Cardano PRIME Live, w/Charles Hoskinson & AlphaGrowth

It's great to be on, Eric and Brian. Good to see you guys again.

Well, I've been in the industry for 15 years, which makes me either the newest or the oldest guy around. I don't think there's a lot of people that have been working in blockchain longer than me at this point. So I should have retired a long time ago, but I started in Bitcoin and I started the Bitcoin education project and I brought in about 70,000 people through that and I had a lot of great students and some of them ended up becoming big entrepreneurs in the space. Then I created the first algorithmic stable coin and DEX with Dan Larimer that was Bitshares. Then later on created Ethereum with Vitalik Buterin and people seem to like that one. But what I'm most known for these days is obviously Cardano and Midnight. I've been working on Cardano for about 11 years now, so it's the vast majority of my time in the cryptocurrency space. And recently got involved in the privacy space and we're working with Midnight. We're doing smart compliance, abstraction, privacy and agents. So it's a wonderful blending of four different areas that seem like they're different, but actually they're all deeply interconnected and it's probably the most fun I've had there. Outside of the cryptocurrency space, I also do work in synthetic biology and I'm a bison rancher, do a lot of healthcare work with my dad and brother. So I keep busy these days. It's been a lot of fun the last decade and a half.

We got more coming, by the way, for those animals. I can't say anything about it, but the direwolves was just the tip of the iceberg.

Well, I'd always been interested in synthetic biology. So I had a kind of a long serpentine path in academia. I graduated from high school when I was 15 because I was homeschooled. And so then I went to a community college and I graduated there at 18. And originally I wanted to be a doctor. So I transferred to Metro State and I was doing the whole biology thing and all the doctor stuff. And I had a lot of fun but I said yeah I don't really want to do medicine and so then I transferred to CU Boulder and I was in this combined program where I was taking graduate classes and undergraduate classes and that's how I got into mathematics. But when I was studying biology and chemistry and these other things, right at that point we were starting to discover how to do proper genetic engineering. CRISPR hadn't quite been invented yet but we had a lot of proto stuff and things like that. And one of my friends did a lot of work in bioluminescent plants and they were interested for cross-linking genes. So they said, 'Well, if the plant glows, it has the gene. If it doesn't glow, it doesn't have the gene.' So it's a fast visual way of knowing if your engineering was successful without having to sequence the genome. But I'd read a lot of work from George Church, and George is like the super prominent biologist at Harvard, and he talked about basically using these technologies to resurrect dead animals, you know, basically restore them.

Jurassic Park. So when Ben Lamm started his company Colossal in the very early days I contacted him. I said I'm super interested in this project. I've been following what Peter Thiel did with funding some of the early mammoth stuff. I'm really curious where you want to go and what you want to do. So Ben and I became very good friends and I invested in Colossal very early. Now it's doing quite well. I think it's over a $10 billion valuation. So I guess there's a market for resurrecting dead things. And Ben and I actually started a company from that and we'll be announcing some things at the end of the year about it. But anyway, it's just been a passion of mine since I was 19. And I've been very interested in these capabilities and technologies and we've had like two independent revolutions that have happened since my early college days. You know, we had this huge revolution in CRISPR Cas9 and bioinformatics and other things and then the AI revolution which helps being the interpretive and analytic layer of understanding what all this stuff means. And because of those two things, you can now very precisely change stuff. And in silico, you can predict what your changes are going to be before you even do them. Now, why the direwolf? You have these special genetic protection components in your genome. Humans have about two of them. Whales have 300, elephants have about 60. And what they do is they protect the genome from changes. So it's an anti-cancer mechanism. Dogs don't have any. So that's why you have so much variability in dogs. So you have tiny dogs and big dogs and it's very easy to change your genes and manipulate them. So the direwolf was a really nice proof of concept of a whole tech stack and the genome doesn't get in your way and prevent you from manipulating it or changing it. You can silence those genes that protect things, but then those are the same genes that prevent you from getting cancer. So you don't want a mammoth with massive tumors and cancer. So there's a lot of work that has to be done and Colossal probably has at this point the largest brain trust in the world of synthetic biologists. And they're from incredible universities and incredible places. And it's really like the Bell Labs of the place. They're inventing as they go and I think they've pushed the state-of-the-art by at least a decade or two with all of these techniques. And there's a wonderful leadership there from the technical leadership to the operational leadership to the CEO. And it's just a joy every time I go down to Dallas to see what they're doing, what they're working on, and how much progress they've made. It's one of the hardest problems in all of biology. But it's super useful to solve this problem. You know, every day species go extinct and there's a fatalism in ecology. You have all these Greta Thunberg people who are like, 'How dare you take my future? I don't even have kids because of global warming and the whole world's coming to an end.'

