Charles Hoskinson is arguably the best and worst thing about Cardano. Without him, of course, the chain would not exist — he’s driven its development over the past decade and claims he invested $450 million of his own funds into bootstrapping the network.
But he’s also a magnet for bad publicity who makes everything about him and constantly picks pointless fights. This week, for example, he’s threatening to sue Wyoming for not using Cardano for its stablecoin. He frequently overshadows the network’s many technical achievements in terms of decentralization, governance and its new privacy-focused sidechain, Midnight.
Despite just having turned 37, he looks like a semi-retired professor with his retreating hairline, greying beard and signature colorful shirts — during our interview at Token2049 he was wearing a kitten. Being born middle-aged may have helped spark his keen interest in researching experimental stem cell longevity therapies, which he plans to trial on himself to turn the clock back 10 years.
With a fortune of around $1.2 billion (according to him), Hoskinson has enough money to do whatever he likes — whether it’s hunting alien artifacts, gene editing glow-in-the-dark plants, or trying to convince world leaders like Argentina’s Javier Milei and the Trump transition team of the benefits of crypto and/or running the world on Cardano.
Hoskinson says he’ll travel to Washington regularly next year to discuss crypto policy. (X)
Hoskinson and controversy
Hoskinson’s amount of wealth is often called “fuck you money,” and he appears to embody the idiom, frequently saying controversial things and insulting other projects and people in his characteristically blunt way.
When we were introduced, Magazine joked that we were “hoping you’ll say something horribly controversial, and then we can get a great news story out of it.”
And that’s precisely what happened after Hoskinson explained…
..
