Charles Hoskinson: ADA Is A Better Investment Than BTC

Transcript

You think ADA will still outperform BTC in the future? Of course, because how much farther can Bitcoin go? Maybe to a million. Okay, it's a 10x. ADA can go 100x, a thousandx uh over this. It's like, guys, we're not a secondass citizen. Cardano does substantially more. And because of Bitcoin DeFi, it's going to end up probably being the yield layer of Bitcoin. And so, it's going to get a huge halo effect from that. And because of the launch model of Midnight, partner chains are going to bring in airdrops almost annually to ADA. This episode is brought to you by Scale, the next evolution in layer 1 blockchains. Explore the gas-free ecosystem at scale.space/ecosystem and follow their journey on X atcale network. Thanks to Scale for making

today's episode possible. Nothing said on Empire is a recommendation to buy or sell any investments or products. This podcast is forformational purposes only and the views expressed by anyone on the show are solely their opinions, not financial advice or necessarily the views of Block Works. Our hosts, guests, and the Blockworks team may hold positions in the companies, funds or projects discussed. All right, everyone. Welcome back to Empire. I have been waiting to do this episode for a solid like four or five years. Uh we finally got the man, the myth, Charles Hutchinson, uh from Cardono on the show. So, Charles, welcome finally to Empire.

Yano, it's so good to be on, man. How you been? I have been good. Good to see you. Good to see you. Um, dude, you are, we were talking about some other people in the industry before we hit record and, uh, you use the word they are an institution in crypto and I would say that you are an institution in crypto. Uh, I'm just curious like what your life looks like these days. I mean, I'm just the the jackass who didn't retire. So, uh, so now I'm doing all the side quests, right? Um, you know, it's crazy because a career-wise when you look at crypto, I've been in the room for the creation of about $450 billion worth of value from Ethereum to Cardano Bitshares. And there's not a single project I haven't somewhat in some way been part of. Like I was the

founding chairman of the Bitcoin Foundation's education committee and I started the Bitcoin Education Project way back in the day. Uh, and so with all these things, I've watched Bitcoin go from under a dollar to, you know, basically $120,000 Leviathan. I've watched us go from no one cared to the US government tried to kill us to the US government's buying our tokens. So, it's it's like in crazy when you look at the totality of uh of all of that. But what people really don't know is that I diversified after 2021. And I said, you know, if all I do is crypto, I'd be a very boring life because while crypto is super important, crypto is important as an enabler to other things. The purpose of cryptocurrencies is to rewrite the

economic, political, and social systems of the world. You know, all it is is just this trust mcuffin. It creates an environment where people who don't trust each other can trust each other in a new way and then enables new types of business. So I said, 'Well, you're never going to get anywhere with mainstream adoption of crypto unless you go and do things with crypto. So necessarily that forced me to diversify a little bit. And I went agriculture. I bought a bison ranch and I raised bison, got 11,000 acres and hundreds of bison. But that means I can start tracking and tracing my animals using a blockchain and thinking about growing stuff and how that relates to blockchain technology. I have a medical clinic with 15,000 patients up in Gillette, Wyoming. and and we can now start thinking about

electronic health record systems in blockchain. I do stuff in biotechnology like we we have a big stem cell program that we're doing a lot of deep R&D. So then I get to think about medical data and I get to think about the monetization of medical data, clinical trials, these types of things with blockchain. Then we have a venture studio with input output and and we do more than Cardano. The venture studio uh is building Midnight. The venture studio is building quantum hosky and we can get into that. It's one of the coolest projects I've ever worked on in my entire career. Um, and and these things we now get to think about privacy and gamefi and meme coins and we get to think about the innovation process and launching a company every year and doing something in a different vertical. Uh,

we're working on a lot of deep R&D projects and now that we're starting to get to kind of a a certain point, uh, there's a long backlog of things that I've always wanted to solve and some of them are in the crypto space and some of them are outside of the crypto space. Yeah. Um, you know, and some of them are just out there. Like I I have a a program that I'm going to go to the Monroe Institute and do a a multi-day training in person with an old CIA guy that ran Project Stargate to do remote viewing. I mean and somehow not surprised by that, Charles. Somehow not, are you um you like you you've been in the industry for like you said like longer than most. You've seen you've been like firsthand witness to pretty much everything. Are you impressed by how much crypto has

accomplished or let down or like you know I actually to kind of prep for this listen to some of your really old interviews from back in the day like a decade ago and um you know a lot of the things that you were predicting have actually kind of come true like you know the government would you you were kind of calling and saying the government would start to attack us once we got big enough and a bunch of different things in the industry you know Bitcoin going well above six figures you were calling for that very very early days are you impressed by how much we've accomplished or are you uh let down by the lack of accomplishments? H how do you feel about where the industry's gotten so far?

Isn't it funny that we're never allowed to have a win? You know, never 15 years we've gone from under a billion dollars, no one cares, there's no one in N to half a billion people, trillions of dollars, the US government holding it. And we're right at an inflection point where mass adoption is about to happen. We'll have billions of users and be a 10 trillion market by the end of the decade. And crypto is literally percolating and entering in to everything. There's blockchain research labs at every Fortune 500 company. Uh and the rate of technological progress is growing parabolically. So, so yes, we've achieved enormous things. Um there's frustrations in that people continue to look at crypto only as a financial product and they say is it a

security or commodity? And you know, I've always said it is a trust engine to think about the economic, political, and social systems of the world. So to me it makes a lot more sense to to to start saying let's get crypto into real world applications and real life things. The reason they're not there yet is actually technological. Um we spent a long time figuring out how to do smart contracts, a long time figuring out governance structures, a long time figuring out interoperability like the bridges and and uh and hybrid applications, these types of things. We didn't think too much about the privacy and the identity side of the equation. And the thing is anything that's real world business, it has a public side and a private side.

So, you know, if you if you run a company, you know, you have an HR department, are all your HR files public record? No, you keep them private. You know, we don't want to know, you know, what little Bobby was doing in the bathroom, you know. So, so, so you probably want to have a private side. So, you can't put all that on a blockchain. But the problem is that when you want to do a real world thing, if you have a blockchain and non-blockchain side, you collapse the entire trust, privacy and control model of that to the non-blockchain side. So it's like it's basically centralized. You know, Circle is a great example where it runs on all these blockchains, but there's a centralized issuer, a centralized actor.

So at the end of the day, it's not really a blockchain ethos compatible product because at any time it just gets collapsed to one single entity and you just have to go talk to that entity to freeze and seize and recall and to create a ponopticon to reveal what people have been buying with uh their stuff. So you really want privacy inside the conversation, but you need programmable privacy and selective disclosure. Now once we have those components, what that does is that opens up the real world application space and that's where you get the mainstream adoption. That's where the Magnificent 7 come in. That's where everyday consumers are using it on their cell phone. That's when grandma's using it. You know, that's when we actually get to two or three billion users and blockchain basically percolates into uh the world

and tradi and defi go away and they become fi just like kind of like legacy media and internet media became media and everything just kind of blended together. That's where we're going to we're heading with all of that. And I think that's the last generation. We're currently late third generation in the technology. I got on board late first generation, mid-first generation, then created the second generation with Vitalic and the other guys was a pioneer in the third generation with Cardano and now we're with Midnight in the fourth generation. But that's the last mile and once we have it, we'll get billions of adoption and everything else. We won't talk about crypto anymore because like who talks about internet anymore.

Like we suppose when you build a product that there's going to be an internet connection to that product. We don't even it's not a differentiating USP or something to even discuss. This episode is brought to you by Scale, the next evolution in layer 1 blockchains. With a gas-free, invisible user experience, instant finality, and robust security, scale allows for limitless scalability, and has already saved its $50 million users over 11 billion in gas fees. scales, high throughput, zero transaction costs, and powerful web3 infrastructure make it the ideal platform for gaming, AI, and other high throughput apps. To explore the

gas-free ecosystem, visit scale.space/ecosystem and follow their journey on X at scale network. That's scale spelled with a K. Thanks to Scale for making today's episode possible. Katana isn't another new generalpurpose blockchain. Its purpose built for DeFi users to provide the best experience possible. It does this by sustainably generating deeper liquidity and higher yield than any other network. If your assets are sitting idle, then they're dead. Katana is built from the ground up with DeFi mechanics to bring your bags back to life. All you have to do is bridge over and Katana does the rest for you.

Incubated by Polygon Labs and GSR, Katana launches with a notable ecosystem of primitives, assets, and partners like Morpho Sushi Vertex Lombard Chain Link, and Year. Be early to Katana. Join the pre-eposit campaign before mainet opens at the end of this month. Deposit funds and open rewards filled with randomized amounts of KAT tokens. There's also a Cryptounk and other exclusive NFTts hidden for the lucky ones. As always, investments in blockchain technology involve risk terms and conditions apply.

How do you balance Charles? I mean, you have a strong like u backbone of what you believe. I feel like like privacy maybe is one example here. How do you balance uh these things that you believe, but also maybe if you believe them too much uh it makes it so that user acquisition and developer acquisition actually slows down? Like I'm looking at like I think you guys are looking at uh DeFi Llama. You guys are the 20th largest chain right now by the met a metric that they look at on here. I think it's TVL that I'm looking at here. Things like Ethereum and Salana and Tron and Arbitum and Sooie and Hyperlid are bigger than you guys right now. Um, and h how do you think about that uh dichotomy?

