Cardano Founder Points Finger for ADA’s DeFi Collapse - Shocking Revelation
Charles Hoskinson breaks silence on Cardano's DeFi downturn
The Blame Game
Cardano's creator finally names the culprit behind ADA's decentralized finance struggles - and it's not what investors expected. The revelation comes as ADA's DeFi metrics show concerning declines across key protocols.Market Impact
DeFi activity on Cardano has plummeted despite the network's technical advancements. TVL figures tell a brutal story of capital flight and dwindling developer interest. The timing couldn't be worse with competitors eating Cardano's lunch.Industry Response
Crypto veterans shrug - just another day in blockchain land where today's innovation becomes tomorrow's deprecated code. The usual cycle of hype, disappointment, and finger-pointing continues unabated.Hoskinson’s Clarification: I Never Blamed Anyone
In a video on X addressing the controversy, Hoskinson expressed frustration at what he described as “fundamentally dishonest” reporting. He stated that the headlines portraying him as blaming cardano users for the network’s DeFi woes were entirely false.
He insisted that his initial comments were meant to identify a structural issue within the ecosystem. The structural issue is based on the difference between those who stake ADA and those who engage in decentralized finance, and it is not to assign blame.
According to Hoskinson, over 1.3 million users actively participate in Cardano staking, while far fewer engage with the blockchain’s DeFi protocols. This disparity, he argued, explains why ADA’s total value locked (TVL) is modest compared to other networks.
He estimated that if the same level of engagement were mirrored on both sides, Cardano’s DeFi TVL could range between $5 billion and $10 billion. Hoskinson pointed out that this observation was not a criticism of the community but an analytical point about user behavior and ecosystem growth patterns. “There’s not a single person in the Cardano ecosystem who I am blaming for our DeFi situation,” he said.
A Closer Look At Cardano’s DeFi Sector
Hoskinson went on to explain that the problem lies not in lack of community engagement, but in the absence of proportional participation between governance and DeFi. According to him, Cardano’s large user base and strong staking participation prove the network’s health and scale, and this contradicts claims that it only has between 10,000 and 50,000 active users.
The real challenge, he said, is understanding why the majority of participants who stake their ADA are not also contributing to DeFi liquidity. These challenges could be factors such as slippage, fees, user experience, yields, and education.
Despite the controversy surrounding the misinterpretation of Hoskinson’s remarks, there is still an underlying issue of Cardano’s sluggish DeFi growth. On-chain data still shows that ADA’s daily active addresses have dropped from over 32,000 in mid-October to around 24,000 in early November.
According to data from DeFiLlama, the Cardano network currently has the 26th largest TVL, with only about $243.2 million in 60 protocols. At the time of writing, ADA is trading at $0.5417, down by 6.2% in the past 24 hours. However, the decline is not limited to Cardano alone, as the entire crypto market is currently down by 4% in the past 24-hour timeframe.
