Charles Hoskinson: ADA Is A Better Investment Than BTC

Do you think ADA will still outperform BTC in the future?

Of course. Because how much farther can Bitcoin go? Maybe to a million. Okay. It's a 10x. ADA can go 100x, 1,000x, uh, over this. It's like, guys, we're not a second-class citizen. Cardano does substantially more. And because of Bitcoin DeFi, it's going to end up probably being the yield layer of Bitcoin. And so it's going to get a huge halo effect from that. And because of the launch model of Midnight, partner chains are gonna bring in airdrops almost annually to ADA.

This episode is brought to you by SKALE, the next evolution in Layer 1 blockchains. Explore the gas-free ecosystem at scale.space/ecosystem and follow their journey on X @skale_network. Thanks to SKALE for making today's episode possible. Nothing said on Empire is a recommendation to buy or sell any investments or products. This podcast is for informational purposes only, and the views expressed by anyone on the show are solely their opinions, not financial advice, or necessarily the views of Blockworks. Our hosts, guests, and the Blockworks team may hold positions in the companies, funds, or projects discussed. All right, everyone, welcome back to Empire. I have been waiting to do this episode for a solid, like, 4 or 5 years. Uh, we finally got the man, the myth, Charles Hoskinson, uh, from Cardano on the show. So, Charles, welcome finally Empire.

Jano, it's so good to be on, man. How you been?

I have been good. Good to see you. Good to see you. Um, dude, you are— we were talking about some other people in the industry before we hit record, and, uh, you used the word they are an institution in crypto, and I would say that you are an institution in crypto. Uh, I'm just curious, like, what your life looks like these days.

I mean, I'm just the jackass who didn't retire, so, uh, so now I'm doing all the side quests, right? It's crazy because career-wise, when you look at crypto, I've been in the room for the creation of about $450 billion worth of value from Ethereum to Cardano, BitShares. And there's not a single project I haven't somewhat in some way been part of. I was the founding chairman of the Bitcoin Foundation's Education Committee, and I started the Bitcoin Education Project way back in the day. And so with all these things, I've watched Bitcoin go from under a dollar to basically $120,000 Leviathan. I've watched us go from no one cared to the US government tried to kill us to the US government's buying our tokens. So it's like crazy when you look at the totality of all of that. But what people really don't know is that I diversified after 2021. I said, you know, if all I do is crypto, I'd be a very boring life. Because while crypto's super important, crypto is important as an enabler to other things. The purpose of cryptocurrencies is to rewrite the economic, political, and social systems of the world. All it is is just this trust MacGuffin. It creates an environment where people who don't trust each other can trust each other in a new way, and then it enables new types of business. So I said, well, you're never going to get anywhere with mainstream adoption of crypto unless you go and do things with crypto. So necessarily that forced me to diversify a little bit, and I went into agriculture. I bought a bison ranch and I raised bison, got 11,000 acres and hundreds of bison. but that means I can start tracking and tracing my animals using a blockchain and thinking about growing stuff and how that relates to blockchain technology. I have a medical clinic with 15,000 patients up in Gillette, Wyoming, and we can now start thinking about electronic health record systems in blockchain. I do stuff in biotechnology, like we have a big stem cell program that we're doing a lot of deep R&D. So then I get to think about medical data and I get to think about the monetization of medical data, clinical trials, these types of things with blockchain. Then we have a venture studio with Input/Output, and we do more than Cardano. The venture studio, uh, is building Midnight. The venture studio is building Quantum Hosky, and we can get into that. It's one of the coolest projects I've ever worked on in my entire career. Um, and, and these things, we now get to think about privacy and GameFi and meme coins, and we get to think about the innovation process and launching a company every year and doing something in a different vertical. Uh, we're working on a lot of deep R&D projects, and now that we're starting to get to kind of a a certain point. Uh, there's a long backlog of things that I've always wanted to solve, and some of them are in the crypto space and some of them are outside of the crypto space. Um, you know, and some of them are just out there. Like, I, I have a program that I'm going to go to the Monroe Institute and do a multi-day training in person with an old CIA guy that ran Project Stargate to do remote viewing.

I mean, and so somehow not surprised by that, Charles. Are you, um, like, you, you've been in the industry for, like you said, like longer than most, and you've seen, you've been like firsthand witness to pretty much everything. Are you impressed by how much crypto has accomplished or let down? Or like, you know, I actually, to kind of prep for this, listened to some of your really old interviews from back in the day, like a decade ago. And, you know, a lot of the things that you were predicting have actually kind of come true. Like, you know, the government would— you were kind of calling and saying the government would start to attack us once we got big enough and a bunch of different things in the industry. You know, Bitcoin going well above six figures. You were calling for that very, very early days. Are you impressed by how much we've accomplished? Are you, uh, let down by the lack of accomplishments? How do you feel about where the industry's gotten so far?

Isn't it funny that we're never allowed to have a win? You know, never, never. 15 years, we've gone from under a billion dollars, no one cares, there's no one in, and to half a billion people, trillions of dollars, the US government holding it, uh, and we're right at an inflection point where mass adoption's about to happen. We'll have billions of users and be a $10 trillion market by the end of the decade. And crypto's literally percolating and entering into everything. There's blockchain research labs at every Fortune 500 company, and the rate of technological progress is growing parabolically. So yes, we've achieved enormous things. There's frustrations in that people continue to look at crypto only as a financial product, and they say, is it a security or commodity? And I've always said it is a trust engine to think about the economic, political, and social systems of the world. So to me, it makes a lot more sense to start saying, let's get crypto into real-world applications and real-life things. The reason they're not there yet is actually technological. We spent a long time figuring out how to do smart contracts, a long time figuring out governance structures, long time figuring out interoperability, like the bridges and hybrid applications, these types of things. We didn't think too much about the privacy and the identity side of the equation. And the thing is, anything that's real-world business, it has a public side and a private side. So, you know, if you run a company, you know, you have an HR department. Are all your HR files public record? No, we keep them private. You know, we don't wanna know, you know, what little Bobby was doing in the bathroom. You know, so you probably wanna have a private side. So you can't put all that on a blockchain. But the problem is that when you wanna do a real-world thing, if you have a blockchain and non-blockchain side, you collapse the entire trust, privacy, and control model of that to the non-blockchain side. So it's like, it's basically centralized. You know, Circle's a great example where it runs on all these blockchains, but there's a centralized issuer, a centralized actor. So at the end of the day, it's not really a blockchain ethos compatible product, 'cause at any time it just gets collapsed to one single entity. And then you just have to go talk to that entity to freeze and seize and recall and to create a panopticon to reveal what people have been buying. With their stuff. So you really want privacy inside the conversation, but you need programmable privacy and selective disclosure. Now, once we have those components, what that does is that opens up the real-world application space, and that's where you get the mainstream adoption. That's where the Magnificent Seven come in. That's where everyday consumers are using it on their cell phone. That's when Grandma's using it, you know. That's when we actually get to 2 or 3 billion users, and blockchain basically percolates into the world and TradFi and DeFi go away and they become Fi, just like kind of like legacy media and internet media became media and everything just kind of blended together. That's where we're heading with all of that. And I think that's the last generation. We're currently late third generation in the technology. I got on board late first generation, mid-first generation, then created the second generation with Vitalik and the other guys, was a pioneer in the third generation with Cardano. And now we're with Midnight, the fourth generation, but that's the last mile. And once we have it, we'll get billions of adoption and everything else, we won't talk about crypto anymore. 'Cause like, who talks about internet anymore? Like, we suppose when you build a product that there's gonna be an internet connection to that product. We don't even, it's not a differentiating USP or something you even discuss.

This episode is brought to you by SKALE, the next evolution in Layer 1 blockchains. With a gas-free, invisible user experience, instant finality, and robust security, SKALE allows for limitless scalability and has already saved its 50 million users over $11 billion in gas fees. SKALE's high throughput, zero transaction costs, and powerful Web3 infrastructure make it the ideal platform for gaming, AI, and other high-throughput apps. To explore the gas-free ecosystem, visit scale.space/ecosystem and follow their journey on X at Skale Network. That's Skale spelled with a K. Thanks to Skale for making today's episode possible. Katana isn't another new general-purpose blockchain. It's purpose-built for DeFi users to provide the best experience possible. It does this by sustainably generating deeper liquidity and higher yield than any other network. If your assets are sitting idle, then they're dead. Katana is built from the ground ground up with DeFi mechanics to bring your bags back to life. All you have to do is bridge over and Katana does the rest for you. Incubated by Polygon Labs and GSR, Katana launches with a notable ecosystem of primitives, assets, and partners like Morpho, Sushi, Vertex, Lombard, Chainlink, and Yearn. Be early to Katana. Join the pre-deposit campaign before mainnet opens at the end of this month deposit funds, and open rewards filled with randomized amounts of KAT tokens. There's also a CryptoPunk and other exclusive NFTs hidden for the lucky ones. As always, investments in blockchain technology involve risk. Terms and conditions apply. How do you balance, Charles? I mean, you have a strong, like, backbone of what you believe. I feel like, like, privacy maybe is one example here. How do you balance, uh, these things that you believe, but also maybe if you believe them too much, uh, it makes it so that user acquisition and developer acquisition actually slows down. Like I'm looking at, like, I think you guys are looking at DeFi Llama. You guys are the 20th largest chain right now by the metric that they look at. Um, on here, I think it's TVL that I'm looking at here. Things like Ethereum and Solana and Tron and Arbitrum and Sui and Hyperliquid are bigger than you guys right now. And how do you think about that dichotomy?

