It wasn’t rational to build a 70,000-foot clinic in Gillette, Wyoming.

The economics don’t work. It’s an insane project. It was so hard to build; you have no idea what we had to deal with and the insanity of it. But we built it anyway because we love the community, we love the people, the 17,000 people. You go to my clinic in Gillette, Wyoming, you walk those halls, and you see the people there.

Every single one of them has smiles on their faces. They the place. They really do. Google Hoskinson Health and Wellness. Look at the Google reviews.

Look at the happiness people have there. They really care. They really think, “Gosh, this is something special.” You have to have love in your heart. You have to have passion and joy in the things you do, and you will do those things for life.

That’s definitely true. Get some tacos. Love those tacos. The technology is getting better, but the problem is quantum computers are going to be here probably by 2033. Unfortunately, we’re all going to have to put those weights on and start training with them.

First, the market there is going to have a huge advantage over the rest. So, we have a two-year strategy on Midnight to get there. Midnight will be kind of the petri dish to backport it into Cardano. Have you abandoned World Mobile Token, or are you cooking? I still want to build an Earth node.

I’ve remained relatively the same. You always have the greatest sense of humor. You’re always up for a laugh. Hey, Charles is the life of the party and always knows how to make people smile. Oh yeah, I do.

Do you have any cool stuff written on the wall behind you? Actually, yeah, it’s super cool. Are you satisfied with the development of the stuff IO company since you became part of the story? They got William Shatner. How about that?

I never thought I would do an X-space with William Shatner. It was one of those surreal moments where I’m on the X-space, and William Shatner is there. We’re talking, and I’m just like, “This is amazing.” He’s going to monetize his content and pass it through multiple blockchains. That’s so cool.

I grew up watching those movies. I saw the Wrath of Khan and the Undiscovered Country, and I watched TJ Hooker. Oh man, it was on reruns late at night in the 90s. Terrible show. You watch like five episodes and think, “Is this going to get better?

” But William Shatner is great. Boston Legal—remember Denny Crane? It’s cool because Bill reached out to me and said, “Hey, I’m thinking about doing something. Where should I go?” I said, “The stuff guys are great.

” I handed them the deal. They called him, talked to him, and got the deal. I had nothing to do with it after I handed it off. I just said, “Here’s Bill William Shatner.” They made it happen.

I was like, “Whoa, those guys are good.” Nothing makes me happier than a competent company. You hand them a great opportunity, and they find a way to make that opportunity a reality. Ben and his team are doing a wonderful job at Stuff IO, and it’s going to continue growing by leaps and bounds. Shatner just did a video with Altcoin Daily.

Yep, there you go. Charles, what’s your definition of artificial general intelligence? Do you think it would be reached with an LLM? It’s kind of a red herring when you look at intelligence in general. I tend to look at intelligence in a very reductionistic view and say, “Okay, intelligence is an entity or organism’s ability to influence its environment towards a goal, either in the short or long term.

” When you look at it from that lens, bacteria can be hyper-intelligent, and humans can be very intelligent. Animals can be very intelligent. If this entity, living or non-living, has the ability to influence its environment to pursue an end, what are you really saying here? It understands how the world around it works, and it has some internal desire to pick and pursue a goal. Human beings are really bad at intelligence up and down the stack.

When you look at a human rating another human, you can say, “Well, that person’s very smart or that person’s dumb.” But when you go up the stack and a human interacts with a super intelligence, it may not be the case that the human is actually able to discern that that thing is very, very smart. They may even think it’s not smart; they may think it’s dumb because it can’t understand why it does what it does. It may just appear as a non-intelligent entity. When you go down the stack, it’s hard to understand more primitive life.

Why do cells do what they do? There’s no spatial information in DNA. When you fertilize an embryo, it starts dividing and becomes a person. It has two hands, two eyes, and two legs. How does it know where those hands, eyes, and legs go, and how does it figure out all that stuff?

There’s some form of goal direction implicit within the medium, and we discount it. We’re just like, “Well, that’s not the same as our intelligence.” We exist only because of that emergent intelligence. If we had a nuclear war and wiped out all of humanity, I’m willing to wager bacteria would still be around, doing just fine, and adapting to the radioactive environment. They can even live in space in certain circumstances.

