The Wolf Of All Streets - "I Lost $2.5 Billion While The Government Destroyed Crypto Investors" | Charles Hoskinson

Episode Date: January 11, 2026

Charles Hoskinson Founder of IOHK & Cardano reflects on the crypto industry's turbulent past four years, marked by regulatory chaos, failed projects, and political mismanagement, which wiped out retail investors and left altcoins stagnant while Bitcoin became institutionalized. He emphasizes that 2026 is not a typical bull market but a necessary reset, driven by the need for a new generation of protocols focused on rational privacy, smart compliance, and chain abstraction that simplify user experience and enable mass adoption. Despite significant setbacks, including his own $2.5 billion paper loss, Charles remains optimistic about the future, comparing the upcoming crypto evolution to Amazon’s transformation, where real utility and global decentralization will drive growth, reclaim retail trust, and resist Wall Street’s institutional grip, ultimately shaping a stronger, privacy-centered, and politically neutral crypto ecosystem.

Charles Hoskinson is down $2.5 billion in crypto over the last four years. Not because the tech failed. Not because retail was early. It happened while this administration promised clarity, launch meme coins, and left the industry stuck between regulation and chaos. Retail got wiped out. Builders got punished. Bitcoin became institutional and alt coins were horribly left behind. So when Charles says 2026 isn't a bull market, it's a reset. He's not speculating. In this conversation, he explains what actually went wrong. Trump got elected. And then we all said, oh, my God, this is going to be the best thing in the world.

And the U.S. government is going to pump our bags as an industry. And the first thing that Trump does is he launches Trump coin and we didn't get clarity and, you know, all this other stuff happens. Why government involvement made things worse. By definition, cryptocurrency should be politically neutral, geographically neutral, ethically neutral. They're global products. There's no such thing as an American crypto. And the minute you make it an American crypto, it doesn't make any sense at all. And by the next version of crypto looks nothing like the last one.

When you go into Starbucks, you don't say, hey, I want a latte, so here let me tell you how to make it step by step by step. That's currently where the cryptocurrency space is at. To use a decks or whatever, kind of have to understand the underlying platform, wallets, public-private keys, all this stuff. It's a complicated affair. Instead, you just want to be like, I want $100 worth of food coin, best available price within an hour. That's an intention. Stay to the end, because this decides whether crypto becomes Wall Street's product, or a something entirely different.

Ladies gentlemen, Charles Hoskinson, thank you. All right, well, let's. Okay, we're going to start here again. Charles, I would love for you to give us, in your mind, the state of crypto right now, where the industry stands here coming into 2026. Well, it's kind of like Japan, 1946, you know, that we've been carpet, nuked, all the cities have been firebombed. It's pretty grim, but we can rebuild and we'll make it better,

and eventually we'll get Super Mario, you know, at the end of the rainbow. So, so it's not, it's not all doom and gloom. It's just the problem was we spent several years post-2020 in hell. You know, we had a hell of a time with FTX and with Luna. And then Gary Gensler came around and it was like, like that movie, It was Scary Gary. And the sewer, he's like, hi, Georgia. Come on down to the sewers. And so we had Scary Gary for two years and it was horrible.

And then Trump got elected. And then we all said, oh, my. God, this is going to be the best thing in the world. And we thought, oh, man, the U.S. government's going to pump our bags as an industry. And the first thing that Trump does is he launches Trump coin and we didn't get clarity and, you know, all this other stuff happens. And we said, oh, my God, the government's now rug pulling us. It's like, what the hell is going on? So it's a mixed bag. A lot of great building and progress was done, especially on the zero knowledge side. You know, a ton of great milestones were reached amongst many different

projects like Cardano reach full decentralization and full on chain governance and you know Ethereum had a lot of great milestones a ton of amazing things in the ZK space but on the other hand a very lackluster on the regulation side and that's why you had a bifurcated recovery so you you had Bitcoin go up because institutions were buying and you have a lot of structured financial products in that world but none of that trickled into the altcoin space so the altcoin space kind of stayed stagnant throughout all of 2025 and we just just didn't get the bull market that was promised. So now everybody's kind of recovered a little bit. We're a little bitter. October, we were supposed to have like pumped over. We were all excited.

And then we got what happened October. Again, you know, so it's like Jake Paul in Breaking Bad where he's like, he can't keep getting away with this. You know, so we were just, we were just there mentally. So everybody's a little tired. They're a little fatigue. The biggest issue is retail wouldn't want to come back. they're just like, my wife is going to divorce me if I keep buying this stuff because every time I say it's going to 10x, I just get destroyed. And all the incumbents seem to be doing fine. So 2026 is a reset. And I saw this before, you know, with Bitcoin, when we were going from Bitcoin to the Ethereum, everything was stagnant in Bitcoin. You know, we had Bitcoin and light coin and feather coin and Freight coin and this coin and this coin. And we didn't have anything new or different.

It was just all forks of Bitcoin. Then the second generation came around. Oh, smart contracts. Yay, all right. We have something new and different. And then the third generation came around and delivered Solana and Cardano and all these other things. So we're ready for a new generation. And that brings retail back. It brings the excitement back.

It gets the conversations and kind of a new place. So in the absence of that, it's just going to stagnate right now. Bitcoin will continue improving because it's now an institutional asset. It's not a Web 3 asset anymore. But for the Web 3 space, we need a different narrative for retail to return. When you say we're ready for a new. generation. Do you mean a new generation of retail and investors? Or do you mean a new generation of protocols and improvement? Yeah. Yeah. So, you know, Bitcoin was just basically, let's push value

around in a decentralized way. And then the next generation was, let's make value programmable. So we have smart contracts. And the next generation is we need on-chain governance. So we need like Dow's and these things. And we need interoperability. And then we need scalability. So in the fourth generation, what I think it is, you know, I'm betting for putting my money, is going to be in rational privacy, so that's privacy with selective disclosure, smart compliance, and so that's like taking smart contracts and doing AML and KIC, so you can bring real world assets in, and then chain abstraction. So the whole industry is moving to intense. And to explain that, like when you go into Starbucks, you don't say, hey, I want a latte, so here let me tell you how to make it step

by step by step. That's currently where the cryptocurrency space is at, to use a Dex or whatever. You kind of have to understand the underlying platform, wallets, public-private keys, all this stuff. it's a complicated affair. Instead, you just want to be like, I want $100 worth of Foo coin, best available price within an hour. That's an intention. And so by 2030, 90% of all defy transactions,

excuse me, Dex transactions, and 60% of all defy will be in the intent space. So tents don't care where the transaction settles. So everything is changing. We're going from one chain to multi-chain. Chains are starting to get privacy. The privacy is becoming programmable. is working its way into the industry, and then with that you can do regulated products in