Yeah. Well, you know, it doesn't bother me too much KPIs and metrics. Just to discuss that, it always depends on what you value. So like Bitcoin has no DeFi market, very little TVL, and it's all in layer twos. So, you know, it's the most successful cryptocurrency and it's the one that everybody acknowledges is going to be around forever without any doubt and it it is zero on many of these metrics. And so, Cardano is always like a hybrid where it has a lot of Bitcoin's ethos. And we tried to start from resilient decentralization, gradually build up and then uh work our way into the DeFi space. And we were very late to the game with smart contracts. And there are certain things that made it a little bit more difficult to build that side like the UTXO development model. On the other hand, they give us massive

competitive advantages when you look at Bitcoin DeFi because now Bitcoin wants to do DeFi and it's a lot easier to write UTXO smart contracts on Cardano than it is uh to write those on Ethereum or Salana. So, you know, when you look at these generational things, sometimes your time hasn't come yet. So, what I do is I say start always with the principles and look to the future and ask yourself where is it going in 10 years? Like when I did the Bitcoin education project, I had a slide in 2013 where I talked about what would have to happen for $10,000 Bitcoin, which was inconceivable when Bitcoin was $4. But we talked about it being say, well, these are the fundamental characteristics that have to be there.

So when you look architecturally, you see in the next five or 10 years, the guys are always coming and going. it was Ethereum was the big dog and then Salana was the big dog and you know now people are talking about Sweet and Aptos and you know there's always this next big thing that's going to go kill all these other things and if you're chasing that tail you're never going to get anywhere because you're always chasing something that was in the making three years ago or five years ago. You have to predict the future. Yeah. And so when you look at TVL like what's the biggest grower of TVL uh for uh the next five years? is going to be real world assets and those are going to be nested in systems with privacy. It's going to be private stable coins and you know again you need a system with that

capability. So we got midnight coming out and also where the user is going to come from the liquidity going to come from the vast majority of that is going to come from Bitcoin even three or 4% is is like tens of billions of dollars of value and this an opportunity that's four times larger than the t than the market cap of Ethereum and Salana combined when you look at Bitcoin DeFi as an opportunity. So, you know, we look at the long arc and we say, are we in a competitive position for that? And we think we are. And also, it depends on how you count it. Like, for some reason, Ethereum gets to count its locked stake as TVL. We don't. If you count our stake that participates in consensus as TVL, our TVL would be 14 billion.

So, we don't get that on DeFi Lama. They don't report that metric. Well, you know, if you look at the list, where would we be on the list if we had a 14 billion TVL? You see, so some of these other things are that there our technology is different and so unfortunately it gets held against us. TPS is another example where if you go to eutxo.org you can see real time the Cardano network and what people don't understand is that one Cardano transaction can be many transactions together because of the input out the uh the UTXO model. So each output can be an event and EUTXO actually shows that. So when you go real time, you can actually see transactions falling. And when you look at the transaction embedded, there's an NFT being issued and money being moved and a

DEX swap happening in one transaction. So they say, well, look at your TPS rate. It's falling. Well, yeah, because people are more efficiently using transactions and one transaction can be a 100red events or 200 events. So no, it's not a lack of utilization. It's a more efficient utilization of a finite and scarce resource, you know, that we have. But it's so unfortunately because these are apples to oranges comparisons, they cause problems. So I I don't tend to think about them too much. I tend to think about the first principles and I tend to think about where is the industry going? Where will the users come from? Where will real value come from? What's going to be, you know, kind of the next big thing and are we architecturally and philosophically aligned with that? Um and then also

where have we screwed the pooch? Where have we done things wrong? Yeah. And you know, how do we change that? So we're moving to a multi client environment. So it's not just Haskell anymore. You got Rust and Go and Typescript. We have multiple programming languages now for smart contract development. So it's not just Haskell anymore. You can write Rust smart contracts with Akin and TypeScript smart contracts and these types of things. So developer accessibility, you know, has dramatically improved. Uh and then also Midnight as a project has fixed a lot of broken windows and interoperability. So suddenly we're now on Brave with 91 million new users. Now we're on blockchain.com and soon to be Bitcoin.com and we we have a lot of custodians now supporting Cardano native assets and and ADA. So now Copper is in and all these other guys are in 108

deals over the last year which is one every three days. So we're kind of getting that interoperability thing so that Cardano is no longer an island and I think that'll massively improve the TVL side. So before going too deep into kind of Cardono versus the rest of the industry and stuff like that, um there is you I feel like you can't talk about Cardono without talking about the Uber drivers and I want to know how this became kind of I think the best like a a meme essentially. I mean I feel like you've got like the class of 2017 kind of got you know chain chain link and Sergey got the link marines and you know you know another person got the like you know Neo had like the Ethereum of Asia. you guys got somehow in with the Uber crowd and I want to know I want to know the story

here. How did this happen? I I don't know. I mean I've heard that and there's this weirdness that and it sometimes comes from like the podcasting elite like the bankless people in Ethereum land where they say well there there's no compelling re real reason why Cardano can win or be successful or have adoption. So there just must be this large cabal of misinformed people whether it be the hairdresser or the Uber driver or the waitress who's just buying Cardano and it's a cult and there's no real value there. It's it's a pjorative in many cases when when people say that you you know and meanwhile we have we've been right about everything like Vitalik is saying hey maybe we should have liquid non-custodial staking we've had it since the beginning Vitalic is saying hey UTXO is actually useful we

should probably find a path to do that especially for the zero knowledge stuff we've had it since the beginning you know we said hey formal methods matters we've been running eight years straight 247 and we haven't had a major hack meanwhile there's 80 million to hundred million dollars a day in hacks and other ecosystems. So, we say these things. We wrote 250 plus papers. We have 168 scientists. We did the work. We wrote the code. And then somehow, despite all of that, we're super slow. Our technology is obsolete. I don't even know what that means. And uh and there's no compelling adoption or technical reason to be there. And we have a four and by the way, we have four and a half million people now in the Cardano ecosystem. So, year after year, net net, we continue to grow in terms of the raw

population. And then they say, "Well, the only reason they're growing is because it's a cult and misinformed uh people with no understanding of crypto are buying it and uh it's there." And and yet we're a thought leader for many of these things and we have long arc bets that we've made. So if they I give them the benefit of the doubt, maybe it's because common people agree with the philosophy and principles. They enjoy the decentralization. They enjoy that we care about freedom of associate, commerce, and expression. and they just want a system that's philosophically pure. And they say, "Hey, if I'm going to get into crypto, I want crypto to solve real problems economically, politically, and socially." And my AMAs, I talk a lot about what crypto does for society as a whole. You know, I say

things like, "Hey, you're angry. There's a big chunk of the American population angry about the 2020 election and said that the votes were stolen." Fine. Don't complain about it. Fix it. So, blockchain can fix it. We could actually have a voting system where we could audit and know that the system has not been tampered with and know that your vote has been counted correctly. That's what blockchain can do for you. They say, "Well, I'd like to have a system like that." Or, you know, you could have another thing about disclosures, whistleblowing, and other things. So, let's say you run a big organization, you want a whistleblowing system so people can alert that the CEO is doing something wrong or the CFO is stealing money or things like, "Well, that's zero knowledge technology." So, these aren't hypothetical things. These are things that come up politically, economically,

socially on a daily basis. Abuses of power, theft, waste, fraud, and abuse, and fundamentally a lack of trust. And so we come in and we say blockchain is going to solve that. And my entire career, whether it's been Bitcoin or Ethereum or Cardano or now Midnight, I've been saying these are the tools of freedom. So people hear that. The Uber driver hears that. And a lot of these people, especially at the lower rungs of the economic ladder, they're angry because they feel like they don't have a voice. They're they're a drift on a boat where they can't decide where it's going to go. And they're basically victims of circumstance. And they're told, "By the way, in five or 10 years, you're going to lose your job to humanoid robot or AI." So they're like, "We got to have a

better system. Lateage capitalism is a bad deal." So they look to crypto and they say, "This is the escape valve for us to get out." When you look at the marketing of Salana or the marketing of Ethereum or the marketing of many of these other newer things like Spirto, it's so focused on web 3 stuff like how do we get more yield? How do you get more TVL? Look at our growth. Look at our TPS rate. What the [ __ ] does that mean philosophically to anybody? When you look at the marketing of Bitcoin, it doesn't talk about any of that. It says Bitcoin is the antidote. Bitcoin is the solution. And you notice how Bitcoin has the strongest community. Yeah.

