← The Wolf Of All Streets
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- [00:00]
Charles Hoskinson
You know, there's only two options, negotiation or war. Then you see FTX happen. Then you see Luna happen. Then you see $80 million of hacks every single day in the defi space. You see all the bridge hacks occur. Then you see Solana go down all the time. Then you see all these pump and dumps happen. Then you see meme coin mania. There's too much money in the world and we don't have places to put it because they overprinted money.
- [00:24]
Scott Melker
Everybody's going to Washington. How does that happen?
- [00:26]
Charles Hoskinson
It's a hotline.
- [00:27]
Scott Melker
You know, seemingly the only thing we talk about in crypto anymore is Washington D and institutional adoption. It's a far cry from the original ethos of libertarians and decentralization and shorting the bankers and not participating in government. But now that we're here, we have people in Washington lobbying for our interests. One of those people is one of the most interesting in our industry, the founder of Cardano, Charles Hoskinson. Charles and I talked a lot about, obviously, Cardano, what's being built in crypto, what's important and what's not. But we also dove deep into what it looks like to be a part of the lobby in Washington. Insight I haven't gotten from anyone else. You have to listen to this conversation. That's dope. I mean, you've got a lobster on your mic. What's the story behind that?
- [01:29]
Charles Hoskinson
Oh, that's Logan the lobster. So that was the very first smart contract on Cardano. I had this lobster and it was a collective contract and it named it. So people, by interacting with a smart contract, it would create some randomness, and then it randomly picked a name based upon all the different interactions. So the winner was Logan, and that became Logan the Lobster.
- [01:48]
Scott Melker
He's right there with you for every conversation. So listen, let's start at Cardano. I would actually love to start here. You're a founder. I think you've been through basically everything there is to be through in crypto. And I think inevitably, as a founder, there's always misconceptions or false ideas about what you're building, who you are. Maybe even just to start from the beginning, are there any particular misconceptions about you or Cardano that you would like to clear up once and for all? Because it seems like there's something every month.
- [02:22]
Charles Hoskinson
Everybody's got an opinion, right? Yeah. Well, the first thing is people when they say Cardano's old tech or it can't scale or all these other things. It's like guys, we spent 10 years building the fucking thing. And there's 168 scientists that have worked on it, 240 papers. There's all this research that's behind it. We're best in class for a lot of different approaches. We predicted UTXO DeFi, and suddenly Bitcoin defi is becoming a thing. We're the first system to actually exploit that and build that infrastructure out. And we're going to be a great layer for Bitcoin defi in terms of the scalability properties of UTXO over accounts. It's very clear. You hear Vitalik say, oh, we need UTXO now. It's like they're starting to realize what we knew in 2017. And so there's a lot of things buried in the roadmap of Cardano, whether it be decentralized governance or Orboros leos, which is the first solution to the blockchain trilemma, or other things which are now starting to turn on. And the ecosystem is actually becoming very resilient and strong. You know, people say, oh, there's one transaction per block, it's just a lie. Or they say you have to know Haskell to program on Cardano. That's a lie. You can Write TypeScript, that's JavaScript, man. You can write Akin, which is a Rust dialect. There's all these different things that you can do inside the ecosystem, but what people do is they just write it off and they move on. I would say there's no DAPPS or defi. It's like, okay, well go to TAP Tools and just take a look at all the different projects on Cardano. Year by year, we have TVL increasing by a hundred percent or more year by year. Dapps are increasing dramatically. Year by year, transaction volume is increasing dramatically. And the system's been running for seven years straight, 24 hours a day, seven days a week, no downtime. So, and then decentralization. The Edinburgh Decentralization Index says that Cardano is the most decentralized cryptocurrency on the planet. Okay, so, you know, the evidence is there, the papers are there, the indexes are there, the growth rates are there, and we've been first or best in class a lot of different categories. Where it be decentralized governance, where we have a thousand D reps, that's twice as many as the congressmen that represent 340 million people in the United States to an on chain constitution that just got ratified, 85% approval rating on it. There's a $1.5 billion on chain treasury with Cardano, that's under the control of the Cardano ecosystem. And so when you take the time to really look into the nuances, oh wow, there's a. There, there's. But a lot of people, they just kind of write it off because they say, well, I heard something in 2021 and why is Cardano still around? It is like, well, why are we in the here for the last eight years? And by the way, we're in the reserve. The US Government seems to think there's something valid with, with Cardano and they say, oh, it must be a mistake or something or a typo or these types of things. So it does get frustrating when you have the same conversation again and again and again and you talk past people because they don't acknowledge basic facts and reality. They don't acknowledge what we've achieved, they don't acknowledge where we've been, or they completely discount all these things. Then you see FTX happen, then you see Luna happen, then you see $80 million of hacks every single day in the defi space. You see all the bridge hacks occur, then you see Solana go down all the time, then you see all these pump and dumps happen, then you see Meme Coin mania. And yet we're still there and we're still pushing through and we don't suffer from any of that stuff. But then that doesn't matter because we're not the flavor of the week and it's a ghost chain and blah blah, blah. So that's the biggest frustration, I think, is it's just having the same damn conversation again and again, having to drag up the same set of facts and then people discount those things. And here we are in 2025, we're still alive, we're still strong, we're still growing, and by the way, we're this close to finishing the roadmap that we originally set out to do 10 years ago.
- [05:59]
Scott Melker
So obviously you were there for the earlier days of Ethereum and for crypto in general. You just mention all these hacks and smart contract issues and problems. A lot of them obviously surround Ethereum and other chains. You have not been victim to any of that. So seeing all that happen, does it sort of give you more fuel to continue innovating and building things that are more decentralized and less able to be exploited? The exploits have been crazy. I mean, listen, Bybit, that had nothing to do with Ethereum itself. But at $1.4 billion hack of an exchange of that asset is A big eye opener for the entire world.
- [06:43]
Charles Hoskinson
Yeah. And you know, if you build your system right, it's very easy to be secure. If you build your system wrong, it's really hard to be secure. And in a MAD dash for accessibility and a mad dash for, you know, user acquisition, they built everything the wrong way. And so now they're trying to figure out how do we make the system secure, which is absurd, it shouldn't be hard. And we started from first principles and we hired cryptographers and people whose day job is to do nothing but worry about security. And we say, well, what do you need to do to make that happen? And it's part of its language design, part of its protocol design, part of its best practices. Part of it is working with your ecosystem, part of it is developing a culture of audit and secure software development standards, and part of it is working with partners to make sure they harden things. It's not like we're invincible. And there's certainly ways to hack things, but net net on average, the model just simply works better. You know, the bigger thing is also where's the connection point between the off chain and the on chain? Because that's where almost all your problems tend to happen. And when you look at things like UTXO is really hand in glove built for isomorphism between the off chain and on chain, in other words, equality between these two, you actually have a reasonable method for how do I move assets and people from one system to another system? Because the future is meta chain. Everything's going to be moving around between JP Morgan Chase and crypto and NAS Tech and crypto and this crypto to this crypto and you have a thousand blockchains, so you need a system that makes that easy to think about and easy to generate. Zero knowledge proofs for easy to do rollups, for easy to build bridge infrastructure, recursive snarks, whatever it may be. We thought about that called channel isomorphism. And so we built that in 2017 when we launched the system. Now all these other people are trying to wire it on and the process of wiring it on. You have hack after hack after hack because they're discovering that the systems were never designed for that mindset. And it's really hard after the fact to bolt that type of stuff on. So it's frustrating because we told people this years ago and they ignored us. And now it's becoming a thing and now they're pretending like they're innovating while they're just fixing problems in the system that they have.