tandem with unregulated products. They live in the same infrastructure. The TAM is huge. It's about $10 trillion, so it's going to bring a ton of new users in. And also it means that you can start using cryptocurrencies without having wallets. You can use cryptocurrencies from your cell phone, and the consumer rails are all there. So the wallet abstraction gets really good in this chain abstraction world. So that's the next generation, the fourth generation, and it kind of is the merger

of defy and tradfi and it's the merger of the traditional web two experience with the web three experience into one and we should probably see probably a two to three x in user count and a 10x and assets under management inside the inside the ecosystem it's funny because i feel like we've been having the it needs to be simple enough for grandma conversation for seven or eight or nine years already and it's kind of surprising to me in 2025 that we're still having conversation that it's not usable enough for grandma well it's got better massively better but the problem is that you want, grandma now knows how to use a cell phone. So the question is, how do you get a cell phone like experience with crypto? And so there you need chain abstraction and wallet abstraction

and trusted execution environments and multi-party signatures and multi-chain signatures and threshold cryptography and MPC. We've been building it, you know, as an industry. And all the standards are starting to get good, like ERC 7683, I think, and the OIF and all this stuff. It's not like no one's doing anything. It's like billions of dollars have been spent and all the projects you're building, but that building doesn't reflect token price. So most people tend to ignore it. But that building is an enabling function for large growth inside the space and to bring a lot of people in. So the third generation is really just figuring out, like what collection of technologies make everything talk to each other, work at scale of millions to billions, and also how to govern

that. Well, that's a necessary component then for the final generation, which is opening up the retail flow, the institutional flow, and all these other things. And when they come on in, they say, well, hang on a second here. I have compliance. I have like, I'm going to get sued or go to prison if I do this. So I need like AML and K.C. I need identity. I need privacy. I need this and this and this are kind of the missing components. And they have to work across all the chains for the system to work well. So that'll bring them back. It's just a question how long is it going to take. We have midnight. There's espresso. There's a Leo. There's all these new projects that are chasing that part of the equation. And it's an upgrade. So it's not a replacement for

Ethereum or Solana or for Cardana. Those are sticky. It's more like additional infrastructure that you plug on top, like embedding chat GPT into your application and you have an API, you call it, you get something back. And now you have AI-enabled application. And it just, it's self-evolving, so that black box every six months gets more capable, it gets more abilities, and you just call the API and you get your answer back. So we should actually have it pretty quickly.

I'd say the next 12, 24 months, fourth generation will turn on completely, and it's going radically augment these things. And you're going to see tons of new assets entering the cryptocurrency space. So why is Wall Street want to do it? Because it trades 24 hours a day, seven days a week globally, as opposed to 9 to 5 within one jurisdiction. And also, why does the government want it? Because it massively simplifies the regulatory burden of globalization. They don't really know how to, like, have a transaction be under the jurisdiction of 60 countries at the same time and regulate that. You need software to handle that as libraries and these types of things. So fourth generation, everybody wants it. And the U.S. government actually does want it, too.

If you listen to Paul Atkins' speech, he said privacy is the big new thing. We've got to automate regulation, these types of things. So when you have the chairman of the SEC, the U.S. government, MECA framework, all these guys basically saying the same thing. It's going to get done one way or the other. It's interesting to me that privacy has once again emerged as a key narrative because obviously that was very important to Bitcoiners from the beginning and everyone who was there. And it seemed to have gotten sort of lost in the shuffle over the years,

maybe as a result of all the speculation and pumps and excitement around other things. But we saw kind of this massive move in Zcash. I can't explain why it was Zcash specifically or why that happened. But to me, watching it happen from the outside, it seemed like, as usual, you got a price move on something that got people excited about a narrative again. And now we're talking about privacy. It seems like it should have happened the opposite. Like something should move because it's private and new. Yeah, I'll tell you inside baseball on that one.

So basically you have all these big guys like the Mark Andrasons, A16 Zs, you know, so forth. And they've been investing in privacy preserving technology for a long time. And they're getting tired that they keep throwing money at this thing that's absolutely required for the industry. So it sounds like they just got together and said, hey, if we do the pump-to-pump on one of these coins, then everybody's going to pay attention to the privacy, and then they'll pay attention to, like, the real privacy, because the thing is Z-cash is still transactional privacy system. It doesn't have smart contracts yet. So they've been pushing pretty aggressively to try to bring that narrative back.

And you'll notice that in their blogs and all their statements, all these things, they say privacy, privacy, privacy, you know, I do take great pride in the fact that, you know, we did a retail distribution with Midnight and gave it all these different chains, eight different ecosystems, seven blockchains. And when it launched the market, actually the market cap was more than ZKSync, Starkware, LEO, and Mina combined. And our trading volume actually was like $9 billion a day. when it first came out as the token. So I was pretty happy about that. It shows you like retail still has some juice

and VCs aren't necessarily masters of the universe, but it's very clear the U.S. government, the VC class, the builder class, all of them want ZK. All of them want privacy-enhancing technologies. And so we just got to figure out how to put these things in. And I think combining chain abstraction

with privacy-enhancing technology is the way to go because you get private intents. Because the only problem with intents is if you tell me, hey, I'm willing to pay between $400,000 and $550,000 for the house, what are you the seller going to offer? Right. 550,000, you know. 650, yeah, exactly.

You know, fuck you, right? So intents have to be private because there's negotiation leverage and the intention, and you need to be able to moderate, manage that. To do that at the DAP by DAP level is super hard, because then you're not just a DECS anymore or a prediction market or a stable coin, but you're all. a privacy coin. And it's like saying, hey, I'm going to go build chat GPT to do my language translation app. It's like, yeah, okay, so $100 billion later in eight years and massive infrastructure, congratulations, you have your AI module. Or alternatively, you can spend $50 a day

on chat GPT calls through the API and have that exact same service, and every six months it gets better. You know, so privacy is very specialized thing, and it's not something you want to do like 400 different ways with 400 different applications. You want a small group of maybe three to five different competitors who are highly speciality. They have the scientists, the engineers, the formal methods, these types of things to be able to do that right. Because it's super easy to f*** it up. And you can't vibe code your way to success with it. It's a very, very difficult domain. It's interesting that we have Atkins talking about privacy of all things, the head of the SEC, right? Because I think that sentiment or the assumption in the crypto industry has always been that

We want privacy and the government wants a window into everything that we do. Right. We've long feared the CBDC and, you know, certain stable coin issuers and the way that things are created and centralization versus decentralization. So it's nice and encouraging to have an entity share right now who talks about it, but we know that doesn't last forever. That's true. I think you can have both. I mean, it's a game of 21 questions. Like, do I really need to know your name is Scott, you know, or do I just need to know some things about the nature of the transatlantic?