The largest community and it still preserves and protects its value. So, so how important is storytelling then, right? Because it is Yeah, I do notice like you like I mean you've got more money like you could retire if you wanted to. I think that's no surprise, right? You could go chill on the ranch and you could like, you know, fly the jet and stuff like that. Why are you I mean you're out here making like daily YouTube videos. Why Why is this so like why are you still doing this? Because we haven't accomplished the mission yet. We're not done until blockchains in every facet of society and it holds people honest. You got to remember where I came from. I I was the Ron Paul guy and we had three simple things. We wanted to follow the Constitution. We wanted to have sound money and we wanted a humble foreign

policy. Are we following the Constitution in the United States of America? No. Do we have a humble foreign policy? We just bombed Iran. Okay. No, we don't have a humble foreign policy. We're still running around doing crazy [ __ ] And do we have sound money? We have $35 trillion national debt heading to $50 trillion. It's burning itself out. And you know, people are getting systemically poorer. What do you mean we're not What do you mean we're not following the Constitution? I agree with you on the on the second two, but what do you what do you mean by that? Oh my lord, there's massive constitutional abuses. First, the Constitution said only gold and silver could be money. We don't even follow that. Do you think we really have freedom of speech? Nah, not really. You know, do you think we really have a freedom? Like, do you think the

government's not spying on us right now? Palunteer just got uh, you know, the world's best spy deal ever to create total information awareness and, you know, read everybody's stuff. Um every place you look uh FISA courts uh are are fundamentally unconstitutional. Patriarch is fundamentally unconstitutional. Uh you know only Congress has authority to initiate conflict but yet the president can just unilaterally bomb people without congressional approval or consent. Um you know you have uh people being arrested without due process. On Alawalaki, a US citizen was killed without due process in a non-combat setting. you you know you don't have to be nom Chomsky to see the enormous civil rights violations, procedural

violations, and just the scope and scale of the US government. There's no constitutional authorization for most of the bureaucracy of the United States. They just created it during the progressive era and they brought it out. There's unconstitutional agencies like the Federal Reserve. It's neither a private nor a public institution. So what branch of the US government is the Federal Reserve in? Is it an executive branch? then Trump should be able to fire the head of the Federal Reserve. Is it a legislative branch? Well, then they would be subject to legislative oversight and GAO audit. But they're neither. So, how can we when the Constitution doesn't give us the right to do this create an organization that it transcends the US government? It's almost like a fourth branch just for fun and had to run for 100 years. And by the

way, it's not a small thing. Your entire life you what do you do? You look at your bank account every day. You go to work. Why do you go to work to make money? What money are you making the US dollar? And so the thing that controls whether that's valuable or not valuable, you as a person in a representative republic have no say over the leadership of it, the management of it, and you are not even allowed to audit that organization. I don't think the founding fathers stood up for [ __ ] like that, man. This episode is brought to you by Scale, the next evolution in layer 1 blockchains. With a gas-free, invisible user experience, instant finality, and robust security, Scale allows for limitless scalability, and has already saved its $50 million users over 11

billion in gas fees. scales, high throughput, zero transaction costs, and powerful web 3 infrastructure make it the ideal platform for gaming, AI, and other high throughput apps. To explore the gas-free ecosystem, visit scale.space/ecosystem and follow their journey on X at scale network. That's scale spelled with a K. Thanks to Scale for making today's episode possible. Katana isn't another new general purpose blockchain. Its purpose built for DeFi users to provide the best experience possible. It does this by sustainably generating deeper liquidity and higher yield than any other network. If your assets are

sitting idle, then they're dead. Katana is built from the ground up with DeFi mechanics to bring your bags back to life. All you have to do is bridge over and Katana does the rest for you. Incubated by Polygon Labs and GSR, Katana launches with a notable ecosystem of primitives, assets, and partners like Morpho Sushi Vertex Lombard Chainlink, and Year. Be early to Katana. Join the pre-eposit campaign before mainet opens at the end of this month. Deposit funds and open rewards filled with randomized amounts of KAT tokens.

There's also a Cryptounk and other exclusive NFTts hidden for the lucky ones. As always, investments in blockchain technology involve risk terms and conditions apply. Let's get into politics a little bit. I mean, so there was this New York Times article the other day and uh I mean, you got basically it says uh there's like the people who shaped crypto in the United States. You got a big picture of Trump here and you've got um you got Bill Zanker, you got David Sachs, you got you got um who do we have here? Eric Trump. Um who else do we have here?

You've got David Bailey, Brad Garlinghouse, and you have you right here. And there's only like 10 people on this on this on this list. So, you you mentioned you're a Ron Paul guy. So, what do you make of just Yeah. the politics in America today? Well, I I mean, we're we're a three planks of government. You have judicial, executive, and legislative. And during the evils of the Biden administration, the only thing that saved our industry was the judiciary, the judges stepped in and said, "The SEC does not have the authority to do for this gargantuan overreach." And it started swatting them down and the repudiations got worse and worse as the abuses of power grew. But it was the last stand because if the

judges stood with the executive branch, we would have been [ __ ] as an industry. So now we're in a situation where Trump has enabled and empowered the legislative branch because of the Republican majority to actually pass laws to restructure and rebuild the entire US view of the cryptocurrency side. So what happened was that after he got elected created cryptozar it was very fluid time and it wasn't clear who was going to be that. I think Elon Musk picked um David Saxs because he kind of jumped the queue from all the people that interviewed and talked about it and David uh basically created a process to have the legislative branch start passing laws. So we've been working very closely with the legislative side. We just had a round table with four

different senators and 35 staffers. Uh actually was the day the Genius Act passed and uh we talked a lot about clarity and the market structure and we did have some uh discussions about Genius. We we really were keen on section 14. We put in the the N stuff. Um and so what we've been focused on IO has been primarily the legislative process and the the the and we tried to engage with the White House, but if you read that particular article, it talked about how difficult and weird it was where I was going to have dinner with the president at Mara Lago while literally flying there. They canceled the dinner. Then the day after they added ADA to the reserve, then we had an invitation to go to the White House. Uh, and then they rescended the invitation.

Then I moderated a panel with Don Jr. and I moderated a panel with Eric Trump. So, we're it's weird and it's a very chaotic thing. And I think that that is a microcosm of a macro problem with how the Trump White House runs itself. But let's be clear on the legislative side, uh we've had a constant since actually September discussion with many people in leadership about foundational things that need to happen for crypto to be successful in the United States. Because when the president says a mandate, we want America to be the best place to found fund and run a cryptocurrency business.

He's not saying we want America to be the best place to run Ethereum businesses or Salana businesses or Bitcoin businesses, saying crypto businesses. So that has to be all the layer ones, that has to be the layer 2s, it has to be the DAP and DeFi industry. And so if you think about legislation, it's multi-administration. The Securities Exchange Act of 1933 was passed 92 years ago, and we're still using its definition of an investment contract. So the Clarity Act, if it's written right, is going to transcend the Trump administration, and we're going to be talking about it for decades to come.

So we got to get it written in a way that allows rule making then to have enough dynamicism that it can evolve and change over time as technology changes and the rulem will take about 2 to three years. So the executive branch went to the legislative branch. The legislative branch will do its job. Then it'll go back to the executive branch for rulemaking. We're going to be involved and have been involved on the legislative side. We've been heavily involved then when it gets back to the executive side at the administrative level. So that's going to be working groups between the SEC, the CFTC, hopefully NIST, really advocating strongly to get them involved because you need the science capacity um and the engineering capacity to understand it.

Also, you need it for government procurement like how does the Department of Commerce or DoD or Secretary of State write an RFP for crypto if they don't have any definitions or standards inside the United States. So we're just trying to be the adults in the room. What a lot of people have tried to do, Yano, for this is hijack the process for branded optics and political. Yeah, I'm in the room. I was at the White House. I've done this thing. I'm a big guy. It's like, yeah, everyone's got the everyone's got the million donate dollar donation. I know the selfie and then uh yeah, they all want that. But then it's like, guys, okay, great. You got a picture with the president and great you went to the White House. But you do understand that like we went from US trying to kill crypto to the US liking

crypto. We could go back to trying to kill crypto. The delta between that is the administration and administrations come and go. The thing that prevents that from happening is rulemaking and laws. So the nexus of power is article one here. You have to get good legislation passed and you have to get legislation that's dynamic enough that it's updatable at the rulemaking level so that we as an industry don't get stung with scary gary again. So that's been our constant focus for the last uh 7 months. And frankly, actually, a lot of the people that are writing these laws, we've worked with since 2022. We got early copies of the FIA from Senator Lumis and Gillibrand back when they were trying to pass it under the Biden administration. And and so for over three years, we've been engaging with a

lot of these people, whether it be Senator Scott or Lumus or others. Um, and built relationships there. Uh and and what what that's allowed us to do is to have an adult conversation about what needs to be in like we really have to have a serious conversation about the definition of investment contract for for it's been wrong since 1946. You know, we really have to have a serious adult conversation about inter agency rulemaking and also we have to create provisions to make sure that crypto can also be treated as a non-financial product. It can't be like fit 21 where it's either commodity or security and there's no difference between two.