Yeah, well, it didn't bother me too much. KPIs and metrics, just to discuss that, it always depends on what you value. Bitcoin has no DeFi market and very little TVL, and it's all in layer 2s. So it's the most successful cryptocurrency and it's the one that everybody acknowledges is going to be around forever without any doubt. And it is zero on many of these metrics. And so Cardano is always like a hybrid where it has a lot of Bitcoin's ethos, and we tried to start from resilient decentralization, gradually build up, and then, uh, work our way into the DeFi space. And we were very late to the game with smart contracts, and there are certain things that made it a little bit more difficult to build that side, like the UTXO development model. On the other hand, they give us massive competitive advantages when you look at Bitcoin DeFi, because now Bitcoin wants to do DeFi, and it's a lot easier to write UTXO smart contracts on Cardano than it is to write those on Ethereum or Solana. So when you look at these generational things, sometimes your time hasn't come yet. So what I do is I say, start always with the principles and look to the future and ask yourself, where is it going in 10 years? Like when I did the Bitcoin Education Project, I had a slide in 2013 where I talked about what would have to happen for $10,000 Bitcoin, which was inconceivable when Bitcoin was $4. But we talked about it and said, well, these are the fundamental characteristics that have to be be there. So when you look architecturally, you see in the next 5 or 10 years, the guys are always coming and going. It was Ethereum was the big dog, and then Solana was the big dog. And you know, now people are talking about Sui and Aptos, and you know, there's always this next big thing that's going to go kill all these other things. And if you're chasing that tail, you're never going to get anywhere because you're always chasing something that was in the making 3 years ago or 5 years ago. You have to predict the future.

Yeah.

And so when you look at TVL, like what's the biggest grower of TVL for the next 5 years? It's going to be real-world assets. And those are going to be nested in systems with privacy. It's going to be private stablecoins. And, you know, again, you need a system with that capability. So we got Midnight coming out. And also where are the users going to come from? The liquidity going to come from? The vast majority of that's going to come from Bitcoin. Even 3 or 4% is like tens of billions of dollars of value. And this is an opportunity that's 4 times larger than the market cap of Ethereum and Solana combined. When you look at Bitcoin DeFi as an opportunity. So, you know, we look at the long arc and we say, are we in a competitive position for that? And we think we are. And also it depends on how you count it. Like for some reason Ethereum gets to count its locked stake as TVL. We don't. If you count our stake that participates in consensus as TVL, our TVL would be $14 billion. So we don't get that on DeFi Llama. They don't report that metric. Well, you know, if you look at the list, where would we be on the list if we had a $14 billion TVL? You see, so some of these other things are that our technology is different, and so unfortunately it gets held against us. TPS is another example where if you go to eutxo.org, you can see real-time the Cardano network. And what people don't understand is that one Cardano transaction can be many transactions together because of the input out, the, uh, the UTXO model. So each output can be an event, and eUTXO actually shows that. So when you go real time, you can actually see transactions falling. And when you look at the transaction embedded, there's an NFT being issued and money being moved and a DEX swap happening in one transaction. So they just say, well, look at your TPS rate, it's falling. Well, yeah, because people are more efficiently using transactions, and one transaction can be 100 events or 200 events. So no, it's not a lack of utilization. It's a more efficient utilization of a finite and scarce resource that we have. But it's so unfortunately, because these are apples to oranges comparisons, they cause problems. So I don't tend to think about them too much. I tend to think about the first principles and I tend to think about where is the industry going? Where will the users come from? Where will real value come from? What's going to be kind of the next big thing? And are we architecturally and philosophically aligned with that? And then also, where have we screwed the pooch? Where have we done things wrong? Yeah. And, you know, how do we change that? So we're moving to a multi-client environment. So it's not just Haskell anymore. You got Rust and Go and TypeScript. We have multiple programming languages now for smart contract development. So it's not just Haskell anymore. You can write Rust smart contracts with Aiken and TypeScript smart contracts and these types of things. So developer accessibility, you know, has dramatically improved. Uh, and then also Midnight as a project has fixed a lot of broken windows and interoperability. So suddenly we're now on Brave with 91 million new users. Now we're on blockchain.com and soon to be bitcoin.com. And we, we have a lot of custodians now supporting Cardano native assets and ADA. So now Copper's in and all these other guys are in. 108 deals over the last years, which is one every 3 days. So we're kind of getting that interoperability thing so that Cardano is no longer an island. And I think that'll massively improve the TVL side.

So before going too deep into kind of Cardano versus the rest of the industry and stuff like that, there is— I feel like you can't talk about Cardano without talking about the Uber drivers. And I want to know how this became kind of, I think, the best, like a meme, essentially. I mean, I feel like you've got like the class of 2017 kind of got, you know, Chainlink and Sergey got the Link Marines and, you know, another person got like, you know, Neo had like the Ethereum of Asia. You guys got somehow in with the Uber crowd. And I want to know, I want to know the story here. How did this happen?

I, I don't know. I mean, I've heard that, and there's this weirdness that, and it sometimes comes from like the podcasting elite, like the bankless people in Ethereum land, where they say, well, there's no compelling real reason why Cardano can win or be successful or have adoption. So there just must be this large cabal of misinformed people, whether it be the hairdresser or the Uber driver or the waitress. Who's just buying Cardano and it's a cult and there's no real value there. It's a pejorative in many cases when people say that. And meanwhile, we've been right about everything. Like Vitalik is saying, hey, maybe we should have liquid non-custodial staking. We've had it since the beginning. Vitalik is saying, hey, UTXO is actually useful. We should probably find a path to do that, especially for the zero-knowledge stuff. We've had it since the beginning. We said, hey, formal methods matters. We've been running 8 years straight, 24/7. And we haven't had a major hack. Meanwhile, there's $80 million to $100 million a day in hacks in other ecosystems. So we say these things— we wrote 250+ papers, we have 168 scientists, we did the work, we wrote the code— and then somehow, despite all of that, we're super slow, our technology's obsolete— I don't even know what that means— and, uh, and there's no compelling adoption or technical reason to be there. And we have a for— By the way, we have 4.5 million people now in the Cardano ecosystem. So year after year, net-net, we continue to grow in terms of the raw population. And then they say, well, the only reason they're growing is because it's a cult and misinformed people with no understanding of crypto are buying it and it's there. And yet we're a thought leader for many of these things and we have long arc bets that we've made. So I give them the benefit of the doubt, maybe it's because common people agree with the philosophy and principles. They enjoy the decentralization. They just enjoy that we care about freedom of association, commerce, and expression. And they just want a system that's philosophically pure. Uh, and they say, hey, if I'm going to get into crypto, I want crypto to solve real problems economically, politically, and socially. And my AMAs, I talk a lot about what crypto does for society as a whole. You know, I say things like, hey, you're angry. There's a big chunk of the American population angry about the 2020 election and said that the votes were stolen. Fine, don't complain about it, fix it. So blockchain can fix it. We could actually have a voting system where we can audit and know that the system has not been tampered with, know that your vote has been counted correctly. That's what blockchain can do for you. They say, well, I'd like to have a system like that. Or, you know, you could have another thing about disclosures, whistleblowing, and other things. So let's say you run a big organization, you want a whistleblowing system so people can alert that the CEO's doing something wrong, or the CFO's stealing money, or things like, well, that's zero-knowledge technology. So these aren't hypothetical things. These are things that come up politically, economically, socially on a daily basis, abuses of power, theft, waste, fraud, and abuse, and fundamentally a lack of trust. And so we come in and we say blockchain is going to solve that. And my entire career, whether it's been Bitcoin or Ethereum or Cardano, or now Midnight, I've been saying these are the tools of freedom. So people hear that the Uber driver hears that. And a lot of these people, especially at the lower rungs of the economic ladder, they're angry because they feel like they don't have a voice. They're, they're adrift on a boat where they can't decide where it's going to go. And they're basically victims of circumstance. And they're told, by the way, in 5 or 10 years, you're going to lose your job to humanoid robot or AI. So they're like, we gotta have a better system. Late-stage capitalism is a bad deal. So they look to crypto and they say, this is the escape valve for us to get out. When you look at the marketing of Solana or the marketing of Ethereum or the marketing of many of these other newer things, like we are Aptos, it's so focused on Web3 stuff. Like how do we get more yield? How do you get more TVL? Look at our growth, look at our TPS rate. What the fuck does that mean philosophically to anybody? When you look at the marketing of Bitcoin, it doesn't talk about any of that. It says Bitcoin is the antidote, Bitcoin's the solution. And you notice how Bitcoin has the strongest community. Largest community and it still preserves and protects its value.

So how important is storytelling then? Right? Because it is. Yeah. I do notice like you, like, I mean, you've got more money, like you could retire if you wanted to. I think that's no surprise, right? You could go chill on the ranch and you could like, you know, fly the jet and stuff like that. Why are you, I mean, you're out here making like daily YouTube videos. Why, why is this so like, why are you still doing this?

Because we haven't accomplished the mission yet. We're not done until blockchain's in every facet of society and it holds people honest. You gotta remember where I came from. I, I was the Ron Paul guy and we had 3 simple things. We wanted to follow the Constitution. We wanted to have sound money and we wanted a humble foreign policy. Are we following the Constitution in the United States of America? No. Do we have a humble foreign policy? We just bombed Iran. Okay. No, we don't have a humble foreign policy. We're still running around doing crazy shit. And do we have sound money? We have $35 trillion national debt heading to $50 trillion. It's burning itself out. And, you know, people are getting systemically poorer.