What companies like Colossal do is fundamentally they restore your agency. They say that instead of just accepting that this existential problem is here and basically it's just going to get worse every year and there's nothing you can do about it and the fatalism of that mindset, it says you actually can be an active participant and you can bioengineer and you can bring species that are extinct back and you can change the environment to make it healthier again. And the fact that we are able to bring back an animal that hasn't walked the earth in tens of thousands of years is a really good case study on that path. And very quickly, it'll go from just a simple thing to much more complex things. And then inevitably you can start having a real adult conversation about what type of environment do we want to live in and how do we fix that environment.

So, by the way, it's not just an Earth question. It's also like Mars. If Elon Musk is serious about having a million people live on Mars, you have to terraform that planet. So all of this technology is directly applicable in that direction as well. And you can start thinking in terms of centuries and planet scale terraforming. But it's the next logical step of where this technology is going.

Yeah, and it's a lot of fun to work on and you can do magical things. But everything about my career has a common theme of restoring human agency, whether it be economic identity or banking the unbanked or self-custody or self-sovereign identity. Really it's about pushing power to the edges. And whenever I see an ecosystem where there's a fatalism in it where they say you can't fix it, you can't cure it, it's going to get worse over time, that is something I don't accept. I say there's got to be a way to apply technology to reverse the trend. That's why the Warhammer 40k universe is so grim dark. It's because there's no innovation or advancement and everything is just a copy of a copy and technology continues to decay and they can't repair the machines they have because society got to a point where it got stale. It's also why Bitcoin is quite stale because there's just not a lot of innovation that goes on there. So everything I do in my career is always connected to let's figure out a path to have recursive self-improvement and grow it. What you look for is widening the aperture. So you don't look for what's today or what's weak. You say is the process such that over time it gets more decentralized, more resilient and it has recursive self-improvement. So it evolves and even if it's slow, it's exponential growth and compounding interest. And so you come back in 20 or 30 years and you just have this incredible thing that's basically indestructible. You know, if you fire the core entities, you kill the founder, no matter what you do, you can't stop it because it's sufficiently decentralized at that point that it self-heals and grows on. So everything we do, we try to imagine how do we build something that grows in that particular direction.

Yeah, that's Metcalfe's law. You know, any social network you have, the communication overhead typically is quadratic to the amount of nodes inside the system. So that is true in any social system and any huge advancement is where you have a subquadratic representation of communication. So really, if you look at the growth of the internet, one of the reasons why it has the topology it has is because of that communication complexity. Instead of having everybody run their own server and everybody doing their own thing, we tend to aggregate it on these super nodes like Google and Facebook and others and they regulate all the communication, commerce and other things and so that simplifies the graph tremendously. So when you think in terms of systems and especially complex systems that are self-evolving, they tend to form topologies of convenience. They're not necessarily the most effective, efficient, or best structure for our societal goals, but of convenience typically to maximize something like communication or information dispersal. And what ends up happening is it goes too far typically in one direction and then we say, 'Oh gosh, we need to dial this back. There's too much misinformation spreading or there's this issue here over there and what do we do about it?' Blockchain's great because it's a native citizen in this structure and it's a regulation mechanism. It's a place where you can store true things, objective reality, and they're immutable, timestamped, and irreversible, and so they create a mechanism where you can prune out bad things. And when you add ZK to it, then you have selective disclosure and verifiability to that. So you get privacy too, but also just verifiability all the time. People are saying, 'Well, I did this.' Well, how do you know that's really true? Especially in an age of AI and generative AI. So I'll give you a story. I have a family friend and he's kind of like one of these hillbilly mountain dudes and his brother was a special forces guy. And he and his brother when they were younger were hiking in the mountains of Colorado and they saw a mountain lion in one of the trees. And so, hillbillies in the mountains, they just do stupid things. So he said, 'All right, I'm going to go up and climb that tree and pull the tail of that mountain lion. It's the stupidest thing you could do in your life.' So he goes up the tree and there's this beautiful picture of him, his hand is just about to grab the tail of the mountain lion and tug it. And he did. He tugged the tail of the mountain lion and the mountain lion freaked out, woke up, and just went and attacked him and he fell down the tree and was attacked by a mountain lion. Here's the problem. That was like over 20 years ago. And so when I saw the picture, I said, 'That's the coolest thing, man. You're brave but stupid.' Well, now in generative AI, anybody sees that picture and says that's not a real picture.