That's like saying the internet can either be a chat app or email. It's like it's a lot of things, guys. So, so if you regulate the internet in 1992, maybe that would be your view of it. But so you can't just view crypto as a financial product. And the first few pieces of legislation, unfortunately, they were too much aligned on that. And our view was it would destroy innovation. You have to open up for the industry as a whole. And it can't have statutory exemptions for specific blockchains. The first draft of the FIA actually had exemptions for Ethereum and Bitcoin, which made no sense. And so regardless of where the technologies at, what the technology does, if it's large or small, by law, they get special passes and then everything else is under a test. It's like it should be one

standard for everybody in the entire uh in the entire cryptocurrency space. Are you um are you worried at all that the industry has gotten too in bed with the Republicans and that if the every if things flip back and become more progressive or Democrats get back in power that it's going to be really net negative for the industry? Well, I mean, what more can the Democrats do? Um Biden took a position that everybody in the cryptocurrency space is a criminal. They shut our bank accounts down. They sued every US exchange. They said every cryptocurrency is a security for Bitcoin. They tried to kill it with environmental policy. I I I mean there was no safe harbor under the Democrats. So So what are they going to do? Like like double kill us? I I I I

mean this is almost like the cadaavver synod with Pope Formosus and Pope Stefan V 6. Like Formosus was already dead when Stefan V 6 put him on trial. So what are you going to do? Like sentence the corpse to extra death? So what more can the Democrats do to us at this point? They they were not pro- crypto at all. So, you know, and if the Democrats are like, "Well, you gota you got to be like nicer to us or else, you know, when we get back in power, we'll hurt you." No, the proper thing they should do is apologize for Gary Gendler. And the proper thing they should do is say, "Here's our strategy to be bipartisan and work together." And by the way, when you look at the Clarity Act and Genius Act, when it went to a vote, it wasn't party line. There were Democrats who

voted for it. So there especially amongst younger Democrats who aren't beholden to the Warren part of the party, they really do feel like this technology is intrinsically bipartisan and and you got to understand that a lot of the people who are billionaires and powerful in the cryptocurrency space, they're young and politically liberal. So the crazy part of all of this when you remove the miasma of the Trump administration is that half or more of these people who got rich from crypto will be donors for the left.

And so when you start talking on a bipartisan basis, you're like, look, look, widen the aperture and think about a life after the drama and chaos of all this stuff. Do you want 25 more billionaire donors or not? Do you want half of America because there's there's, you know, 50ome million Americans that hold crypto. Most of them are young, so politically probably the majority of them are liberal. Do you want to take money out of the pockets of people that normally vote for you or do you want to put money in the pockets of people that vote for you? When you start having that conversation, they do the math and the numbers, they're like, "Shit, yeah, we got to get behind crypto."

Just some things have come up that have been horrifically counterproductive to the process. Trumpcoin was horrifically counterproductive and uh Trump's business interests in crypto have been counterproductive. They had I been an adviser, I would have said like I'm not telling you not to do these things, but why don't you wait until after the legislation's been passed and we're in the rulemaking phase to launch your projects uh and launch them under the new frameworks. So then there's everybody's following the same rules. problem now is that it's reduced the entire dialogue to crypto equals Trump equals bad amongst some people on the left and uh especially the politically elite inside America. And it's just sad because we actually in December were in a very bipartisan spot. Uh a lot of people post Harris realized one of the

reasons they lost the election was because of crypto. It it moved several million votes and so they were prepared to embrace crypto fully and we were looking at a a very bipartisan program. It's still bipartisan, but it's light bipartisan now, unfortunately. And you're absolutely right to point out that, you know, if we continue go down this road, it will become a wedge issue, just like abortion, for example, is a wedge issue between the Yeah, I I actually I I do agree with that. Um Charles, what do you think of these crypto treasury vehicles or digital asset vehicle? What whatever we want to call them.

I got a banker every [ __ ] day reaching out to every day, right? Every day. Let's do something with it. You They want me to Why don't you Why don't you do something? I probably will. you know, I learn by doing and so I'll reserve comment until I actually start something and then then I'll be like, "Yeah, it's the best thing since sliced bread." Yeah. Yeah. That's how it goes. Well, maybe I mean on on those um or like I guess adjacent to that you guys have uh I was trying to find out how much was in your treasury, but you guys have something like 1.2 1.25 billion in your treasury. I think that's on the price of ADA. It's about 1.8 billion ADA. And so it's like 1.2 billion or something like that.

1.2 billion dollars in your treasury. Yeah. on chain treasury, not our treasury, but the Cardano itself. Cardono. Yeah. Yeah. And I saw a video um I think it was maybe a month or two ago from an interview where you were proposing converting some of the ADA into Bitcoin and stable coins and then using yield to buy back ADA from what I can kind of understand. But yeah, it accurately. So, so I you know a minute I said it then all these maxis came out and said Charles is dumping all of his ADA for Bitcoin. I was like Jesus [ __ ] Yeah, that's how it goes. That's how it goes man. So here's the thing. saying the Cardano treasury is an onchain treasury. So it is passive non-yield bearing and single asset and unmanaged just ADA. Uh so the suggestion was to create a governance vehicle where uh

basically we could have an a treasury that is managed multi-asset and yield bearing and then the community could decide on an annual basis of how much they want to live in bucket A and how much they want to live in bucket B and for the stuff that's managed when it makes a yield have that yield by ADA and send it back to bucket A. Um and so the amounts are immaterial but it's it's more of a question philosophically do we want to upgrade our treasury vehicle to have some management layer and then there's has to be a governance structure to handle that usually a board of governors and then an administrator and then uh some form of financial uh an advisor that does the actual deployment of capital now the primary problem I want to solve is that the stable coin issuance of Cardono is very soft and so

it would be nice to get 25 to50 million dollars of stable coins minted through this vehicle every year so that we can kind of build it up. The other thing is Bitcoin DeFi, we have prime the pump. So it'd be nice to put 50 million to $100 million worth of Bitcoin and show on Cardano, Bitcoin can get a bitcoin yield. Uh then that can create a channel for more Bitcoin to come into Cardano and we can use it to seed up kind of like you when you're growing a crystal, you have a seed to grow the crystal. So similarly, you put the first 50 million in to grow that up. So that was the idea. But what's nice is as ADA grows, the treasury can grow. And then it becomes like a sovereign wealth fund and it generates a passive return for the ecosystem as a whole. And then the

ecosystem can if they don't want to do anything with it, just buy ADA with it and send it back uh like you would with a sovereign fund. Or it could deploy that capital in more intelligent ways like it could for example take equity positions and key projects or blockchain to blockchain partnerships like let's say maybe we make a deal with XRP. So the treasury actually buys some XRP as an example. So it shows now the Cardano ecosystem is a holder in that. Why don't Okay, if you extend this far enough on the let's say there's a spectrum here, why don't you just go the EOS strategy and just convert all your I mean I think block one is the fourth or third largest holder of Bitcoin in the entire world. Like why not just go all the way, sell all the ADA, buy Bitcoin,

you're then like a top five Bitcoin holder in the world and then you can do a bunch of good with with that money. Because ADA is a significantly better investment than Bitcoin. It's not me saying it's a fact. So here's some history that you might not be aware of. When the ADA crowd sale happened, um we didn't yen and the yen was converted to Bitcoin for auditability. So an audit reports actually coming out likely next month to it'll show the Bitcoin addresses for this. But at one time I was one of the largest holders of Bitcoin in the world. We had 108,000 Bitcoin. So you know that's a lot of Bitcoin. But it was that $250 give or take, you know, depending on when it was purchased because there were several tranches for it. Well, here's the thing.

If you do the market valuation of that, what 12 13 billion, you know, depends on the the Bitcoin value of the day. Yeah. Well, if we just held the Bitcoin from the ADA sale, it'd be 12 billion. The market value of Cardano is 30 billion. So, we outperformed Bitcoin by a factor of 2.8, give or take. So, people are like, oh, you know, Bitcoin is such a better investment than all these other things. Well, EOS, absolutely that's true. The only two around from that era are Ethereum and Cardano where actually the network substantially outperform Bitcoin this case by almost 300%.

Wait, what are the two? Cardano and what's the other one you said? Ethereum. And Ethereum. Yeah, those are the only two. So, so that's that's just the fact, you know. So, so why is it all why don't you just convert all your ADA to Bitcoin? It's like okay, so we can make less money uh as an e. You think you think ADA will still outperform BTC in the future? Of course, because how much farther can Bitcoin go? Maybe to a million. Okay, it's a 10x. ADA can go 100x, a thousandx uh over this. It's like guys, we're not a secondass citizen. Cardano does substantially more. And because of Bitcoin DeFi, it's going to end up probably being the yield layer of Bitcoin. And so, it's going to get a huge halo effect from that. And because of the launch model of Midnight, partner chains are going to bring in airdrops

almost annually to ADA. So, you're like making the case for holding ADA. It's like if you hold ADA, you're going to get Knight tokens. Knight could be a $10 billion product right out of the gate and 50% of the supply is being allocated to uh ADA holders and every year these things are going to be dropping. When does that when does that airdrop happen? The airdrop is uh the second half of the year we'll have an announcement at Rare Evo about it. Uh but that's like imminent. It's not like a hypothetical thing. It's like this year and midnight's launching this year and every year you know these drops are coming and when you hold ADA you're going to get multiple revenue streams.

you get the ADA yield, but then you also get all the other tokens that are managed inside the ecosystem. So, I mean, if you look at the technology, the growth of the technology, the growth of the community, where we're at in the product life cycle, uh, relative to Bitcoin, you also take a look at all the upside that can come, it it's a it's a probably a a 10x to 100x difference between what's potentially possible for ADA over Bitcoin. So, why was there a suggestion to convert some ADA to Bitcoin? It's a good asset to hold, but more importantly, it primes the Bitcoin DeFi pump. That was the suggestion there.