What do you mean we're not following the Constitution? I agree with you on the second two, but what do you mean?

Oh my Lord, there's massive constitutional abuses. First, the Constitution said only gold and silver could be money. We don't even follow that. Do you think we really have freedom of speech? No, not really. You know, do you think we really have freedom? Like, do you think the government's not spying on us right now? Palantir just got, you know, the world's best spy deal ever to create total information awareness and, you know, read everybody's stuff. Um, every place you look, uh, FISA courts, uh, are, are fundamentally unconstitutional. Patriot Act is fundamentally unconstitutional. Uh, you know, only Congress has authority to initiate conflict, but yet the president can just unilaterally bomb people without congressional approval or consent. Um, you know, you have, uh, people being arrested without due process. Anwar al-Awlaki, a US citizen, was killed without due process in a non-combat setting. You, you know, you don't have to be Noam Chomsky to see the enormous civil rights violations, procedural violations, and just the scope and scale of the US government. There's no constitutional authorization for most of the bureaucracy of the United States. They just created it during the progressive era and they brought it out. There's unconstitutional agencies like the Federal Reserve. It's neither a private nor a public institution. So what branch of the US government is the Federal Reserve in? Is it an executive branch? Then Trump should be able to fire the head of the Federal Reserve. Is it a legislative branch? Well, then they would be subject to legislative oversight and GAO audit, but they're neither. So how can we, when the Constitution doesn't give us the right to do this, create an organization that transcends the US government? It's almost like a fourth branch. Just for fun and has it run for 100 years. And by the way, it's not a small thing. Your entire life, you, what do you do? You look at your bank account every day. You go to work. Why do you go to work? To make money. The, what money are you making? The US dollar. And so the thing that controls whether that's valuable or not valuable, you as a person in a representative republic have no say over the leadership of it, the management of it, and you, you're not even allowed to audit that organization. I don't think the founding fathers stood up for bullshit like that, man.

This episode is brought to you by SKALE, the next evolution in layer 1 blockchains. With a gas-free, invisible user experience, instant finality, and robust security, SKALE allows for limitless scalability and has already saved its 50 million users over $11 billion in gas fees. SKALE's high throughput, zero transaction low transaction costs and powerful Web3 infrastructure make it the ideal platform for gaming, AI, and other high-throughput apps. To explore the gas-free ecosystem, visit scale.space/ecosystem and follow their journey on X @skale_network. That's Skale spelled with a K. Thanks to Skale for making today's episode possible. Katana isn't another new general-purpose blockchain. It's purpose-built for DeFi users to provide the best experience possible. It does this by sustainably generating deeper liquidity and higher yield than any other network. If your assets are sitting idle, then they're dead. Katana is built from the ground up with DeFi mechanics to bring your bags back to life. All you have to do is bridge over and Katana does the rest for you. Incubated by Polygon Labs and GSR, Katana launches with a notable ecosystem of primitives, assets, and partners like Morpho, Sushi, Vertex, Lombard, Chainlink, and Yearn. Be early to Katana. Join the pre-deposit campaign before mainnet opens at the end of this month. Deposit funds and open rewards filled with randomized amounts of KAT tokens. There's also a CryptoPunk and other exclusive NFTs hidden for the lucky ones. As always, investments in blockchain technology involve risk. Terms and conditions apply. Let's get into politics a little bit. I mean, so there's this New York Times article the other day, and, uh, I mean, you got basically— it says, uh, uh, there's like the people who shaped crypto in the United States. You got a big picture of Trump here, and you've got, um, you got Bill Zanker, you got David Sachs, you got, you got, um, who do we have here, Eric Trump, um, who else do we have here, you've got David Bailey, Brad Garlinghouse, and you have you right here. And there's only like 10 people on this list. So you mentioned you're a Ron Paul guy. So what do you make of just the politics in America today?

Jason Yanowitz: Well, I mean, we're a three planks of government. You have judicial, executive, and legislative. And during the evils of the Biden administration, the only thing that saved our industry was the judiciary. The judges stepped in and said the SEC does not have the authority for this gargantuan overreach And it started swatting them down and the repudiations got worse and worse as the abuses of power grew. But it was the last stand, because if the judges stood with the executive branch, we would've been fucked as an industry. So now we're in a situation where Trump has enabled and empowered the legislative branch because of the Republican majority to actually pass laws to restructure and rebuild the entire US view of the cryptocurrency side. So what happened was that after he got elected, created Crypto Czar. It was very fluid time and it wasn't clear who was going to be that. I think Elon Musk picked David Sachs because he kind of jumped the queue from all the people that interviewed and talked about it. And David basically created a process to have the legislative branch start passing laws. So we've been working very closely with the legislative side. We just had a roundtable with 4 different senators and 35 staffers Actually, it was the day the Genius Act passed, and we talked a lot about clarity in the market structure, and we did have some discussions about Genius. We really were keen on Section 14. We put in the NIST stuff. And so what we've been focused on, I/O, has been primarily the legislative process and the— and we tried to engage with the White House, but if you read that particular article, it talked about how difficult and weird it was where I was going to have dinner with the president at Mar-a-Lago while literally flying there. They canceled the dinner. Then the day after, they added data to the reserve. Then we had an invitation to go to the White House, uh, and then they rescinded the invitation. Then I moderated a panel with Don Jr. and moderated a panel with Eric Trump. So we're— it's weird and it's a very chaotic thing. And I think that that is a microcosm of a macro problem with how the Trump White House runs itself. But let's be clear, on the legislative side, uh, we've had a constant— since actually September— discussion with many people in leadership about foundational things that need to happen for crypto to be successful in the United States. Because when the president says a mandate, we want America to be the best place to found, fund, and run a cryptocurrency business, he's not saying we want America to be the best place to run Ethereum businesses or Solana businesses or Bitcoin businesses. Saying crypto businesses. So that has to be all the layer 1s, that has to be the layer 2s, it has to be the dApp and DeFi industry. And so if you think about legislation, it's multi-administration. The Securities Exchange Act in 1933 was passed 92 years ago, and we're still using its definition of an investment contract. So the Clarity Act, if it's written right, is going to transcend the Trump administration, and we're going to be talking about it for decades to come. So we gotta get it written in a way that allows rulemaking to, to have enough dynamicism that it can evolve and change over time as technology changes. And the rulemaking will take about 2 to 3 years. So the executive branch went to the legislative branch. The legislative branch will do its job, then it'll go back to the executive branch for rulemaking. We're gonna be involved and have been involved on the legislative side. We've been heavily involved then when it gets back to the executive side at the administrative level. So that's going to be working groups between the SEC, the CFTC, hopefully NIST. We're really advocating strongly to get them involved because you need the science capacity, um, and the engineering capacity to understand it. Also, you need it for government procurement. Like, how does the Department of Commerce or DOD or Secretary of State write an RFP for crypto if they don't have any definitions or standards inside the United States? So we're just trying to be the adults in the room. What a lot of people have tried to do, Jono, for this is hijack the process for branded optics and politicals. Yeah, I'm in the room. I was at the White House. I've done this thing. I'm a big guy. It's like—

Yeah, everyone's got the million dollar donation.

Yeah, I know.

And then the selfie and then—

Yeah, they all want that. But then it's like, guys, okay, great. You got a picture with the president and great, you went to the White House, but you do understand that we went from US trying to kill crypto to the US liking crypto. We could go back to trying to kill crypto. The delta between that is the administration, and administrations come and go. The thing that prevents that from happening is rulemaking and laws. So the nexus of power is Article 1 here. You have to get good legislation passed, and you have to get legislation that's dynamic enough that it's updatable at the rulemaking level so that we as an industry don't get stung with Scary Gary again. So that's been our constant focus for the last, uh, 7 months. And frankly, actually, a lot of the people that are writing these laws we've worked with since 2022. We got early copies of the FIA from Senator Lummis and Gillibrand back when they were trying to pass it under the Biden administration. And, and, uh, so for over 3 years, we've been engaging with a lot of these people, uh, whether it be Senator Scott or Lummis or others, um, and built relationships there. Uh, and what, what that's allowed us to do is to have an adult conversation about what needs to be in. Like, we really have to have a serious conversation about the definition of investment contract. For, for, it's been wrong since 1946. You know, we really have to have a serious adult conversation about interagency rulemaking. And also we have to create provisions to make sure that crypto can also be treated as a non-financial product. It can't be like FIT-21 where it's either commodity or security and there's no difference between two. That's like saying the internet can either be a chat app or email. It's like, it's a lot of things, guys. So, so if you regulate the internet in 1992, Maybe that would be your view of it. But so you can't just view crypto as a financial product. And the first few pieces of legislation, unfortunately, they were too much aligned on that. And our view was it would destroy innovation. You have to open it up for the industry as a whole, and it can't have statutory exemptions for specific blockchains. The first draft of the FIA actually had exemptions for Ethereum and Bitcoin, which made no sense. It said regardless of where the technology's at, what the technology does, if it's large or small, By law, they get special passes and then everything else is under a test. It's like it should be one standard for everybody in the entire, uh, in the entire cryptocurrency space.

Are you, um, are you worried at all that the industry has gotten too in bed with the Republicans and that if the, every, if things flip back and become more progressive or Democrats get back in power, that it's going to be really net negative for the industry?

