Cardano Isn’t ‘Fading,’ Hoskinson Says: ‘I’ve Lost Over $3B’
Charles Hoskinson used a Feb. 6 livestream from Tokyo to push back on a familiar narrative he says he’s hearing on the ground in Japan: that Cardano is “fading” or “dead,” and that the bear market has drained the ecosystem’s momentum.
Speaking midway through a multi-city tour tied to Cardano’s third cohort of ambassadors, Hoskinson said long-time community members and newcomers alike have been approaching him with relief that the project is still active. He framed the trip as a signal that Cardano, after years of protocol work, is shifting into what he called a commercialization phase, building products that feel less like infrastructure demos and more like mainstream use cases.
Hoskinson Rallies Cardano Through The Downturn
“We’ve been on tour all throughout Japan,” Hoskinson said, describing meetings with “a lot of investors, a lot of developers,” including people who have followed Cardano “for more than 10 years.” The message he said he’s delivering is that major building blocks are in place: “The infrastructure is strong. We’re fully decentralized. Governance has been done. So now it’s the time to go build some fun, exciting, real use cases and get them into the ecosystem.”
Hoskinson name-checked Hydra, Cardano’s scaling effort, and pointed to projects he characterized as the “vanguard” of the next phase, including Midnight — the privacy-focused sidechain he has promoted as a cornerstone of Cardano’s broader roadmap. He also referenced “Starstream,” a WASM-based zero-knowledge virtual machine (zkVM) designed for the Cardano blockchain to enable private, scalable smart contracts.
The backdrop, he acknowledged, is a market environment that “is red, red, red,” with sentiment weak enough that some attendees told him they had assumed Cardano’s best days were behind it. Hoskinson’s response was less a price defense than a thesis about why crypto persists through cycles and why he believes the longer-term direction of global finance makes open networks unavoidable.
“Globalism has finally reached its peak, accelerated by AI and accelerated by demographic changes,” he said. “The human race is starting to think in terms of we instead of nation by nation… And the old guard and the old way of doing things is fading. And they’re kicking and screaming as they’re being dragged off the stage.”
Red Days https://t.co/lO21fGjc0w
— Charles Hoskinson (@IOHK_Charles) February 5, 2026
He argued that a more integrated global economy ultimately needs a neutral settlement layer: an “economic franca,” in his words and that blockchain-based systems are the practical option. “The only way to run a world like this is through cryptocurrency. Full stop,” Hoskinson said. “Otherwise, you have to build an empire and no one’s strong enough…
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