So he broke his leg. He got mauled by a mountain lion. He did all this stuff and no one will ever believe that that picture is true. So we have a truth issue. So it's not just communication overhead, but it's also a veracity issue where now it's choose your own adventure. You can just decide arbitrarily what pictures and videos and text is real and what aren't. And anything that you don't like, you say it's AI. Anything you do like, you say it's real. So you need a veracity layer in addition to a communication reduction layer. And I'd argue that blockchains and ZK are the only way to get that back into society. And if you live in a society without trust anchors or truth anchors, it devolves very quickly. Everybody gets incredibly paranoid.

Yeah. Agency without truth isn't agency. Totally aligned with the ZK stuff. You touched on the complexity and conversation in the number of people involved not being efficient but being designed that way for a reason. I'll say like in businesses there are two phases. There's endless growth. We're going to keep growing forever. Operate at a loss. It's going to be the biggest thing in the world. Then you tap out at what seems to be the TAM. And then it's SOPs. It's like decline as efficiently as possible. Cut back, pay less, get more optimization. But the growth is gone.

Yeah.

You know, it's funny because everybody shits all over Cardano. Oh, everything's gone to hell and the whole system's falling apart. It's a failed experiment, all this other stuff, and we're literally on schedule. You just accept it as it is. So when we built the decentralized governance system, the problem is that we had to change the tires on the car while it was driving. So if you start from day one, you could build anything you want and nobody can challenge your question because they're adopting into a pre-existing philosophy. But when you're changing it without a voting or consent system, you literally have to figure out how do you get consent of people you don't know in more than a hundred countries and there's more than a million of them and when does legitimacy come? So it's a game of iterations. And so you do it by building your legislative and judicial function first and allow the masses to come together and vote on things like hard forks and info actions and the treasury. And then you allow very naturally and organically problems to occur and those problems are typically problems that can only be resolved by executive function. This is actually what happened in the United States of America. So we had a revolution, we kicked the British out and our initial government was the Articles of Confederation. And very quickly people started realizing that that governance structure was too weak on the executive authority side. So you couldn't unify and do things well, even things everybody agreed we ought to do well. For example, during the Revolutionary War, they couldn't get shoes to Washington's soldiers. So they're fighting the Revolution and they're out in the winter and they can't get shoes. It's a governance failure. So did America fail? The entire country collapsed and the experiment was over? No. They wrote the constitution to replace the articles of confederation and it became a very robust structure that was able to survive a civil war, win two world wars and become the dominant superpower. So when you look at Cardano, we're now at a point where we've outgrown a two branch government. We need a third branch now, an executive branch. And in doing that, it solves a lot of the foundational problems about vision, direction, KPIs, marketing, growth, and adoption. We made a lot of great bets in terms of technology. Extended UTXO is non-custodial staking algorithm with Ouroboros and Praos, we're back in the game in terms of performance and finality. And partner chains and Hydra, we can have a non-parasitic L2 ecosystem and we have natural areas to grow like Bitcoin DeFi. So there's plenty of good stuff to do, but you're not going to get good marketing, good growth, and adoption. And you're not going to get a singular voice about a strategy to execute and achieve unless you have executive function. So you can't get executive function though until you have a voting system of legitimacy. So step one is get a constitution to set what integrity is. Step two is get a voting class, a governance class of people that are legitimate and people in the ecosystem believe them. And step three is unify them to build the executive function, then get the executive function turned on. Then you can do the KPIs, the vision, the strategy, the governance structures and then finally you have a fully working system. To do this in just two years is an extraordinary pace. It took the United States like a decade to get that solidified and going and everybody wanted it. And these were people that were literally willing to die for it. They fought the Revolutionary War and put their names on a document that if they lost they'd get executed. So we're moving at a very fast pace in terms of the rest of the technology that hasn't been molested at all. I'm very happy with Mithril and very happy with Plutus and very happy with the amount of innovation that we have. We don't really have a technology problem. We don't have a node diversity problem. We have the Rust node, Go node. We don't have a development problem. The DevX has massively improved in Cardano from where it was just a few years ago. You don't want to write Haskell code? That's fine, write in TypeScript, write in Rust. You have plenty of options to do that and we don't have an interoperability problem. And with the Pendulum we were able to start fixing the broken windows of integrations like LayerZero, Pyth, and Circle and other very needed things. So with all those things in play now, the time has come to do two things at the same time: get the executive function and then number two start commercialization. On the commercialization side, what we're doing at Input Output, we become a venture studio and we have four things that we're building that are Cardano adjacent or directly on Cardano: RealFi, POGAN, Midnight, Midnight City. And all of these we think are going to bring millions of users in and billions of dollars of TVL into the ecosystem. And they're intrinsically non-adversarial, meaning they bring new people in or they bring new ecosystems in. We don't have to go and steal users from Solana, Ethereum, or Hyperliquid or other places. And what this allows us to do is also work with pre-existing people like yourselves and others to have an adult conversation about how to get that TVL in, what the cost of it's going to be, and how to make it sticky and sustainable and beneficial for all the parties involved. So from that lens, I feel very optimistic and we're masters of our own domain. It's not like we're waiting for an A to come or a Uniswap to come and we have to pay $100 million and hopefully they'll solve our problem. It's more of can we get these ventures where they need to be. And others have shown up like Draper and they've set up the Orion fund and so we're really excited about what they can do for the ecosystem. And there's still a lot of passion and excitement. We just have to get over these last hurdles: get LEO shipped and turned on, get Parachain shipped and turned on, continue the drumbeat of Hydra, and get executive function in play and launch these ventures. And over the next three to five years, I think we'll see the greatest growth Cardano has ever experienced in its history. And it creates a lot of confidence in people because we did it in a completely decentralized way. It wasn't because one leader showed up and as long as that leader is around everything's going to be great. It was done in a bottom-up way and no one party was essential for it. Everybody worked together.