- [08:54]
Scott Melker
We Talk about decentralization. Obviously you mentioned that Cardano rated the most decentralized. Obviously you're an early bitcoiner and we know that bitcoin is generally considered as sufficiently decentralized. Maybe that's a debate for another day. But with all that in mind, you also mentioned a multi chain world with the JP Morgans and the blackrocks. We find ourselves in this interesting situation where we believe in decentralization. Many of the things we created were meant to replace these existing systems. But we find ourselves in a position we have to cheer for the governments and the institutions now as a part of our ecosystem. Is this cognitive dissonance on our side? Are we coping or is it a net positive that Larry Fink, you know, is a cheerleader for our space?
- [09:40]
Charles Hoskinson
Now it's a mixed bag. One of the reasons why we're working on Midnight is that we want to be able to have our cake and eat it too. You know, you need really a fourth generation, so you need a private smart contract layer and selective disclosure regime because you can pull a lot of the tradfi legacy world into the crypto space and preserve the crypto ethos, but at the same time have a compliance regime and be able to move between all these different centralized hubs and still preserve some notion of autonomy and user control. But it's challenging for me because I came into the space very early on. I've been here for almost 15 years now. And back in the day we hated all the banks. We wanted to burn these guys down.
- [10:19]
Scott Melker
And long bitcoin, short the bankers, right? Yeah.
- [10:22]
Charles Hoskinson
And now Everybody's cheering on BlackRock and things. And I've been a very vocal critic. I said I didn't sign up to gargle the balls of BlackRock. So I'm trying really hard to moderate myself a little bit because people say I have to play nice, but I'm a firebrand. That's one of the reasons why people sometimes don't like me. So no, I'm not really enamored or in love with the idea that we should just hand the keys to the entire kingdom over to five banks or five governments and we should cheer when stockpiles are constructed. Now, on the other hand, I'm a libertarian, so if they want to do these things, that's okay. But we have to have options and we have to have connecting tissue that is beyond the control of the government as a whole. So some of this is protocol innovation, some of this is identity innovation, some of this is building up the defi stacks like we really need better dexes, you know, we really need better algorithmic stablecoins to counterbalance tether and circle and all these other things. And sometimes we make progress. If you look at from when the first generation of dexes came out to where we're at today, it's day and night. When you look at Luna compared to Jed, it's day and night in terms of these things. So we are making meaningful progress in that direction. But ultimately it's liquidity. More money has to live in the decentralized world than in the centralized world. And the problem is there's perverse financial incentives because the short term incentives are indexed on centralization. And we see that with Solana, where they didn't really care about decentralization, but they focused on better, faster, cheaper and they got a huge amount of customer adoption. And nobody really talked about, well, how do you become a real cryptocurrency? They just kind of said, well, we'll figure that out later, we'll innovate our way to decentralization. But you have no incentive to do that. Once you're centralized and you make money from being centralized, it's too tempting just to hold it in that configuration and you and your 14 friends will continue making tons of money as a middleman. You have no incentive to release the system to the people. So that's the philosophical challenge that we have and others have. And I think it's one of the big differentiators with Cardano is that we've tried really hard to keep that philosophical purity and in many times it's created friction with other ecosystems and other people and we just keep pushing through. But frankly, bitcoin has done the same. There are certainly pockets of bitcoin that are centralized, but it still is a pretty decentralized ecosystem as a whole. Their challenge is upgradability. They don't have any way of coordinating an upgrade. So you just have to live with the system as it is. And so the best it can be is digital gold. It can't really be an effective payment system or smart contract layer, but you have to outsource that to other systems.
- [13:02]
Scott Melker
Well, interestingly, as you mentioned in the conversation about UTXO and coming to block to Bitcoin is effectively a layer two. I'm very good friends with Adan Yago, obviously building Bitcoin os. I know that you've been working with them. So those things can't be done on native bitcoin, but they can be done in the bitcoin ecosystem. And that's A focus for you and something that you were looking at very early and I think is raising a lot of eyebrows even for critics, because now you're coming home to some degree.
- [13:30]
Charles Hoskinson
Yeah, well, you know, the thing is that we wanted Bitcoin to be better for many, many, many years. I'm old enough to remember Master Coin and Color Coins, the founders of these projects. And you know, we all started in the Ethereum ecosystem as Bitcoin guys trying to make Bitcoin better as a layer two and just couldn't do it because at the time we didn't have Taproot and these other primitives that existed, or the Lightning network. But now when you look at the evolution of Lightning and Taproot, there's enough programmability and interactive interactability inside that ecosystem where you can graft on a layer to do your smart contracts and still pay the transaction fees in Bitcoin and have fast finality and all these other great features. So that's what we're doing with Cardano right now is we're, we're working with Fargate on something called Bit vmx. It's a RISC V processor and basically you can compile code to it, then transpile it to Bitcoin script and then you can embed that in, in Taproot. But that gives you enough programmability that you then can connect Bitcoin to other systems and use those systems as a smart contract layer. What makes Cardano unique is you have something called Babel fees and so it allows you to pay your transaction fees in your underlying currency. So you can pay your transaction fees in Bitcoin instead of Ada. Okay, so from a Bitcoin user's perspective, it's Bitcoin all the way through, end to end. There's no second token, there's no different ecosystem. You just click a button, enable Bitcoin mode. Your security ultimately is nexused by the Bitcoin blockchain and use Cardano as a computation layer. Paying in Bitcoin, it's very similar to like tourism. So when you go to, you know, Barbados or something and you pay with your credit card, you're paying in dollars or euros or whatever. But under the hood there's some thing that's happening to pay in their local currency. So it creates demand for that. And it's very same with our network. Under the hood there's an intent based system that kind of matches Ada with it. User doesn't see that they pay all their transaction fees. And in Bitcoin, So I think it's the best of both worlds. It creates chain to chain trade and then it creates incentives for chains to know each other and work together. And Cardano I think has a great chance to be kind of the nexus of the entire UTXO Defi ecosystem because we have the most sophisticated and feature rich UTXO programming system. And then once you have Bitcoin, then all of these taproot enabled systems will basically be interoperable. So eventually there'll be an ecosystem where Doge and Litecoin, all the other UTXO guys, are there. What people don't get is that's four times larger than Solana and Ethereum together when you look at liquidity and market cap. So yeah, they don't have any TVL yet, but that's because it hasn't turned on. But when they do turn it on, like with Babylon for example, as an AVS system for Bitcoin or Stacks for example, then suddenly you see thousands of Bitcoin enter that like almost instantly. And here's the thing, all these financial institutions, they have a fiduciary obligation to create yield. So when a ETF that holds Bitcoin creates yield for Bitcoin, all the competing ETFs has to do the same because their shareholders will say why don't we have that yield too? That's not fair. So suddenly blackrock is going to do Defi and Grayscale and all these other guys once the competitive pressures push them in. So I think it's in the one to three year horizon. Bitcoin Defi and eventually UTXO Defi. And we've positioned ourselves really, really well with that. We're going to combine Hydra, which is our layer two with, with lightning and create lightning Hydra. We are building a strong, trustless, recursive bridge between Bitcoin and Cardano. And also we're porting Akin to work on Bit vmx which is one of our programming languages, is based on Rust so that you can use Aiken to write Bitcoin script and Aiken to write Cardano smart contracts. And eventually Aiken would work across all the UTXO chains. And then we also partnered with Maestro, we did a strategic investment there and they're an off chain host for, for Bitcoin applications and Cardano applications. So you have like a turnkey experience to be able to do applications kind of like inferior alchemy or these types of things. So it's still early days, but we're making methodical progress every step of the way. And what's Nice is Cardano has that ethos that's interoperable and compatible with Bitcoin and it's really hard to do Bitcoin defi from Bitcoin to Ethereum, they tried that with rootstock and it just didn't really work. Well, the EVM is not the same paradigm, whereas Bitcoin and Cardano, it's a natural extension of these things because of extended utxo. So you think the same way you build applications, the same way you kind of use the same development paradigms. And ultimately the ethos is very similar. It's deflationary, deflationary. Fixed supply. Fixed supply. You know, it's like the ethos is there decentralization. Decentralization. So it's a much natural partner than Ethereum to Cardano.