For example, is it under U.S. jurisdiction or not? Are you accredited investor or not? Is it in the state of New York or not? Or these types of, these are yes, no questions. So you play a game of 21 binary questions as selective disclosure with things like a non-creds. And with zero knowledge proofs, you can basically answer most of those. And then they get bundled together and they get transacted. And then if it settles, it's compliant.

But you haven't really doxed yourself. You haven't revealed your real-life human identity. The counterparty doesn't have any of that information. I think that's the intent, the good faith intent of financial regulation. The bad faith intent is a financial panopticon to go and punish and arrest people and these horrible things. So what you do is you build the good faith system and you give it to them. And then they're like, but we want more. And it's like, but why do you need more?

You have all the good faith stuff satisfied. Yeah, but it would just be really comfortable if we know your real life identity and all this. But that's not what you're asking for. You have created two boxes, safe and unsafe. and we've just demonstrated they're in the safe box. Why do you need to know anymore? And then they're going to have to say the quiet part out loud that they just want to put a dystopian hellscape and kill all of us.

And it's like, okay, well, we're not going to do that. And so reasonable, the problem is that how bad people hide is they hide within large systems that are highly complex. So bad actors, whether they be criminals or criminal bureaucrats, They both have the same method. And so what you do is you simplify the system, you modularize the system, and then you ask what is the goal and intention of the system.

And then what you do is you build each of those modules, and you stop before dystopia. And they say, there you go. I've satisfied your need. And then the bad people, they have nowhere to hide because you've kind of exposed them. So taking on rational privacy has been a lot of fun, because privacy is always a game of what are you doing.

For example, if you're the CEO of a company, you have a different view of that company than the janitor. If you're the HR director, you have a different view than the engineer. If you're the CFO, you have a different view than, let's say, the marketing director. Okay, so that's selective disclosure is contextual to whom and why, and under what conditions is it revoked and how, and what guarantees do you get about the data provenance and in storage. So once you start getting into that, what you do is you build a base level that's completely anonymous, and then you build a DAP level and an identity level, and when you put those two pieces together,

then you can build any type of selective disclosure regime that meets your needs. Otherwise, you have a panopcom. Stable coins have exposed that. Every time you buy something with tether or circle in its current configuration, it's known forever by everyone everywhere, and it can be frozen at any time and reversed at any time.

And they're not denying that. I mean, that's part of the business. Yeah, right? And it's an ingenious act. I mean, it's like, so I don't really feel comfortable having a money system that has those properties. I didn't sign up with that. It's not cash. Right.

The whole idea was that we, you know, it would be like transacting in cash in the old day. You and I meet somewhere. I buy something for you. I give you some cash. Nobody knows about it. We have true privacy. It's kind of shocking that that's not what we have right now on the digital side. Right.

And that's why we built things like midnight, you know, because it would be nice to have a private stable coin. How about that? And they say, well, but how do you keep the credit? general's out. We'll put a slow-gall disclosure component on it. But you can't have a transparent system. You can't. It's insane. It's so outside of any standard. And frankly speaking, it feels like it violates the Bank Secrecy Act, amongst many other things. You know, so there's all kinds of things floating around where we're not doing it right as an industry. Why have we embraced stable coins? Because that's the retail on-round. You use your credit card or whatever, your bank account.

you have stable coin now you're not on the standard bank settlement rails you're in crypto land once you're in crypto land it's very easy through decks to convert to any other asset so that's your entry point for on and off ramps into crypto traditionally it was i have to set up an account with an exchange go through kwayc and aml i have to wire money from my bank get my bank account shut down because banks are fpped up and then finally i can use that money after five days or whatever it takes to settle to buy something on the exchange and then once i have it on on the exchange, then I send it to my wallet, and then I lose it. So that's my, that's my traditional cryptocurrency experience. And people are like, would it be great just have stable coin? Your bank

treats the stable coin the same as your bank ledger. And then when we convert it out, you can just withdraw to Ethereum or withdraw to Solana. Yeah, I really think stable coins truly win or become truly adopted when people just feel like they're sending a dollar. You don't know it's a stable going, you don't know what network's on, you don't know what stable coin it is. You're just going into your PayPal or your Venmo or bank or wherever you're comfortable and spending on a dollar it's just the rails all of our Argentine developers they're like pay me either in bitcoin beta or stablepoint they have no desire to be paid in peso we're like no problem they're getting paid in bolivars um but what a crazy world uh right now i want to double

god it's like i woke up and somebody's like hey we have a lot more ocean and beachfront property just to let you know crazy man it's crazy it's crazy Yeah, I don't even know if we want to dig down that rabbit hole. I want to double-click on something you said earlier, sort of in passing, because it sounded very important. He said, Cardano has become fully decentralized, you know, sort of in passing. But that seems like very important. So first, I would like you to explain what that means, I guess, you know, for people who are listening.

And then maybe there's a deeper conversation to be had at this point in 2026. How much do people truly care about the levels of decentralization versus centralization when using a protocol because it feels like we've gone mainstream enough now that most people just don't even get that side of it, right? You know, it's one of those examples of, you know, you don't ask for it, but you beg for it when you lose it and you feist the consequences of it. So decentralization has eight different lenses. We don't have time to go through all of them, but we created something called the Edinburgh

Decentralization Index with the University of Edinburgh to measure it because it's an open question. like what is decentralization? Like there's the distribution of the tokens, there's the consensus nodes inside the C. You can use the genie coefficient or the HHI index or, you know, all kinds of stuff. And then you're running on cloud flare

and it all goes down anyway. Exactly. So it's kind of like a chain and your weakest link is the point in which it breaks. And so all eight links have to be very strong. So we started decentralization a long time ago and the consensus side was our number one priority. We said we have to get a net

network with lots of validators, lots of block racers, and that'll be decentralized. So we've had that by EDI, we're number one for a long time. But governance is another big component because there's like who pays for development, who makes the decision to hard fork, the ecosystem, all this other stuff. So they used to be federated. Now it's completely decentralized. We built a whole government. We wrote a constitution.

50 countries participated, 1,800 people. We had a constitutional convention in Argentina, which was a hell of a lot of fun, very stressful. We ratified a constitution. Then we elected an on-chain government, and so we have a constitutional committee, and we used liquid feedback, liquid democracy for delegated representatives. So we have dereps, we have – you know, it's a tripartite government. And that government came online, and then the government ratified the first budget. So $150 million of on-chain money was spent in 2025, ratified death.