How is that not intelligence? When you talk about AGI, you’re really talking about a collection of things. First, can you build a world model so that an AI agent can understand an environment similar to or the same as our world? Then, Now, you can argue that nobody knows about Aken outside of Cardano, and that's why they've discounted it. But now you're not talking about a Plutus problem, are you?

You're talking about a marketing problem. That's what you're discussing. So, we can have that conversation. Aken needs better marketing. That's fair.

So, how would we do that? Well, if we had a functioning foundation, they would recognize that and say, "what? We need to do hackathons. Let's do one every two weeks across the world. Put a few million dollars into the budget, go on a roadshow, and show people that they can build with Aken.

" Instead of having a vanity party in Berlin, bringing together less than a thousand people and spending six million of the community's money, maybe we should do that at Token 2049, Consensus, and Bitcoin, and these other conferences that have 20, 30, or 40,000 people. We could have hackathons there with a million-dollar prize in Aken, and then people would say, "I thought I had to know Haskell to write smart contracts on Cardano." No, no, we changed that. You don’t have to do it. "Oh, well, that’s super cool.

I want that million dollars. I'm going to go learn and tell all my friends about it. Wow, Cardano is so awesome. Extended UTXO is actually not that hard. I didn’t know.

I’m going to go tell all my developer friends." That’s a good idea. So, is it a Plutus problem or is it a talking about Aken problem? What is it? It’s a talking about Aken problem.

Will Midnight use a proof of use as a mining method? Oh man, I would love to find a path for Midnight to do that. I really would. It would be so cool. We're working on it.

I think there is a path for that. Charles, can Midnight replace Zcash completely? Midnight is a superset of Zcash. It does everything Zcash does and more. Charles, how do I put my hat in the ring and be one of the Midnight podcasters?

We’ll get back to you. Well, of course you’ve heard of Aken. You created it, you son of a [expletive]. This is Lucas right here. He’s like, "I’ve heard of Aken.

" This guy. [laughter] this guy. Yeah. Now you play the victim. You clutch your pearls.

You’re [crying] called me out for my opinion. I clutched my pearls. Oh no. Play stupid games, win stupid prizes, man. Take it on the chin.

You have to be precise with your language. You have to say, "Is Aken the problem or is it talking about Aken?" We’re not talking about Aken. That’s the problem. So, let’s go talk about it.

Here’s what you do: go to Catalyst and say, "I want $50,000 worth of ADA to spend the next year of my life traveling the world as Captain Aken, and I’m going to go tell everybody about Aken. I’m going to wear the Aken suit like big A on my head. I’m going to walk around like Hare Krishna people at the airport. Hare Krishna, come for a free feast." You’d be like, "Aken, come for a free feast.

" You could guest lecture with Lucas and Casey, these other guys. You see, you could do that, and then we’ve solved our Aken problem because you are now an Aken ambassador. There we go. I’m Aken for Aken. Yeah.

Yeah. This guy, this guy, he gets it now. He’s Aken for Aken. How about that? We use Aken for the Atrium profile.

And that’s one of the best smart contracts of 2025. Very complex, very hard. the big pace guys. [panting and sighs] Stop trying to appease him. He likes being [expletive].

You still haven’t told me why I’m schizophrenic. I’m waiting for you, man. You’ve got to come in. You’ve got to tell us. Everybody’s here.

You’ve got 12,000 people listening live from warm, sunny Colorado. You’ve got to go tell them. You called me out for talking about many people. Again, precision in language. Let’s be more precise and concise.

Some people say Plutus is the problem. Why do people have that perception? That’s very different from saying Plutus is the problem. See, precise and concise, no disrespect tone, but some people say that you’ve got a little bit of an ego problem, tone. And as your consigliere, I’m supposed to tell you, tone, that maybe you need to tone it down a little bit.

Did you talk about microtubules yet? Oh lord, no. Although those dish brain computers, we can use that to verify if you can create a biological quantum computer. That’d be fun. Thank you.