But, you know, here's another thing people don't get about our TVL. Once yield products and lending products come on Cardano, our TVL is probably going to be over 10 billion instantly from that because 50% or more of the ADA supply is in Japan. That's about $15 billion worth of ADA. Okay. Wait, 50% of the ADA supply is in is in the because the owners, Japanese owners, they never sold it. They never sold it. They bought it back in 2015. Okay. Okay. Let me ask you this. So, I was talking to people before this episode being like, "All right, like, you know, a bunch of like OG friends and stuff." I was like, "What should I ask Charles?" And he's like, "I'm you know, we we can see where you want to take this take this question." But they were like, "You should ask him about the

original founding of Cardono in Japan with like the four families or the four banks." And I was like, "What are you talking about?" They're like, "Charles will know what what what you're talking about." So, where do I know how you would take that that answer? I I mean so so we actually had one of the most decentralized distributions in the history of cryptocurrency and we actually have the only one that had provable people. So the entire crowd sale was basically in Japan. Everybody who bought they bought usually with yen. So they went from not from crypto but from fiat into crypto. So it brought a lot of new people into the space and there were 9,900 and some Japanese people that participated. They all went through KYC.

It was only in Japan. It was Japan and a little bit in Korea. Interesting. Why Japan? Why'd you do Japan? Because the the people who uh who when I just did Ethereum and some people in Japan reached out to me and said we want to do the Ethereum of Japan and and I had been pushed out of Ethereum. So I had this unused roadmap for Ethereum. Got it. Okay. This is what I was trying to understand with a with a friend of mine who was you know kind of early early Ethereum world as well. He was saying someone else had the kind of idea for Ethereum of Japan or Ethereum of of Asia or something and then they reached out to Charles to run it. Well, yeah, I had the entire road map and all the technical stuff, but the the thing is they had the market access. So, we

partnered people who had the market access became Emergo, which is a sister company and uh I created input output out of it. And so, we did the protocol engineering and the the product philosophy and these things and kind of the design of Cardano and then they they did the initial distribution and took care of that uh that side of the house. Uh so, basically almost 10,000 people bought it. It was all in Japan. um they bought vouchers and you know raised about $60 million. It was converted into uh into uh Bitcoin and it was 108,000 Bitcoin and then it financed the project throughout its entire life cycle. Uh and what was really cool is like the Japanese buy and hold and just never sell. So like 50% or more is still sitting in Japan. So it's about $15

billion and they're they sell they get a 55% tax rate. So here's why it's going to supercharge DeFi. So they just never sell because of the tax rate. Yeah, they just hold it. So, but but they're not taxed on those. But basically, if you make a yield product out of it where they lend their ADA, create a stable coin, and then do that, then they're not selling, right? So once those DeFi markets turn on and the Japanese decide to do that like instantly the TVL goes to like is that the dynamic with some of these other like uh this they're I don't know how you feel about this term but like dinocoins like you know there's when when the market really pumps like you guys pump ripple pumps Hideera pumps Algorand pumps like is that because a lot of the holders are in Asia where the

tax rate is actually a lot higher uh it depends on the dynamics but Cardano has the largest Asian ownership partner interesting who's the guy who's the guy who reached out to you in the first place is like a very wealthy Japanese guy. No, no, no, no. Actually, it was crazy. My secretary that I had when I was at Ethereum was Jeremy Wood. He lived in Osaka, Japan. And he played poker with a random guy who was like a crypto investor, and he wasn't even a big crypto investor. He was like a midsize crypto investor in Japan who'd made some money off of XRP and Bitcoin. And he's like, I really like what you guys did with Ethereum. That's so cool. And you know, I have some friends we probably could set up and everybody's fundraising this particular way. we probably could figure out how to raise some money if

you guys want to do like an Ethereum of Japan. So my ex- secretary called me and he's like, "Do you want to come to Japan and talk to this guy and and I I was like, "Oh man, I'mma leave crypto. I'm just I'm owing two, you know, I'm having a bad [ __ ] it, I'll go. I need I need a distraction." So I flew out and I spent a week with these guys and that were like, "Yeah, this sounds like a lot of fun. Let's go for it." And uh I put I had the whole Ethereum plan already written down. I was really excited about it. you know, this formal methods things and UTXO and we knew how to do the proof of stake and the other stuff and basically started from scratch and uh and had to build new companies and a foundation and all this other stuff and

it was an enormous amount of work and nobody cared about it at all until we launched in 2017 and then when uh then we launched it immediately went to the top 10 and it never left um for any substantial period of time and we outlined the road map. We said we're going to start as a static federated system and then grow to dynamic and decentralized and then add smart contracts and add governance and then add scalability inside the system. So we're 10 years into it and we're nearly done with the entire original roadmap and we're in a really strong position because it's it's become this incredible project. And what's ironic is the Japanese are kind of running the system now. You know they all the the drep power is in their hands and we have an onchain constitution and they elect people now. The largest derepp is a

Japanese guy named Uda. you know, so so they're and and you know, Japan didn't really like the way that things were done initially, but then uh what happened is that once it became the largest Japanese cryptocurrency, they're like, "Yeah, Cardano was made in Japan. It's our thing." It's like we we it's we run that. Um in Japan, you just have to live long enough so they forget why they hate you and then they then they then they accept you gradually. But it was a wild time. I got to see the whole country. I lived in Osaka for a bit. I started Hokkaido, went all the way down I didn't know this.

That's cool. Uh and and we have a lot of lifelong friends there and there's just a lot of power in that uh base. But you got to understand Japan is like its own planet and so it's not connected to Silicon Valley. It's not connected to the US media. So that's why that phrase big in Japan is such a thing because it they're so far apart that when things happen in Japan, people in US tend to ignore it unless they make an action to move it into the United States. So it was both a blessing and a curse. It was a blessing because we were insulated and we could grow in our own way and also because the financing was done as Regex and Softshore. It it had a very different character than let's say Salana did or Ethereum did or um or EOS did.

Um but it also the the other issue was that Silicon Valley mostly ignored it and a lot of people mostly ignored it and they weren't really sure like where's the nexus of the success from? So it must just be like everybody loves Charles and he's a great cult leader and he just pushed these things along not realizing there's millions of people in the community and they actually do care about it and they invest in it, build it up and there's a lot of activity. It's just in a very non-traditional way. Yeah. Yeah. Um I'm trying to think of uh the the appropriate way to ask this question, but how do you uh how do you manage your personal money, Charles?

Well, there's a big crypto component to it and then there's a lot of private wealth management. So, all the usual private wealth suspects and you know, you create a diversified portfolio of these things. Like, are you mostly out of like I mean, you obviously, you know, Cardano is trading at Cardono's FTV is 37 billion today. I don't know what percentage you owned. Let's make it up and call it 10%. Uh, so then that's a, you know, roughly a four billion to you. I've I also have, one of my friends was like, yeah, at one point I think Charles owned about 50,000 Bitcoin. um which is let's call it six $66 billion. So I'm doing good. Yo.

Yeah. What do you do? Uh I want to maybe segue into some of the fun stuff you do with your money. Um there's we can go anywhere where we want with this. I've got I've got a story someone texted me about buying a Blackhawk for about 10 million. I've got someone else who said you own more buffalo than anyone in the world. That's true. I only own about a few hundred of them. Ted Turner's ranch has got like half a million or something. That's what I said. I said I fig I thought Ted Turner owned more than that. Um and John Malone, too, I think owns owns a lot of them or a lot of lot of land at least.

Um and then you've got an alien tech expedition. So where um tell me about some of these stories, man. Like how how do you get into this? There's a lot there's a lot of there's a lot of billionaires out there who are not doing this these interesting, you know, trying to find aliens and buying Blackhawks. So, well, I mean, they they probably do, but they they're just less public, you know, about all these things. And I'm a very public guy because I'm kind of the the new generation of billionaire. And so, we're we're all out there and everything goes on Twitter. So, uh, with respect to Blackhawk, what happened was that I have a ranch and a farm and also I have a clinic. And so, the clinic's in Gillette, the farm is in Boulder, and the ranch is in Wheatland. So, it takes about three hours to drive to the ranch,

it takes about five hours to drive to Gillette. So, I got really tired of driving, you know, back and forth. And I said, it'd probably make a lot more sense by a helicopter. But then when I started thinking about helicopters, I said, 'Well, if I'm going to do it, because we have a lot of heavy industry stuff and also wildfires, it would be nice to buy a helicopter that can also do heavy stuff like heavy lifting and fence building and ranch work, but then also can be used to treat wildfires. So then we started looking at all these different thing and I also have private security detail and you know I wanted something that potentially could be used in training missions with these guys or if we want to do humanitarian stuff like I sent my helicopter for example uh to North Carolina after hurricane Helena

happened we worked with Samaritan's Purse and we had uh Don Jr. on the helicopter and we worked with Billy Graham's grandson and we delivered generators to people and you know all kinds of things. In fact, right there that uh that story Wyoming man donated a Blackhawk helicopter to Hurricane Helena disaster in the Cowboy State Daily. That's a picture of the helicopter. So, when we put all the mission profile, and those are my pilots. When we put all the mission profiles together, uh it came down to uh Blackhawk is the way to go. The problem was that the FAA wasn't really enamored with the idea of a civilian, you know, doing it for all these profiles. So, it took a little while to kind of figure out a package with that they would be comfortable with. And then what I ended up doing is I upgraded the helicopter substantially.

