Last night, I was scrolling through my phone until 2 AM, and the little ADA I have felt like a hot potato: should I hold it for another year or trade it for a cup of coffee? A search for Charles Hoskinson left my mind buzzing—born in Hawaii in 1987, both parents were doctors, yet he pursued mathematics and jumped into the crypto space, just like that impulse I had in college to 'change the world.' But he actually made it happen: in 2013, he helped Vitalik Buterin build Ethereum, and in 2014, he was ousted after a fierce debate on whether to accept VC funding. By this point, my coffee was already cold. Isn't this the workplace version of 'I started my own business to make you regret breaking up'?

That breakup became the fuel for his entire life. He teamed up with his old partner Jeremy Wood and registered IOHK in Hong Kong at the end of 2014, with a brutally simple slogan: write code using academic papers. While others were running meme coins on the blockchain, he published 300 peer-reviewed papers first, proving that the Ouroboros proof-of-stake mechanism consumes only one ten-thousandth of Bitcoin's energy. In 2017, when Cardano's mainnet launched, ADA climbed from $0.02 to a peak of $3.10, and at one point, its market cap broke into the top five. In October 2025, he said in a livestream: 'By 2030, Cardano aims to hold a 10% share of the crypto mainstream.' The data speaks for itself: Hydra's second layer theoretically achieves 100,000 TPS per second, while the 2024 testnet recorded 12,000 TPS, and by 2025, the mainnet exceeded 25,000 TPS; after the Chang hard fork, governance was entirely handed over to the community, with a treasury of $2 billion waiting for annual budget votes; after the launch of the Bitcoin DeFi bridge, TVL surged from $350 million to $1.5 billion, with a growth rate exceeding 300%. He was like a paranoid architect, drawing 300 blueprints before moving a single shovel of dirt. While others were eager to build, he ensured the foundation was set on solid rock.

"Cardano took five years to release smart contracts, what a load of crap!" In 2021, before the Alonzo hard fork, the community was anxious. He remained calm, donating $20 million to Carnegie Mellon to establish the 'Hoskinson Center for Formal Mathematics.' Since 2019, the Ethiopian Ministry of Education has been using Cardano to store the credentials of 5 million students, with 30,000 paper certificates stolen each year, while none were lost on-chain. Slow does not mean procrastination; it means academic-level fault tolerance. After Ethereum's Shanghai upgrade in 2023, L2 fragmentation became severe, but Cardano unified the ecosystem with sidechains and state channels. By 2025, the Partner Chains framework had integrated three enterprise chains, with TVL growing by 47%. In case too many papers are written and the community doesn't support them, the $2 billion treasury could also go up in smoke. In 2024, the proposal approval rate for the treasury was only 38%, which increased to 62% in 2025, but there’s still a need to guard against 'proposal fatigue.' If I were him, I would have printed ADA on coffee cups to sell as merchandise, but he actually sold beef jerky at his Boulder ranch, with a limited run of 500 units selling out in seconds.

In 2023, his educational background was scrutinized: Metropolitan State University didn't even have a PhD program in mathematics. He self-deprecatingly remarked on X: 'My life is 100 times more exciting than my resume.' After completing a ketamine treatment in 2024, he suddenly apologized in a livestream: 'I was too competitive before, I'm sorry.' He then reconciled with the founders of Ripple and Stellar, and Midnight's privacy sidechain airdropped to 37 million users, while IOG's quarterly code submissions increased by 47%, and active addresses in the community surpassed 4 million. I clicked on his Wyoming ranch livestream, where the sound of wind blowing through wheat fields mixed with cow calls, reminiscent of my grandmother's barn when I was young; it turns out even big shots need a piece of land to catch their breath. After the treatment, IOG's R&D spending ratio increased from 31% to 44%, but the marketing budget was cut by 30%, as he chose to spend money on code rather than KOLs.

Ethiopia is just the starting point. In 2025, 3,000 coffee farmers in Tanzania will use Cardano for traceability, with an 18% premium; in Kenya, World Mobile will use Cardano eSIM to cover remote villages, with monthly active users exceeding 800,000; he retweeted Jed McCaleb's space solar panel project, giving it a thumbs up: 'Our competitors are progressing, and so are we.' Imagine a street vendor in Uganda paying for electricity with ADA, the beep of a QR code scan, the meter ticking up—this isn't science fiction; it happened in 2025. Cardano is not just an 'African chain'; it's an infrastructure chain. Like highways, it may be built slowly, but once operational, it can outpace even Bitcoin.

$2 billion in the treasury sounds sexy, but in 2024, a proposal to allocate $100 million for a 'Cardano Metaverse' was rejected by the community; in 2025, 50% of the approved proposals will go towards Hydra R&D, 30% for African education, and 20% for security audits. Risks abound: governance attacks, whale voting controlling the treasury; inflation pressure, with 380 million ADA released each year needing to match TVL growth; regulatory crackdowns, as the SEC in the U.S. may classify ADA as a security, leading to a liquidity crash. If by 2030 Cardano holds 10% of the crypto market, that would mean a market cap of about $300 billion, and the treasury's annual budget could reach $6 billion, equivalent to that of a small country's finances. But the prerequisite is that the community must not engage in infighting.

Charles now lives in Boulder, Colorado, with a few cows and several wolf dogs, waking up at 5 AM to check emails. He says: 'If Cardano fails, I will have wasted my life.' In 2025, he also congratulated Jed McCaleb on X for his space solar panel project; he genuinely liked to see his competitors make progress.
I believe because he wrote decentralization into the constitution and handed the treasury keys to us. What about you and me? Keep holding, or should we mint an NFT on-chain today?
If by 2030, ADA is really used to pay for coffee, will you regret not pressing 'buy' a few more times now? Markets hit zero, regulations reset, hackers strike—what blockchain hasn't faced challenges? DYOR; investing has risks, and life needs poetry.

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