Well, there's three dimensions you can look at. One is Cardano has a very insular mindset and we need to have now an industry-wide global mindset. So you need people from outside of the ecosystem who have experience in many different ecosystems to come in and say, 'Well, this is the way they're doing it.' Not to tell us we should do it that way, but rather to give us the information so we can figure a hybrid approach where we blend the best of both worlds. Number two, once we have a strategy and approach, you need some people to help facilitate and execute that strategy and approach and bring in the very necessary lifebloods of liquidity and TVL and these other things. And number three, you need somebody to be there on a day-to-day basis to advise them, 'Hey, this is what you guys need to do to get to the next level.' Cardano doesn't have a shortage of passionate people or smart people, but they do need some oversight. We had three core entities and only one of the three, mine, was able to actually fully execute. The foundation has improved in its execution capability. Emurgo was an unmitigated disaster and failure, just be straight up with it. And they were supposed to be the consensus of the ecosystem. So this was their primary domain. They never built that infrastructure. So we have a 10-year hole and we keep coming back to it and there's this learned helplessness and cynicism in the ecosystem. We need to shut that chapter. We need to reconstruct that capability and simply move on as an ecosystem and say, 'Okay, it didn't work. It's okay. FTX collapsed and Solana looked like it was dead. They rebuilt themselves and now they're a strong ecosystem. We can cut to the next level even if mistakes were made in the past.' And when you look at Intersect and Pragma, they've mostly compensated for where the foundation has been negligent. So self-healing and recursive self-improvement are much more important than perfect founding entities because you're always going to make mistakes. You're going to have issues. You're going to have founder conflicts. There's divorces. There's bad stuff. Shit comes up. People leave. Elon Musk went through a brutal divorce right in the middle of all the Tesla crisis and all these other things. Somehow he's a trillionaire, right? You can survive these types of things, but you'll only survive them if the systems and structures are in the right place. So that's where we're at. And that's why executive function is so powerful for an ecosystem because it can give you the right to let the past go and to set a new road map, set a new vision and push forward.