- [17:58]
Scott Melker
Yeah. I mean, at the very basic level, Bitcoin has arguably the best security. There's the most amount of money in the ecosystem, highest aum. It makes a lot of sense for these things to be built there. And on the institutional side, to your point about the ETFs and BlackRock, it's just the biggest name brand.
- [18:15]
Charles Hoskinson
Yeah.
- [18:15]
Scott Melker
Doing it on Bitcoin is going to be a much easier sell to these institutions than trying to convince them to use another chain that they just haven't become comfortable with.
- [18:25]
Charles Hoskinson
Yeah. And also it's the biggest market opportunity. You have the largest user base, 550 million users. It's the only one that all the nation states seem to like. And with Midnight and Cardano, what Midnight's going to do for us has privacy, so you can actually have private Bitcoin transactions and all these other things. And so there's a lot there, you know, and it's deceptively simple because there's a ton of things under the hood that make it pretty magical for the Bitcoin user. And all it is is just a wallet upgrade for the Bitcoin user. You just flip a switch and then you have defi mode.
- [18:55]
Scott Melker
Well, the key is that the UX UI has to be simple and that they don't even need to know what's happening under the hood. Right. I don't know how the Internet works necessarily, or how my phone sends or receives text messages, but it works. And that's what institutions want. They don't want a long conversation about the tech.
- [19:12]
Charles Hoskinson
Yeah.
- [19:13]
Scott Melker
But so, interestingly, if you're coming to Bitcoin and you're building all of these things there, do you think that in any way that will cannibalize what you're building uniquely in the Cardano ecosystem itself, is it competitive or do you see these as entirely separate silos that can both grow individually?
- [19:29]
Charles Hoskinson
No, they're synergistic. And so what I mean by this is that there's two levers you can't change with Bitcoin. So they with taproot added programmability, but you can't change the finality characteristics and the high transaction fee characteristics. You're only ever going to get seven transactions a second. And those block sizes are very precious, especially as more users come in. So it's a really bad idea to try to do native defi on Bitcoin as a layer one. So what you do is you partner and you say, okay, as long as I can pay the transaction fees and my anchor of trust is the bitcoin network, it doesn't really matter what network the computation takes place in. So what you're looking for is do I have a sufficiently decentralized network that has fast finality, great programmability, low transaction fees, and all these other characteristics where it's very natural to extend my defi into. And when I'm done with that, then I rely on the security of the bitcoin network after that's done. So it's a circle, basically. And you.
- [20:26]
Scott Melker
Yeah, I guess what I'm trying to get at is you're becoming the plumbing obviously to do defi on bitcoin. Once that becomes effective and popular and huge. Why would people do defi anywhere else other than bitcoin? Like, why would they go to.
- [20:43]
Charles Hoskinson
What I'm trying to say is that the bitcoin transaction will, will. All the defi elements will settle on Cardano.
- [20:49]
Scott Melker
Of course, I understand that. I'm just saying they wouldn't go anywhere else.
- [20:52]
Charles Hoskinson
Yeah, exactly right. But remember, Cardano is a crossroads. And so what'll happen because of what Midnight's doing, connecting all the different ecosystems, is that when Solana people want to participate in Bitcoin defi, like merge liquidity or yield farm or whatever the heck it is that they do in the defi space. Well, then they'll go through Cardano basically for that. Because Cardano can easily talk to Solana, Cardano can easily talk to Ethereum. It's a lot harder for Bitcoin to make that transit. So they kind of meet in the middle and they use Cardano as a crossroads for those two things. And so that's kind of where we're moving. And what's nice is that we can move there on the security side because we're becoming A very large AVS system move there on the bridge side, but then we also can move on the proof side as well. So we're kind of getting capabilities all around to be that kind of middleman between these different paradigms, the accounts world and Solana world and the UTXO world. But you know, regardless of whether those mergers are successful or not, Bitcoin is so vast and large. Just living with Bitcoin and Cardano together that that's sufficient to make Cardano a much larger defi system than Ethereum and Solana combined. You know, as these things grow. But then there's also the legacy world. And that's another reason we built Midnight is that we wanted to connect to that. And you there you need selective disclosure regimes, you need real world assets and that's larger than Bitcoin. It's $20 trillion when you look at the real world asset marketplace. So you need automated compliance and all these other things. Well, by having private smart contracts with an identity system, in this case Hyperledger Dentist, which we created for Midnight, putting those two things together gives you the legacy world as well. So it's kind of this perfect trifecta where you have your traditional smart contract systems and Midnight can reach in through chain abstraction and hybrid apps. But then you also have Bitcoin Defi that touches emerging Leviathan, that's waking up. But then you have Midnight connecting into the tradfi world which is 20 trillion on RWAs and all three of them are starting to come to the ledger. And so it'll just organically build up that momentum. And what's cool is we have the treasury to support it. We have $1.5 billion on chain to basically make strategic investments for as long as necessary. And we have all the technology coming online to support it. Like Midgard is our layer two optimistic roll up system. And then we have leos, which is going to give us kind of Solana side style speed, but you know, full decentralization and no stalls. And then we have all the zero knowledge technology that's coming in too. We're kind of state of the art on the zero knowledge side.