And then also we're already starting to talk about updating the Constitution with problems that have been found. We've already gone through a series of elections and 100% of the chain is now controlled by members of the community. We also had a complete transition to members-based organizations for development. So all the code that we worked on at I.O. It was transitioned over to an MBO that's a not-for-profit called Intersect. And now there's a product steering committee and a technical steering committee and a community elected board and all these other things. So all that's there. So it's kind of like HyperLedger or Linux Foundation or any of these other things that do open-source projects.

So all the code lives there. Plus there's a competing organization called Pragma, which is also not-for-profit based in Switzerland, which is building alternative nodes in the Cardinal ecosystem. So you have no diversification, technology diversification, roadmap diversification, a community ratified budget, on-chain treasury, on-chain governance structure, and it all works and it all runs. And it's boring, and that's the way we like it. It's going to be boring. We need a little more boring in this industry.

The excitement doesn't tend to go well for us in my experience. So it circles back to something we were talking about before, which is obviously kind of the state of the union, and obviously that relates to price. So it's an interesting question. Do you think that when it gets down to it, a lot of the people who harped on decentralization thought it was important? Do you think it's actually what they care about?

Or have you kind of seen the veil lifted, and we have found out in the last few years that people really just care about the number going up? Well, here's the thing about. decentralization. If you do it wrong, it hurts your competitiveness. If you do it right, it reinforces your competitiveness. So we spent two years figuring out how to decentralize governance because here's the problem. These protocols, we want them to do more and more and more over time. So Bitcoin's very simple by design. So you don't have to think a lot about like how do we make

radical changes to Bitcoin because it just won't happen. It takes 10 years to get taproot. But when you have Ethereum or Cardano or Salon, these are high complexity systems, fat protocols. So they have to adopt ZK and new cryptographic primitives and be post-bottom and do smart contracts and on-chain governance and all this other stuff. So here's the problem. How do you, when you have millions of people, coordinate those millions of people to make a decision quickly about the roadmap and the vision and upgrade the system? So the bigger you get, the more valuable you get, the harder it is to change the system, which is why it took Ethereum eight years to get the practice date. So if you have an on-chain governance system, that's the good way of doing it. you in six months can make a decision about a five-year roadmap and hard fork the network and change protocol parameters, regardless of the token value and the amount of people inside the network.

That's why you have to have it. It's not just about decentralization. It's about competitiveness. You can't change the protocol. The alternative is you just make a god. You say, okay, the foundation's in charge of everything. They'll make all the decisions for us, and we'll have this leader. But then that's not decentralized. And yes, it works great for a while, but what happens when your leader, you know,

becomes a billionaire and gets addicted to cocaine and hookers and drugs and all what happens when they want to fund something and you don't like it everybody can transparently see them selling the tokens to do so which you can say it's totally fine but it's just exactly adds a layer of complexity so they fund it by selling something that you need to buy right so yeah and so cardana will never have that problem just we got rid of it you know and it took two years and all this hard work and it was brutal to get through and and you know the price it's connected to three big anchors on the defy side. You look at MAUs, monthly active users, you look at transaction volume, and you look at TVL. And so Cardano historically has not been very strong there. Why? Because

we were late to the market with smart contracts. We took a very principled view where we gradually get more expressive over time. So couldn't do much in the beginning, then a little bit more, then a little bit more. So it takes about three to five years for that to wake up. We're mostly through that cycle. And also, Cardano's not yet integrated with a lot of the big bridges and oracles and stable coins and these types of things. So it's been able to build a nice kernel of a defy ecosystem, but it's dormant. And there's a big mismatch between the value of EDA and the defy value in the system. Well, now we got Bitcoin Defi coming, XRP defy coming. Midnight connects us to all the other blockchains, and we add privacy to all those connection points.

So we have a lot to add an offer, and we've shown we can scale, like Hydra can scale at a million TPS. We showed that with Hydrid Doom. We got Orr-Wor's Laios coming this year. It's a 60x improvement and throughput of the system. But here's the biggest, point. AI is going to make crypto miserable for the protocol developers. And the reason being is to be an attack a protocol, a zero-day exploit, because every protocol has bugs in the code, you need two things. You need somebody who has the skill and somebody who has the desire. There's plenty of people that want to destroy it. But how many of them are like turbo-autistic Haskell nerds who are experts in formal methods and consensus design and all this other stuff? Maybe five or ten, but then they

have to choose, do I fuck you or do I go after Galois and their drone stuff or Durial and their stuff or to the U.S. government? There's too many targets relative to the supply. But now with AI, I can load the entire code base of the cryptocurrency into the AI and then I can say, hey, find a novel attack to bring this entire network down. You can vibe code your way to attacking a protocol. Exactly. And so the problem is that you're going to see an exponential increase in attacks and people are going to real tired of it. So you have to use formal methods. It's the only technique. to actually try to reduce these things dramatically.

And we pre-built that. Everything we have is Agdad Haskell and all this other stuff. So eight years, we've only had a few major issues relative to everyone else. Our uptime is phenomenal. And so I think we have the right philosophy in terms of decentralization and governance, and we've pre-built some things. This is the do-or-die year for Cardano for supercharging our defy. And we have a $1.5 billion ADA treasury that's open,

and the community's ready to go with it to invest in our defy. ecosystem and supercharge it, and we have commercially critical integrations coming. We just announced PIF and we have more for Oracle and we have more to come, and then we'll get the stable coins and bridges in, and so we'll be able to get liquidity and users and other things from other people. So, you know, do I think we're going to eclipse Ethereum by the year? No, but I do think we're going to see a huge growth in the defy side of the ecosystem, which should translate to a healthy growth in the ecosystem as a whole. It's funny. I've had this conversation so many times about the intersection of AI,

cryptocurrency and, you know, all the bullish things are going to happen when they come together. And you just made the point that it's not all roses and puppies and unicorns when you bring the two together. And then I think about how one of the other narratives of late, which I find very stupid, is the quantum attacks. AI is probably a bigger threat to protocols than quantum is, and everybody's over here, you know, praying to the, at the altar of Nvidia. Yeah. So the thing is, we have solved the quantum issue as an industry and as a society. No one wants to pay the price. Hash-based crypto, lattice-based crypto. It's five to ten times larger proof size, five to ten times more computation, if that. And you give up a lot. So they're quantum resistant,

but nobody wants to be the guy to say, hey, I just updated the blockchain and it's 10 times slower. Right. No one wants to be that guy. So the question is, when do they come? And there's the bullshit and there's reality. So DARPA brought a program together called QBI, the quantum benchmark initiative, because the U.S. government asked the military, hey, when are quantum computer is going to be like a real threat? When do we need to start prepping for them? The military is like, we have no idea. So they went to DARPA because that's where all the smart people are. And they said, can you create a benchmarking initiative where you bring all the companies together and you have a three-phase process and basically phase by phase by phase, we're going to determine if any of

these companies have a viable path to have a working quantum computer at scale by 2033. Now let's do it in a public way. So there's 11 companies working with DARPA, IBM and Quantitium and all these other guys. And all those have already passed phase one and they're entering phase two and phase three. And by the end of 2027, we'll have a definitive answer. Will we have a working quantum computer with greater than 50% probability by 2030? So you can Google it and you can see the website and see all the different approaches, whether it be trapped ion or photonic or you know, topological quantum computers. There's a hundred different ways to build these damn things. But the long of the short is that that is an example of a truth-finding exercise.

