He insisted that his initial comments were meant to identify a structural issue within the ecosystem. The structural issue is based on the difference between those who stake ADA and those who engage in decentralized finance, and it is not to assign blame.
He estimated that if the same level of engagement were mirrored on both sides, Cardano’s DeFi TVL could range between $5 billion and $10 billion. Hoskinson pointed out that this observation was not a criticism of the community but an analytical point about user behavior and ecosystem growth patterns. “There’s not a single person in the Cardano ecosystem who I am blaming for our DeFi situation,” he said.
Hoskinson went on to explain that the problem lies not in lack of community engagement, but in the absence of proportional participation between governance and DeFi. According to him, Cardano’s large user base and strong staking participation prove the network’s health and scale, and this contradicts claims that it only has between 10,000 and 50,000 active users.
