"550 million crypto users aren't going to magically migrate to your chain. That's the land of wishful thinking."
Charles Hoskinson (@IOHK_Charles), co-founder of Ethereum, founder of Cardano. Twelve years building crypto infrastructure. Has watched every "mass adoption" cycle come and go.
On the @new_era_finance podcast, he broke down why crypto's foundational thesis is broken:
"The market has proven it cannot self-govern. You see what happened with FTX and Luna. The meme coin mania. The hacks and scams."
"Crypto has always been built on scarcity. 'We can't scale, so we'll charge surge pricing.' Try to send money to a friend while someone trades memecoins — you pay more. For nothing."
"Google does not charge surge pricing because there are more websites on the internet. That's not how the real world works. Yet that's exactly how crypto works."
"Pull out your BlackBerry. Open Internet Explorer. Go to your AOL account. Reset your Myspace password. All those had over 100 million users. They seemed unassailable. Now they're all gone."
"The only way long-term people are going to use crypto is through agents. They'll delegate authority to AI to do it on their behalf."
"The paradox of agents: to make them effective, they have to know you. The more they know about you, the more dangerous they are."
"Technology has a way of breaking monopolies relentlessly."
Translation: the entire premise of crypto adoption — that users will choose to learn wallets, manage keys, and pay gas — is wrong. The next billion users won't "adopt" anything. AI agents will use crypto on their behalf. The chains that survive aren't the ones with the most evangelists. They're the ones built for machines, not believers.
Which crypto thesis do you think breaks first?
Die Maßnahmen der Regierung zur Kürzung der Leistungen für die einzahlenden Bürger ist ein Raubzug. Denn es wird an Leute umverteilt, die nichts einzahlen.
#Cardano fam, a history lesson.
What happened to Solana.
FTX implosion.
Alameda implosion.
SBF goes to jail.
Gary Gensler
Op Chokepoint.
Silvergate bank collapse.
Inflation.
Gaza war.
Etc.. Etc…
$Sol falls to $8. Everyone was writing its eulogy. It’s done. No leadership. Directionless. Stained by criminals.
And then what happened. It had one of the best runs 2024-2025.
Crypto is a PysOps.
Cardano, as long as we make the right decisions and trust the right leaders has its best days ahead.
$ADA @IOHK_Charles@RickMcCracken
Charles Hoskinson just poured his heart out on Spaces.
He has no power to unilaterally fix Cardano, gets zero love, catches every single blame for failures, and watches his funding proposals get rejected by the same people who then complain nothing improves.
This man is getting crushed under undeserved hate while carrying the weight of the entire project he built from nothing.
Cardano community it’s time to wake up.
Unify, support the founder and the team whose vision created this entire foundation, or watch it slowly die.
No more toxicity.
#Cardano $ADA @IOHK_Charles
BlackRock-Kanzler und Multimillionär Merz will, dass die Deutschen länger schuften und ihre Altersvorsorge auf den Aktienmärkten verzocken. Mehr Abgehobenheit geht nicht! Hat Merz überhaupt eine Vorstellung davon, wie es ist, jeden Morgen aufzustehen, um sich und seine Familie irgendwie über die Runden zu bringen? Oder davon, was es bedeutet, Jahrzehnte lang zu arbeiten und Beiträge zu zahlen, am Ende aber trotzdem kaum von der mickrigen Rente leben zu können? Wir brauchen dringend wieder eine Politik, die das Leben der Menschen verbessert, statt sie mit immer weiteren Kürzungen zu überziehen! Meine Rede auf der BSW-Kundgebung in Berlin.
Last week's Cardano R&D session unpacked IOR's CV26 proposal — post-quantum, consensus, sharding, identity, ZK scaling, plus 35 min of Q&A.
🗳️ DReps – voting closes 8 June. Watch to see how the work packages combine to deliver 40+ integrated outputs.
📺 https://t.co/wveskhBnwT
👉 Make your voice count — vote on ADAstat before 8 June: https://t.co/nIhJKemQ9f
Watch on YouTube: https://t.co/0ejDVxQkA5
Listen on Spotify: https://t.co/Mt2a3HJ9LN
Listen on Apple: https://t.co/GQuluNOZrG
Subscribe to @new_era_finance for weekly episodes with the biggest names in macro and crypto.
"AI agents will hold more crypto than humans within a decade."
Charles Hoskinson (@IOHK_Charles) studied math, dropped out, built one of the only blockchains designed by peer-reviewed research. He co-founded Ethereum, walked away over how it was run, and built Cardano to do it differently.
The man who has argued with everyone in this industry now thinks the biggest user of crypto won't be people at all.
"Humans are a rounding error in the system we're building. AI agents don't sleep, don't panic-sell, and don't care about price. They transact in tokens because that's the only thing they can actually use."
We cover:
- Why AI agents (not humans) become the dominant on-chain actors, and what that does to every token model
- The infrastructure that has to exist before agents can transact safely at scale
- Why most current blockchains can't handle machine-speed transactions
- Where Cardano's research-first approach fits in a world of autonomous agents
- The identity problem: how do you tell a human from an agent on-chain, and why it matters
- Why he's bullish on the technology but blunt about the timeline
- What he thinks the rest of the industry is getting wrong about AI + crypto
- The one thing that has to happen for any of this to be real
Thanks to Charles for coming on @new_era_finance.
TIMESTAMPS:
00:00 - Intro
01:30 - Why AI Agents Change Everything
06:30 - Humans as a Rounding Error
12:00 - The Infrastructure Gap
18:30 - Identity: Human vs Agent On-Chain
24:30 - Where Cardano Fits
30:00 - What The Industry Gets Wrong
34:00 - The Timeline Nobody Wants To Hear
UPDATE
PARTNERS ARE PREPARING TO BUILD ON MIDNIGHT😱😱😱
@IOHK_Charles says Midnight's guarded period is turning off, we're getting ready for the next hard fork. We're adding composable contracts, upgrades, soon we'll turn on those new features, a lot of partners like Monument will be able to build.
Völlig berechtigte Kritik an Aussagen wie "Einheitsbraun" oder der, dass "niemand ins Sozialsystem" einwandere, tut Bas als Äußerungen aus "rechten Netzwerken" ab, die "schwer auszuhalten" seien. Sie beweist jeden Tag mehr, wie ungeeignet sie für ihr Amt ist, während die CDU dennoch an ihr festhält. Beides ist fatal für unser Land.
https://t.co/pX53M6C3Uz
A whopping 75,000 people have signed the @SaveEuropeAct in less than 48 hours.
The native peoples of Europe have had enough. Together, we will make remigration happen.
Go to https://t.co/h2FixvZnjK and sign if you haven’t already.
UPDATE
£250M IN BANK DEPOSITS COULD BE TOKENIZED ON MIDNIGHT 😱😱😱
@IOHK_Charles says Monument wants to tokenize about £250M worth of deposits on the Midnight blockchain, and we've already started discussions with other banks to syndicate that, so our hope is to get lots of financial institutions in.