- [23:15]
Scott Melker
We've obviously had these repetitive crypto cycles. They've rhymed, they haven't all been the same. This time it's been a bit unique because we've had a bit of a barbell, right, the performance obviously, and focus on Bitcoin. And then I would say we've seen a massive increase on the speculative side even from previous cycles, specifically meme coins on Solana. I think have captured a lot of the attention, a lot of the volume and liquidity. You've probably in 15 years seen every distraction that we have in, in crypto and they've been massive. I would argue that this has been the largest. Do you think that meme coins are simply just a distraction or do you think that they've been, you know, a net negative for utility tokens and things that are actually being built because the attention has been so wildly diverted?
- [24:05]
Charles Hoskinson
So a meme coin is just like the ascendancy of a celebrity that has 15 minutes of fame. Yeah. It doesn't, doesn't necessarily mean that that celebrity is going to disappear forever. But they're in a temporary state of popularity. They have to find a way to become sustainable quickly or otherwise the people stop paying attention and they die out. That's why the 99% of the meme coins will fail. And the ones that succeed, they pivot into ecosystem building, they cease to be meme coins.
- [24:37]
Scott Melker
I would even argue to some degree, right, they, they transcend to utility.
- [24:41]
Charles Hoskinson
Yeah, they, they have to, it's the only way they can survive. So typically they have to build community. You have to start doing things with that community. You have to have a reason for people to be there and continue investing. And it's real hard because the, almost always with the distributions have been coins. It's built for insider dump. So the person who issues it and the insiders who issue it, their only incentive is pump the price to dump the price. So they have to survive the dumping. And it's interesting that Solana is like the number one meme coin system because Solana actually endured the same distribution curve. You had this like FTX style insider fucked up shit that was going on and they had to survive the collapse of FTX and then they thrived on the other side. So Solana is like the ultimate analogy for a meme coin that managed to escape the paradigm. But you have to have a utility, you have to have something there. And so you know, you have, you have to have your pump fun for the, for the system to work. Right.
- [25:39]
Scott Melker
But in the previous cycles you still needed to sign up for a centralized exchange to get access to Doge or Shiba Inu that you wanted to trade this time because of decentralization and dexs and because people have figured out web three, you can go on pump fun and launch 15 of these things an hour if you want to and make a little bit of money and move on with your life and not care about the pain that you've left in your wake. So this time we get 5 million meme coins a month. Right, instead of 500 in a cycle.
- [26:14]
Charles Hoskinson
Yeah. Just because you write extra zeros on your, on your $1 bill, it doesn't make it a hundred. So you can launch as many meme coins as you value. Yeah, value comes from people. And so you have to fundamentally improve your people count inside your system. And then external value has to enter into your ecosystem. So that's a conserved resource. It's like conservation of energy or conservation of mass or these things. So there's only so much of that at any given time, which is why we're focusing on things like Bitcoin defi and focusing on things like, you know, real world assets, because these are massive external value stores and they are massive user stores, like hundreds of millions of people. And so when you open those floodgates, then you get real value inflow into your system. When you do a meme coin, what's happening is you're moving water from one side of the bathtub to the other side of the bathtub, so.
- [27:06]
Scott Melker
And slowly draining.
- [27:08]
Charles Hoskinson
Yeah.
- [27:08]
Scott Melker
And the drain is slightly open.
- [27:10]
Charles Hoskinson
Yeah, the drain is open. Right. It goes into the Founder's pocket. And so, so, so basically you're not adding any water to the tub, you're losing water over time and you're moving value from one side to the other side. But it's not, it's net, net neutral or negative. So that's one of the fundamental problems with a lot of meme coins. And so what people are trying to do is use meme coins to bring new people in. And some cases that's successful, like Trump Coin, for example, was able to do that. There was a huge influx into Solana to get to Trump Coin.
- [27:37]
Scott Melker
There was. None of that has gone anywhere else.
- [27:39]
Charles Hoskinson
Exactly.
- [27:40]
Scott Melker
The metrics I've seen. So even, even in the case of the largest meme coin launched by a president, it brought in a bunch of people who now are just going to sit there and never move the money around or test the test. What else is out there?
- [27:52]
Charles Hoskinson
Well, maybe they'll happen to see over time, you know, but, but it's very rare. That's a Black Swan event and it's the exception to the rule instead of the rule itself. But, but, but it's not, it's not sustainable in the long term, so you need something else to make it sustainable. So, you know, it's, it's not surprising to me. We had NFTs before, before that, and then we had ICO mania if you remember that, you know, before that, and then we had altcoins before that, where people just fork bitcoin again and again. We had feather coin and you know, all these different things way back in the day, and they were fun, you know, and everybody just did the same thing. They just changed the distribution function a little bit, maybe added like a memory. Hard proof of work and huzzah. I have my. I have my new ecosystem. Here you go. Start mining. Start. We're silver to your gold. And. And sometimes they survive and they create an ecosystem around them like Doge did and Litecoin did. And the vast majority of them collapse and fail. And so that game will be played again and again and again, mostly by new people coming in, not remembering the mistakes in the past. And as long as there's an inflow of value, there's water going into the bathtub, it's sustainable. The minute that you cut the spigot off, the whole thing stops because the water drains out of the tub.
- [29:03]
Scott Melker
I guess I'm questioning if there is new water coming into the bathtub and how that water escapes the bathtub to greener pastures of actual utility.
- [29:11]
Charles Hoskinson
And from being built, it's not, but there's still ton of opportunity. Yeah, there's. GameFi is a great opportunity and there's a ton of interesting things there. As I mentioned, RWAs are a great opportunity. Bitcoin defi is a great opportunity. Algorithmic stablecoins, I think they've been damaged badly by Luna, but they'll make a comeback at some point. And micro lending and these things, we have a company called RealFi that does that in Kenya. So there are real opportunities here. And they typically take advantage of the fact that the legacy system is so fucking bad. I mean, when Your loans are 85% and your remittances take 5% off of every transaction, or I just tweeted yesterday.
- [29:51]
Scott Melker
It'S literally a necessity.
- [29:52]
Charles Hoskinson
This person trying to withdraw $2,500 from their bank to buy a motorcycle. And the bank's like, we're not going to give you your money so that when your competition's there, everybody wants to kill that competition. So that's where our nexus of utility comes from. And so as long as that's the case, crypto's not going anywhere, it's going to be strong. It's just the problem is you also have to deal with the fact that crypto enables people at a very low cost to commit scams, and crypto enables people at very low cost to extract value from Things that have value and you'll just have to tolerate that. Right.
