Red Days

Hi, this is Charles Hoskinson broadcasting live from Tokyo. I need to come up with a catchphrase for each of these places. I'm going to use AI to help invent it. It's always warm and sunny here in Tokyo, even in the wintertime. It's a beautiful day outside.

I woke up and thought, hey, we have a lot to do. We're on our third cohort of ambassadors and have been touring all throughout Japan. We said the cavalry is coming. We've met a lot of investors, developers, and well-wishers—people who have been around the Cardano ecosystem for more than 10 years. They come up and say, "Oh, we thought Cardano was fading and dead.

We're glad to see you. Give us some hope. Give us some news." We talked about Leos, Hydra, and all the wonderful things coming. More importantly, we discussed the fact that we're ready for commercialization.

The infrastructure is strong, we're fully decentralized, and governance has been established. Now it's time to build fun, exciting, real use cases and integrate them into the ecosystem. We see projects like StarStream and Midnight as the vanguard of all of this. Markets are tough right now. It's red, red, red—almost The Shining: "Red rum, red rum.

" People are not feeling good. But you have two choices: you can either turtle up and say, "Hey, it's over. Everything's collapsing. It was all a scam," or you can view this as just one of many challenges on a difficult road to freedom. Why would it be easy?

Why would any of this involve a straight path? We're literally restructuring and rebuilding the entire world financial system and everything that goes along with that. Do you think it's an honest system? Do you think it's a fraud-free system? Do you think it's not a corrupt system?

It's a reflection of humanity, warts and all. You have good sides and bad sides, and nothing is stable right now—not our president, the United States, not the U.S. dollar, not any foreign policy, and not the markets of any asset, whether it be gold or silver, or real estate. We're going through a transition as a society.

Globalism has reached its peak, accelerated by AI and demographic changes. The human race is starting to think in terms of "we" instead of nation by nation. You have customers in every country, movements in every country, and you speak every language. It's a different way of doing things. The old guard is fading, kicking and screaming as they're dragged off the stage, while a new way of doing things is emerging.

The only way to run a world like this is through cryptocurrency. Full stop. Otherwise, you have to build an empire, and no one is strong enough to conquer the world right now—not even China. That's the only option. If we're going to globalize and be one market, one group of people trading with each other, we need an economic front cop.

Tell me how we're going to do that without a blockchain. I've thought about it for over 15 years, and I've reached the conclusion that there's no other way. So there's an inevitability of victory; we just have to earn it. The next few weeks and months are going to be hard for everybody. There will be more red days, and you have every right to lose faith and go home.

All I ask is that you ask yourself, "What are you going home to?" A rigged system that robs you of 5% to 10% of your wealth and will lay you off when AI takes over? What's the point? We're at the endgame, people. Humanity's done with the way things are going.

The most revealing part of the Epstein files wasn't that Jeffrey Epstein was running around sleeping with children every day. The most revealing part is the social acceptance of it. Despite emails, recordings, and other evidence of some of the most powerful people in the world bragging about horrific things to children, there are no investigations, and everyone expects that to be the status quo. Deep down, we all know this can't last. Humanity has moved on.

We don't want to accept that a dark group of people who worship Bronze Age pagan gods and murder children should have the right to lead us forever and control us with money. There has to be something better. So I'm optimistic. I don't care if the road is hard. I really don't.

I don't care where it leads or if we fail or succeed. It's not about that. It's about me personally saying, "I don't consent to what's going on. I don't consent to the system that we have. I don't.

It's evil. It's irredeemably evil." Every group that tries to work with that system becomes evil, whether they it or not. There's no compromise with the devil. You can't dance with him in the moonlight and expect to come out the other side the same person.

We have something that isn't evil. Yes, it has its problems, its warts, and meme coin mania. Why would you expect anything different? We're kids in this space; we don't know any better. We're new at this.

We don't have 400 years of legacy to lean on to do things the right way. Yet, you can't exclude all the brilliance and amazing advancements. Today, these systems can process billions of transactions every month. They are far more advanced for your identity, your data, and your self-sovereignty than anything ever built in the legacy world. It's not a hypothetical; it's a reality.

The pieces of the puzzle are everywhere, with Solana, Sui, Cardano, and Midnight. All we have to do is put them together and make them easy to use. Is that so hard? Are we so bereft of common sense that someone won't figure out how to package it for the mainstream? It's a ticking time bomb.

Someone's going to do it. I'm fighting for it. Vitalik is fighting for it. Anatoly is fighting for it. We're going to figure it out.

And whoever does will open the floodgates, and we win. In the meantime, we have to endure the red, but we do so knowing we're walking a road that doesn't lead to an evil place. The best things in life don't have to be complicated or dark. There are good people who want to do a good job and make things work out. What they do to control you is put a little cynical time bomb in your brain that ticks and ticks.

Every time you hear something like this, you say, "Yes, but." It's easy for you to say, Charles; you're rich, you can ride it out. I've lost more money than anyone listening to this—over $3 billion now. It would have been easy to cash out and walk away. Do you think I honestly care if I lose it all?

I'm not doing this for money. You're mistaken if you think that. There's a reason I'm not in the Epstein files. There's a reason I didn't get rolled up in FTX. My name doesn't seem to be mentioned in these scandals because my default answer is no.

I don't care if you lose money. I don't care if it means I get put at the kids' table and don't get to go to the White House or any of these other things. Why would I want to go? What are those people offering? It's a poison chalice.

You say I'm too principled. What else do I have? What else do any of us have at the end of the day? All you have is your integrity. You have to be able to look at yourself in the mirror and say, "Today, I did the right thing.

I wasn't an asshole or an evil person. I fought for something that was right." That's all we have. Every line of code we write, every ambassador that joins, every step forward on that difficult road—that's progress. Some days are easier than others.

I don't care. I'm here for life. This is who I am, and as long as I'm alive, I'm going to keep going. I don't care if it's with a 100-person team or a 5-person team. I don't care if I have to write the code myself, just me on a laptop jamming out to good music, or if it's 1,000 people.

I was alone when I began this, and I can be alone when I finish it. This is who I am. So don't let the turkeys get you down. Don't let the markets get you down. It'll get worse; it'll get redder.

It is what it is. But at the end of the day, are you having fun? Find a way to. Know that each and every one of you in the cryptocurrency space is doing something that matters. You're doing something that has the potential to change the world.

When we reset and get rid of all these dark, evil people, the people who replace them will go from "don't be evil" to "can't be evil." The system will keep us in check. It's the only way to do it. You can't trust people anymore. We need rules, regulating functions, and something outside of ourselves to regulate us so that we don't succumb to the demons of our nature.

And that's crypto. We're always going to be the punk rock, the cypherpunk, the rebels. So join me on the long road. Become a Midnight ambassador. Join Intersect with Cardano, or pick your favorite cryptocurrency.

If they believe in these things, work there too. I like Anatoly; he's a good man. There are a lot of people I like in this industry. It's not about tokens or your favorite team; it's about believing that you're making a difference and finding a path to do that. Let's all do it together.

So on a red day, thank you. I'm here with you. I'll be with you on the green days too, and I'll be with you on the red days. I ain't going anywhere. We're in this together.

Good night, everyone.