Because then I, as a business leader, can look at that and say, what's my clock? Do I have the luxury waiting another five years to optimize lattice and hash-based crypto to move to it? Or do I urgently have to adopt this now? But you notice no one ever says that when you interview them. They're all, well, you know, either they say quantum's nothing, it's never going to be a threat, or it's It's the biggest thing ever, and we have this MacGuffin algorithm that we've invented, XYZ, and that's why you should buy our token, because we have XYZ and no one else has XYZ. And you're just like, okay, under what basis, what first principles are you making the decision

of whether this McGuffin is going to exist or not? Because I just say, okay, who are the people who are subject matter experts in it? And Darkwood brought together the best physicists in the world, the best universities in the world, they created a rigorous benchmarking initiative to basically see if these things work or not. they've identified 11 companies so far that actually have viable plans. And so then those companies are going to prove over the next 24 months whether that's going to yield a quantum computer by 2033 or not.

If the answer is yes, you know what I'm going to do in the 2027 roadmap, we got to go to post-quantum. And I'm already doing post-quantum stuff. We worked with NIST on the Phipps 203, 204, 205 for the standards. We also have a folding project with the Linux Foundation called Nightstream, where we're working on lattice-based folding schemes with zero knowledge, which require us to have lattice-based signatures, which are post-quantum. So we know how to do it. We have the people to do it. We have the cryptographic knowledge, and it's probably six months to 12 months of work to add a post-quantum

primitive to Cardano. We did that with, for the classical crypto, BLS-12, 381. So we added that to Cardano, and we added the Bitcoin primitives to Cardano as well. So it's not that hard to do. It's just more, is it the right time? Is this the right horse to bet on? Because once you put it in, you have to live with it forever. It's like getting married. If it's not to show up tomorrow. People act like there's a quantum switch that's just going to be turned on,

and we have no idea when it's going to happen, and then we're all doomed. And by the way, they also think that the first thing that happens when quantum is turned on is for some reason someone decides to use that power to go after our thing, as opposed to, you know, like the nuclear codes of the banking system or something way more obvious. Well, I mean, the president issued a meme coin, so stranger things have happened. Yeah, that's right. I hope fart coin is quantum proof and Trump token, right? Because if they're not, we're in big trouble.

The president launching a meme coin, I mean, I know we've talked about it, but it still is just mind-blowing to me that that's what we got, right? It's such a push and pull of positive and negative when the government gets involved in this stuff. Because you have all the positive regulation and legislation, and I think everybody agrees those are tailwinds, we'll probably get clarity. But you know that the minute that there's any change in power, the anti-crypto army is now coming back and they're going to use all those things as examples of why we don't deserve to exist. Yeah. Well, I mean, how they should have done.

At first, they picked the wrong cryptosar. You know, Sacks just came out of nowhere. He was a chief operating officer under Elon Musk when I think he was running PayPal. So he's just one of those crypto Valley guys, Silicon Valley guys, like Valley Bro. and he had no real connections in the industry other than being an investor, and he didn't have the right philosophy or approach. Typically, when you come in, in that role, you spend 180 days, you bring a whole industry together by vertical.

You look at the exchanges and the defy people, and you look at the wallet builders and the protocol builders and blah, blah, blah. And what you do is you say, all right, tell me everything that's going on that's bad, tell me your wish list of all the things you guys want, and that you give everybody a seat at the table and you just go by adoption, and so keep it fair. You have some objective set of metrics. You consolidate all that together, and then you go all the regulatory agencies in parallel,

the CFTC, the SEC, the DOG, the FBI, these people, and you say, tell me all the things that are worrying you about crypto, what's problematic right now, what do you guys want? You get all their goodies there. Then you go and you talk to key leaders in the Senate in the House, and you say, okay, politically speaking, like, what are sacred cows? What can we do? What can we do? Like, can we change Securities Exchange Act in 1933, for example? Then you take the totality of all that together, and you consolidate it into an official strategy of the White House.

Then you say, this is our vision of where we think we can take this. And you have three layers. You have the statutory layer. You have the rulemaking layer. And then you have kind of the ongoing maintenance, like the SRO stuff and the interaction, the public-private partnership component of it. So rulemaking is done by the administrative arms, the CFTC, the SEC, the SEC, all these other people.

The lawmaking is done by the House and Senate. You already kind of know what the industry wants. You know what the government wants, and you know what the political realities are. So you know how to sculpt this in a way where you can first gate it well, and then you also know what you can and can't do. Then you ask a question, can we make this bipartisan. The reason why Trump coin was so catastrophic and the same for WLF was that it changed crypto from a bipartisan concern where Democrats are like, my constituents are crypto holders. If we go Fulgari, I'm alienating people that donate to me to crypto-eco-

Never go Fulgari. Never go Fulgari. Yeah, never go fool, Gary. And so that was a challenge, is that it limited the bipartisan capabilities. So we went from a non-controversial, we have 70 votes in the Senate, to maybe if we're lucky we can get to that 60. If we're lucky. We're going to have to use a whole bunch of parliamentary tricks to push this through, regardless of what the text and the bill is, because Democrats are going to run this year anti-crypto. Crypto equals Trump equals back.

Crypto equals corruption. Trump made $5 billion from crypto, crypto, potency scheme, blah, blah, blah, blah. everything we've ever done wrong for the last 15 years in industries in the ballot box, and the problem is Trump's names on it. So it's really hard to run away from it and say he had nothing to do with it. He's not connected to it. So Sachs mismanaged the entire situation. There was just nothing but chaos.

They had this round table of the White House. They only did one of them. They brought a bunch of people together. What comes of this? It was made for TV. We're going to show stuff. The reserve was another example. We're going to announce a reserve, but there's no inclusion exclusion standards or principles for that reserve.