- [30:27]
Scott Melker
I guess the question then becomes what gets us over that hump and brings in this next hundred million or five hundred million or billion people that we need to really gain the traction that we've been talking about for all these cycles. I agree with you. Real world assets.
- [30:45]
Charles Hoskinson
Well, no, I'll tell you, I'll tell you what it is. So there's two bills that are currently being discussed in the House and Senate. The one that's most likely to pass in the next 30 to 60 to 90 days is the stablecoin bill and then the second one's the market structure bill. Once those two bills pass, Apple, Microsoft, Google, Facebook are going to say, hey, we're crypto people now. And so they're going to put wallets in their platforms because they can capture an enormous amount of the market when you add their user bases of 3 billion people. And when they have those 3 billion users, it's like they have cryptocurrency wallets right in Windows, right in Facebook, right in your cell phone apps, right in iOS. And because they now can legally hold stablecoins and use stablecoins, they're going to do it because they don't like paying the processing fees on credit cards. So they'll issue their own stablecoins or partner with people to do that and they have fee less transactions inside the system. And then suddenly these tech companies become financial service providers and they have so much money and so much power that they'll push through once that's there and you have a good regulatory regime, it's very easy then to click a button to create yield products on top of that. So that's what's going to bring the value flow in. Because the users already are wired into that system, their money's already there, their credit cards are already there, their purchase power is already there. And there's just too much temptation not to do that. And the competitive equilibria are such that they have to do that. The only reason they didn't enter in Facebook tried it was the most ambitious of the four. Remember Libra? And they just got brutally, brutally beaten down with I guess they changed the name to dm.
- [32:16]
Scott Melker
Yeah, because the regulators Libra to dm and then, you know, Mo and Avery, they all left and made Aptos.
- [32:21]
Charles Hoskinson
Yeah, exactly right. And I like, I like Avery. You know, we're working with them on Jolteon for, for midnight. They're great guys. But Facebook tried this because they have the Playbook and And it's like they're just going to abandon that playbook. No, they had to because the regulator told them no. Once these two bills pass, that opens the floodgates and that's 3 billion people that enter in. The other thing is markets want to be liberated. There's too much money in the world and we don't have places to put it because they overprinted money. So Goldman and all these other guys are like, how do we move money around so we can keep getting a 10% return for our investors in our private wealth funds and all these other things. Well, you need 24, seven global markets that are highly liquid. So all these walls that are put there have to be lifted up. And crypto is the only connecting tissue that makes sense in a great powers conflict structure of a world. You can't, you can do it in a rules based international order, but that's gone. Russia and China, America hate each other. So the only way you can get unified markets now is through crypto. You can't do it through treaties and international agreements or these types of things.
- [33:21]
Scott Melker
There's just some irony still. I've always said that stablecoins are the killer app of crypto outside of block, outside of bitcoin. That's clearly what we're talking about here. So we end up with Facebook money and Google money and Amazon money and We've already seen PayPal money, right? And so yet again it's that push and pull of careful what you ask for or what you cheer for because it's antithetical to the original ethos. But once they, Bitcoin was created as a, as an answer to the dollar. And I know best thing we're coming up with is digital dollars. And I don't begrudge that.
- [33:53]
Charles Hoskinson
Well, but, but remember, once they're in the ecosystem, they're in the ecosystem. So they have a wallet, they have a public private key pair. They're able to interact with defi. They can convert those Facebook dollars into bitcoin, they can convert those Facebook dollars into other crypto assets. And you know, even if it's 5%, actually follow the crypto ethos. When you run the numbers on that, you know that's 150 million people. You know, that's a nation state. Like that's a mid sized nation state. That's, that's very significant. So it's not bad, it's not good. You know, it's kind of neutral. And I wish everybody just went to crypto and said screw the legacy banking system and Overthrew the government and all this other stuff, but we can't do that.
- [34:32]
Scott Melker
But you just honestly, we're also not ready for it. Right. We can have the expectation for it, but most people in most places still can't figure this stuff out enough to completely opt out of the legacy system and only exist in.
- [34:45]
Charles Hoskinson
Yeah. And also like, have we earned it? And when we look at our own internal governance and we look at the scams and all this other stuff, it's like we really. It's like that 18 year old kid telling you how to run the entire world and you're like, have you cleaned your room yet, Billy?
- [35:00]
Scott Melker
It's really true.
- [35:01]
Charles Hoskinson
You have a job, Billy. Are you going to stop smoking pot?
- [35:04]
Scott Melker
Doesn't that just mean that we're still really early? Is that the, is that the positive take on this? Is that we're still early? But you know, there's the cynical take, which is we've been at this a long time, we should have built more by now, right? We, this should all be happening. And then I think the more positive view is these things take a really long time and we're doing well, we're on our way.
- [35:23]
Charles Hoskinson
Yeah, well, I mean the history of computing, you know, today would be the equivalent of like 1955. So are we done with computers in 1955? You know, not really. Obviously there was so much more to do. We invented the transistor and then new revolution that we have quantum computers coming. So analogously when you look at crypto, it's very early days. You know, 15 years in, we went from like a single person creating a single protocol that nobody cared about to a global movement with 550 million people and trillions of dollars of value and governments and getting involved and forming reserves and launching meme coins and all kinds of things. That's an extraordinary. There's no technology in the history of humanity that's grown as quickly as crypto. When you look at it from that widened aperture, you say, well, if we have that same rate of growth in 15 years, crypto will be the dominant asset in the world.
- [36:17]
Scott Melker
And usually they go more parabolic once they start, so you don't flatten once the hockey stick starts fall applying. And we're still.
- [36:23]
Charles Hoskinson
Yeah, even if it's an S curve and it balances out like the S curve balances out at 3 billion users, you know, and so that's Internet scale. And also it's like, what is your alternative? You want to go back to 5 day wire transfers, 5% fees, 10% fees getting locked out of your accounts, government stealing from your bank accounts. Like in the case of Cyprus, having to ask for permission to withdraw $2,500 of cash to go buy a motorcycle. You know, high fees, credit card interest rates at 18%. That's your alternative that you want to go back to? It's like, no, it's just not going to happen. So crypto's here to stay. It's just we don't know as a society how to make this work, because the whole regulatory model is not built for crypto. And it will change over time. But we now have to reevaluate things like how compliance works, how bank secrecy act works, suspicious activity reporting, international transactions, all these things. Everything has to be, be completely rebuilt. But it's the same like, remember the old publication model? You could buy a newspaper, you know, and then the Internet comes and then obviously the papers that adapted, they, they survived, but the vast majority of papers didn't take it seriously and they got blindsided and went out of business.
- [37:31]
Scott Melker
You don't want to get blockbustered or codec.
- [37:33]
Charles Hoskinson
Yeah.