Well, I mean, what more can the Democrats do? Biden took a position that everybody in the cryptocurrency space is a criminal. They shut our bank accounts down. They sued every US exchange. They said every cryptocurrency is a security. For Bitcoin, they tried to kill it with environmental policy. I mean, there was no safe harbor under the Democrats. So what are they going to do? Like double kill us? I mean, this is almost like the Cadaver Synod with Pope Formosus and Pope Stephen VI. Promosus was already dead when Stephan VI put him on trial. So what are you going to do, like sentence the corpse to extra death? So what more can the Democrats do to us at this point? They were not pro-crypto at all. So, you know, and if the Democrats are like, well, you got to be like nicer to us or else, you know, when we get back in power, we'll hurt you. No, the proper thing they should do is apologize for Gary Gensler. And the proper thing they should do is say, here's our strategy to be bipartisan and work together. And by the way, when you look at the Clarity Act and the Genius Act, when it went to a vote, It wasn't party line. There were Democrats who voted for it. So there, especially amongst younger Democrats who aren't beholden to the Warren part of the party, uh, yeah, they really do feel like this technology is intrinsically bipartisan. And, uh, and you gotta understand that a lot of the people who are billionaires and powerful in the cryptocurrency space, they're young and politically liberal. So the crazy part of all of this, when you remove the miasma of the Trump administration, is that half or more of these people who got rich from crypto will be donors for the left. And so when you start talking on a bipartisan basis, you're like, look, look, widen the aperture and think about a life after the drama and chaos of all this stuff. Do you want 25 more billionaire donors or not? Do you want half of America? Because there's, there's, you know, 50-some million Americans that hold crypto. Most of them are young. So politically, probably the majority of them are liberal. Do you want to take money out of the pockets of people that normally vote for you, or do you want to put money in the pockets of people that vote for you? When you start having that conversation, they do the math and the numbers, they're like, shit, yeah, we got to get behind crypto. Just some things have come up that have been horrifically counterproductive to the process. Trump Coin was horrifically counterproductive, and Trump's business interests in crypto have been counterproductive. They had, I had been an advisor, I would've said like, I'm not telling you not to do these things, but why don't you wait until after the legislation's been passed and we're in the rulemaking phase to launch your projects and launch them under the new frameworks. So then there's, everybody's following the same rules. Yeah. The problem now is that it's reduced the entire dialogue to crypto equals Trump equals bad amongst some people on the left and especially the politically elite inside America. And it's just sad because we actually in December were in a very bipartisan spot. A lot of people post-Harris realized one of the reasons they lost the election was because of crypto. It moved several million votes. And so they were prepared to embrace crypto fully. And we were looking at a very bipartisan program. It's still bipartisan, but it's light bipartisan now, unfortunately. And you're absolutely right to point out that if we continue to go down this road, it will become a wedge issue, just like abortion, for example, is a wedge issue between the—

Yeah, I actually, I do agree with that. Charles, what do you think of these crypto treasury vehicles or digital asset vehicle, whatever we want to call them?

I got a banker every fucking day reaching out to me every day.

Right. Every day.

Let's do something with it.

You know, they want me to try it. Why don't you do something?

I probably will. You know, I learn by doing and so I'll reserve comment until I actually start something and then I'll be like, yeah, it's the best thing since sliced bread. Yeah. Yeah.

That's how it goes. Well, maybe, I mean, on those, Or like, I guess adjacent to that, you guys have, uh, I was trying to find out how much was in your treasury, but you guys have something like $1.2, $1.25 billion in your treasury.

I think it's on the price of ADA. It's about 1.8 billion ADA. And so it's like $1.2 billion or something like that.

$1.2 billion in your treasury.

Yeah. On-chain treasury, not our treasury, but the Cardano itself.

Cardano treasury. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I saw a video, um, I think it was maybe a month or two ago from an interview where you were proposing converting some of the ADA into Bitcoin and stablecoins and then using yield to buy back ADA, from what I can kind of understand.

But yeah, accurately. So, so I, you know, a minute I said it, then all these maxis came out, said Charles is dumping all of his ADA for Bitcoin. I was like, Jesus fucking Christ.

Yeah, that's how it goes.

That's how it goes, man. So here's the thing. The Cardano treasury is an on-chain treasury, so it is passive, non-yield-bearing, and single asset and unmanaged, just ADA. Uh, so the suggestion was to create a governance vehicle where, uh, basically we could have a treasury that is managed multi-asset in yield bearing, and then the community could decide on an annual basis of how much they want to live in bucket A and how much they want to live in bucket B. And for the stuff that's managed, when it makes a yield, have that yield buy ADA and send it back to bucket A. Um, and so the amounts are immaterial, but it's, it's more of a question philosophically, do we want to upgrade our treasury vehicle to have some management layer And then there's— it has to be governance structure to handle that, usually a board of governors and then an administrator and then, uh, some form of financial, uh, an advisor that does the actual deployment of the capital. Now, the primary problem I want to solve is that, uh, the stablecoin issuance of Cardano is very soft. And so it would be nice to get $25 to $50 million of stablecoins, uh, minted through this vehicle every year so that we can kind of build it up. The other thing is Bitcoin DeFi. We have prime the pump. So it would be nice to put $50 million to $100 million worth of Bitcoin and show on Cardano Bitcoin can get a Bitcoin yield. Uh, then that can create a channel for more Bitcoin to come into Cardano, and we can use it to seed up. Kind of like you, when you're growing a crystal, you have a seed to grow the crystal. So similarly, you put the first $50 million in to grow that up. So that was the idea. But what's nice is as ADA grows, the treasury can grow, and then it becomes like a sovereign wealth fund, and it generates a passive return for the the ecosystem as a whole. And then the ecosystem can, if they don't want to do anything with it, just buy ADA with it and send it back, uh, like you would with a sovereign fund. Or it can deploy that capital in more intelligent ways, like it could, for example, take equity positions and key projects, or blockchain-to-blockchain partnerships. Like, let's say maybe we make a deal with XRP, so the treasury actually buys some XRP, as an example. So it shows now the Cardano ecosystem is a holder in that.

Why don't— okay, if you extend this far enough on the Let's say there's a spectrum here. Why don't you just go the EOS strategy and just convert all your— I mean, I think Block.one is the fourth or third largest holder of Bitcoin in the entire world. Like, why not just go all the way, sell all the ADA, buy Bitcoin? You're then like a top 5 Bitcoin holder in the world, and then you can do a bunch of good with, with that money.

Because ADA is a significantly better investment than Bitcoin. It's not me saying it's a fact. So here's some history that you might not be aware of. When the ADA crowdsale happened, we did it in yen and the yen was converted to Bitcoin for auditability. So an audit report's actually coming out likely next month to— it'll show the Bitcoin addresses for this. But at one time I was one of the largest holders of Bitcoin in the world. We had 108,000 Bitcoin. So, you know, that's a lot of Bitcoin, but is that $250 give or take, you know, depending on when it was purchased because the There were several tranches for it. Well, here's the thing. If you do the market valuation of that, this is like, what, $12, $13 billion? Depends on the Bitcoin value of the day. Yeah. Well, if we just held the Bitcoin from the ADA sale, it'd be $12 billion. The market value of Cardano is $30 billion. So we outperformed Bitcoin by a factor of 2.8, give or take. So people are like, oh, Bitcoin is such a better investment than all these other things. Well, EOS, absolutely, that's true. The only two around from that era are Ethereum and Cardano, where actually the network substantially outperformed Bitcoin, in this case by almost 300%.

Wait, what are the two? Cardano. And what's the other one you said?

Ethereum.

And Ethereum.

Yeah. Those are the only two. So that's just the fact, you know? So why is it all, why don't you just convert all your ADA to Bitcoin? It's like, okay, so we can make less money as an ecosystem.

You think ADA will still outperform BTC in the future?

Of course. Because how much farther can Bitcoin go? Maybe to a million. Okay. It's a 10x, ADA can go 100x, 1,000x over this. It's like, guys, we're not a second-class citizen. Cardano does substantially more. And because of Bitcoin DeFi, it's going to end up probably being the yield layer of Bitcoin. And so it's going to get a huge halo effect from that. And because of the launch model of Midnight, partner chains are going to bring in airdrops almost annually to ADA. So you're like making the case for holding ADA. It's like if you hold ADA, you're going to get Knight tokens. Night could be a $10 billion product right outta the gate. And 50% of the supply is being allocated to ADA holders. And every year these things are gonna be dropping.

And when does that, when does that airdrop happen?

The airdrop is the second half of the year. We'll have an announcement at Rare Evo about it. But that's like imminent. It's not like a hypothetical thing. It's like this year, Midnight's launching this year. And every year, you know, these drops are coming. And when you hold ADA, you're gonna get multiple revenue streams. You get the ADA yield, but then you also get all the other tokens that are managed inside the ecosystem. So I mean, if you look at the technology, the growth of the technology, the growth of the community, where we're at in the product life cycle, uh, relative to Bitcoin, you also take a look at all the upside that can come. It's a, it's a probably a, a 10x to 100x difference between what's potentially possible for ADA over Bitcoin. So why was there a suggestion to convert some ADA to Bitcoin? It's a good asset to hold, but more importantly, it primes the Bitcoin DeFi pump. That was the suggestion there. But, you know, here's another thing people don't get about our TVL. Once yield products and lending products come on Cardano, our TVL is probably gonna be over $10 billion instantly from that. Because 50% or more of the ADA supply is in Japan. That's about $15 billion worth of ADA. Okay.

