Thanksgiving for Unity

Hi, this is Charles Hoskinson broadcasting live from warm, sunny Colorado. Always warm, always sunny. Sometimes Colorado. Today is Thanksgiving, November 27th, 2025, and it has been a year. It’s been a long year.

There’s been a lot that’s happened. There have been a lot of ups and a lot of downs, and we’re all here, and we’ve all survived. Thanksgiving is one of those days in America where we try to bring everybody together—people we like, people we don’t like—and we try to find a way, on that one day, for people to set those things aside, be a family, have a conversation, and genuinely have empathy for each other. We check in on how the family is doing, how the friends are doing. There’s always some wedding to talk about, some funeral, some graduation.

There’s a lot of news, especially if you have an Italian family I do. My mom had five brothers and a sister, so there’s a large group of people. We recently had a soft fork in the Cardano ecosystem and a long-chain reorganization. The good news is we’ve recovered and come back stronger than ever. But we’ve had other forks as well—social forks that are philosophical in nature and ultimately have created differences that at times felt irreconcilable.

Everyone has grievances, and we all have sins as well, myself included. For my part in all these things, I am sorry. At times, I can be a rigid and principled person, and when I see things I don’t I get angry about it. That approach can work sometimes, but often it fails. The reality is that in disunity and division, this ecosystem cannot succeed, regardless of philosophical differences.

The times ahead are going to be difficult because our industry as a whole has to fight for the soul of the world. Over the next five years, there are going to be two philosophies in the cryptocurrency space. One philosophy is to just rebuild Wall Street, making it a little faster, better, and cheaper, while preserving the fundamental control structures, power groups, and philosophy behind having the middleman rule your life. The other philosophy is to fully embrace the vision that Satoshi Nakamoto gave us, which came from the cypherpunks and freethinkers who said that no entity should be so powerful that they get to decide your freedom of association, commerce, and expression. No entity should be so powerful that they get to decide how the world’s economic, political, and social systems should work.

Rather, we all together will work as one to figure that out. No one person is greater than the other. We cannot, as an ecosystem and an ecosystem of ecosystems, assert that we can deliver such a future to humanity if we can’t work together ourselves, regardless of our differences and disagreements. So within our own ecosystem, which is what we have control over, we have to come together. Thanks to the hard work of Philip from Emergo, Fami from the Midnight Foundation, and Jack from Intersect, we came together today to discuss how all five entities—the Midnight Foundation, Intersect, Emergo, the Cardano Foundation, and IOG—can work better together for the greater good of the Cardano ecosystem.

In the coming days, weeks, and months, there will be proposals, but that’s for another time in another video and discussion. Here on Thanksgiving, I’d like to say that I am optimistic we can find not only a way to work together in the short term but a permanent governance structure where the entities can collaborate for the greater good of Cardano as a whole. The reality is that the future is ours to earn, ours to win. We have layoffs coming. We have Hydra starting to wake up with Delta DeFi and other applications.

We have amazing innovations like Starream. We have great ecosystems like Midnight leading the tip of the spear for commercialization. And we have Bitcoin DeFi to open up completely new markets. If we work together in unity as one voice, we can correct the things that need to be corrected, fix the problems that need to be fixed, and aggregate enough capital to get through this period in Cardano’s history. This will then leave two choices: Do people want to work with an ecosystem that has the ability to do great things for the greater good, or do they want to return to the days of Wall Street?

Do they want to return to the days of division and centralization, the days of control? I think Cardano, Midnight, Bitcoin, and others that have the philosophy of unity, inclusive accountability, and the belief that everyone is equal will win the day. We’re the good guys. Every day we wake up and fight for every person to have a seat at the table. Even if at times it’s been difficult to get them there, and even if at times we don’t want them there, we realize they have a right to be there simply because they are human.

So by popular demand, we cleaned up our mess. We came back together. In the coming weeks, there’s no doubt going to be some griping and social frictions. There’s no lost love in many circles, and there’s some understandable anger. Harsh things were said, harsh things were done, and there’s bitterness.

But we cannot move forward if that is all we talk about, and we cannot assert that we have the right to lead if that’s all we focus on. From my point of view, I’m not going to talk about the past anymore; I’m just going to focus on the new governance structure moving forward. If what I have said is hurtful or harmful, or if you feel it’s unfair, you have my apologies. Please understand it came from a place of passion and love, but also know that I am aware enough to recognize that what we do and say can be hurtful and harmful. I want this ecosystem to succeed.

I want Cardano to be the largest cryptocurrency in the world, and I want Cardano to be the cryptocurrency that runs the world. I recognize that every day we have to wake up, reset the day, try a new strategy, try a new approach, find better and new allies, and take the allies we have and make them better. We have to start with ourselves, and all I ultimately have control over is myself. My approach has to change, and this ecosystem’s approach has to change. I still have absolute faith in the design decisions made, absolute faith in the scientists that got us here, and absolute faith in the engineering that got us here.

Every now and then, an incident occurs that reinforces that faith. What occurred recently with the soft fork was not a demonstration of the failures of Cardano; it was a demonstration of the strengths of Cardano as a whole. No other proof-of-stake system could survive an attack of this nature without physically shutting the chain down and having human beings manually reset the chain and restart it. Only because we had a Nakamoto-style proof-of-stake algorithm and only because of the remarkable protocol engineering were we able to organically recover without significant disruption or loss, preserving Genesis and all the infrastructure and tooling. This has happened to Bitcoin more than 3,000 times.

Orphan blocks happen again and again, and the chains find a way to reconcile when there’s competition. Occasionally, this means people lose Coinbase awards, and occasionally this means that certain transactions get dropped. That’s the magic of what Satoshi designed. It’s a feature, not a bug. It creates this internal resilience that a network, no matter how hard it’s hit, has a mechanism to recover to the longest chain over time.

The network will heal itself. Cardano taught me something I’d forgotten: that no matter how big the fork, there is a way for two chains to become one. And today we figured that out. In the coming weeks and months, you’re going to see announcements, collaborations, pictures, joint efforts, and a reset in all the relationships. We’re going to move forward with one voice to get what we need done in 2026.

There’s a lot of work on the menu, and every single entity has to do its part—the young new ones the Midnight Foundation, those with a lot of collaboration but dissonance like Intersect, the ones on the outside like Pragma that need to be brought into the fold because they serve a critical role, and the old guard like IOHK and the Cardano Foundation. We all have a part to play alongside the community as a whole. And what? This time next year, we will be ten times stronger than we are today. I already feel we’re pretty strong today.

So to all of you listening, if you’re in America, happy Thanksgiving. To all of you abroad, this is what Thanksgiving is all about. We all brought some turkey today, and we all had the chance to enjoy it, eat it, and figure out that what holds us together is much stronger than what drives us apart. Thank you so much, and God bless.