Yeah. And you have to stay current. There's winners and losers all the time. Apple was a loser in the 90s and then they became a hyperdominant winner in the 2000s and 2010s because of the iPhone and other things. Then they're a loser in the AI revolution. Google was the company that was going to completely dominate and win the entire AI revolution. They even invented the transformer. And now they're the furthest behind of all the frontier AI labs and they can't keep their staff. OpenAI was supposed to win. Then Anthropic is now on top. Now we're talking China with all the open source models. So things change very quickly in business. And if people don't believe me, then what you need to do is you need to pull out your Blackberry because obviously you have one, right? And then you need to open up Internet Explorer on your Blackberry to go search for your AOL account to reset the password on your MySpace page so you can go and complain about it. And you might have to use Yahoo to search for that. All these things had over 100 million customers at one point and had dominant market positions and they were damn near untouchable and now they're just has-beens. Technology, the one constant is change. So anybody tells you that their ecosystem has won, they're a bag holder and they're trying to dump their tokens on you. No ecosystem has won. You've won your turn. And then the music changes and then there's a new game. 10 years ago, it was like, how do you build something that isn't Bitcoin? That was the Ethereum story. Everything was a copy of Bitcoin. And we brought the smart contract revolution in. And then the third generation came and it was like, how do you kill Ethereum? And now it's Web 2.5 is the narrative. You have a regulated entity like Ripple or Tether or Circle, and then you have a blockchain product and these things emerge together. That's where almost all the growth has happened when you look at Binance or any of these guys in the last two years. And that's going to bring 10 trillion dollars and two billion customers into the cryptocurrency space. So the narrative changes, the technologies change, the game changes. The people who keep what they have and are able to adapt and be strong where they go. Just another example real quickly. We have these AI cybersecurity things and they're just beating the hell out of everybody. The only people that are going to survive this Armageddon of infosec nightmare from AI are people that used formal methods throughout all their code. So the thing that was a huge weakness for our velocity has become now one of our greatest strengths in the Cardano ecosystem. And by the way, if you want to build software quickly, if you have formal specifications, you can vibe code in 20 days a full node if you have really good specs. That's what Bun taught everybody with the Anthropic rewrite of Bun from Zig to Rust. They wrote a million lines of code in 11 days with a single guy. So it's not about the language anymore. It's about the specifications. And we spent 10 years getting good at writing specifications and everybody else is massively behind us. So the games change all the time. So never believe network effect is a thing. It's not.

No, I haven't.

Party in the back.

Yeah. And so when you take a step back and you look at these things, you need four components to win in the unification of web 2 and web 3. And this is the entire resident detra of midnight. If you don't have these four things, you can't win. And so our bet for the fourth generation, and we're leaning into it as hard as we can. I'm literally writing code every day for it. I think I have like 4,000 commits. My people, I mean, it's all hands on deck. We're so passionate about it. We're moving faster than we've ever moved before. You have abstraction, smart compliance, PET and agents. So everybody knows Midnight is privacy systems. That's PET, privacy-enhancing technology. Usually when you think privacy, you think ZK, but that's only one of many different things. You want to pair ZK with multi-party computation and trusted execution environments. And you put those three primitives together, you can do anything. Outsourceable computation and keep tons of great secrets and you can analyze data without ever seeing it. So you can replicate homomorphic encryption and you can prove everything is correct by construction and you don't have to trust anybody. But that alone is not sufficient which is why you don't see massive commercial adoption of zeroache or zcash or any of these other projects. You see speculative adoption but nobody's really doing anything with them. Abstraction is what near really brought to the table and they've leaned so heavily into that and wonderful work. Ilia is a brilliant guy. Multi-chain signatures and intents. You tell me what you want and you don't care about where it settles or how that works. You don't care about how it's going to get solved. You just tell me what you want to do and then somehow it's going to get figured out. And MCS gives you the ability to write to any chain you want. With ZK, you can read from any chain you want. So you have read and write. So you have a universal end-to-end system where you can interact with everything in the cryptocurrency space and with intents accept payment and any cryptocurrency. So you meet the users where they're at, not where you want them to be. And it's the orchestration logic that's really meaningful. Smart compliance, what that's about is extending what Satoshi had with self-custody to self-sovereign identity and self-disclosure. So you basically can bring your personal life, your private life into the cryptocurrency space. And then you can verify statements you make when you need them, how you need them, but in a way where you have minimum viable disclosure. You can prove you're a US citizen. You can prove you're over 21. You can prove you're a resident of New York. You can prove you're not a politically exposed person. You can prove you're not a jurisdiction of whatever. It's a ZK proof. I don't know who you are. And thus compliance becomes a game of 21 questions. How many questions do I need to ask that are yes or no before it's safe to do business with you? And then you move to algorithmic regulation settlement as compliance. Say create a sovereign subnet within your system that allows regulated business to live in a decentralized system. And you can bring all of these regulated things from centralized federated off-chain servers into the blockchain space and they can have ubiquitous liquidity and there's no compliance issues for doing on a global basis. By the way, there's a little side corollary, the LCP protocol from the American Arbitration Association, the legal context protocol that for the first time ever you can start embedding legal understanding into these things. So the contracts into these transactions instead of having them live separately. You add selective disclosure. You can prove properties of the contracts to each other without ever revealing the underlying contractuals. So it's really powerful. But the final thing is agents and I think people don't really understand the value that they bring. Agents solve the single biggest issue that we have in cryptocurrency which is I want to screw it up. I've been in the industry for 15 years and every year if you poll consumers and you ask them a question about cryptocurrencies, they say the exact same thing. It's too complex. It's too hard. And I know I'm going to screw something up. I'm going to lose all my money. I don't know where I'm going to do it. Maybe I'll not back up my wallet or I'll click the wrong link and somebody will drain my wallet or my computer will crash. Something's going to happen somewhere and I lose all my money. Nobody wants a financial system that if you make a mistake, you lose everything forever and there's no back seats. So when you bring in agents, they massively simplify the equation because you can delegate authority through standards like OWS to the agent and then the agent could do a lot of the really complex hard gigabrain stuff on your behalf. And then when you add in like trusted execution environments, you add in ZK and intents, you can create a regulation layer where the agent behaves deterministically, meaning it never does anything you don't tell it to do. And then you can start building ecosystems of best practices and standards and the agents can be there and watch. Like when you're just about to send money to an unknown address, it says, 'Hey, hang on a second here. This address is an impersonation. Are you sure you want to do that?' Oh, yeah. So, it almost comes like the antivirus that made computing safe. You know, we had like Norton and McAfee and you install it in the 90s and 2000s. Agents do that. So, when you combine all four of these things together, that is what brings cryptocurrencies into the world. We have great products like Midnight Passport and all kinds of things that are trying to make it super simple and just make it work on a phone and make people not really care what cryptocurrency they're using, what infrastructure they're using and so forth. And then you can find tons of market opportunities that are embedded within this unification.