And there's no parliamentary path for that. reserve to get into law. And the president doesn't have unilateral authority with an executive order to create a reserve. The power of the purse string belongs to the Congress. So there was a misunderstanding of how the government works, how our industry works, and it just became this popularity contest of who donated the most money to get access to basically be able to take a picture at the White House or with the president as opposed to like what's good for the industry. The other thing is none of that is ongoing. Like I, you know, we still see these like press bites of industry leaders talking with senators about clarity act for example right but you haven't

really you haven't really seen the roundtables anymore it some of them have spent over 25 million dollars and donations and other things to be in those rooms and talk to those people and some of those are public companies so they kind of need to justify with those press releases that they're making forward progress on this because that's bad news if you spent 25 million dollars and you basically been taken for a ride but here's the reality of the situation I don't think the Clarity Act is going to pass in this quarter, and because it's an election here. We only have one left window, and if the Democrats retake the House, we will not have another opportunity until 2029. If it doesn't pass this quarter, I think SAC should resign.

He's utterly failed us as an industry. We look at three lenses. The price going up, no. Adoption going up? No. Do we have clarity and certainty, and do we have a strong foundation to build on? No. So if you're the czar and you're in charge of this whole thing, I've got to judge you by your track.

record. Most cryptos are down 40 to 50% since Trump took office. So the industry is unhealthy. Yeah, I guess the question is, how could he control what Trump did before he was even in office? The Trump token launched three days before, you know, Trump was inaugurated. He was selected before Trump launched Trump coin. And what he should have done is say, if you do this, I'm going to resign and publicly protest it and say there's no path forward for us as an industry. if you do this. Because here's the irony of it, man. Trump could have made two to three times as much money launching Trump coin launching Trump coin. That's the f*** up part of all this. He's so poorly advised by the people around him. If his goal is just extractive, he could have made so much more

money doing it after the framework because the new framework would have supercharged the markets and brought a lot of money into the markets and you're launching a coin into a bull market. And also, Democrats can't complain because it's in full, compliance with the framework they just voted for. Then does clarity, okay, obviously you've already said you don't think clarity passes, but let's say that it does. If we get the Clarity Act, then can that still be the catalyst for that bull market that you're talking about?

Yeah, but we got to get off. At least the optics are that things are aligned. We got to get off this U.S. dependency of the United States has to solve all the world's crypto problems. We live during the scary era with international growth and non-U.S. growth. And I think we just got to get back to that. the thing is even if they pass, clarity takes two to three years of rulemaking for clarity to be realized. So clarity will pass, but it doesn't do anything after it's passed. There's a grace period of

rulemaking that exists. So it's a McGuffin, and it certainly will create a short-term spike, just like the reserve announcement did or other things did, but nothing will compensate for the fact that retail has left. You need a new narrative for retail to come back. Retail got battered and burned and broken. They got in 2022. They got f***ed with NFTs. They got f***ed with the third generation. And a lot of these guys are down 70%, 80%.

How do they go and tell their wife, I'm going to go do it again? And by the way, whoever was left and still, at least the speculators, they got on October 10th. Yeah. And I say this as a person who's lost quite a bit of money in the cryptocurrency space. Say, I've lost more than $2.5 billion over the last. four years. So it's like, people are, oh, well, Charles, it's easy for you to say that. It's like, ah, well, yeah, I lost some money, too, you son of a bit more than you will ever know. So we've all been badly burned, but I believe in the vision, the technology, and where we can go with all this

stuff, and we're not going to get a bag pumping through parliamentary procedures of the United States government. The time for U.S. pumping bags was 2025. There was a process and approach they could have followed to bring everybody together that felt inclusive and have amazing legislation that was bipartisan and make America the crypto hub, which would have also required courage. We would have to update, modernize, the tax law, and update modernize the securities laws at the same time. We could have done that if we had the right bipartisan process and the right leadership. But Trump took a scorched earth strategy.

He just said, it's my way or the highway. Congress works for me. Just do whatever the I want to do. And I don't give a shit about being bipartisan. know, and I know a lot of MAGA people, they say, oh, well, you're just saying that, but the Democrats are pure evil, and they don't want to work with anybody and all this other stuff. Well, what incentive do they have to work with you? What incentive? What do they get? If it turns out good, Trump takes all the credit. If it turns out bad, they get all the blame. You can't expect people to collaborate

with you in a negotiation if there's no upside for them. You have to create an upside. You have to give them something. You know, if I was crypto czar, what I would have done is got all the billionaires. I was literally going to say if you were cryptos are. I gave the roadmap, but also in private, what I would have done, go to all the crypto billionaires and said, all right, how many of you guys are Democrats? Because that helps me a lot. So I want you to go tell your Congress critter and your senator that there's a whole bunch

of oligarchs now who are going to be cutting 10 to $50 million checks for Senate campaigns and House campaigns for the left if crypto is, if they're pro-cropto. Then suddenly they're like, oh, well, we got to pass this. crypto thing because it turns out all these young people got really rich and a lot of young people are politically on the left and go figure maybe that's a donor base for the political left. Why the hell are we listening to Elizabeth Warren, the cryptkeeper over in Massachusetts? What the fuck are we getting from her? Is she going to be cutting me a $10 million check for my campaign when I'm running in a very competitive race here in my state? No, she's not. But Sam McGee,

the guy who's got $8 billion in Foocoin, he can cut me a $10 million. check. He's not on the Forbes list of billionaires. Exactly right. That's the thing. You see, so that's all you got to do. And then suddenly, the politics, they made a lot more sense. Here's another thing that David f*** up on. It's so bad. It's so bad. Okay, we want the government to procure crypto. Great. What are the standards? He should have walked into NIST in January and said, okay, we need to give you guys some more money so we can figure out how we can write national standards for things like decentralization and throughput and other things, because we're going to be writing RFPs at the State Department and the DoD and the White House and all

these other things to adopt blockchain technology. What basis do we write the RFP for? What standard do we refer to? Like when we do post-quantum, NIST has FIPS 203 and 204 and 2.5. And you have all these other FIPP standards for procuring cryptographic devices. So when they write the RFP, it says must be this compliant. So how do we distinguish Solana from Ethereum from Bitcoin from Cardano, from anything else, from a standard's basis, objectively speaking. You can't. So it's just bribery. It's just basically who has the biggest lobbying department to win the bid for blockchain

procurement, you know? So you go to NIST, you have them do that. By the way, once NIST is engaged, the Congress and the Senate, what do they have, the House and the Senate? They have a group of cryptographers and engineers who are objective and neutral and work for the U.S. government to advise them on cryptocurrency legislation, as opposed to members of industry who are by definition biased because they have bags to hold. It's just one-on-one stuff of understanding the competitive dynamics and how all these things come together. And I guess he's