- [37:34]
Scott Melker
So to speak. And that's inevitable. I think, for, for most of these entities, it's just a matter of time. But they're not going to go quietly into the night. Right. I mean, we talk about, when you really talk about the core ethos of what we can do, whether with stablecoins or Bitcoin in general, it's eliminating that toll collector in between our transactions at the end of the day. Right. But those are the biggest entities in the world. Those toll collectors are the visas and the mastercards and the banks and the clearing houses. And they're going to have to adopt or die in our minds, but maybe they're just going to keep fighting.
- [38:07]
Charles Hoskinson
Yeah, they'll adapt. And there's an embrace and extinguish mindset and, and, you know, it's an ebb and flow and some administrations are captured and they get very hostile and other administrations are very embracing. We saw that with the Biden administration versus the Trump administration. So there's a jubilee right now. And what we're trying to do as an industry is move as quickly as possible to get some legislation passed to create a backstop so that the Biden administration can't happen again. So it's a race.
- [38:35]
Scott Melker
So even, even if we get regime change at, there's actual laws on the books and not just executive orders that protect the industry at a very basic level into the future. I think that's so important. It comes back to the earlier conversation where I asked you about the JP Morgans and the blackrocks and celebrating them. Obviously, as I said, we were sort of anti government. You're a Libertarian. Right. But you're headed to Washington, you know, after our conversation, we know that you've been spending time there. You kind of have to. Right. Like, if you want to make sure that this industry is going to be safe moving into the future, you still have to play the legacy game that exists, regardless of your beliefs of the value of that system.
- [39:13]
Charles Hoskinson
Yeah. You have to go to show up and represent your philosophy. And ultimately, you have to make some compromises to get what needs to be done done. I'm the face of a fairly large ecosystem of millions of people, and although it's decentralized, those people do believe in me. They want me to be there fighting for them. So, you know, you go to Washington and you fight the good fight, and I think we can make a lot of progress. I think we can move it along. You know, there's only two options, negotiation or war. So I. I don't think we want war. And so negotiation is the. Negotiation is the only option then. Right. So we have to not go so great for us.
- [39:50]
Scott Melker
Yeah, war did not go so great for us at the Biden era and the Gary Genslers and the Elizabeth Warrens, it's. Yeah, it's nice to see them marginalized, but to your point, can't sit on your laurels and pretend that that's indefinite. I mean, we can see, literally, we could see the Senate or the House flip in some sort of situation in two years, and Elizabeth Warren's ahead of the Senate Financial Committee again.
- [40:10]
Charles Hoskinson
Yeah, exactly. Right. And so we have window, and so we have to, you know, set our differences aside and push forward. And what I found is that a lot of people used to be competitors, are now friends. You know, I talked to Brad and Ripple and all the other guys, and.
- [40:24]
Scott Melker
I want to talk more about that. I want to talk about. So. So everybody were enemies to some degree. Right. I think everybody had this base level of friendship because we're all in crypto, but every ecosystem has its own battles and dislike for others. Then we had a common enemy, which was the Biden administration, obviously. And this industry came together massively, put aside all of their differences, lobbied against Biden, gave Trump a ton of money. You could argue the crypto industry won that election. Right. For Trump. It feels like now, though, you say it's still united, which I think is great to hear, because it feels like everybody's Going back to the fracturing and lobbying for their own interests or that that's what's inevitably going to happen.
- [41:04]
Charles Hoskinson
Well, I mean if you look at the dcc, the event that I'm going to, most of the major blockchains are represented there. I think there's like eight or nine congressmen going, a few senators going, Don Junior's there, all kinds of people are there. There definitely is an industry wide awareness that we have a limited window of time and people are trying their best to work together. What's happening though is certain entities are trying to take advantage of the progress to institutionalize their competitive advantages. Circle is a great example of that. They're trying to keep tether out of the US market and so they're trying to co opt the stablecoin process for this. And there's dozens of examples of where some people are trying to take advantage. But why should we expect them to do any different? I mean when there's power to be made, there's money to be made, people are going to try to take advantage of this situation. It's human nature, it's a competitive ecosystem. And so I don't judge people or fault people or say, oh, these are bad actors. And it's, it's a free market and you are going to use everything in your back pocket to win in a free market, even if it's an unfair advantage. What you have to do though is transcend all of that and say, okay, can we at least agree on some basic principles on digital asset classification, Custodial standards, tax standards, the treatment of proof of stake and proof of work, work being equal, dozens of things like this under the law that really need to get in to the law. And then yeah, some things will get corporate cronyism and there's be certain protectionism that comes in and certain markets will gain an unfair advantage because the law wasn't written perfectly. But that's a lot better than scary, Gary. Literally suing every single American exchange. That's a lot better than every single layer. One being a security and maybe even bitcoins is security. I don't know, ask me on the side of the week. It's a lot better than the Kafkaesque come in and register. Coinbase goes for 20 times to the SEC saying we'll tell us what to do and then they ghost them and then they sue them. I mean that's day and night when you look at these testings. Because we can always five years or 10 years down the road kind of clean things up a Little bit or offshore, certain parts that are unfair. But that's better than the entire US government being united to try to kill us. As an indication industry, it's a massive improvement. So there's a lot more that unites us and divides us. And you know, I'll go out there and fight the fight and take the hits. And there's a lot of criticism we get. And that's fine. You know, it's like be a grow thick skin and just get it done. People rely on it.
- [43:25]
Scott Melker
It's funny, you know, you have the, you know, first they laugh at you, then they lie, then they fight at you, then you win the whole thing. The then you fight you phase was terrible. I just think that we've taken for granted that then we feel like then you win. But you still need to go there and make sure that we solidify those wins. As I said before, I haven't asked anyone this question. So obviously you're the head of ecosystem. As you said, it's decentralized, but you're obviously the figurehead. Millions of people, lots of interest in Washington. Everybody's going to Washington. How does that happen? What is the process of going to Washington? Do you like call who do you decide who to call?
- [44:02]
Charles Hoskinson
How do you get a hotline?
- [44:03]
Scott Melker
How do you make sure that you get your. Is there like a lobby? Excuse me, I'm with the crypto lobby. I would love a meeting with this hundred people. It's very interesting because it seems like, you know, for the summit you needed to be friendly with Sachs, right? Which makes sense. His summit you had, you had to be one of like his guys who knew before he, he invited them. Then there's all these side events and then you see individual senators. How do you penetrate? Do you have to hire a lobbyist that goes in on your behalf and knows the lay of the land? I have no, never asked about this process.
- [44:36]
Charles Hoskinson
Well, it depends on who you are. So, you know, if you're a big guy and you know everybody you know, don't ask anybody. Just call your friends who are now in power, say, I'm coming. Hey. Yeah. I say like, hey, I'm coming.
- [44:47]
Scott Melker
There. Where's my invite? Must been locked.
- [44:48]
Charles Hoskinson
Exactly right. They call you, you know, call them if you're on the outside. Then you have to earn your way in. And then typically you use some combination of industry events and lobbyists and these other things and you kind of walk your way up the food chain and then eventually you work your way in. Every administration is a little different and you have to understand the United States is different in terms of balance of power. So while the executive branch has all the prestige and the momentum and everybody pays attention to the President, the legislative branch is the one that writes the laws, the President signs the laws. So the actual power for cryptocurrency regulation long term is nested in the legislative branch. Legislative branch is ridiculously easy to approach because there's a lot of people and gateways to come in.