Well, if RWA means I'm going to take Microsoft stock, tokenize it, put it on a blockchain, I'm not super bullish for these types of things. I think that narrative is not meaningful. If RWA means I'm going to take an asset that's intrinsically regulated, make it global, and it's novel, new, and different, so basically like structured finance or synthetic finance do something different, then that is actually not only a bullish thing for me, I think it's the entire reason cryptocurrencies exist. So I'll give you a great example that nobody's talking about but it's self-evident that we need it. Every day there's a bridge hack, a wallet hack. Every day somebody's losing money, right? And if you're a non-custodial wallet, it is what it is. Why can't I buy an insurance product that when bad things happen, my wallet is insured and I get it? That's an RWA at the end of the day. And if you have selective disclosure and ZK and all these other things at the time of wallet creation, you can embed something into it that is non-repudiable. So when you need to prove something, you can sign up for a policy. Nobody even knows you have it. Nobody knows who you are, but when bad things happen, you can prove that that was your money and get the policy, and you just automatically pay a premium. Then the other side is a collateral pool where people dump Bitcoin or whatever into it and they get the premium until it has to be paid out if some bad thing happens. That would solve massive problems in the bridge and wallet space because how do you get an insurance policy? It has to meet certain suitability guidelines, so the quality of wallets and bridges exponentially increases to be able to be insurable. Consumer protection goes to the moon, and now you have an RWA that's on chain that pays like a 10, 20, 30% yield per year depending on the risk tranches and categories.

For that and now an incredible product. All right. So we're going to kill RWAs 1.0 but very bullish on RWAs 2.0.

Yeah, Agentic Finance is the way to go. They were literally building a trading bot system for Midnight City. It's one of our fastest growing products and I'm a huge believer in this. The thing about agentic trading is agents are self-evolving and through cloud skills, they can rapidly learn things that humans take years to decades to master. So if you're going to trade at retail, this is the only way that you can get some alpha over regular retail investors and institutional investors. It also allows you to execute very complex strategies as a small person. Whenever I want to execute a strategy, I have relationships at Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley and all these other places. I just pick up a phone, call them, and they have these incredible private wealth people that have been doing this for a long time. They have a lot of capabilities, and because I have access, I can do really complicated things. But if you're a regular retail person, you don't have the market access, you don't have the knowledge. When you're an agent, you can. And they're becoming super intelligent. What they can do is protect you on a thesis. So if you think the market's going to trade sideways for the next 6 to 12 months, they can have a strategy, and you could create marketplaces for strategies. One thing that makes Midnight unique is you can share the strategy without sharing it. You could come up with something, license it to somebody, get 5 or 10% of whatever they do with it, but that person who has it can't see the strategy that the agent is executing. That's awesome for a hedge fund. They get a return on capital without having the underlying capital. That's like naked trading. You create a marketplace for strategies, and then there's a wisdom of the crowds thing. You end up with a very efficient marketplace. The other thing about agentic trading is they never sleep. They're around 24/7. They can monitor things while you're sleeping. If the markets collapse, they can introduce protection mechanisms and circuit breakers to stop you from losing all your money. That's so much better than having a broker or a private wealth manager. I just think it's a better world to live in. We're going to experiment with it with Midnight City and build that marketplace out. Plus, it'll be ubiquitous liquidity through MCS and Intents. You can trade on the big six: XRP, Bitcoin, Ethereum, Binance, Hyperliquid, and Solana. And you also have APIs for agentic trading with all the major exchanges like Coinbase, Robin Hood, and Binance. So you can merge the offchain and onchain books and have one god's eye view of all the liquidity in one place. I think the DeFi mullet kind of gets embedded into Agentic Finance because the purpose of the mullet is to make it easy to access and understand for the user, and the agents are just going to operate in DeFi directly and present it to their owner. Additionally, Brian and I and AlphaGrowth have done, I believe, the first affiliate-based skills and have been working on turning the strategies that we create, that we put in front of liquid funds and family offices, into agentic skills so that we can market to the agents directly. We're deploying our strategies on Cardano as well as researching X42, MPP, which are popular right now, like your agent can go to a mall, but really looking into how agents can interact with their own version of P2P cash, kind of like creating Bitcoin for agents to be their own businesses rather than to go to storefronts.

