The Cardano Foundation has issued a public clarification of its remit and recent decisions, answering a wave of community questions that followed Charles Hoskinson’s latest broadside against the organization. In a new forum post published on August 26, the Foundation outlines what it says are its day-to-day responsibilities for the network’s plumbing, its governance posture as a decentralized representative, and the legal provenance of its board—without naming Hoskinson or directly addressing his specific accusations.
The Cardano Foundation refers to services such as GraphQL (originally built by IOG on top of DB-Sync), a high-performance Java implementation of Rosetta backed by Yaci Store, the reference cardano-wallet, and the Token Registry and its API, which now supports both CIP-26 and CIP-68 metadata and has been embedded into GraphQL “for performance improvements.”
The Foundation adds that it “hosts a Token Registry API accessible to the public,” and says its Core Integrations, Engineering, and Exchange Relationships teams have worked with market venues “since 2021” to reduce friction and cost for ADA and native-token onboarding.
On the flashpoint of who should pay for new listings and token integrations, the Foundation says it will not fund bespoke Cardano Native Token integrations because doing so would “pick winners”—and, by extension, “losers”—across the ecosystem. That, the organization argues, exceeds its mandate and would distort a “diverse and complex ecosystem.”
It points to educational resources, a DRep voting tool, governance flowcharts, and co-coordination of hard-fork processes as evidence of practical support aimed at “enabling the community to engage easily and meaningfully in on-chain decision making.”
Perhaps most notably, the Foundation revisits the 2021 overhaul of its board—a recurring theme in Hoskinson’s critiques. According to the post, after a “somewhat dysfunctional” period, Switzerland’s foundation supervisor fulfilled its statutory duty by bringing in an external law firm in January 2021 “to guide the Cardano Foundation into calmer waters.”
A head-hunting firm interviewed outgoing board members and IOG leadership, after which the new board president was elected unanimously, “including by the IOG board representative,” followed by two additional unanimous appointments (with one abstention) and the outgoing board’s voluntary group resignation; a fourth member was later appointed. The Foundation says it remains committed to “adoption, education and operational resilience” delivered “in an accountable and transparent manner.”
In the same breath, he accused the Foundation of squandering opportunities and failing to support the ecosystem effectively. Notably, the clash has deeper roots. Late last year, Hoskinson urged relocating the Foundation away from Switzerland to a jurisdiction that would enable community election of board members, arguing that the Swiss supervisory framework—while lawful—constrains accountability to token holders.
He has also alleged heavy-handed intervention by the Foundation in constitutional drafting and broader governance, claims the Foundation has periodically rebutted with process narratives and disclosures. If the Foundation intended to calm the waters, early forum replies show the community pressing for more.
At press time, ADA traded at $0.86.