- [45:34]
Scott Melker
Typically it's people you can contact. Some of them are your representatives.
- [45:38]
Charles Hoskinson
Yeah, it's a game of having dinner with various congressmen and senators. It's a game of, you know, talking to various policy groups. It's a game of talking. It's a lot of staffers. And staffers are the lubrication of Washington. They're the ones who do all the work, get everything done, schedule all the meetings. So you actually get a lot more done smoking cigars with a staffer, you know, at 1:00 in the morning at Shelly's, you know, than you can many cases by having dinner with a congressman or a senator. Because at the end of the day, they're the, like the, they're in the neck. They determine where the congressman looks and what they sign. So it's a, it's a layered approach and there's, there's a lot of, like, publicity events. Like the White House summit was a really curious one where it's like, were we in, were we out? You know, and, and we didn't know if those, those invitations were coming in or out.
- [46:25]
Scott Melker
You were like, you were like a main source of news whether you were invited or not, without you even saying whether you were invited or not. That was a stranger thing.
- [46:33]
Charles Hoskinson
It was so, it was so weird because we kept calling them.
- [46:36]
Scott Melker
It was like breaking news. Charles not invited. And I was like, was. Did he ever say. He was like, I don't, I never did.
- [46:41]
Charles Hoskinson
You know, I never did. It's, it's like first we call him and say, are we on the list? We said, we don't know. I said, all right, well, I'm going to Japan on Friday, so. So, like, do I cancel my plans or not? And they just kept dragging out, dragging out. And then they went to Laura Shannon and they, they said, charles has nothing to do with this and he's not invited. I was like, I don't know what White House staffer?
- [46:59]
Scott Melker
Like, big deal. Neither was I.
- [47:01]
Charles Hoskinson
But okay, you know, you have fun at your party, guys. That's great. But yeah, that's the other thing that People understand about Washington is it is hyper fucking petty and very catty. And there's, there's a lot of factions and various people and misinformation and you know, maneuvering and all this other garbage. And, and any given Sunday you can be in and then next Sunday you're out and the next Sunday you're in again and it's, that's Washington. So we try to stay above the fray and say that we spend a lot more of our time on the legislative branch than the executive branch. Because here's the thing, like Security Exchange act of 1933 was passed 92 years ago and it's still relevant today.
- [47:43]
Scott Melker
Howie.
- [47:43]
Charles Hoskinson
So just because there's a president today, there's going to be 5, 10, 15 administrations that are going to be under this cryptocurrency legislation that gets passed. So you really have to have a systematic, first, principled, considered and delivered approach in market structure and how this is going to globalize as a product. And really the only branch that's set up to do that is the legislative branch. It's not the executive branch. What the executive branch can do is kind of rally the industry.
- [48:09]
Scott Melker
They can make a lot of noise and make a lot of noise forces the hands.
- [48:13]
Charles Hoskinson
Exactly right. And get a lot of people together. And also whether they're willing to endorse or not is the deciding factor. Like had the legislative branch passed a cryptocurrency law, Biden would have vetoed it. So there was no way.
- [48:23]
Scott Melker
SAB121.
- [48:24]
Charles Hoskinson
Yeah, exactly right. There was no way to push it through. But now that they're unified and there's an all of government approach with a bicameral working group, it'll get done. And so that's where we spend most of our time is, is on the legislative side. It's a lot nicer because it's erdite conversations. You're going over like a lot of nuanced things in law like what is the definition of a security and how do you define statutory digital asset? What is decentralization and should this be deferred to a standards body like nist or should you try to write it in the law like fit 21 did? You don't have those types of conversations with, with the executive branch. It's just that's not set up for that type of erdite conversation. And the way that Sachs has constructed the group, it's not set up for that. And that's fine. You know, it's, it's their prerogative on you Know how they want to run, what they want to do. They're not hurting the process. They're. They're helping the process. They're pushing it along. They're creating urgency because there needs to be urgency. That's the problem with legislative branches. There's no urgency. It's like a university. They're like, hey, you know, maybe next year or maybe two years from now.
- [49:22]
Scott Melker
We think we are the most important thing in the world.
- [49:24]
Charles Hoskinson
Yeah, exactly. Right.
- [49:25]
Scott Melker
It's so funny watching the crypto community, like, engage or the expectations of this crypto summit or the expectations of some meeting that's happening. And it's like you've never watched a meeting in Washington. It's just a bunch of dudes come together, shake hands, make a canned statement, and they move on. And you need to look for the underlying meaning. The fact that those meetings are happening is what matters. The meeting itself is a photo op. Everybody knows that.
- [49:49]
Charles Hoskinson
Yeah. And, you know, and. And every president has an inner circle, and there are people that they like and they get along with and they want to work with, and there's people that they don't like and they don't get along with. I mean, if RFK got elected president, I probably would have been in the cabinet or at least going to the White House a lot. So everybody, you know, everybody has a nexus. And sometimes you're in, sometimes you're out. Sometimes you're like Schrodinger's cat, where you're half in and half out. You're alive and dead, you know, at the same time. So that's why we say, you know, we'll focus on where we're strong, which is the legislative side of the process, and other people very strong in the executive side of the process. They're very intimately in that circle, and they're connected, but you need both sides to actually get anything done. And that's. That's what's happening right now.
- [50:33]
Scott Melker
So I, you know, when I started doing all this, I came in in 2016, but really didn't start passionately, you know, podcasting and everything. So I was 18, 19. In a million years, I would have never thought this would be my conversation with you and that this is what I would be covering every single day on my shows. It's just very strange that we. All we seem to talk about is institutions in the United States and the United States government in context of what's being built and what we're doing. You have the luxury, I guess, of still building. I just get to cover it. It's exhausting. It's almost like we've forgotten the rest of the world exists.
- [51:06]
Charles Hoskinson
No, no, I, I have six companies.
- [51:08]
Scott Melker
You have it. You have it. I'm talking about. Yeah, from what we talk about, you.
- [51:14]
Charles Hoskinson
Know, it's like, it's funny because I do crypto about half time and the other half the time I'm making glow in the dark plants and reversing human aging and traveling to exotic locations and raising bison on a ranch. You know, I've kind of diversified, you know, life a little bit and I think it makes you a more balanced and nuanced guy. I. I own a construction company. I just got a drywall robot. Man, that thing is awesome. It's doing like a level five finish, you know.
- [51:37]
Scott Melker
Is it, is it a chat GPT drywall? Like, let's.
- [51:41]
Charles Hoskinson
No, no, real robot.
- [51:42]
Scott Melker
I'm kidding. The AI in it. But now all we talk about now is the efficiency of AI, so.