So that's an Alpha model. And what I did is I added uh a Lima engine with So the Alpha models came out in the 80s, the Limas were in the 90s, the Mike model were the 2000s. So I added a Lima engine uh in transmission to it. And then we upgraded the interior a little bit, but it's still retro. And we even have a fries bar with it. So you can jump out of it, you can fast rope out of it, you know, you can do all the military special ops stuff because I I have my security details almost all special forces operators. Uh and uh and so we still train them just like they would SoCal. Um you know that's why we have the Shawn Ryan relationship and you know all these other things. Uh, but I love it and I learned an enormous amount

about rotary wing assets and aviation and uh, you know, we we just had a tremendous amount of fun kind of figuring out the art of the possible and at some point actually I'd like to start manufacturing them because I'm a big fan of the Blackhawk as a platform, but it's getting long in the tooth. It's over 40 years old and so I came up with a lot of ideas to kind of do new material sciences to to build this up. You'll find with my passions is that I don't just buy stuff for the sake of buying stuff. It's usually I want to blend it with some part utility, some part humanitarian, some part preservation of history and providence and then some part innovation. So like my ranch for example, Teddy Roosevelt used to own part of it and I'm actually writing a book uh with Mark Jung and that'll be

published on book.io. So I I'm doing like a book on my blockchain about the history of my ranch with a historian in Wyoming. Uh and now I get to run a ranch. And so then I get to learn about ranching and then I'm starting to think about the innovation of ranching and like how do we take ranching to the next level. So I'm like remediating the soil from many years of misuse from prior owners and then I'm also thinking about like next generation ways of feeding my bison using hydroponically grown fodder. You know there's all these cool things that you get to do with the new technology but then you get to use uh old stuff too and you you want to pres preserve that. The Blackhawk is part of history. Like every American conflict that we've had since the 80s the Blackhawk has been there. that

particular one fought in the Gulf War. Um, and so by having that, you're also now part of that history of GWAT and prior conflicts. Uh, and then you kind of get to keep it going and keep that legacy going. But then it makes you think about what would be a better Blackhawk and you know, how could I build something like that with modern material sciences and these things? And that's one of my big interests. And so I' I'd love to be able to eventually do that and take it to the next level like with an electromagnetic rotor system and make it hydrogen powered or or battery powered as opposed to be on JP8 and then also make it a lot lighter and so you can put more armor on it uh and then put drones in it and all these other things because if you make it electric motors,

take out the transmission and the engines, you'll save an enormous amount of weight, you know. So there's all kinds of things I think about. The tail, for example, is an open tail design. I'd love to do a dual finestron design inside the tail. So, I don't just buy these for fun. I I buy them because I'm interested in them and there's something I want to do with them. Mantle is pioneering the blockchain for banking, a bold new category combining traditional finance with the power of web 3. With UR, the world's first onchain money app, users can manage fiat and crypto side by side using a Swiss IBON account in euro, US dollar, Swiss Frank, and RMBB, all posted to the blockchain. Backed by the Mantle network, UR is the access layer that

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Tell me tell me about the bison. So, how uh I think this is a picture. This is a real picture, right? This is actually your bison. Yeah. And then this is bison. That's your ranch. This is not a real picture right? No, no, no. That's uh Yeah, that that's uh actually a very famous buffalo lives up in Canada. He's dead now. That was Bailey the Bison. And the guy who owned him raised him from a calf and that was the only house alo. So that was a house buffalo. And uh and actually he even modified his he had a Cadillac and he modified his car so he could drive the bison to a local bar and the bice would go to the bar and drink beer out of a bucket.

That's ridiculous. That's ridiculous. I love that though. Um how many bison do you have? Uh so I used to have 800 but we had to call the herd a little bit and so we took it down to a few hundred and we'll build it back up. Uh we had some issues with because we do guided hunts every year for the for the ranch and we had some issues with one of the the years where we didn't have enough sales because one of our people wasn't calling people back and the head of bison ops had some health problems and so I wasn't watching it closely and bison breed pretty quickly and so suddenly the herd just grew too quickly and we had to pair it down. It was getting pretty ridiculous.

800 bison they were everywhere. Like I would I would pull up my ranch house and there'd be like bison sitting in my front yard. I'm like, "Hey, get get out." You're you're you're in uh Wyoming. Is that right? Uh half the time in Wyoming and then halftime Colorado. Yeah. Wow. Where are the where are the bison? In Wyoming at the in Wyoming. Okay. Nice. Nice. And what about what about this Alien Tech expedition? So that was with Avi Lobe. So if you Google like Charles Hoskinson Avi spirals, you can kind of bring up uh the uh spirals and you can see them because it's better to just kind of look at them.

Where which thing should I click? It's Obby Loe, not Lo L Obe and uh Spherals. So, so up there at the Google search sphirerals. Well, sure. Why not scroll down? They probably have a picture inside this article. That article right there that you were just in. Oh, good. This is going to tell the whole story. Yeah, that's one of the sphererals. Keep going. That's where they tested them. And there should be a beautiful picture of the gold ones. That's us on the sled. Okay. So, yeah, this is a this is a pretty good visual story. So, so basically what happened was that Avi I've known Avi for a while and I called him up after he was talking about a Mua Mua and uh oh, that's such a beautiful picture, too. I'll tell you about that

guy on the left. He's a [ __ ] legend. That's Art, right? He's like this old dude. He's 89 in that picture. So, so, so basically, I called Avi up and I'm like, "Avi, I really want to, you know, I I was thinking about Mua Mua. It'd be really fun to do something with you guys." guys and he's like, "Hey, I'm looking for some funding to go and recover uh a meteor that crashed on the Earth in 2014 that's from a different solar system." And yeah, right there, those those are the spirals. So, so basically what happened was that uh in 2014, this thing from a different planet came into our solar system and it crashed on Earth and nobody knew what the hell it was. So it could be alien space junk. It could be an asteroid. It could be from a core of a planet. Nobody

knew. But it had a very strong material strength. It was going way too fast and it wasn't from our solar system. And that's a very very rare thing. It's like winning the lottery three times in a row. So we had to haggle with the Air Force for a while to because they knew where it was at, but they wouldn't tell us because they use spy satellites to find it. So we had to haggle with them for a while to give us some rough coordinates. And then we basically created this search box. And what we did is we retrofitted a ship with Rob McCllum and uh he was like a famous sea salvage guy. Uh and Rob basically is the guy went down with um James Cameron for the Titanic and he was with Bezos when he recovered the the Saturn 5 boosters and all these other things. He's like a

billionaire's play guy. Like you want to go to space, you talk to Rob. Or you want to go like find something on the seafloor, he's your guy. So we talked to Rob and we basically designed an expedition with Rob. And then on the science side, if you click on that picture just to the left of the spiral where there's like this sled or to the right of it, sorry. Uh where Yeah. Yeah. Right there is fine. Or or the more interesting one with uh just right there. Yeah. So So that sled right there is something we designed and has magnets embedded inside of it. And what we would do is drop it bel uh behind the ship 6,000 ft underwater. Uh so over a mile underwater. And we drag that sled on the seafloor for eight hours. We'd bring it up and then we'd scrape off the

magnets uh whatever it found and then we would be looking for a needle in the hay stack. So we actually found fragments of the meteorite that came and hit the earth and that's what those little gold orbs are to the left. Those are spherals that you So this is the gold. So you found this. We found that. Yeah, we found it using that. And what was it? What is it? So it's really interesting. We wrote a paper on it and basically the paper analyzed it. So they took it back to Harvard uh and uh bas the astrogeeology department uh discovered that those spheres have one to 5,000 times more burillium, lanthanum and uh uranium than uh than anything in the solar system for background materials. So basically what

we think happened was that something collided with a planet in a different solar system long time ago. the planet spilled open and then for a billion years the core traveled through space and then it hit our planet. So, uh we basically found those needles in a hay stack and it was just an extraordinarily difficult thing to do and you know like just think about how crazy this is this is crazy. It was so much fun. Uh we had to learn a lot. I was on the ship for two weeks. uh you know it was a it was a catamaran so it was doing this the entire time and you know and seasick we had to put the scopamine patches on to prevent seasickness but the problem is you leave them on too long you start hallucinating so you're like do I want to hallucinate

and have crazy ass dreams or do I want to throw up I mean like what's what these are my two options here on this expedition but it was it was great we and I learned an enormous amount about sea salvage I learned an enormous amount about uh you know astrogeeology and it was just a lot of fun to work with and actually the guy that was in that beautiful picture with the sunset was Art Wright and and we pulled him out of retirement just for this but he was the Navy's top sea salvage guy and he actually used to work to find clearance stuff. So like when a Russian nuclear sub would you know blow up and fall to the seafloor. Art was the guy the Navy would bring in to go and find that. Uh so he was like a crusty old sea captain

who was 89 years old and he was our navigator and he was navigating the entire time with a piece of graph paper in his front pocket. So every morning I I'd have coffee with him at like 5:00 in the morning. as a morning captain and he was salty guy like he was a rowing champion at 89 and so he's like how do you become a rowing champion at 89 he's like everyone else died like okay yeah that that kind of does make sense uh but he was a brilliant guy and he knew more in his left shoe about you know being a sea captain than uh than pretty much anybody I've ever met but it was just a crew of characters man it was a lot of fun how much did you pay to fund this you funded this right yeah I funded the whole thing it was

