Charles Hoskinson used his latest AMA to unleash his most forceful critique yet of the Cardano Foundation (CF), defending the decision to exclude the CF from claiming Midnight’s NIGHT tokens while outlining aggressive multi-chain partnerships, airdrop mechanics he says could be among the largest ever, and a near-term push around Token2049 and an Asia tour.
He escalated further later in the stream: “At what point does the community tell the CF to f*** off […] the free [stuff] they already squandered?” and, when pressed on why to blacklist the Foundation’s addresses, replied, “Why invite a bad actor […] into an ecosystem?”
He added to his rant: “I’m out there alone and it’s expensive, guys. Some of these deals with the big guys, they’ve become eight figure deals. […] It’s frustrating because all of our competitors have foundations that in some cases have endowments that are in the billions to tens of billions of dollars and they’re hungry and aggressive, and they’re doing stuff and they’re investing in stuff and they’re really pushing things forward.”
Hoskinson also insisted that the Midnight rollout materially benefits Cardano rather than siphoning attention from it, pointing to custody and exchange integrations set up to list both Midnight and Cardano-native assets. “We just announced today the Copper partnership[…] any exchange that uses Copper as a custodian […] can now support that asset. And […] they didn’t just agree to support Midnight. They agreed to support Cardano and Cardano native tokens,” he said, grouping Copper with relationships involving Bitcoin.com, Blockchain.com and Brave.
The CF critique broadened into a sweeping governance and resourcing indictment. Hoskinson alleged the Foundation “is just not deploying capital in meaningful ways,” noting its absence from recent conferences: “When I was at Salt […] who wasn’t there? The CF. When we were at Rare Evo […] there was no CF booth.”
By contrast, he cast the Midnight Foundation as aggressively commercial—110 deals in the pipeline and “hungry” account management across ecosystems—and pointed to Intersect, Cardano’s members-based body, as the organ that now embodies his original foundation vision: “You already got a members-based organization […] It took two years to build it […] Now just add like $600 million […] and give them four extra years.”
He drew a direct line from CF governance to reputational damage: “Members of the organization are low-key soft accusing us of stealing money […] Were there any apologies? Was there any attempt for reconciliation?”
Hoskinson framed it as “complete exoneration on our part,” and “very damning” for the CF’s “recusal […] of their responsibilities,” arguing that the Foundation’s decision to distance itself from Cardano’s origin story “created a lot of problems.” The purpose, he said, is “sunlight”: “You push it all out there […] and I think those conclusions will be very positive and favorable to Input Output.”
At press time, ADA traded at $0.8795.