Wait, wait, 50% of the ADA supply is in, is in the, the, because the owners, Japanese owners.

So they never sold it. They never sold it. They bought it back in 2015.

Okay. Okay. Let me ask you this. So I was talking to people before this episode being like, all right, like, you know, a bunch of like OG friends. And stuff. I was like, what should I ask Charles? And he's like, I'm, you know, we can see where you want to take this, take this question. But they were like, you should ask him about the original founding of Cardano in Japan with like the 4 families or the 4 banks. And I was like, what are you talking about? They're like, Charles will know what, what, what you're talking about. So where do you— I don't know how you would take that, that answer.

I mean, so, so we actually have one of the most decentralized distributions in the history of cryptocurrency, and we actually have the only one that had provable people. So the entire crowd sale was basically in Japan. Everybody who bought, they bought usually with yen. So they went from not from crypto but from fiat into crypto. So it brought a lot of new people into the space, and there were 9,900 and some Japanese people that participated. They all went through KYC. It was only Japan? It was Japan and a little bit in Korea.

Why Japan? Why'd you do Japan?

Because the, the people who, uh, who— when I just did Ethereum and Some people in Japan reached out to me and said, we want to do the Ethereum of Japan. And I'd been pushed out of Ethereum, so I had this unused roadmap for Ethereum.

Got it. Okay. This is what I was trying to understand with a friend of mine who was, you know, kind of early Ethereum world as well. He was saying someone else had the kind of idea for Ethereum of Japan or Ethereum of Asia or something, and then they reached out to Charles to run it.

Well, yeah, I had the entire roadmap and all the technical stuff, but the thing is they had the market access, so we partnered.

Got it.

The people who had the market access became EMURGO, which is a sister company, and I created Input/Output out of it. And so we did the protocol engineering and the product philosophy and these things and kind of the design of Cardano. And then they did the initial distribution and took care of that side of the house. So basically almost 10,000 people bought it. It was all in Japan. They bought vouchers and raised about $60 million. It was converted into Bitcoin. And it was 108,000 Bitcoin, and then it financed the project throughout its entire life cycle. And what was really cool is the Japanese buy and hold and they just never sell. So like 50% or more is still sitting in Japan. So that's about $15 billion. And they sell, they get a 55% tax rate. So here's why it's going to supercharge DeFi.

Oh, so they just never sell because of the tax rate.

Yeah, they just hold it. But they're not taxed on those. But basically if you make a yield product out of it where they lend their ADA, create a stablecoin, and then— Of course. Do that, then they're not selling, right? So once those DeFi markets turn on and the Japanese decide to do that, like instantly the TVL goes to like—

Is that the dynamic with some of these other, like, uh, this, they're, I don't know how you feel about this term, but like dino coins, like, you know, there's when, when the market really pumps, like you guys pump, Ripple pumps, Hedera pumps, Algorand pumps. Like, is that because a lot of the holders are in Asia where the tax rate is actually a lot higher?

Uh, it depends on the dynamics, but, uh, Cardano has the largest Asian ownership part.

Interesting. Who's the guy, who's the guy who reached out to you in the first place? Is it like a big, very wealthy Japanese guy?

No, no, no, no. Actually, it was crazy. My secretary that I had when I was at Ethereum was Jeremy Wood, and he lived in Osaka, Japan, and he played poker with a random guy who was like a crypto investor. And he wasn't even a big crypto investor. He was like a mid-sized crypto investor in Japan who'd made some money off of XRP and Bitcoin. And he's like, I really like what you guys did with Ethereum. That's so cool. And you know, I have some friends We probably could set up and everybody's fundraising this particular way. We probably could figure out how to raise some money if you guys want to do like an Ethereum of Japan. So my ex-secretary called me and he is like, do you want to come to Japan and talk to this guy? And I was like, oh man, I'm gonna leave crypto. I'm just, I'm 0 and 2, you know, it's, I'm having a bad, fuck it, I'll go. I need a distraction. So I flew out and I spent a week with these guys and that were like, yeah, this sounds like a lot of fun. Let's go for it. And I had the whole Ethereum plan already written down. I was really excited about it, you know, this formal methods things and UTXO, and we knew how to do the proof of stake and the other stuff and basically started from scratch and, uh, and had to build new companies and a foundation and all this other stuff. And it was an enormous amount of work and nobody cared about it at all until we launched in 2017. And then when, uh, then we launched, immediately went to the top 10 and it never left, um, you know, for any substantial period of time. And we outlined the roadmap. We said we're going to start as a static federated system and then grow to dynamic and decentralized, and add smart contracts, and add governance, and then add scalability into the system. So we're 10 years into it, and we're nearly done with the entire original roadmap, and we're in a really strong position because it's, it's become this incredible project. And what's ironic is the Japanese are kind of running the system now, you know. They— all the, the DREP power is in their hands, and we have an on-chain constitution, and they elect people now. The largest DREP is a Japanese guy named Yuta, you know. So, so they're— and, and, you know, Japan didn't really liked the way that things were done initially. But then what happened is that once it became the largest Japanese cryptocurrency, they're like, yeah, Cardano was made in Japan, it's our thing. It's like, we, we, it's, we, we run that. Um, in Japan, you just have to live long enough so they forget why they hate you, and then they, then they, then they accept you gradually. But it was a wild time. I got to see the whole country. I lived in Osaka for a bit. I started Hokkaido, went all the way down.

I didn't know this.

That's cool. Uh, and, and we have a lot of lifelong friends there, and there's just a lot of power in that, uh, base. But you gotta understand, Japan is like its own planet. And so it's not connected to Silicon Valley, it's not connected to the US media. So that, that's why that phrase big in Japan is such a thing because it, they're so far apart that when things happen in Japan, people in the US tend to ignore it unless it, they make an action to move it into the United States. So it, it was both a blessing and a curse. It was a blessing because we were insulated. And we could grow in our own way. And also because the financing was done as Reg S and offshore, it had a very different character than let's say Solana did or Ethereum did or EOS did. But also the other issue was that Silicon Valley mostly ignored it and a lot of people mostly ignored it and they weren't really sure like, where's the nexus of the success from? So it must just be like everybody loves Charles and he's a great cult leader and he just pushed these things along. Not realizing there's millions of people in the community and they actually do care about it and they invest in it and build it up. And there's a lot of activity. It's just in a very non-traditional way.

Yeah. Yeah. I'm trying to think of the appropriate way to ask this question, but how do you manage your personal money, Charles?

Well, there's a big crypto component to it, and then there's a lot of private wealth management. So all the usual private wealth suspects. And, you know, you create a diversified portfolio of these things.

Are you mostly out of like, I mean, you obviously, you know, Cardano is trading at Cardano's FDV is $37 billion today. I don't know what percentage you own. Let's make it up and call it 10%. So then that's a, you know, roughly a $4 billion to you. I also have one of my friends was like, yeah, at one point I think Charles owned about 50,000 Bitcoin, which is, let's call it $6 billion.

So I'm doing good, you know.

Yeah. What do you do? I want to maybe segue into some of the fun stuff you do with your money. We can go anywhere we want with this. I've got a story. Someone texted me about buying a Blackhawk for about $10 million. I've got someone else who said you own more buffalo than anyone in the world. That's not true.

I only own about a few hundred of them. Ted Turner's ranch has got like half a million or something.

That's what I said. I said, I figured, I thought Ted Turner owned more than that. Um, and John Malone too, I think owns, owns a lot of them or a lot of, lot of land at least. Um, and then you've got an alien tech expedition. So where, um, tell me about some of these stories, man. Like how, how do you get into this? There's a lot, there's a lot of, there's a lot of billionaires out there who are not doing this, these interesting, you know, trying to find aliens and buying Blackhawks.

