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Charles Hoskinson used his latest live AMA on November 1 to issue a point-by-point rebuttal to claims that Cardano is suffering from low adoption, thin liquidity, poor interoperability and marketing inertia—while laying out a 2026 growth blueprint anchored in the Midnight partner-chain, cross-ecosystem bridges, an events-driven marketing push, and clearer accountability for KPIs.
Hoskinson framed the broadcast as a response to an “adversarial” community post listing seven alleged flaws “holding back Cardano adoption,” including the lack of USDC/USDT, “critically low” liquidity/TVL, “severe network congestion,” “minimal on-chain adoption,” limited marketing reach, poor interoperability/bridges, and thin tier-one exchange support for Cardano native tokens. He rejected the framing as “not fair,” arguing that it ignores both network realities and pipeline developments, and that it collapses the distinction between Cardano’s base-layer participation and DeFi usage.
“It comes up quite a bit,” he said on the stablecoin debate. “There is this belief […] that if somehow, someway Tether or Circle came to Cardano, then magically all of our DeFi problems would be solved […] I do agree that there’s not enough stablecoins issued, but remember we have USDM, we have USDA. They don’t dip. They’re asset-backed […] and we can mint them all the time. I’ve personally minted them myself.”
On TVL and adoption metrics, he contrasted DeFi snapshots with broader on-chain engagement: “It is absolutely valid that there’s about $680 million in TVL on Cardano. But […] we have 1.3 million people participating in either governance or staking […] more than 15 billion ADA […] We don’t get to count that in our TVL. Ethereum does […] but we don’t.”
The core challenge, he argued, is not user scarcity but conversion: “Cardano users aren’t using Cardano DeFi […] If our own people consumed, our TVL would be $5 to $10 billion minimum instead of $680 million.”
Midnight As Key Adoption Driver For Cardano
A large portion of the AMA elevated Midnight—the privacy-preserving partner chain—as the mechanism to unlock the “interoperability and bridges” critique and to catalyze exchange coverage for Cardano native tokens.
“I’ve spent the last six years building Midnight. We’re getting ready to launch […] [It] resolves pretty much all those concerns,” he said, adding that the token would be a Cardano-native asset with “tier one exchange listings,” “over a 100 partnerships,” and connectivity to “eight ecosystems, seven blockchains—Ethereum, Bitcoin, Solana, Binance Smart Chain, XRP, Avalanche, and obviously Cardano.”
He positioned Midnight as a practical bridge layer for cross-chain capital and as a driver of DeFi participation on Cardano: “People are going to want to create yield with their [Midnight tokens], and so they’re going to utilize Cardano DeFi.”
He also previewed distribution mechanics and scale claims around the Midnight drop: “Midnight is shaping up to be the largest drop in the history of the industry […] There are already millions of addresses […] about 200,000 participating in the glacier drops […] I believe Kraken and […] Gate [are participating] […] when you sum up all those people, it’s going to be probably over a million, which makes it larger than Arbitrum.”
On stablecoins specifically, he forecast resolution via Midnight’s negotiation leverage and a trust-minimized “recursive snark bridge” between Midnight and Cardano: “As for the stablecoin side of things, that’s going to get totally resolved in 2026 […] If it’s on Midnight, we’ll have a trustless recursive bridge […] Native issuance on Midnight into Cardano.”
Cardano Scaling
Hoskinson dismissed the “severe network congestion” critique as inconsistent with current utilization. “Our blocks are about a third to half full most of the time or less […] do we really have a throughput problem?”
He pushed back on suggestions that Cardano’s scaling stack was unreleased: “Hydra is working on mainnet right now […] If you participated in the Glacier drop, you were using Hydra […] Hydra has reached version 1.0. There are numerous people on Cardano mainnet using Hydra right now on a per-application basis.” As evidence of efficiency, he cited loading “33.6 million eligible addresses” into a Hydra head for the drop “at a total operation cost” of less than five figures.
On the data availability/throughput track he calls Leios, Hoskinson said “the SIP is done” and that “linear Leios is being planned for released next year,” with a public monthly R&D cadence and an upcoming progress website. He linked those efforts to partner-chain finality work and recursive SNARKs, arguing Cardano is scaling “with values”—maintaining decentralization and resilience while adding throughput.
Marketing And Governance
While rejecting claims of “negligible marketing reach,” Hoskinson conceded underperformance and said he would personally drive an event-centric push in 2026: “Even though it’s not my job, I’m going to make some of it my job […] we’re going to have four major events per year […] bring the top 25 to top 50 dApp/DeFi projects on Cardano to those events to augment the Cardano booth, the IO booth.” He pointed to Token2049 as a model—“we took over that entire event […] even the Wi-Fi codes”—and called for a sustained campaign around Cardano’s “USPs.”
He repeatedly stressed the absence of a single entity accountable for growth. “There is nobody currently accountable […] for the growth of Cardano. If it’s no one’s problem, everyone’s problem is no one’s problem.” The remedy, in his view, is a 2026 framework of delegated authority with explicit KPIs across MAUs, transaction volume, TVL, active dApps, developer counts, integrations and blockchain-to-blockchain partnerships.
In this context he contrasted the Midnight Foundation’s “hungry” execution—“they announce deals every week”—with frustration at the Cardano Foundation’s silence on Midnight partnerships and listings: “Zero tweets saying Midnight is a big thing […] It’s frustrating to me because how do we win if we destroy ourselves?”
Pipeline: Africa, Bitcoin DeFi, Partnerships
Hoskinson said IO is preparing Cardano-native DeFi applications for 2026 and emphasized that the “real” Africa microfinance product never stopped.
“We never gave it up. We never stopped. Go to Twitter. People just lie until it becomes reality in their minds. They say we abandon Africa. John O’Conor is still here. It’s a huge team. We’ve been lending money like crazy, my money, and we’re opening it up for micro finance, banking the unbanked, the economic identity side of it. And that is coming in 2026. I think that’s going to be the largest contributor to Cardano’s TVL when that service turns on,” Hoskinson said.
He also tied it to the Bitcoin defi initiative. “Bitcoin and ADA can be lent, converted into a stablecoin, and then lent out […] Our belief is that’ll create billions of dollars of TVL for the network and bring a lot of Bitcoin into the network.”
He also referenced conversations and integrations with Near—“you guys saw the Near intents coming through”—and floated blockchain-to-blockchain outreach to Tezos and Algorand including an indirect route to Chainlink via Near given “a direct conversation has been less than fruitful due to the price […] mid eight figures.”
On developer experience, he argued the narrative is outdated: “They say it’s Haskell only […] They don’t even talk about Aiken […] Every programming language designer […] says it takes about three to seven years […] we’re right there.” He flagged Plutus v4 “next year,” StarStream “adding contract composition,” and a lane for rollups supported by recursive SNARK primitives, alongside L2 efforts “like Midgard and Gummy.” The strategic thread, he said, is continuity: “We bet big on decentralization […] resilience […] interoperability with Bitcoin […] partner chains. Now it’s about adoption.”
Hoskinson closed by pledging continuing delivery on partner chains—“I want to launch one every year”—core research translated into production, and relentless advocacy, while asking the community to match that with usage and unified messaging. “We can complain about it or we can solve the problem. Together we will succeed.”
At press time, ADA traded at $0.577.
Featured image created with DALL.E, chart from TradingView.com
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