Yeah, the thing about what we've done with Midnight is when you look at those four things that come together, all four are required for agents to really reach their final form. You need a deterministic control layer because the biggest concern with agentic trading is the agent hallucinates, goes crazy, and does a lot of crazy stuff. The other concern is that proprietary and private information about how you're doing things leaks to an untrusted third party. So by having ZK and TEE, that resolves all of that. Then having the right language in case of intents and having a proper language for trading strategies, if you combine those things together they work really well. Having smart compliance means that the agent, like an X42, has a native protocol for understanding where they're allowed to trade and where they're not, and it opens up a non-custodial representative. Very much like self-driving cars, the liability still falls to you, but the car is driving and it massively improves your quality of driving experience. So similar with agentic trading, what I want is a non-custodial agent. It's your agent, you own it, you control it, you load it up with a bunch of stuff and it does a lot of things on your behalf, but ultimately you are the KYC agent. So you can go under your Binance KYC and your Coinbase KYC. I think that's a much better world. It removes an asymmetry. I'm always looking out for the little guy. There's this huge asymmetry between the big guys like the Steve Cohens and the little guys inside the market. How do we rebalance the scales? We give superhuman intelligence and capabilities to the little guy, and now they can be an effective market participant. This also prevents panic selling. Whenever anything happens, people sell. There was a bridge hack on one chain on Cardano and Binance Smart Chain and like 500 million was stolen. So everybody's panicking. 'Oh my god, now it's going to zero.' The market's going to rebound in 48 to 72 hours. Why are you dumping? Because you're panicking. This is what people do. The market overcorrects and professional traders know that and they're just waiting for the floor because they're going to mop up and get an easy 30 to 50% ROI in 24 hours. When you have agents, they don't panic. They say, 'Okay, here are the structured products we're going to buy. We're hedged. We're ready to go. Don't worry, we got you covered.' You come back 24 hours, the market rebounds, you don't lose any money, or you minimize your losses. That is where I want to go with all of this. You have a significantly more sophisticated and less Wall Street gambling casino style market, more of a value Benjamin Graham style where people are behaving reasonably. The other thing about agents is they can understand everything. One of my friends built this beautiful agentic harness, and every time he trades the S&P 500, every company in there reads the 10Ks, perfectly parses all the disclosures and statements and shareholder meetings, and has a huge analysis engine. He does the work of what a Morgan Stanley analyst would do. Instead of having 50 analysts study the entire S&P, his agents can do all of that, make bets on the valuation of the portfolio if it's undervalued or overvalued. So he can trade the S&P on the CME and makes a lot of money. The agent does the work of 50 people. That's just the raw capability that we all have and can share with each other. So hugely bullish on agentic finance if it has trusted execution to run the agents, ZK intents to regulate that, and proper interfaces. In Cardano Midnight, we integrated OWS, the open wallet standard, for agents to have a wallet. We have Midnight Passport so agents can have their own identity and disclosure system, coming live at the end of the year. Then we have X42 integration. We just joined the X42 foundation. So we're at the stage of getting all the foundational integrations in, now adding the ZK and legal layers, and then you can have these non-custodial trading agents we deploy with Midnight City, eventually franchising out to every wallet as an extension.