only about 1.5 5 million. So, it was very small. And actually, there was a Netflix crew there. They documented the whole thing. And the and the guy who did it is a famous director, but he uh he hasn't released it yet. It's been like two years. And we keep calling him. We're like, "When is that coming on Netflix? I want to want to show people because it they were all in our face like cameras everywhere." And we had these dramatic flybys with my jet where they were recording the search area and and and I even kind of got into it like I posted a tweet with like the thing when we're bringing up the sled and had the the background track for the thing like hey because we always were like hey is it really going to be alien stuff you know because it technically could be

alien stuff you never know but it wasn't it was do you do you uh just we're kind of going all over the place but that's fine. Do you have security problems being so public and and wealthy? Yeah, there's there there's been some issues. Um, and I have a full detail and they take care of me and everybody sees me these days, they kind of see the guys around me. But you can see all the news stories like there was an Australian cryptobillionaire that bit off the finger of of a uh person. No. Yeah. This dinner I was at last night, everyone like the main topic was basically security. Yeah. Um, and and I I kind of predicted this was going to be an issue. So, I built the detail back in uh back in 20 uh uh 21 before it was a big deal. And I lived with the

detail, built up the detail and trained them and you know got them integrated into the home life. So they they protect the property and they protect me. And I learned an enormous amount about running an executive protection company to an extent where we may even start offering it as a service to other family offices. And what's nice is they're all special forces guys. So they're green berets and rangers and SEAL team six people and and so they're just super smart about running operations and they do advances and this and that. And so what's nice about those processes and procedures is that it's the same type of package that Secret Service would have for an UltraVIP and actually makes it very easy to deal with other ultravips because we understand security. We understand their security needs. So if I meet with somebody who's like a head of state or

we have like an ultra wealthy person or a celebrity come over, their detail talks to my detail and they handle all the travel coordination, logistics and everything's just easy. Like we met with Robert Kennedy when he was on the campaign trail and Gavin Debecker did the security package for Kennedy because they're good friends. So we just talked to Gavin Debecker and we're like, "Hey, how do you guys want to meet up and do this?" Or like when we met with Eric Trump, you know, there was a Secret Service coordination, you know, these types of things. Um the other cool part is you just get to hang out with all these special forces guys and they have amazing stories and they've done all these crazy things and so you learn a lot from it and that special forces culture, the tempo that they operate at is just incredible. And I travel 200 to

250 days a year. I've been to 75 countries. So I have kind of the an operator's tempo. So having those guys roll, they actually can keep up with the enormous demand. And we're working 12 16 hour days. We're meeting dozens of people. There's a lot of prevetting we do for meetings. So I get, you know, doseier every time I meet with a person. So I can kind of get an understanding what their background is, where they come from, the political connections and other things because we we meet with lots of heads of state and some are good people and some are kind of mixed bags and so it's really important to have a pretty good understanding of what you're getting yourself into and you know these relationships and connections and it keeps you out of a ton of trouble. You know a lot of crypto people they just

seem to think that they can live the same way that they lived before they got rich and it's like well more money more problems man. So when you you get rich unfortunately then there's extortion rackets and sometimes undesirable people that come they try to latch on to you to take things and kidnapping is the big one right now especially in France where uh multiple people have been kidnapped like a friend of mine got kidnapped a co-founder of Ledger and they cut his finger off. Yeah. You know and so it's just just crazy you know what these people are doing and that was a premeditated thing where they followed him for his pattern of life and they broke it and took him and his wife and uh it's it's it's a bad deal. And so now all these crypto people are like, "Well, we need to do security." And it's like,

"Well, duh." You know, just like Cardano, I've been ahead of you for a few years. We did it in a peer-reviewed way. You know, we went to the best of the best in the military. And uh a lot of these guys did like embassy protection packages or ultravip packages for generals and things like that. So, they have a pretty good understanding of what's necessary for security. And it's just good to have them around. Plus, they never say no matter how dangerous it is. Let's get back into this cycle. Um, one thing I want to get your take on that I feel like is not there's there's a lot of disagreement is do we still have four-ear cycles, right? And since you've been in the industry, the industry has run on these the market cycles have run in these four-ear cycles obviously. I'm curious if you think the four-year cycle

is still intact. No, it's a different cycle. It's something different going on. And I don't even think we're close to the peak of the bull market. Um, you know, people have gotten so pessimistic and cynical that they're like, "Oh, the market's dead and we, you know, we've we've ballooned." It's like, dude, clarity is not even passed yet. When clarity gets passed, the bag seven are going to enter the cryptocurrency space. You're going to have stable coins go above two 1 to two trillion in issuance. You're going to have real world assets come in. The the total market cap aggregate is going to be over 10 trillion. And uh, and so I call this the gigachad bull run. You know, it's like the biggest bull run we've ever had. And when Bitcoin starts stalling, then the alts will pop. And so you're going to see great ratios that

you know come from this whole thing. And uh yeah, it'll die off a little bit, but it's it's like every time you have these these windows, you you go to new all-time highs and then you stay at new all-time lows, you know, and so it's no longer a four-year cycle because it's not retailled anymore. It's more led by institutions and it's more led by massive investors. But simply put, there's just too much going on. The the inventories on Bitcoin are too low. You got these DATs injecting gargantuan amounts of money into the market and there's no way not to see a bull run, you know, from all When do you think we hit Wait, so what what are we at today? Four trillion, I think.

Yeah. Yeah, we're at four trillion. When do you think we hit 10 trillion? Before the end of the cycle. And I think the cycle will last throughout 2026. Because clarity is going to be the catalyst, I think, that really bootstraps it up. And you know, the only reason why we haven't super taken off was that there was an irrational exuberance when Trump got elected and then it didn't immediately pay off and so people got a little crazy about it. Um, and then, you know, the tariffs and all the macroeconomic stuff kind of shook the market a little bit. But people are starting to look at crypto as a countericklic um as a hedge asset to the collapse of the US dollar or uh, you know, to inflation or you know, there's such things. So we'll get where we need to go, you know, as as an industry and a

market and especially when the fourth generations come in and they bring in all the real world assets because then suddenly you have all these yield products that come in that give 10% 20% whether it be rela la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la launch insurance you know for rockets or you know exotic micro finance plays or whatever the hell it is they'll come in and and then it'll just attract a ton of money and the max come yeah what do you think Cardono Okay, so Cardano in 2017 ripped from like what a cent to like a dollar, let's call it. And then the last cycle you guys ripped again from 5 cents to $3.

Um bottom of this cycle you guys were at 25 cents, you're at like 82 cents today. What does what does Cardono hit if uh crypto as a market cap is at 10 trillion? You know, it's hard to say. It'll be a ratio. Um but um I don't think it's unreasonable to believe that there's a path to recover the all-time high uh that you know that we enjoyed. uh but you know it's hard to say because there's a lot of factors that uh that come into play. So that's why I tend to look at the macro of the industry as a whole like do I believe the vertical is going to go from four to 10? Yes. Do I believe there's enormous amounts of new capital entering the market? Yes. And I do believe Cardano is well positioned to receive a fair share of that especially

with value leakage from Bitcoin because once Bitcoin stalls because it always happens at some point it's going to reach a some ceiling like quarter million or half a million then the game is no longer buy and hold appreciation. It's now just make yield with what you have. So when you flip that switch and you go into Bitcoin DeFi you will have a two and a half trillion if it goes to 250 about$4 trillion market where 10% flows into other cryptocurrencies. Yeah. Yeah. So that's $400 billion which is going to flow into other cryptocurrencies to seeking yield. Yeah, I tend to I tend to agree with that.

So So it doesn't matter if it's 1% or 5% or 10%. These are big [ __ ] numbers, man, when you talk about the yield side of the game. Um and so that that's why I always wen the apeture and look at these things. So I'm a protocol architect guy. And so I say, "All right, well, what capabilities does Cardano need to have in terms of its ecosystem, its technology, its market position to be able to absorb this halo? And we're moving very quickly as an ecosystem to do that. And we have a lot of built-in advantages from the hard fork cominator to UTXO and other things that kind of allow us as an ecosystem to move there, you know, and uh we're rallying the base as hard as we can to anticipation of the gigga channel run."

Um, speaking of being a protocol architect uh someone sent me something, uh, maybe our producer wrote this down. Um, but I haven't actually read any information on it, so I'm not sure where where we're going with this question, but they said, "You've hinted psychedelics has shaped how you designed consensus." Um, I have I've done no research on that question, but what are your what are your thoughts on just psychedelics in general? Well, no. I didn't take a bunch of mushrooms and then come up with oraoris or anything like that.

