Hoskinson Admits Cardano’s Stagnation—Reveals Bold Revival Plan

Cardano’s founder Charles Hoskinson doesn’t mince words—his blockchain is stuck. Now, he’s laying out a roadmap to jolt it back to life.

The Diagnosis: More Talk Than Action

Despite its academic rigor and lofty promises, Cardano’s adoption lags behind rivals. Hoskinson blames slow execution—ironic for a project that prides itself on peer-reviewed delays.

The Fix: Scalability, Interop, and a Dash of Hype

His plan? Turbocharge Hydra for scaling, bridge aggressively to Ethereum and Bitcoin, and—because this is crypto—launch a few meme-worthy side projects to stir the crowd.

Wall Street Won’t Care (Until It Does)

Traditional finance still sees Cardano as that ’overengineered science experiment.’ But if Hoskinson’s playbook works? Even the suits might stop yawning—right after they finish shorting it.

Does Cardano Need A “President”?

Governance, indeed, was the morning’s dominant undercurrent. Hoskinson characterised Cardano’s post-Vasil polity as lopsided: a legislature and judiciary (community voting and constitutional committee) exist, but no clear executive authority to enforce branding, marketing or an integrated roadmap. “At some point you have to reintroduce some FORM of executive function,” he argued, floating a model in which a community-elected “president” would be rewarded in ADA for meeting network-level KPIs such as monthly active users or total value locked. Without that accountability, he warned, roadmap items like Ouroboros Kronos—his favoured remedy for time-sync attacks—could languish indefinitely because “no one can really unilaterally say, ‘this is what’s going to happen.’”

Technical privacy surfaced again when an audience member asked whether the long-dormant Crypsinous paper—private staking for Ouroboros—should be revived. Hoskinson acknowledged its conceptual elegance but cautioned that full anonymity would “take a big hit” on performance and complicate multi-resource consensus. Any resurrection, he said, would need to marry new zero-knowledge primitives with the emerging, multi-ledger world Cardano now targets.

That multi-ledger push was most vivid in his discussion of partner chains for Bitcoin DeFi. Hoskinson outlined a three-layer stack: first, a bridging mechanism built on BitVM-X and Hydra-backed operators to batch Bitcoin transactions; second, a wallet layer (headed by Lace) that abstracts the complexity; third, an ecosystem of Cardano DeFi apps refactored to accept Bitcoin collateral and fees. “Even five or ten percent coverage would be larger than the market cap of Aptos, Solana and pretty much ethereum combined,” he claimed, dismissing Bitcoin maximalist objections with an analogy: “Gold is valuable whether it sits in a mine or a jewellery shop.”

Amid the technical depth, Hoskinson’s frustration with misinformation was palpable. He returned repeatedly to what he called “600 articles, 50-plus million views” alleging that he had misappropriated unredeemed ICO funds—allegations he flatly denies and says will be refuted in an imminent BDO forensic audit.“

Still, the founder’s tone was more determined than defensive. He framed every grievance—whether about “gridlock,” misaligned incentives or public defamation—as a data point in how decentralised systems mature. “We have the right to rewrite the economic, political, and social systems of the world,” he said, linking Cardano’s ethos to his childhood fixation on unfinished games and four-dimensional puzzles: “If it’s not good enough for you, how could you possibly say it’s good enough for everybody else?”

For now, Hoskinson’s own puzzle pieces are clear: bring fast finality to the mainnet, launch Midnight’s selective-disclosure toolkit, revive research threads like Kronos under a more decisive governance model, and test it all inside a living simulation where AI agents behave like citizens and criminals alike. Whether the ecosystem can align behind that blueprint—or whether the very lack of an “executive” will keep the tiles mis-matched—now falls to the Cardano community he insists must learn to act as a nation, not a forum.

At press time, ADA traded at $0.769.