doing that. And he's the AI guy at the same time. That's probably, I mean, the AI is just a bigger job. Yes. It's just like, it's like you're, you're going to like regulate this multi-trillion dollar industry and this multi-trillion dollar industry. And what are the KPIs? You know, the KPIs are there more adoption? Is there more clarity? Is the price going? up, or there are more U.S. businesses. When I went to Dubai, excuse me, when I was at Web Summit in Portugal, they had a booth for Dubai there. And right on the booth, it says, the king has given us a KPI, 500% more blockchain businesses by 2027. They have KPIs. They actually measure the amount of blockchain businesses entering in and registering with VARA and all these other things. So what are

the KPIs? That would be the thing. If you want to be Crypto-Zar, be great, what are the KPIs for my performance. How do I know if I'm successful in that job or not? But most people would say passing the Genius Act and passing clarity from an outside perspective. Sure. And what do we get with genius? We got fan service for banks. Basically, Genius meant that now we banks can enter in and be stable coin issuers. Haza. Great. That's certainly important for the industry, but by no means is that a retail bill that doesn't take care of defy, that doesn't take care of a single layer one, it doesn't take care of any of our innovation, doesn't handle anything as government procurement. And you know, it does is centralizes the industry around Black Rock and Cantor and,

you know, Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley and all these big guys. So great. We passed a bill to hand Wall Street the keys to the crypto kingdom. And the one thing we need it. I don't remember when we Bitcoin to avoid that. Yeah. And all the Bitcoin now belongs to like institutions, right? They're the ones that actually hold it on behalf of other people. So that's the fundamental issue here. It's just if you're going to do something, you start with a mission. And then you work your way backwards. The Venezuela thing is like perfect example of the Trump administration. There's nothing better than that moment.

Okay. You have this dramatic, daring, incredible raid. And Delta Force, by the way, has trained for 40 years to do this type of mission. This is like since they were started, this was their mission, man. When the Shah got deposed by Kumani, you know, they were always like, can we get rid of Kumani and go capture them and bring it back? They were always wanting to do this mission. So Trump gave it to him.

And kudos to Delta Force and to the U.S. military. They did a phenomenal job. But that's execution. You start with principles and philosophy. Then you create frameworks. Then you create a strategy. Then you execute. So now they're like, okay, now that we execute,

let's come up with the Venezuela strategy. Like, what do we do next? They're working backwards for the whole thing. They're like, we're going to run Venezuela. Yeah, but Maduro's government is still in charge. I have a lot of problems with what happened there. I know. I know.

By the way, I will say that I've said it on every show and on Twitter and every single time I get the opportunity. Two things can be true at once and there's nuance. You can be very happy that Maduro is no longer in power for the people, but very unhappy that the United States decided it was their job to do it in this manner. Yeah, it's like typically when you do an operation like this, you would have like Delta and Team Six split. Delta captures Maduro. Team Six goes and decapitates and kills because they're bruisers. all the generals and high-ranking people. And while you're doing it, in parallel,

you have 50,000 rebels that you've trained up with a counter-government, enter the country and take Caracas and take the media, and there's no one to oppose them because you've decapitated the command and control structure and degraded the Venezuelan military's ability to respond. And within 24 to 48 hours, you have a new government basically in power, and that new government has full U.S. backing. And you've already pre-talked to the gang of aid,

so you have full legislative support, and you've pre-talked to the U.N. So you basically have international recognition of the transition government. And then the U.S. works with transition government to install a new elected government. You announce an election in a year or something like that. That's how you do a regime change, like by the textbook, and the Green Berets trained for that, the agency trains for that. You know what the irony is of that? Even if we had done all of that, it's still never worked out.

It's never worked out. Oh, yeah, exactly right. You can argue maybe that Panama, like, worked out to a great point. But like, Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq. Of course. I mean, name every. We're not good at this. Yeah, that's the point.

It's like, that's the way you do it. And we didn't even do it that way. We just like took Maduro and then we're like, we're just going to work with this government and figure this out. So it, Venice will is the perfect example for how that shop runs. Doge was another example. Elon Musk comes in like a hammer. He gets tired and destroys his reputation doing it. And then at the end of the day, they're like, yeah, we're just not going to do any of those cuts at all.

Like the government's going to continue growing. We're not going to shut any agencies down or all these other things. the day I knew Doge wasn't serious was I said okay here's a list of 16 intelligence agencies at the end of the rainbow how many do we have left five four three you know here's a list of 14 bureaucracies in the U.S. government at the end of the rainbow how many do you have left two three four okay and they said no no we're not going to shed any agencies down you're not serious you're not serious at all it's not it's not real it's just made for television it's made for drama it's made for something to talk about but it's not made for reality

And Trump tried to treat crypto the same way. Dramatic meetings at the White House, people flying down to Mara Lago and all this other stuff. But none of that was wrapped up in a philosophy, a framework, and all this other stuff. Remember, the Security Exchange Act of 1933 was passed 92 years ago, which meant that FDR was the president. JFK's dad was the first chairman. These laws, when you pass them, they live a long time. The goal shouldn't be that we absolutely have to pass genius and clarity because the Democrats are peer-eer-eastern. and they won't do anything. The goal should be, let's get the whole industry together to speak

with one voice and the U.S. government behind them. And even if it takes a little longer to get done, we recognize that what we pass may be around for 92 years. So we have to do it in a wise and judicious way. And we have to do it in a way that makes sense for all the people here. And that doesn't hinder or harm the industry as a whole. And that's what you do as a leader. Instead of, I just have to pass best available and we can't change any of this stuff. We can't touch tax law and we can't change the Securities Exchange Act or anything else because it requires more committees and the Democrats won't do it. It's like, well, what would it take to get them on board? If they can get money from it, that's a good start. If they can get some political upside from it,

that's a good start, right? And so the Tsar's job is in that first precious 30 to 90 days to negotiate with them and let them know that there's a lot of money at the end of the rainbow and a lot of credit at the end of the rainbow to help them out, you know? And you start with the younger Democrats who are pro-crypto but can't. be like Roe Kana or these others and you get them on board and then use them as proxies to go and talk to the older Democrats and be like, guys, this is the future. All these young kids own this, 50 million Americans, half are Democrats. We can't alienate 10% of the voting population. Can't do it. We have to bring them along. It's one of the reasons we lost in 2024.

You're talking about bringing the industry together for a common purpose. We're not that great at that historically. But the czar could have done it because everybody knows the payoff if it's the U.S. government saying if you worked with me, you all get a big bag of goodies at the end of the rainbow and you 10x the market. You damn well know. Everything is set their shit aside. I was going to ask you, you were around. It's not like you were an absentee observer of all of this, right? So would you say that there was at least a Goldilocks period where the industry did come together for a common interest?

And would you say now they're doing that? Or do you think that everybody is lobbying now in their health interests? Everybody was dumping tons of money. Person A was trying to disinvite person B. person A was trying to get access. Everybody wanted the pitcher with Trump. Everybody wanted to pitchers sacks. They wanted to be in the White House.