So, well, I mean, they, they probably do, but they, they're just less public. you know, about all these things. And I'm a very public guy because I'm kind of the new generation of billionaire. And so we're all out there and everything goes on Twitter. So, uh, with respect to Blackhawk, what happened was that I have a ranch and a farm, and also I have a clinic. And so the clinic's in Gillette, the farm is in Boulder, and the ranch is in Wheatland. So it takes about 3 hours to drive to the ranch. It takes about 5 hours to drive to Gillette. So I got really tired of driving. you know, back and forth. And I said it'd probably make a lot more sense by helicopter. But then when I started thinking about helicopters, I said, well, all, if I'm gonna do it because we have a lot of heavy industry stuff and also wildfires, it would be nice to buy a helicopter that can also do heavy stuff like heavy lifting and fence building and ranch work, but then also can be used to treat wildfires. So then we started looking at all these different things and also have private security detail and you know, I wanted something that potentially could be used in training missions with these guys, or if we want to do humanitarian stuff. Like, I sent my helicopter, for example, uh, to North Carolina after Hurricane Helena happened. We worked with Samaritan's Purse, and we had, uh, Don Jr. on the helicopter, and we worked with Billy Graham's grandson, and we delivered generators to people, and, you know, all kinds of things. In fact, right there, that, uh, that story, Wyoming man donated Black Hawk helicopter to Hurricane Helena disaster in the Cowboy State Daily. That's a picture of the helicopter. So when we put all the mission profile— and those are my pilots— when we put all the mission profiles together, uh, it came down to, uh, Black Hawk is the way to go. The problem was that the FAA wasn't really enamored with the idea of a civilian, you know, doing it for all these profiles. So it took a little while to kind of figure out a package that they would be comfortable with. And then what I ended up doing is I upgraded the helicopter substantially. So that's an alpha model, and what I did is I added, uh, a Lima engine with, so the Alpha models came out in the '80s, the Limas were in the '90s, the Mike model were the 2000s. So I added a Lima engine, uh, and transmission to it. And then we upgraded the interior a little bit, but it's still retro. And we even have a fries bar with it. So you can jump out of it, you can fast rope out of it, you know, you can do all the military special ops stuff because I, I have my security details almost all Special Forces operators. Uh, and, uh, and so we still train them just like they would SOCOM. Now, um, you know, that's why we have the Sean Ryan relationship and, you know, all these other things. Uh, but I love it, and I learned an enormous amount about rotary wing assets and aviation. And, uh, you know, we, we just had a tremendous amount of fun kind of figuring out the art of the possible. And at some point, actually, I'd like to start manufacturing them because I'm a big fan of the Black Hawk as a platform, but it's getting long in the tooth. It's over 40 years old. And so I came up with a lot of ideas to kind of do new material sciences to, to build this up. You'll find with my passions is that I don't just buy stuff for the sake of buying stuff. It's usually I want to blend it with some part utility, some part humanitarian, some part preservation of history and providence, and then some part innovation. So like my ranch, for example, Teddy Roosevelt used to own part of it, and I'm actually writing a book with Mark Young, and that'll be published on Book.io. So I'm doing like a book on my blockchain about the history of my ranch with a historian in Wyoming. And now I get to run a ranch, and so then I get to learn about ranching, and then I'm starting to think about the innovation of ranching and like, how do we take ranching to the next level? So I'm like remediating the soil from many years of misuse from prior owners. And then I'm also thinking about like next generation ways of feeding my bison using hydroponically grown fodder. You know, there's all these cool things that you get to do with the new technology, but then you get to use old stuff too, and you'll, you want to preserve that. The Black Hawk is part of history, like every American conflict. That we've had since the '80s. The Black Hawk has been there. That particular one fought in the Gulf War. Um, and so by having that, you're also now part of that history of GWAT and prior conflicts. Uh, and then you kind of get to keep it going and keep that legacy going. But then it makes you think about what would be a better Black Hawk, and, you know, how could I build something like that and with modern material sciences and these things? And that's one of my big interests. And so I'd love to be able to eventually do that and take it to the next level, like with an electromagnetic rotor system and make it hydrogen-powered or, or battery-powered as opposed to beyond JP-8, and then also make it a lot lighter. And so you can put more armor on it, uh, and then put drones in it and all these other things. Because if you make it about electric motors, take out the transmission and the engines, you'll save an enormous amount of weight, you know. So there's all kinds of things I think about. The tail, for example, is an open tail design. I'd love to do a dual fenestron design inside the tail. So I don't just buy these for fun. I buy them because I'm interested in them and there's something I want with them.

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No, no, no. That's— yeah, that's actually a very famous buffalo lives up in Canada. He's dead now. That was Bailey the bison. And the guy who owned him raised him from a calf, and that was the only housealo. So that was a house buffalo. And actually, he even modified his— he had a Cadillac and he modified his car so he could drive the bison to a local bar, and the bison would go to the bar and drink beer out of a bucket. That's ridiculous.

That's ridiculous. I love that though. How many bison do you have?

So I used to have 800, but we had to cull the herd a little bit, and so we took it down to a few hundred, and we'll build it back up. We had some issues with, because we do guided hunts every year for the ranch, and we had some issues with one of the years where we didn't have enough sales because one of our people wasn't calling people back. And the head of bison ops had some health problems. And so I wasn't watching it closely, and bison breed pretty quickly. And so suddenly the herd just grew too quickly and we had to pare it down. It was getting pretty ridiculous.

800 bison.

They were everywhere. I would pull up my ranch house and it'd be like bison sitting in my front yard. I'm like, hey, Get, get out.

You're, you're in, you're in, uh, Wyoming, is that right?

Yeah, half the time in Wyoming and then half time Colorado.

Yeah. Wow. Where are the, where are the bison?

In Wyoming at the ranch.

In Wyoming. Okay.

Yeah. Nice.

Nice. And what about, what about this alien tech expedition?

So that was with Avi Loeb. So if you Google like, uh, Charles Hoskinson, Avi Loeb, spherules, you can kind of bring up, uh, the, uh, spherules and you can see 'em cuz it's better to just kind of look at 'em. Where—

which thing should I—

it's Obby Lobe, not Lobe, L-O-B-E, and, uh, spherules. So, so up there at the Google search, spherules. Well, sure, why not scroll down? They probably have a picture inside this article, that article right there that you were just in. Oh good, this is going to tell the whole story. Yeah, that's one of the spherules. Keep going. And that's where they tested them. And there should be a beautiful picture of the gold ones. That's us on the sled. Okay, so yeah, this is a pretty good visual story. So, so basically what happened was that Avi— I've known Avi for a while, and I called him up after he was talking about Oumuamua. And, uh, oh, that's such a beautiful picture too. I'll tell you about that guy on the left. He's a fucking legend. That's Art Wright. He's like this old dude. He's 89 in that picture. So, so, so basically I called Avi up, and I'm like, Avi, I really want to You know, I was thinking about Oumuamua. It'd be really fun to do something with you guys. And he's like, hey, I'm looking for some funding to go and recover a meteor that crashed on the Earth in 2014 that's from a different solar system. And yeah, right there, those, those are the spherules. So, so basically what happened was that, uh, in 2014, this thing from a different planet came into our solar system and it crashed on Earth and nobody knew what the hell it was. So it could be alien space junk, it could be an asteroid, it could be from a core of a planet. Nobody knew, but it had a very strong material strength. It was going way too fast and it wasn't from our solar system. And that's a very, very rare thing. It's like winning the lottery 3 times in a row. So we had to haggle with the Air Force for a while to, because they knew where it was at, but they wouldn't tell us because they used spy satellites to find it. So we had to haggle with them for a while to give us some rough coordinates. And then we basically created this search box. And what we did is we retrofitted a ship with Rob McCallum, and, uh, he's like a famous sea salvage guy. Uh, and Rob basically is the guy went down with, um, uh, James Cameron for the Titanic, and he was with, uh, Bezos when he recovered the, the Saturn V boosters and all these other things. So he's like a billionaire's play guy. Like, you wanna go to space, you talk to Rob, or you wanna go like find something on the sea floor, he's your guy. So we talked to Rob and we basically designed an expedition with Rob. And then on the science side, if you click on that picture just to the left of the spiro where there's like this sled, oh, to the right of it. Sorry. Uh, we're, yeah, right there is fine. Or, or the more interesting one with, uh, just right there. Yeah. So, so that sled right there is something we designed. It has magnets embedded inside of it. And what we would do is drop it, uh, uh, behind the ship, 6,000 feet underwater. Uh, so over a mile underwater, and we dragged that sled on the sea floor for 8 hours. We'd bring it up and then we'd scrape off the magnets, uh, whatever it found. And then we would be looking for a needle in the haystack. So we actually found fragments of the meteorite that came and hit the earth. And that's what those little gold orbs are to the left. Those are spherules that we found.

So this is the gold. So you found this?

We found that. Yeah, we found it using that sled.

And what, what was it? What is it?

So it's really interesting. We wrote a paper on it and basically the paper. Analyzed it. So they took it back to Harvard, uh, and, uh, uh, the astrogeology department, uh, discovered that those spheres have 1,000 to 5,000 times more beryllium, lanthanum, and, uh, uranium than, uh, than anything in the solar system for background materials. So basically what we think happened was that something collided with a planet in a different solar system long time ago, the planet spilled open, and then for a billion years, the core traveled through space, and then it hit our planet. So, uh, we basically found those needles in a haystack, and it was just an extraordinarily difficult thing to do. And, you know, like, just think about how crazy— this is crazy.

This is crazy.

It was so much fun. Uh, we had to learn a lot. I was on the ship for 2 weeks. Uh, you know, it was a— it was a catamaran, so it was doing this the entire time, and you know, and seasickness. We had to put the scopolamine patches on to prevent seasickness. But the problem is you leave them on too long, you start hallucinating. So you're like, do I want to hallucinate and have crazy ass dreams or do I want to throw up? I mean, like, what's, what, these are my two options here on this expedition. But it was, it was great. We, and I learned an enormous amount about sea salvage. I learned an enormous amount about, uh, you know, uh, uh, astrogeology and it was just a lot of fun to work with Avi. And actually the guy that was in that beautiful picture with the Sunset was Art Wright. And, and we pulled him outta retirement just for this, but he was the Navy's top sea salvage guy and he actually used to work to find clearance stuff. So like when a Russian nuclear sub would, you know, blow up and fall to the sea floor, Art was the guy the Navy would bring in to go and find that. Uh, so he was like a crusty old sea captain who was 89 years old and he was our navigator and he was navigating the entire time with a piece of graph paper in his front pocket. So every morning I, I'd have coffee with him at like 5 o'clock in the morning. I'd say, morning, captain. And he was a salty guy. Like he was a rowing champion at 89. And so I was like, how do you become a rowing champion at 89? He's like, everyone else died. So I was like, oh, okay. Yeah, that, that kind of does make sense. But he was a brilliant guy and he knew more in his left shoe about, you know, being a sea captain than, than pretty much anybody I've ever met. But it was just a crew of characters, man. It was a lot of fun.

