There’s something refreshingly blunt about a founder going live on YouTube and casually suggesting his ecosystem swap one hundred million dollars worth of its own native token into stablecoins and bitcoin, without a vote, without a council, just a man with a camera, some treasury math, and a vaguely optimistic DeFi vision. Charles Hoskinson, ever the main character of Cardano, is once again at the center of a liquidity drama that probably shouldn’t be one, but here we are.
The core idea is simple: Cardano’s total value locked stands at just 356 million dollars, while its on-chain stablecoin presence is laughable, with only 31 million minted. That’s not an ecosystem, it’s a puddle. Compare that to Solana, where the stablecoin liquidity is over 11 billion against a 9.8 billion TVL, giving it a ratio above 100 percent. Cardano hovers around nine percent. This isn’t a mismatch, it’s a missing limb.
Hoskinson says this is killing Cardano, and he’s not wrong. Most DeFi activity begins with stablecoin pools, whether it’s lending, farming, arbitrage, or anything that requires neutral collateral. Without it, you’re not competing, you’re staging a conference in a ghost town and hoping the brochures matter more than the location.
So he wants to fix it with a single shock injection: 100 million dollars worth of ADA, converted into bitcoin and native stablecoins like USDM and USDA. No new inflation, just a reshuffling of what’s already in the war chest. In theory, this would bring Cardano closer to the liquidity ratios of more active chains, inviting volume, builders, and maybe even a second look from institutions that currently treat ADA like a loyalty program for introverted engineers.
But here’s the interesting part. The backlash wasn’t really about whether the move would work, it was about whether it would hurt. ADA holders saw a selloff coming. The token dropped six percent as the headlines hit, not because the treasury acted, but because someone talked about acting. That’s how fragile things feel in 2025.
Hoskinson fired back, calling critics inexperienced and brushing off the idea that ADA has liquidity issues, which is sort of true, since it trades on every major centralized exchange and still has deep order books. A 100 million dollar transaction wouldn’t nuke it, but that’s not the point. This isn’t about market mechanics, it’s about narrative.
Treasury funds are sacred to some. People treat them like strategic reserves, long-term bets on the chain’s own future. Turning ADA into stablecoins feels like admitting the token isn’t enough on its own, like hedging against your own DNA. For some, that borders on betrayal. But maybe that’s the wrong way to look at it.
Maybe the real problem isn’t the swap itself, but the stubborn attachment to keeping things pure. ADA holders have always liked to think of their coin as more than just a trading instrument, imagining it as a representation of the ecosystem’s principles—slow, deliberate, peer-reviewed. If the treasury starts exiting into fiat-pegged assets and bitcoin, what does that say about the long-term faith in ADA?
It might say nothing, or it might say that principles don’t build liquidity.
Here’s the contrarian take: this proposal is not a financial decision at all, it’s philosophical, a quiet admission that Cardano cannot bootstrap a DeFi economy with ADA alone and needs bridges, anchors, and yes, other coins. In that sense, the move isn’t desperation, it’s realism, the kind that most founders whisper about behind closed doors while Hoskinson simply said the part out loud.
Compare this to the Cardano Foundation’s more orthodox stance. CEO Frederik Gregaard doesn’t see TVL as a key metric, and that’s consistent with a nonprofit trying to promote decentralization over hype. But the gap between his view and Hoskinson’s reveals the real divide: one side wants Cardano to remain idealistic, the other wants it to compete.
So what happens if the treasury does move? In the short term, probably nothing significant. Some traders dump on the rumor, some shrug, liquidity spreads a little wider. But long term, it creates a new baseline—a Cardano where stablecoins have actual volume, where bitcoin DeFi becomes plausible instead of theoretical, where the ecosystem is allowed to evolve instead of just being defended.
The value of ADA, paradoxically, might benefit more from admitting it needs help than from pretending it doesn’t. No ecosystem is an island, especially not one with fewer stablecoins than a third-tier Cosmos chain.
This isn’t about a 100 million dollar trade. It’s about permission to adapt. And the market, even with its panic reflex, usually rewards that, just not immediately.
Let them argue. Let the price wobble. The future is being quietly bought, one treasury rebalance at a time.