I want to thank you for Midnight. My claims on Lace were seamless, and my scavenger mining is moving right along finally. that one guy, everything worked for him. Thank you, sir. Thank you.

And on behalf of the team, we thank you. Colorado is too warm and too sunny lately. You can never be too warm and too sunny, except for the times you can be. Hypothetically speaking, if you had a chance to be an executive producer on a Sam the Bull Sopranos-like series, would you take that offer? I know Sammy personally; I can make that happen.

Nah, I’m going to stay out of the Kosinostra stuff. I called you a schizo because now it’s the Sopranos. It just cuts to black. See it again. It goes back to the [expletive] Sopranos, man.

We’re all waiting with bated breath. We’ve got 12,000 people. 12,000 people. Actually, let’s go ahead here, Let’s see. Okay.

What are the symptoms of—here we go. All right. All right. We’re getting perplexity involved here via— All right. All right.

So, here are the common symptoms. Can you tell the audience which ones I have? So we have hallucinations frequently involving hearing voices, seeing, smelling delusions, strong beliefs unsupported by reality such as paranoia or grandiosity. Examples include thinking you’re being spied on or having superpowers or believing you are a famous person. Disorganized speech and thinking, trouble focusing, jumping between thoughts, speaking in jumbled or incoherent ways.

Abnormal behavior like repetitive motions, unusual postures, periods of immobility. Negative symptoms the loss of normal functioning such as a lack of motivation, reduced emotional expression, difficulty planning ahead, social withdrawal, poor hygiene and self-care, changes in social interaction. Yeah. So, you got anything for me? Let’s see.

Let’s look through the list. No, I don’t see him saying anything. Oh, well. You just look at that list. You think about that.

Okay. You come back and let me know which one of those things I have. Is it delusions, disorganized speech, abnormal behavior? I mean, you could say delusions, delusions of grandeur, all that stuff. But I kind of did a lot in my life.

You might not it or think it’s valid, but I do. And a lot of people do. You’re listening to me on a [expletive] Tuesday at goddamn 11:35 in the morning. 12,000 people are with a million followers. So maybe, just maybe, I did something.

I don’t know. Maybe, I don’t know the hallucinations. I don’t have those hallucinations. Although, how would I know? Because to me, it’s real.

I don’t know. Is there a pathway to increase ADA staking rewards? Yeah, it’s called partner chains. All [snorts] of the above. There we go.

Just buy ADA up, bro. Yeah. Yeah, we can. Well, [expletive]. Let me see what I got in my Lace wallet right now.

All right, got it. I have $2,443 worth of assets in the wallet. Holy [expletive]. I got $1,200 worth of Kaju inside that wallet. You guys want to see my little Lace wallet?

All right, let me share my screen here. You ready? All right. One is the loneliest number. Let’s see if we can open that up.

Oh, it doesn’t show you. So, I have to actually make it a full tab. Yeah, here we go. All right, here’s the balance. We got $2,400, and we got about $297 worth of Cardano in there.

A little ADA. We got about $1,200 worth of Kaju. Got about $491 worth of USDM, the only values-based coin. Got a little bit of Strike, a little bit of Cornucopias. We got some ION.

I still owe those guys the unboxing. I got the thingy actually over there. We got a Charlie 3 in there. We got some Iagon. What else we got?

We got some Jed. Got like 10 bucks worth of Jed. And then a whole lot of stuff. Whole lot of stuff. Whole lot of stuff.

Oh my god. Charles Chaplin. I don’t know any of this stuff. A whole lot of stuff. People just send me [expletive], man.

It’s pretty crazy. Yeah. And you just buy some ADA. There you go. Buy ADA, bro.

And let’s take a look at our DApp center. All these different DApps. Got Wing Riders and JPEG and Danzo, Fluid Tokens, Liquid Finance, Indigo, Splash, OpenJet. Holy [expletive]. There’s a lot of stuff here you can do on Cardano, huh?

That’s pretty cool. what we should do? Every week we should just use the DeFi application on Cardano. I don’t know. Would that be something you guys want to do next year?