Yeah, the point is it's an endless river. You want to do what made crypto great into what makes trading great. You want it to be a bottom-up decentralized marketplace. Hundreds, eventually thousands of firms can come in and build products, and anytime they deploy they can make a profit. When you do that, they become cheaper and more ubiquitous, and consumers get access. Then you have the safety layer back into crypto. Once you have that, mainstream consumers will get excited about using crypto because they say, 'Okay, this is the only way I can safely use this.' Then you get two billion people come in. As long as they have the principles that Satoshi started with, that's a good thing. I really hate these indexes and ETFs and these other things because they say, 'Oh, I'm invested in crypto.' You're not. You are a KYC customer of a centralized financial institution buying a security. At any given moment, all the problems of securities are your problems. It is not Bitcoin. It is not an index. It's something else. That's fine, you can participate in the value appreciation, but you're missing what makes the system special. My whole career over the last 15 years has been basically how do I build the tools of freedom? I want to push power to the edges. I want everybody to be non-custodial, self-sovereign. But I have to acknowledge that until we solve the safety problem, we will never get adoption. No one can live in a financial system where if you make a mistake you lose everything forever.

Well, everybody's saying the same thing. Cardano is a ghost chain. There's no activity on Cardano, nothing going on. It's so weird because we have like 1.3 million people delegating and staking, tons of stake pool operators, governance participation, but then we have an anemic DeFi. So everybody's right: there's one side of Cardano that's a ghost chain, and one side that's vibrant and lively. I'm getting so tired of hearing the same tired narrative. You need people like yourselves to come in and work that other side, the ghost chain side. We need good foundational entities, a lot of good meat and potatoes, and paired with external knowledge, we can come up with a systematic plan to grow it in directions complimentary to what Solana, Ethereum, and others have done. So it's not adversarial sum zero; one doesn't have to lose for another to win. You can grow together. Once we get a few billion in TVL, the narrative changes. People start looking at Cardano on its own merits: 'Do you want a system that can never evolve and is completely anarchy?' That's the Bitcoin side. They can't even figure out what to do with Satoshi's coins when a quantum computer comes. Do we steal them, freeze them, or just accept they'll be stolen? Good luck figuring that out any day now.

Yeah. Any day now. Right.

And when the Ethereum side, it's like we need this dictator to lead us but we don't want to pay him, so he's going to go bankrupt. It's just not tractable. You need something different. Recursive self-improving decentralized governance is the only way to go. As we get executive function, we can get much more precise about philosophy, vision, and direction. These types of engagements help us amplify. They're long-term relationships. You start on simple things, solve them, get your first billion in TVL, and then grow exponentially. Eventually, my hope is we have one of the largest and most sustainable and novel DeFi ecosystems, not a copy of a copy stealing liquidity, but novel with real interesting products that don't exist elsewhere. Capabilities in Cardano that don't exist elsewhere. Traders know the system is far more stable. We have eight years of 24/7 uptime with Cardano and a self-healing protocol. Even when a soft fork happens, the protocol puts itself back together without human feedback. It's a tank. That's what you need for trillions of dollars: stability, resilience, self-healing. If you disappear for five years, you come back and the system is exponentially better by its own design. Thousands of people who've never met each other work together to achieve that. That's my hope for the relationship: figure out a path to make that happen. These things are slow to start and require trust, but once integrated, people get addicted because there's no other place with a similar philosophy. All these other people are like, 'How do we move quickly so the token price goes up so we can sell?' And you're like, uh oh.

Yeah, I'm sorry about dropping off. Just finishing the thought real quickly and then I got to get going like you guys do. My point is the worst thing you can do is chase a token price. You got to chase the foundational first principles because everything else comes later. You can never win the game of popularity because no matter what price point you reach, it's not good enough. Look at Vitalik. He got Ethereum to a quarter of a trillion dollars. That's more than the GDP of most African nations combined. It's so big. And they were like, 'The token price is not going up. Vitalik is a failure.' Because someone entered at that quarter trillion and expects half a trillion, then a trillion. No matter what you do, you can't win. It's a treadmill. So focus on first principles: Is it increasing in decentralization? In freedom? Does it preserve the integrity of its founding intent? Can you do innovative new things never done before, for more people, not just a few in America and Europe, but for everybody in the world, all eight billion people? That's the mission of Cardano. We're real excited. I love working with you guys. We'll do what we can on the IO side to help your proposal get through. It shows how decentralized it is that the founder can't just flip a switch; you have to earn it. But I'm glad you guys are doing the hard work, rowing the boat. Love to see you be part of the ecosystem.

Thanks, Eric. Thanks, Brian. Cheers, Charles. Thanks for your time.