How much did you pay to fund this? You funded this, right?

Yeah, I funded the whole thing. It was only about $1.5 million. So it was very small. And actually there was a Netflix crew there. They documented the whole thing. And the, and the guy who did it is a famous, uh, director, but he, uh, he hasn't released it yet. It's been like 2 years and we keep calling and we're like, when is that coming on Netflix? I wanna, yeah, I wanna show people. 'Cause it was, they were all in our face, like cameras everywhere. And we had these dramatic flybys with my jet where they were recording the search area. And, and, and I even kind of got into it. Like I posted a tweet with like the thing when we're bringing up the sled and had the, the background track for the thing. Like, hey, because we always were like, hey, is it really going to be alien stuff? You know, because it technically could be alien stuff, you never know. But it wasn't. It was—

you— do you, uh, just— we're kind of going all over the place, but that's fine. Do you have security problems being so public and, and wealthy?

Yeah, there's, there's been some issues, um, and I have a full detail and they take care of me. And everybody sees me these days, they kind of see the guys around me. But you can see all the news stories, like, uh, there was an Australian crypto billionaire that bit off the finger of, uh, of a, uh, person. Oh yeah.

This dinner I was at last night, everyone, like, the main topic was basically security.

Yeah. Um, and, and I, I kind of predicted this was gonna be an issue. So I built the detail back in, uh, back in 2021 before it was a big deal. And I lived with the detail, built up the detail and trained them and, you know, got them integrated into the home life. So they, they protect the property and they protect me. And I learned an enormous amount about running an executive protection company to an extent where we may even start offering it as a service to other family offices. And what's nice is they're all Special Forces guys, so they're Green Berets and Rangers and SEAL Team 6 people. And, and so they're just super smart about running operations, and they do advances and this and that. And so what's nice about those processes and procedures is that it's the same type of package that Secret Service would have for an ultra VIP, and actually makes it very easy to deal with other ultra VIPs because we understand security, we understand their security needs. So if I meet with somebody who's like a head of state, or we have like an ultra wealthy person or a celebrity come over, their detail talks to my detail and they handle all the travel coordination logistics. Mm-hmm. And everything's just easy. Like we met with Robert Kennedy when he was on the campaign trail and Gavin De Becker did the security package for Kennedy cuz they were good friends. So we just talked Gavin De Becker and we're like, hey, how do you guys wanna meet up and do this? Or like when we met with Eric Trump, you know, there was a Secret Service coordination, you know, these types of things.

Yeah.

The other cool part is you just get hang out with all these special forces guys and they have amazing stories and they've done all these crazy things. And so you learn a lot from it. And that special forces culture, the tempo that they operate at is just incredible. And I travel 200 to 250 days a year. I've been to 75 countries, so I have kind of the, an operator's tempo. So having those guys rolled, they actually can keep up with the enormous demand. And we're working 12, 16-hour days. We're meeting dozens of people. There's a lot of pre-vetting we do for meetings. So I get, you know, dossiers every time I meet with a person. And so I can kind of get an understanding of what their background is, where they come from. The political connections and other things, because we meet with lots of heads of state and some are good people and some are kind of mixed bags. And so it's really important to have a pretty good understanding of what you're getting yourself into and these relationships and connections, and it keeps you out of a ton of trouble. A lot of crypto people, they just seem to think that they can live the same way that they lived before they got rich. And it's like, well, more money, more problems, man. And so when you get rich, unfortunately, then there's extortion rackets and sometimes undesirable people that come, they try to latch onto you to take things. And kidnapping is the big one right now, especially in France where multiple people have been kidnapped. Like a friend of mine got kidnapped, a co-founder of Ledger, and they cut his finger off.

Yeah.

You know, and so it's just crazy, you know, what these people are doing. And that was a premeditated thing where they followed him for his pattern of life and they broke in and took him and his wife. And it's a bad deal. And so now all these crypto people are like, well, we need to do security. And it's like, well, duh. You know, just like Cardano, I've been ahead of you for a few years. We did it in a peer-reviewed way. You know, we went to the best of the best in the military and a lot of these guys did like embassy protection packages or ultra VIP packages for generals and things like that. So they have a pretty good understanding of what's necessary for security and it's just good to have 'em around. Plus they never say no, no matter how dangerous it is.

Let's get back into this cycle. One thing I wanna get your take on that I feel like is not— there's a lot of disagreement is, do we still have 4-year cycles? Right. And since you've been in the industry, the industry has run on these— the market cycles have run in these 4-year cycles. Obviously, I'm curious if you think the 4-year cycle is still intact.

No, it's a different cycle. It's something different going on. And I don't even think we're close to the peak of the bull market. You know, people have gotten so pessimistic and cynical. That they're like, oh, the market's dead and we've ballooned. It's like, dude, clarity's not even passed yet. When clarity gets passed, the Mag Seven are going to enter the cryptocurrency space. You're going to have stablecoins go above $1 to $2 trillion in issuance. You're going to have real-world assets come in. The total market cap aggregate's going to be over $10 trillion. And so I call this the Giga Chad bull run. It's like the biggest bull run we've ever had. And when Bitcoin starts stalling, then the alts will pop. And so you're going to see great ratios that come from this whole thing. And yeah, it'll die off a little bit, but it's like every time you have these windows, you go to new all-time highs and then you stay at new all-time lows. And so it's no longer a 4-year cycle because it's not retail-led anymore. It's more led by institutions and it's more led by massive investors. But simply put, there's just too much going on. The inventories on Bitcoin are too low. You got these DApps injecting gargantuan amounts of money into the market and there's no way not to see a bull run from all—

When do you think we hit— wait, so what are we at today? $4 trillion, I think.

Yeah.

Yeah. We're at $4 trillion. When do you think we hit $10 trillion?

Before the end of the cycle. And I think the cycle will last throughout 2026 because clarity is going to be the catalyst. I think that really, bootstraps it up. And, you know, the only reason why we haven't super taken off was that there was an irrational exuberance when Trump got elected, and then it didn't immediately pay off, and so people got a little crazy about it. Um, and then, you know, the tariffs and all the macroeconomic stuff kind of shook the market a little bit. But people are starting to look at crypto as a counter-cyclic and a, um, as a hedge asset to the collapse of the US dollar, or, uh, you know, to inflation, or, you know, there's such things. So we'll get where we need to go, you know, as an industry and a market. And especially when the fourth generations come in and they bring in all the real-world assets, because then suddenly you have all these yield products that come in that give 10%, 20%, whether it be relaunch insurance, you know, for rockets or, you know, exotic microfinance plays or whatever the hell it is. They'll come in and then it'll just attract a ton of money. And the Max 17 come in.

Yeah. What do you think Cardano? Okay. So Cardano in 2017 ripped from like, what, a cent to like a dollar, let's call it. And then the last cycle, you guys ripped again from $0.05 to $3. Um, bottom of this cycle, you guys were at $0.25. You're at like $0.82 today.

Yeah.

What does, what does Cardano hit if, uh, crypto as a market cap is at $10 trillion?

You know, it's hard to say. It'll be a ratio. Um, but, um, I don't think it's unreasonable to believe that there's a path to recover the all-time high. that, you know, that we enjoyed. Uh, but you know, it's hard to say cuz there's a lot of factors that, uh, that come into play. So that's why I tend to look at the macro of the industry as a whole. Like, do I believe the vertical is gonna go from 4 to 10?

Yes.

Do I believe there's enormous amounts of new capital entering the market? Yes. And I do believe Cardano's well positioned to receive a, a fair share of that, especially with value leakage from Bitcoin. Cuz once Bitcoin stalls, cuz it always happens at some point, it's it's going to reach some ceiling, like quarter million or half a million, then the game is no longer buy and hold appreciation. It's now just make yield with what you have. So when you flip that switch and you go into Bitcoin DeFi, you will have a $2.5 trillion, if it goes to $250, about $4 trillion market where 10% flows into other cryptocurrencies. Yeah. So that's $400 billion, which is going to flow into other cryptocurrencies to seeking yield.

Yeah, I tend to, I tend to agree with that.

So, So it doesn't matter if it's 1% or 5% or 10%. These are big fucking numbers, man, when you talk about the yields. And so that's why I always widen the aperture and look at these things. So I'm a protocol architect guy. And so I say, all right, well, what capabilities does Cardano need to have in terms of its ecosystem, its technology, its market position to be able to absorb this halo? And we're moving very quickly as an ecosystem to do that. And we have a lot of built-in advantages. From the hard fork combinator to UTXO and other things that kind of allow us as an ecosystem to move there, you know, and, uh, we're rallying the base as hard as we can to anticipation of the gigachad we'll run.

Um, speaking of being a protocol architect, uh, someone sent me something, uh, maybe our producer wrote this down, um, but I haven't actually read any information on it, so I'm not sure where, where we're going with this question, but They said you've hinted psychedelics has shaped how you designed ConsenSys. I have done no research on that question, but what are your thoughts on just psychedelics in general?

Well, no, I didn't take a bunch of mushrooms and then come up with Ouroboros or anything like that.

That would have led to a really good short clip for Twitter though, Charles.

Oh, it would have been great. So because I do healthcare as one of our core businesses, mental health is something we are very concerned about. And so we do look at using ketamine and transcranial magnetic stimulation for depression treatment.

We actually, ketamine, ketamine for depression has amazing, amazing results. Yeah.