I will give you 3,8 Charles. You’re poor. Well, I mean, if you want to, sure. I mean, I’m not going to complain. Here, let me—if you want to send me something, let me just go ahead and post that for you.

There you go. Just leave that up there. Anything you want to send. [laughter] Oh, he’s playing the victim again. Just remember, Char, guys, if you don’t agree with everything Charles says, you’re an idiot.

I guess Vitalik is an idiot too. I’m the victim. I’m the victim. clutch my pearls. I’m the victim.

It’s a generational thing. You disagree with somebody, you immediately play the victim. You go and shout it out. I’m out. I can’t see him in this state any longer.

Again, you haven’t really answered the whole schizophrenia thing. We’re all waiting. There are 12,500 people now. We are waiting. We are waiting, sir.

We just really want you to answer the question. You levied the allegation. You couldn’t get there. Have you ever visited the Boneyard in Alaska? That sounds familiar.

Is that in Anchorage? With bated breath? EXACTLY. THIS GUY. THIS GUY GETS IT.

Bated breath. Show us how to create a Bitcoin wallet on Lace. Yeah, great idea. New DeFi app every week. Yeah, we’ll do that for 2026.

I think we’re going to do a rejiggering of the whole podcast thing. I’m loving it. Are you going to build a DC office for government affairs with Rare Evo? No, I already have a government affairs office, and we’re making great progress. Once we’re done with clarity, we move on.

Pearl clutchers do. Oh, what’s this? The Boneyard, Alaska, is a private mining claim near Fairbanks, Alaska, that has yielded a massive concentration of well-preserved Ice Age fossils. Well, [expletive]. You learn something new every day.

I also think there’s a restaurant in Alaska called the Boneyard. We will look into that. We will get the best people on that. But now I’ve got to go to the Boneyard. There’s probably like mammoth bones and [expletive] there.

Charles, why don’t you do a hair transplant? [laughter] Charles, why don’t you call people idiots and liars when you’re on CNBC in front of Congress and nation-state leaders when they ask stupid questions? I have, [laughter] which is why they don’t invite me back to the party. now you’re starting to understand. It’s all starting to come together.

Oh, Lord. Do you think there are tunnels under the pyramids? There probably are. I currently own 30,000 ADA. I hold only ADA.

Good. Get it in DeFi. Put it in Cardano DeFi. Let’s get it working. Get it working for you.

Is the Midnight Open Summit open to everybody? Yes, it is. Please come to the Midnight Summit. Dude, you have so much money. Do a hair transplant.

You look a confused professor. Maybe I just don’t care. Maybe my physical appearance or lack thereof is not my problem. schizophrenia, poor hygiene. Damn [expletive].

We are starting to rack up the symptoms, aren’t we? Look at that. Where do you get your cat shirts? I saw them online. I’m I need to get some cat shirts.

Charles, I’m balding. How’s the stem cell treatment at your clinic coming along? I tried it for a little while. Didn’t grow any hair, unfortunately. So, back to the drawing board.

Chapter two. Why does my hair not grow? Seems like Midnight is the only privacy token that can pass the market structure bill. This guy gets it. We built it for everybody: institutions, Fortune 500, and retail.

Not just retail, not just institutions. The little guy and the big guy alike. For everybody, layer two for everybody. We do not discriminate. What’s your position on the Palestine conflict?

I’ve never heard you talk about the situation because it’s one of those untouchable situations. There is no way to engage in a conversation about that issue that’s reasonable. It’s just not possible. Things happen that become wells of controversy, and they become so ingrained. Opinions get so passionate, and they get so interconnected you can’t discuss it.

When a person asks that question, there’s not a single person in good faith asking that question on one side or the other. They’re asking to either embrace or demonize, and the minute you do, you’ve taken a position, and everything goes to hell. There’s no way to engage with it. It’s just not possible. Lex Fridman tried when he brought people together, tried to have a conversation.

The realities are so far apart between the two parties. I have personal opinions. I’ll never share them because it’ll just do harm and damage. And there’s not a single live stream I do where I don’t get asked about it. Exactly.