- [51:46]
Charles Hoskinson
Yeah, yeah, well, there's some AI in the robot.
- [51:49]
Scott Melker
So it just does feel like though it's become a highly United States focused industry and movement. But maybe that's just because this is the battleground that will determine what it looks like in the rest of the world.
- [52:02]
Charles Hoskinson
And you know, it is a global project. And you know, we had the Constitutional convention for Cardano and Argentina. If you look at it, we had flags from 50 countries and delegates from 50 countries there in Argentina. It's truly global. And while everybody pays attention to the United States, the real work is being done globally as well. There's a lot of interesting things in Abu Dhabi, in Dubai, a lot of interesting things in Singapore and Japan. I was just in Japan. I met with the digital minister there, the former digital minister who's still in cabinet. And Japan is like third, fourth largest economy in the world and they have a huge impact on cryptocurrencies and nobody talks about them. And so you go and you talk to them and they're like, oh yeah, we're really interested in this crypto thing. It's like, well, wouldn't it be an interesting thing if Toyota woke up and they put their entire supply chain on a blockchain or PlayStation woke up and they put all their stuff on a blockchain. That's like hundreds of millions of users and transactions and billions of transactions just from those two companies.
- [52:59]
Scott Melker
And think about Circle, I think was just approved in Japan as the first stable coin this week.
- [53:03]
Charles Hoskinson
Exactly right. And it's the same for Europe and Mica and South America is one of the fastest growing markets Right now, you know, we were down in Argentina and just did, you know, a hundred billion dollars of cryptos down there. It's one out of every seven dollars in their economy is in crypto right now.
- [53:17]
Scott Melker
That. Is that primarily stable coins, I would imagine.
- [53:19]
Charles Hoskinson
Yeah, Stablecoin. Yeah. Because of, they wanted to evade the inflation from the peso collapsing. So. So if you have a country like one out of every seven dollars in the country's crypto, that probably long term is going to have more crypto stuff happening than the United States.
- [53:33]
Scott Melker
I'm trying to remember what guest it was. It was years ago and now my mind is blanking. But who was living in Argentina and said that people would effectively take, you know, a deposit, they would go withdraw it, take it onto the black market, go buy dollars at an unfair rate, go back to the bank and put it in a safety deposit box. Rather than deposit it into the bank, they were using the bank for the physical storage of the dollars that they paid too much for for instead of depositing back into the actual bank where the money came in.
- [54:03]
Charles Hoskinson
Which, which is why stablecoins made a hell of a lot of sense to, to the Argentinians. They're like, yeah, we, we like these things because we don't have to do the safety deposit thing. Oh, and by the way, a guy with a wrench doesn't come and break your legs. You know, it's, it's, it's just one on one stuff. But if you look 100% inflation. Yeah.
- [54:19]
Scott Melker
I mean, that's also the hidden side of remittances. We talk about how much cheaper crypto is for remittances. There's also the gang waiting outside the Western Union for you to walk out with the money that somebody just sent you for the United. From the United States. It's literally dangerous.
- [54:33]
Charles Hoskinson
Yeah. 100. So that's the. So we focus a lot there. And Cardano has always been a global project and it started in Japan, it kind of percolated its way across the entire world. And we have a big focus in Africa and increasingly larger focus in Latin America. A lot of Southeast Asia users as well, like 31 of the population of Vietnam cryptocurrency holders, and a large chunk of them are ADA holders. So, you know, there's a very global audience, you know, across the whole thing. And the United States is important to me because I live in the United States. I'm a bison rancher in Wyoming. So I kind of, kind of sort of have to like, care about my country. I, and I Want the US to be prominent and strong. But nationalism doesn't work very well with crypto. So when they say, like, American cryptos, no tax on American crypto, I have not had a single person from the executive branch be able to explain to me what is an American crypto crypto. I was like, give me a definition of that.
- [55:21]
Scott Melker
You're like, I'm American and I like couch.
- [55:24]
Charles Hoskinson
Yeah, exactly right.
- [55:25]
Scott Melker
It's like, I'm definitely not a security and I'm tax free. That's all I know.
- [55:28]
Charles Hoskinson
Yeah, exactly. Right, Right. Yeah, yeah. Just. I want my cake and eat it too. But I mean, there's, and there's some puffery and all these things, you know, like, you start at 100 and then you kind of compromise your way down to 20, but that's a lot better than minus 15, you know, so you're, you're, you're moving in the right direction with these types of things. But, you know, we just, just show up every day. That's the key. Politics also a game of endurance. And there's no greater example of that than Richard Nixon. People forget that, dude. He was a very unpopular choice for vice president under Eisenhower, and he worked really hard as vice president to try to build his reputation up, and he had a lot of missteps and issues. Then he runs against Kennedy. He probably should have won that election, but there's some canary in Illinois with ballot boxes and Chicago and this stuff. So he loses. Then he says, you know, I'm going to recover by running for Governor of California. 1962, he runs for governor of California. He loses, so everybody thinks he's dead. Republicans get totally destroyed in 64 under Barry Goldwater. And then Nixon shows up out of nowhere in 66 and rebuilds the whole party. He runs for president again. 1968, looks like he's going to lose to Robert Kennedy. Kennedy gets assassinated, then Nixon wins. He has the greatest comeback of all time. Everybody's like, wow, he's back. Then he gets knocked out of office with the Watergate scandal. And then, then he recovers and becomes an elder statesman and, you know, in retirement actually becomes very relevant US Foreign policy. So, you know, that's the American story there. And, you know, that's, that's the thing about American politics, is that you're never dead. Like Harris, she got knocked out in 2024, and everybody thinks she's gone forever. She's running for governor in 2020. She wins the governorship, California, instantly, she's back in the game. As bad as a candidate she was. She's back in the game if she wins, you know, and that's just how politics work. So you just got to move forward.
- [57:18]
Scott Melker
Well, I listened to you break that down, and I know that we're at time because you have to fly to Washington right now, and I say, good luck, man. After listening to you say, you know, describe the ups and downs of politics and the ins and outs, I just hope you have a good time and that it all goes well. But listen, the last time I had you on was 2022. We were in person, and. And, yeah, there's consensus in consensus in Austin. Can we do this again before three more years?
- [57:42]
Charles Hoskinson
Oh, of course. Of course. Of course. You got to come to Washington sometime. We'll. We'll have a lot of fun. They give you, like, a swamp monster suit, honestly.
- [57:48]
Scott Melker
Oh, I would. I would. I will literally come dressed as the swamp Thing. I'm ready for it. I've got the movie, man. That's so good, man. Well, thank you, Charles. Always a pleasure. Really, really cheering for you guys out there. And I hope that we get everything that we want in Washington so that we can go back to talking about all the awesome things that we're building.
- [58:08]
Charles Hoskinson
We'll get her done. Thank you, Scott.
- [58:10]
Scott Melker
Thank you so much, Charles. Have a great flight. Let's do.