That would have led to a really good short clip for Twitter though, Charles. Oh, it would have been great. Um, so so I because I do health care, you know, as one of our core businesses, mental health is something we are very concerned about. And so we do look at using ketamine and transcranial magnetic stimulation for depression treatment. Yeah. Ketamine for depression has amazing amazing results, especially when you combine it with other modalities like TMS. So actually TMS is one of my favorite things and not a lot of people know about it but it's been around for a while and it's FDA approved. So transcranial magnetic stimulation is literally where you map the brain and they use magnets on the brain to basically break synapses and rebuild them and structurally rebuild the brain to rewire the depressed circuits inside the brain to be not

depressed anymore. And so where and when it works it works about onethird to half the time and people like their depression goes in remission and they get off drugs. And what's really crazy about it is that in many cases they're durable gains and they have one protocol with TMS that only takes five days. So you can be super [ __ ] depressed. We nuke your brain with magnets for a little while. 5 days later you come out and you're like, "Wow, life is great. I feel better again." Um, so uh we are starting a study where we're going to combine TMS with ketamine and functional MRI mapping. So we get a really detailed brain map using very sophisticated research MRI because we have a three Tesla research MRI at uh at my clinic and we use AI upscaling with it and

we're going to combine those modalities together and we think that we'll be able to create a durable protocol that cures depression or at least pushes it into remission 50% of the time. So you flip a quarter your depression's gone. We can do it in five days using ketamine. So which is just crazy. But that's just one entry point. You also look at other psychedelic modalities like um psilocybin for example mushroom side, measculine which is you know the peyote and san pedro side and then you have the synthetics like LSD and DMT and these types of things. Um and what's nice about uh MDMA I should say. What what's nice about um you know this area is is ever since Roland Griffiths did the the heavy lifting at John's Hopkins, the

scientific and academic community is starting to come around to the concept that um that psychedelics can be very useful as a therapeutic intervention either as a a frontline or a supportive therapy uh like MDMA combined with talk therapy for example is just incredible for PTSD treatment. So, we're very interested in it. You know, been to MAPS conferences before we're going to we're going to do studies. The only barrier right now is the federal government still classifies the vast majority of these as schedule one, which means they're illegal. Ketamine is a schedule three drug because it's been around for a very long time. It actually started as a pediatric drug for surgery in the 1970. Uh, and so, so it's something we just really care about. We understand it's there and it's awesome for mental

health treatment. Now, your question was related to creativity and nonlinear thinking. Yes, psychedelics can enhance that, and I'd argue that uh they're they're quite powerful for this. And uh there's plenty of offshore programs where people do this to enhance creativity, but there's other things you can do that are that are similar to psychedelics that could be more powerful for that. Like for example, nobody really talks about focused ultrasound. And you can use focused ultrasound to knock a person to any mental state. There's this one research group that actually made people experience pure bliss, like the purest form of happiness you could ever have for 15 minutes.

Have you Have you done that? I I'm going to build a focused ultrasound department at my clinic because I'm so interested in this and I actually I was really curious about stacking modalities like combining focused ultrasound with TMS for depression treatment. But this fact that you could knock a brain state into a flow state or, you know, knock the default mode network into a different state. So you could go into a psychedelic trip or make a person happy, you know, for a period of time. That's really interesting. And focus ultrasound is super precise. You can have threedimensional targeting. With TMS, it's a little harder because if you want to get to a deeper brain structure, you hit surface areas with more magnetic fields and that may be a problematic for the therapeutic intervention. So it's it's a much more precise instrument, but you need better mapping. So, it's

actually really interesting to combine fMRI with focused ultrasound as a uh as a uh approach, but you know, it's it's absolutely somewhere interesting because you can enhance creativity as well with it. Yeah. Um Charles, this conversation went in a million ways I didn't think it would go, but I I enjoyed it a lot. Um, anything that you really I realized actually we have hardly I don't even think we've talked about Midnight. We've hardly talked on talked about some of the Cardono stuff. Um, but any I I was a little more focused on like the the guy behind the protocol here, but um, anything that you really want to cover that we haven't Well, if you want to share your screen one more time, I really would love to go back to um, eutxo.org because

wait, tell me the website exo.org. Yeah. And so, if you take a look at this, so this is a real-time view of the Cardano network. And, you know, I say it, but then it's easier to just show people what's going on. this. Yeah. And so let's let it uh load up. And so this is a real-time view. It's always dangerous to do real-time views. So each of those little blocks is a transaction. So you see that giant little block there? That's a single transaction. And that transaction had all those are NFT issues. So if you click on them, you can see what's issued, swaps, asset transfers, other things like that. So this is a real view of the network.

So, so I have no idea what's going to come for the next block, what's there, but you can kind of see Cardano living and breathing. And this is the kind of stuff that I I get up every morning and I say, I want to see this happen where you build something and this was a community member who put it together and you just bet right on the paradigm. Those can get bigger and bigger over time. So, you can have thousands of events in a single transaction and eventually those transactions will be proofs that can contain roll-ups. So it's an infinitely scalable system. And then we talk about midnight or other things like that. Those are really just extensions of this dream, you know, that we have. And by the way, uh all those scripts there, that's we they're going to be Bitcoin interoperable now that

because we have Bitcoin VMX, uh you know, so we can write an Akin smart contract in Rust on Cardano cross-co compile. It runs on Cardano, it runs on Bitcoin, and it's a hybrid application, you know. So this took 10 years of time and effort and thought to kind of put together. But now that we're here, it's this magical system. And in the same system, you have all three things, economic, political, and social. You have voting transactions for the onchain government that controls that $1.2 billion treasury. You have economic transactions, moving money. You you have DAPs and DeFi basically going on. You know, you have all this this cool stuff happening real time in this crossroads.

And this is what I signed up for crypto to be and it's fully decentralized. You know, we if you go to the Edenboro decentralization index, Cardano is the most decentralized cryptocurrency on the planet. We met with NIST while we were in Washington DC to talk about could we use NIST uh to to start thinking about decentralization so it can start properly measuring this as a uh as a as a metric people care about. Um and and so if you is there's like one overarching thing across my entire career. I look for these these interaction points where everything just kind of comes together into one beautiful visualization. And when you see that visualization then you kind of get it. You say well this is why we signed up for crypto. We wanted to run society on a blockchain. You know we

wanted to have one system that could think about all these things. Um and each and every part of this was made with love. you know the address format, you know how to visualize these things, how to think about the theoretical properties of UTXO, we talk about 250 papers, this is where those papers ended up and when we talk about like the vision of the future like those boxes can become arbitrarily large and uh those boxes can contain more and more semantical data and every one of those is a just a single transaction. So you can horizontally and vertically shard and semantically you can always improve the uh programmability expressiveness of the system and the fact that in one system you can have voting and one

system you can have data storage in one system you can have programmability one system you can have your banking system and by the way a Cardono native assets can pay now transaction fees in the native assets when you issue an asset on Cardano you pay you can pay the fee with the asset like you have your own layer one it's called babel fees is it's just just it's magical that all that came together and like 95% of that I didn't build you know I came up with it and helped write some of the papers and started it but I didn't create this website I didn't create the vast majority of the DAPs and NFD projects or other things that are here it's a thriving vibrant ecosystem and unfortunately in the podcast sphere when people talk about Cardano they have no clue about any of this they don't even

know this exists so they just reduce the entire project to me and they say it's just Charles and it's all just one big marketing game. Charles, why is that? Why do you think that like you are not in the crypto insider crowd, but like Salana is in the insider because we never took any venture capital and we were funded by a bunch of random Japanese people, you know, 10 years ago in a place that most people have never been like Osaka, Japan. Like people go to Japan, they go to [ __ ] Tokyo. Who goes to Osaka? I I I mean it's it's like we were so far off the beaten path. Nobody knew who we were and nobody cared. And so they just had they because there was no way to interface with it. Invest in it, get an insider deal, get an insider distribution, these

types of things, they they basically just wrote us off or said, "Well, we don't understand it, so we don't care about it." The other thing is that Cardano was built with very exotic technology like Haskell and all this peer review. So to understand Cardano in the beginning days, you had to read academic papers and programming language that most people didn't understand. So nobody really wanted to take the time to invest. So they just wrote it off. And also, we never followed these mega trends, these these well, I shouldn't say mega trends, but rather the flavor of the week trends like NFT mania for example, remember that in 2021? And we didn't follow memecoin mania where Salana did. And so that because we weren't in the conversation, they just assumed Cardano was dead and it was gone like EOS or these these other things. Uh

meanwhile, we were just building and we were doing cool things and there was an internal community that was doing all this interesting stuff. Um, and and so we do need to open up and that's what Midnight's about and you know that's what Bitcoin DeFi is about. But on the other hand, we can't sacrifice what made Cardono Cardano. It's super [ __ ] cool that you can just go to that website and real time you can just see like no other system the heart of it like what's what's happening like literally NFTTS are being issued and you know scripts are running and money is moving at scale of billions of dollars every week. It it's extraordinary. And what what I live for is like if I keep doing my job in 10 years, imagine what that website's going to look like. You know, could you imagine a website where the entire

commercial layer of the United States was visualized real time? It would be the coolest thing in the world to see that. And we could see that with Cardano. So, it's it's always the way I like to end these types of interviews and kind of like show people that uh you know, because it says it's I it's it's a thing and it's it's it's not one person's thing. It's the aggregation, the hopes and dreams of so many people. Charles, man, you're you're a fascinating person. Thanks for coming on. You've uh congrats on everything. It's a it's an impressive journey. Um I think a lot of people are rooting for you. So, appreciate appreciate the time. Thanks Yano.

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