Midnight is a beast already. You get that, sir. Midnight is a beast. It’s growing. It’s building.

We’re very excited about it. You’ve been very circumspect about Trump. I was just eating a meal the other day, and I said, "this is the first year where I felt I’ve done something that really does violate my internal integrity because I just always either stay silent or I tell people how it is." If I see something that I think is wrong, I say it. And I think there are some things that have happened this year that are wrong.

And I felt like there are consequences if I say stuff about those things. I don’t think it’s productive that Trumpcoin exists right now. I don’t think it’s productive that World Liberty Finance exists right now. It’s not that they’re bad people or they’ve committed a crime. They’ve done something wrong.

It’s created a difficult situation for us as an industry where something that should be neutral, nonpartisan, bipartisan, and created a clear set of rules has become political theater. It’s the truth. It really is, and there shouldn’t be consequences for saying something about that. And it’s been difficult for me because I was told by all my advisers to just stay silent, don’t do anything, don’t rock the boat, don’t do these things. And I think that’s been the problem this year—that there’s a disconnect between how I feel and what I say.

Whenever that exists, I can’t be real and connect with people, and people can’t trust you. You have to just say how it is. There are certain issues that have been going on for a really long time, and there’s no sense to even talk about them. Abortion, the Israel-Palestine conflict, these types of things. You can’t have a meaningful dialogue about these types of things because the sides are so dug in, and they’re so certain with their opinion, and there’s really no way to move them one edge.

But there are other things that are situational that have just come up that are conduct-oriented. I’m a big fan of leadership, especially presidential leadership, and learning about it and saying, "Did they make good decisions or bad decisions?" And as a leader myself, small or large, I have to make decisions. And I have to think, "Am I doing the right job or not doing the right job?" We don’t have clarity as a nation right now.

What the hell does it mean to make America great again? What does that mean? It’s like Obama with his vacuous hope and change. Hope and change. It’s unaccountable gobbledygook speech.

what I care about? Health care, education, your ability to pay your bills. Go down the list one after another. Let’s look at the world and rank every country. Who’s number one in each category according to some objective set of metrics?

Where is America versus the rest of the world in each category? Somewhere number one, somewhere number 50. It’s not about politics. It’s an objective reality. Let’s measure it.

Once we measure it, wherever that report They say these things and enact policies that put me at a disadvantage because historically, I've been at an advantage. They deny science regarding biological differences in the sexes. There’s nothing good about that philosophy. They also have no respect for property rights—zero, zilch, none. You have these democratic socialists elected who come in and say, "We need to seize the means of production because they’re unfair.

" No, what’s unfair is that the Republicans and Democrats didn’t want to raise taxes to pay for their excess, corruption, and graft. So, they destroyed the money, and the poor people had to pay. Now the poor people are rising up and want to take the means of production because their money is worthless. The problem is that when you do that, you destroy your entire economy. We need a return to sound money.

That’s the solution. As painful as that return is, Mom Donnie is just a symptom. You get Mom Donnie when people feel the social contract is broken, and he says the right things to make people think he has all the answers and solutions. what Mom Donnie is going to do? He’s going to be the best real estate agent in the world for Florida.

All the rich people are going to leave because they don’t want their means of production to be seized; they can vote with their feet. If those people leave and commercial real estate falls through in New York, they’ll have mega deficits, and the whole city will turn into a welfare state. They absolutely did. Bernie Durnney, dude, you have 500 in here. I have 13,558 people when I factor in X and YouTube.

Good X. Take a look at it. Million followers there. Charles is best friends with a Chinese billionaire, acting a regular guy. I grew up with CZ.

He was poor. We were both poor. We weren’t rich before this thing. Yeah, we were all the same, man. Binance was one of the first exchanges to list ADA, along with Bittrex, and it was the smaller of the two back in 2017.

That’s how long it’s been. So, yeah, I have a soft spot. I know him very well. He’s a good man, and he’s had a lot of ups and downs. He’s a vicious businessman and makes decisions to increase the value of his company and holdings.

