Cardano Founder Charles Hoskinson Announces Japan Expansion Tour, Hints at Major Deals Ahead

Charles Hoskinson is taking Cardano on the road—straight to Tokyo. The founder's upcoming Japan tour signals a serious push into one of crypto's most regulated, yet promising, markets.

Why Japan Matters

Forget loose regulation. Japan's Financial Services Agency (FSA) runs a tight ship, granting licenses to a select few. Cracking this market isn't just a win; it's a stamp of institutional legitimacy that most chains can only dream of. Hoskinson isn't just visiting—he's courting the gatekeepers.

Teasing the Deal Flow

The 'new deals' hint is classic Hoskinson. It builds narrative momentum. Will it be enterprise partnerships, payment integrations, or something from the research-driven pipeline that Cardano loves to tout? The speculation fuels the ecosystem, keeping ADA holders watching every move—a masterclass in founder-led marketing while traditional VCs are still writing memos.

The Bullish Case vs. The Skeptic

A successful Japan foray could unlock a wave of sophisticated capital and high-fidelity projects. It's the kind of move that transitions a blockchain from 'crypto-native' to 'finance-infrastructure.' But let's be cynical for a second: in an industry where 'partnership' often means a non-binding MoU and a press release, the proof will be in the on-chain activity—and whether the deals move the needle past the usual hype cycle. For now, Hoskinson has the market's attention. Again.

Midnight, Privacy, And A Cardano DeFi Push

Hoskinson said the tour will span Sapporo, Osaka, Fukuoka, Naha, and Tokyo, covering “the entire Japanese archipelago” over roughly two weeks. He described the agenda as part Midnight introduction, part cardano status update, and part technical pitch for what builders can do when the two stacks interoperate.

“As many of you know, Japan is why Cardano exists. There WOULD be no Cardano if there was no Charles and there would be no Cardano if there was no Japan,” Hoskinson said. “I went to Japan in 2015 and with our partners from Emurgo amongst others we were able to go about all of Japan and convinced them that Cardano needs to exist. So they put up the money we built it and the Japanese community still is the largest and strongest Cardano community in the entire world with more than half the supply there.”

That legacy, in Hoskinson’s telling, makes Japan a natural first stop for positioning Midnight not as a side project but as a strategic lever for Cardano adoption.

Hoskinson said that “about [the] middle part of this year” he intends to “aggressively push for the top 15 Cardano dapps to go through a overhaul and get some additional resources.” His stated goal is not incremental polish, but step-function improvements in usage and distribution.

“In my view the best place to take it is to focus on the DeFi ecosystem and the Cardano dapp ecosystem and ask the question how do we make those Cardano dapps more competitive? How do we 10x their TVL and their transactions?” he said. “Get them listed on major exchanges and get them where they need to go.”

The connective tissue, he argued, is Midnight’s privacy mandate, paired with new infrastructure components he referenced, including “new bridges,” “new stablecoins,” and “new oracles.” The pitch is that dapps cannot win on throughput and fees alone; they need new product surfaces that attract users and transactions from other ecosystems.

“My view is Midnight is going to be an indispensable component in that because it’s not good enough just to make them better, faster, and cheaper,” Hoskinson said. “The dapps have to offer new things and being able to combine Cardano technology and Midnight technology together. What that means is that we can actually offer privacy to the masses to Solana, to Ethereum, to bitcoin and other places.”

Hoskinson also linked the push to Cardano’s broader engineering roadmap, citing Hydra progress while using a roads-and-traffic analogy to argue that application demand, not base-layer capability, needs to be the next constraint to break.

Japan Tour https://t.co/MTq8Trp0UP

— Charles Hoskinson (@IOHK_Charles) January 22, 2026

After Tokyo, Hoskinson said he will head to Hong Kong for Consensus, where he plans to keynote and “have some cool announcements for Midnight along with some big big partners” tied to the network’s mainnet launch. He stressed he would not disclose counterparties until agreements are finalized, saying he expects people to be “very happy” with upcoming “commercially critical integrations.”

At press time, ADA traded at $0.3595.