And you kept saying, okay, great, but let's talk about downstream considerations. Like, should we set up an SRO or not? Don't care. How are we going to participate in the rulemaking process? Who should be in the room for the rulemaking process? Should it be a joint commission between the CFTC and the SEC and these other things? Don't care. They wanted the pitcher.

They wanted the access. Because the pitcher and the access meant token price go up. That's their view. It's like, oh, well, this. going to buy this token because the U.S. government's going to adopt this token, you know. And I'm not going to name names, but you saw them. And some of them, if you go through their Twitter feeds and other things, they were very aggressive with this. And it's just like, great, but what's your vision? Where do we want to go? Let's map out Digital America 2030.

And the president cares about some of this stuff. Like he told us that the election was stolen in 2020. Wonderful, Mr. President. Let's talk about a blockchain-based voting system by 2030 then. and what it would take to actually make that happen. So let's go through it. Because then it never can steal election again, according to the president, if he actually believes these things. So we could have done that as an industry and presented these things step by step.

You talk about waste, fraud, and abuse. Why weren't we able to connect to Doge? Why weren't we able to say, we're going to revise these agencies and install blockchain in so we have real-time continuous auditing? And we know all the inflows and outflows of the agencies. Sachs could have been right there with Doge talking with Elon Musk and saying, let's work together on this and figure this one out,

then you have Musk talking to the president at the time when he still had political capital, saying this is an important thing, but then you also have Musk going and testifying before the House and the Senate about why we need to blockchain the U.S. government, because it's necessary for Doge and waste reduction and all these other things. And then you just get the pork on board. You know, it's like the military stuff. Get Raytheon and Northrop Grumman and all these other guys form a blockchain group. And just give them some pork. And then the banks, they've already figured out how to get their pound of flesh and pork.

You get those guys in. It's not hard. It's not hard. It just you have to know how to do it. It's so cynical and so disgusting when you dig into how it all works. Yeah. I listen to you describe it. I just remember that that's why I bought Bitcoin in the first place.

Exactly. Out of all of what you've just described. Yeah. So that's why I say, like, let's just do a global. You know, the world's a big place. Turns out there's like seven billion people who don't live in the United States. So maybe we should just focus on that and grow in those circles. And there's a lot of very innovative regimes and there's a lot of very innovative ideas.

And at the end of the A, crypto is not a product of a nation state. That was another thing I knew that was just like he said, American cryptos won't pay tax. That's against every single thing. Remember that? I think we had a frozen Charles. It's on our end or his, you think? Hey, I lost you there for a second.

So I said American cryptos won't pay tax. That was against every single thing we stand for as an industry because by definition there shouldn't be an American crypto. Cryptocurrency should be a global concern, a global product. It shouldn't be an American product. And when you start saying, well, we have to make these things American. It's like the American crypto, just to close off the thought, that's so against every single thing we stand for as an industry.

By definition, cryptocurrency should be politically new. geographically neutral, ethnically neutral. They're global products. There's no such thing as an American crypto. The minute you make it an American crypto, it doesn't make any sense at all. There should be American cryptocurrency companies, but there can't be American cryptocurrency protocols.

That doesn't make sense. And when they started saying that, doing that, saying American crypto is going to be tax-free. It's like these people don't understand or they don't care. And this is just a photo-op. The good sound bites. Listen, I know we're right at time.

at time. If you have to go, I won't ask you another question, but if you have five more minutes, I'll ask you one more. Okay. Well, because listen, we're cynical. It's our nature as the industry, but we're obviously skeptics. I just want to put a positive sort of ending on the conversation. There have to be some things that you're still really excited about. Obviously, you continue to build. And, you know, talk about a $2.5 billion loss, but I assume it's largely on paper and there's a belief that those things can come back, right? So, You know, what are you looking forward to? What are you optimistic about, even in the context of all the sort of negativity surrounding this conversation?

Well, I mean, I can say or I can do. So, you know, I'll do. I'm very excited about the fourth generation. I think rational privacy and smart compliance and chain extraction, these are the new pillars that are going to bring a billion people into the industry and $10 trillion of asset value in over the next five years. And it's also exciting because I get to do new things. We've kind of peaked at like consensus protocols and smart contract design and formal methods.

And we all kind of know, you know, we've all done it. Like, is it really sexy and exciting if your consensus protocol is 30% faster? Whereas the rational privacy world is smart compliance, these are fundamentally different technologies. And I get to think about lattice-based crypto and fully homomorphic encryption and multi-party computation and the nature of trusted execution environments. And I get to think very deeply about, you know, zero-nology. cryptography and how does that work with intense and how does that work with regulation and all this other stuff. So it's a fundamentally different way of going about things that's really exciting to me.

So that's where I'm at. And in my belief is if we get that done, we'll have a bull market like we've never seen before. The market will be much stronger and overall there'll be a lot more adoption. But the difference is it's not speculative. It's like Amazon 2011 versus Amazon 2000. The stock price was identical. Amazon 2000, then we're, oh, God, why? It took 11 years to build back up. But the company was radically different in 2011 than it was in 2000. In 2011, it's the everything marketplace.

It's Amazon Web Services. It has a billion customers and all this stuff. In 2000, there was the hope that it would one day achieve that. So I think we'll be 2011 Amazon, where the crypto markets will have real use, utility and adoption behind them. And also, that means we can have fully on-chain Dow's. It means businesses can be put fully on chain. It means governments can actually fully adopt,

and enterprises can fully adopt cryptocurrencies. All those kinds of things will exist and happen. So this is the make or break year for the soul of crypto. If we let it, Wall Street will take it. It'll be run by institutions. You'll have all these federated protocols. You can't even run them. Who cares?

And everything will be a digital panopticon, and Klaus Schwab will just be furiously masturbating in the corner. or if you have the retail revolution and we come in with the fourth generation, we can retake the market and we can force decentralization and we can just think globally and we can get out of these politics of division

and politics of destruction. That's why I left Twitter. I was on it for a long, long time, had a million followers. I said, I just don't want to do it anymore. I don't want to be in this toxicity anymore. I don't want to talk about the stuff that divides us. I want to talk about how we can work together

and midnight's a reflection of that, as is the future roadmaps of Cardano. And I hope there's more of that than the Klaus Schwab masturbating. Well, you've given us all an image to have nightmares about into perpetuity after this conversation. So that's the perfect bookends, I think. But that said, it's not all doom and gloom, and I appreciate that you gave the Amazon comparison, sort of how I view it as well. I don't think it's dead. I don't think it's over.

I think we just need to come with real utility and purpose. and I think we will. Thank you, sir. Charles, your legend. Thank you very much, man. I really, really appreciate it.