You would expect him to act any differently in this type of environment and culture. The man sits on an empire with 400 million users, and he did that from nothing. He came from nothing. That’s really impressive. So yeah, I do look up to him.

I’m not talking about CZ. what? That’s the only Chinese billionaire I know. Which other one do you have for me? Give me a name.

The businessman you introduced to Vitalik? Well, there was Lee Shao and Bo Shen. Lee knew Bo, and Bo and Lee were part of Bitshares after I left. Bo built a partnership with Vitalik called Fenbushi, but Bo never gave me any money. They never invested in Cardano; they actually sat out because they took the investment in Ethereum.

I know Bo got new teeth, and I know Lee. Lee gave me the first quarter million for establishing Invictus Innovations. Lee was also the other guy who pushed for me to get bought out from Invictus Innovations. It was Lee as the middleman, Dan and his family, and me. I didn’t want to do an ICO, and Lee wanted to do an ICO.

He wanted to do angel shares, but I thought it was an unregistered securities offering. So, I took a buyout, went and did Ethereum, and of course, I still had the relationship. I introduced Vitalik to him, and he learned Chinese, moved to China, and actually became their best friend. I stayed in Wyoming. That’s a different Lee.

Why’d you leave Ethereum? You don’t know? Depends on who you ask. I was pushed out. A contract existed.

Well, then publish it. [laughter] Oh, you’re one of the XRP Ethgate guys. Okay. All right. Now I know where you’re coming from.

Yeah, you’re one of those guys. Sorry, you’re going to have to bark up the wrong tree. No, no, no, no. It wasn’t a few weeks late. Scholar 3 was several years late—like five years late on the schedule.

They’re slower than we are. Likely what would have happened is we would have built the account side before the UTXO side. It would have been scaled down a little bit because there would have been a different engineering team, and the functional-first guys were very UTXO friendly. I saw it from both directions, UTXO and account-based, and it was really a question of the right account-based system and whether we could do the right gas model. There’s a lot of stuff you can do, Scholar, that was really sensible.

But we would have always had some UTXO system; the question was the level of expressiveness and interoperability between the UTXO system and the account-based system. Even today in Cardano, there is an account-based system. It’s very subtle, but if you look into the ledger design, it’s part of the reward. So when you withdraw your staking rewards, it’s an account system. There’s more nuance to all of this.

Do you have a good relationship with Gavin Wood? I don’t not have a good relationship. I mean, I like Gavin. He’s a smart guy. We’re very much alike in that we have very strong opinions about things.

So, there we go. Turkish oil wrestling—that’s how we’re going to sort out Polkadot versus Cardano. It’s about the only way. Are Nightstream and Starream quantum resistant? Yes, that’s one of their defining characteristics, and it’s an asset, not a liability.

All right, well, let’s see if we can get one more good one. One more good one. Love this AMA. Well, I love you too. Trump’s literally—you XRP guys with the Ethgate—he built on Ethereum.

[laughter] His kids are saying buy Ether, and it’s going up. He’s digging up the skeletons of Ethgate, the corruption of Ethereum, but he’s building on Ethereum and buying and holding Ether. [laughter] All right, save me, Hapus. Save me, Hapus. Here we go.

There’s Hapus. He’s saving me. He’s right here. He’s floating around. He’s Hapus.

Oh no. Oh no. OH NO. OH NO. OH GOD.

THE INTERNET made him Satus. No, Satapus. he’s going away. He’s going away. And now he doesn’t have the light of God.

Oh, now he’s coming back. He’s coming back as Angryus. HE’S VERY ANGRY. Look how pissed off he is. Oh, God.

No. No, Angryus. Why? H, let’s not go there. Let’s go to the Hapus land.

Appleus. Apple bus. That’s what we have to do. All right, kids. It’s been three hours long.

Happy Veterans Day. It’s been a lot of fun. Let’s return to the center. Midnight is going to be a Leviathan next year, and Cardano, by extension, will enjoy the benefits. As we look to the future, we’re going to be okay.

Everything’s going to be okay. It’ll be a little painful. There are always ups and downs, but what? When you widen the aperture, all in all, we did all right.