Especially when you combine it with other modalities like TMS. So actually TMS is one of my favorite things. I'm, not a lot of people know about it, but it's been around for a while and it's FDA approved. So transcranial magnetic stimulation is literally where you map the brain and they use magnets on the brain to basically break synapses and rebuild them. And structurally rebuild the brain to rewire the depressed circuits inside the brain to be not depressed anymore. And so where and when it works, it works about one-third to half the time, and people, like, their depression goes in remission and they get off drugs. And what's really crazy about it is that in many cases they're durable gains, and they have one protocol with TMS that only takes 5 days. So you can be super fucking depressed. We nuke your brain with magnets for a little while. 5 days later you come out, you're like, wow, life is great, I feel better again. Um, so, uh, we are starting a study where we're going to combine TMS with ketamine and functional MRI mapping. So we get a really detailed brain map using very sophisticated research MRI because we have a 3-tesla research MRI at, uh, at my clinic, and we use AI upscaling with it. And we're going to combine those modalities together, and we think that we'll be able to create a durable protocol that Cures depression or at least pushes it into remission 50% of the time. So you flip a quarter, your depression's gone. We can do it in 5 days using ketamine. So, which is just crazy, but that's just one entry point. You also look at other psychedelic modalities like psilocybin, for example, on the mushroom side, mescaline, which is, you know, the peyote and San Pedro side. And then you have the synthetics like LSD and DMT and these types of things. And what's nice about, uh, MDMA— I should say, what's nice about, um, you know, this area is ever since Roland Griffiths did the, the heavy lifting at Johns Hopkins, the scientific and academic community is starting to come around to the concept that, um, that psychedelics can be very useful as a therapeutic intervention, either as a frontline or a supportive therapy, like MDMA combined with talk therapy for example, is just incredible for PTSD treatment. So we're very interested in it. You know, been to MAPS conferences before. We're gonna, we're gonna do studies. The only barrier right now is the federal government still classifies the vast majority of these as Schedule 1, which means they're illegal. Ketamine is a Schedule 3 drug because it's been around for a very long time. It actually started as a pediatric drug for surgery in the 1970s. Uh, and so, so it's something we just really care about. We understand it's there. and it's awesome for mental health treatment. Now, your question was related to creativity and, uh, nonlinear thinking. Yes, psychedelics can enhance that, and I'd argue that, uh, they're, they're quite powerful for this. And, uh, there's plenty of offshore programs where people do this to enhance creativity, but there's other things you can do that are, that are similar to psychedelics that could be more powerful for that. Like, for example, nobody really talks about focused ultrasound, and you can use focused ultrasound to knock a person to any mental state. There's this one research group that actually made people experience pure bliss, like the purest form of happiness you could ever have for 15 minutes.

Have you done that?

I'm going to build a focused ultrasound department at my clinic because I'm so interested in this. And actually, I was really curious about stacking modalities, like combining focused ultrasound with TMS for depression treatment. But this fact that you could knock a brain state into a flow state or knock the default mode network into a different state so you could go into a psychedelic trip, or make a person happy, you know, for a period of time. That's really interesting. And focused ultrasound is super precise. You can have 3-dimensional targeting. With TMS, it's a little harder because if you want to get to a deeper brain structure, you hit surface areas with more magnetic fields, and that may be problematic for the therapeutic intervention. So it's, it's a much more precise instrument, but you need better mapping. So it's actually really interesting to combine fMRI with focused ultrasound as a, uh, as a, uh, approach. But, you know, it's absolutely somewhere interesting because you can enhance creativity as well with it.

Yeah. Charles, this conversation went in a million ways I didn't think it would go, but I enjoyed it a lot. Anything that you really— I realized actually we have hardly— I don't even think we've talked about Midnight. We've hardly talked on— talked about some of the Cardano stuff, but any— I was a little more focused on like the guy behind the protocol here. But anything that you really want to cover that We haven't.

Well, if you want to share your screen one more time, I really would love to go back to, um, eutxo.org because—

wait, wait, tell me the website. eutxo.org.

Yeah. And so if you take a look at this, so this is a real-time view of the Cardano network. And, you know, I say it, but then it's easier to just show people what's going on. This? Yeah. And so let's let it load up. And so this is a real-time view. It's always dangerous to do real-time views. So each of those little blocks is a transaction. So you see that giant little block there? That's a single transaction. And that transaction had— all those are NFT issues. So if you click on 'em, you can see what's issued, swaps, asset transfers, other things like that. So this is a real view of the network. Uh, so, so I have no idea what's gonna come for the next block, what's there, but you can kind of see Cardano living and breathing. And this is the kind of stuff that I, I get up every morning and I say, I want to see this happen where you build something. And this was a community member who put it together and you just bet right on the paradigm. Those can get bigger and bigger over time. So you can have thousands of events in a single transaction, and eventually those transactions will be proofs that can contain rollups. So it's an infinitely scalable system. And then we talk about Midnight or other things like that. Those are really just extensions of this dream that we have. And by the way, all those scripts there, they're going to be Bitcoin interoperable now because we have Bitcoin VMX. So we can write an Aiken smart contract in Rust on Cardano, cross-compile, it runs on Cardano, it runs on Bitcoin, and it's a hybrid application. So this took 10 years of time and effort and thought to kind of put together. But now that we're here, it's this magical system. And in the same system, you have all 3 things, economic, political, and social. You have voting transactions for the on-chain government that controls that $1.2 billion treasury. You have economic transactions moving money. You, you have dApps and DeFi basically going on. You know, you have all this, this cool stuff happening real time in this crossroads. And this is what I signed up for crypto to be, and it's fully decentralized. You know, if you go to the Edinburgh Decentralization Index, Cardano is the most decentralized cryptocurrency on the planet. We met with NIST while we were in Washington, D.C. to talk about, could we use NIST to start thinking about decentralization so it can start properly measuring this as a metric people care about? And so if you— it's just like one overarching thing across my entire career I look for these interaction points where everything just kind of comes together into one beautiful visualization. And when you see that visualization, then you kind of get it and you say, well, this is why we signed up for crypto. We wanted to run society on a blockchain. We wanted to have one system that could think about all these things. And each and every part of this was made with love, the address format, how to visualize these things. Things, how to think about the theoretical properties of UTXO. We talk about 250 papers. This is where those papers ended up. And when we talk about the vision of the future, those boxes can become arbitrarily large and those boxes can contain more and more semantical data. And every one of those is just a single transaction. So you can horizontally and vertically shard, and semantically, you can always improve the programmability expressiveness of the system. And the fact that in one system you can have voting, in one system you can have data storage, in one system you can have programmability, one system you can have your banking system. And by the way, Cardano native assets can pay now transaction fees in the native assets. When you issue an asset on Cardano, you pay— you can pay the fee with the asset, like you have your own layer 1. It's called Babel fees. It's just, just— it's magical that all that came together. And like 95% of that I didn't build. You know, I came up with it, helped write some of the papers and started it, but I didn't create this website. I didn't create the vast majority of the dApps and NFT projects or other things that are here. It's a thriving, vibrant ecosystem. And unfortunately, in the podcast sphere, when people talk about Cardano, they have no clue about any of this. They don't even know this exists. So they just reduce the entire project to me and they say, it's just Charles and it's all just one big marketing game.

Charles, why is that? Why do you think that like you are not in the, crypto insider crowd, but like Solana is in the insider crowd.

Because we never took any venture capital and we were funded by a bunch of random Japanese people, you know, 10 years ago in a place that most people have never been, like Osaka, Japan. Like if people go to Japan, they go to fucking Tokyo. Who goes to Osaka? I mean, it's like we were so far off the beaten path, nobody knew who we were and nobody cared. And so they just had, because there was no way to interface invest in it, get an insider deal, get an insider distribution, these types of things. They, they basically just wrote us off or said, well, we don't understand it, so we don't care about it. The other thing is that Cardano was built with very exotic technology like Haskell and all this peer review. So to understand Cardano in the beginning days, you had to read academic papers and programming language that most people didn't understand. So nobody really wanted to take the time to invest, so they just wrote it off. And also, we'd never followed these mega trends, these, these well, I shouldn't say megatrends, but rather the flavor of the week trends like NFT mania, for example. Remember that in 2021? And we didn't follow meme coin mania where Solana did. And so because we weren't in the conversation, they just assumed Cardano was dead and it was gone, like EOS or these other things. Meanwhile, we were just building and we were doing cool things, and there was an internal community that was doing all this interesting stuff. And so we do need to open up, and that's what Midnight's about, and, you know, that's what Bitcoin DeFi is about. But on the other hand, we can't sacrifice what made Cardano Cardano. It's super fucking cool that you can just go to that website and real time you can just see, like no other system, the heart of it. Like, what's happening? Like, literally NFTs are being issued and, you know, scripts are running and money's moving at scale of billions of dollars every week. It's extraordinary. And what I live for is, like, if I keep doing my job, in 10 years Imagine what that website's going to look like. You know, could you imagine a website where the entire commercial layer of the United States was visualized real time? It would be the coolest thing in the world to see that. And we could see that with Cardano. So it's always the way I like to end these types of interviews and kind of like show people that, you know, because it says it's a thing and it's not one person's thing. It's the aggregation, the hopes and dreams of so many people.

Charles, man, you're, you're a fascinating person. Thanks for coming on. Congrats on everything. It's a, it's an impressive journey. I think a lot of people are rooting for you. So appreciate, appreciate the time.

Thanks, Jano.