CEO, IOHK
Blockchain Africa 2021 Charles Hoskinson Keynote Speech - Africa To Become A Future World Power
Charles Hoskinson, Founder and CEO of IOHK @ Blockchain Africa 2021.
About Charles Hoskinson
Charles Hoskinson, the CEO of Input Output Global and founder of Cardano and Midnight, has been active in multiple public appearances discussing blockchain governance, privacy, and the integration of cryptocurrency with artificial intelligence. In a January 2024 LinkedIn Live interview, he described blockchain technology as a "management layer" for business and a means to "preserve human rights moving into the 21st century," and argued that the ESG movement would be a key driver of blockchain adoption. In subsequent interviews throughout 2025 and 2026, Hoskinson has focused on promoting Midnight, a privacy-focused blockchain he describes as a "fourth-generation cryptocurrency." He has stated that Midnight's design includes a dual-tokenomics model and aims to provide "rational privacy" through selective disclosure, allowing users to prove properties about themselves without revealing all their data. Hoskinson has also been vocal about regulatory and governance issues. In multiple appearances, he criticized the U.S. Clarity Act, arguing that its language could be used by regulators to classify most cryptocurrencies as securities. He has expressed disappointment with Ethereum's current trajectory and contrasted Cardano's on-chain governance system, where ADA holders have a vote, with Bitcoin and Ethereum, where he says holders have "no say." He has also warned about the potential for quantum computers to break Bitcoin's encryption, stating that the threat is "coming much faster than everybody is anticipating." Additionally, Hoskinson discussed his involvement in a healthcare venture in Wyoming, Hoskinson Health, which he said he co-founded with his father and brother, and which he described as a 70,000-square-foot facility that served 22,000 patients before being shut down due to financial losses and lack of government support.
Transcript (29 segments)
✨ AI-enhanced transcript with speaker attribution
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Charles Hoskinson0:00
To this wonderful summit, and thank you so much to the organizers for inviting me to be here. Thank you so much to all of you who are attending. You know, Africa and the topic of banking the unbanked, the topic of economic identity, is something that's near and dear to my heart.
More than 10 years ago, I remember using Kiva, a microfinance lending platform, and it awoke a long journey of mine to read books like Muhammad Yunus's Banking the Poor and other such titles to start having a discussion of why does the world have fractured financial systems and why is it the case that people, for no fault of their own, if they lose the geographic lottery, are born into systems that will keep them perpetually poor regardless of how hard they work or the content of their character.
This led me to the cryptocurrency space. I didn't really care too much for whether proof of work or proof of stake, or how Bitcoin transactions worked, or any of these nuances or details. What mattered to me was the use and utility of the system for bringing economic identity to the billions who don't have it. And I knew this concept of decentralization, this concept of having a blockchain that serves as a place to timestamp things, to audit things, a place to broker trust amongst people who don't trust each other, was truly something revolutionary and magical. But it's like all great inventions, came without a user manual and came without batteries included.
And over the last 10 years since I joined the cryptocurrency space, it's been my life mission to build systems that have the capacity to act as a backbone for utilities and social structures that will enable a great merging of the markets of the world so that those who are the poorest amongst us will enjoy the same financial systems as those who are the richest. It's a simple idea, but in practice, almost impossible with legacy systems to achieve.
And the crown jewel of our labors has been the Cardano protocol. We started in 2015 for the building the Cardano protocol specifically to figure out how to accommodate this concept of economic identity, how to build applications that would be equally useful as they are in someone's basement in New Jersey as they are to the shepherd in Senegal.
We also realized that in addition to doing great science and great engineering, it would take quite a bit of time for us to actually figure out how to deploy these systems within the developing world. That meant we physically had to move to those countries. And thus, in 2017, after we were a bit more mature as a company, we opened up offices in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. We built extensions into Rwanda and Uganda and came up with great partners. And we also started exploring places like Mongolia, the country of Georgia, and South American nations as well.
And we were unified with a common cause and purpose: how do we enable a system to operate from the bottom up instead of the top down? How do we figure out how to give people self-sovereign identity and put them in control of their own money, control of their own future, and give them a platform to build upon? And once they, through merit, earn, be able to protect and secure that through insurance and other products.
Now, that four-year journey since when we started, established that office in Ethiopia, to today has yielded some amazing fruit. First off, we've had the incredible opportunity to meet many world leaders who are aligned, many NGOs and charities that are directly in line with our goal, and a lot of meals, a lot of breaking of bread, a lot of knowledge that we've gained. We've also had the ability to train local talent and acquire local talent, people who's made this their tireless life mission, in many cases deeply under-resourced and exposed to, in many cases, uncaring bureaucracies or corruption, waste, fraud, and abuse, and just plain old-fashioned setbacks.
We've seen our own setbacks. Some of the countries we've chosen to be in have had unrest. Some of the countries we've chosen to work with have had regimes change. And as a consequence, things that we thought would be happening sooner took a little bit longer. That said, we are at the cusp of deals and initiatives this year which will bring millions of users through public-private partnerships into the Cardano ecosystem.
And what does that mean? Really, what does that mean? It means that for a large group of people, for the first time in their lives, they will have digital identity that also can be linked to wallets, that also can be linked to payment systems, that also can be linked to property, that can enjoy rich metadata and other such things. And this is the highest goal because if we can achieve these things, then it will enable, then it means functionally a new economy can form. The great liquefaction of over five trillion dollars of wealth can happen.
You see, the reality is that Africa is not a poor continent, and African nations collectively are not poor. They are rather a situation where they have tremendous potential and real wealth, but that wealth is inaccessible due to bad systems and difficulty globalizing the nation states. And this is both a disadvantage and a tremendous opportunity.
The reality is, when you look to the future, you don't want to go to where the puck is, you want to go to where the puck will be. In other words, you want to go where the economies are going to grow the fastest and the greatest opportunity. We saw this a long time ago in the 1980s with the surging of China. It was a common notion in the 1980s amongst people in Wall Street and London and Japan and other places that China was a very poor nation with many systemic problems. But amongst the very specialized actors who truly understood where things were going, they realized that changes in those systems had built up to a position where China, in just a few short decades, would become one of the richest and most powerful nations in the world.
Similarly, when you look at the demographics of Africa, you look at the generation that will take custodianship of the continent, you see people over 70% in the case of Ethiopia who are at or under the age of 30, who grew up with a cell phone in their hand, who grew up as digital natives on the internet with the same access to knowledge as I have and the same access to education as I have, thanks to MOOCs, thanks to YouTube and other free platforms that exist. And so the bridge of human capital has occurred, and you have a group of people who are tremendously ambitious and impatient and will not tolerate the bureaucracy of the past and will not tolerate the sins of the past.
Whatever systems stand in their way of progress will soon come collapsing down, and in that wake, that vacuum is a marketplace for new systems. My country has trillions of dollars of social infrastructure, the United States, for our financial markets, for our legal system, for every single thing from how our healthcare works to how we die. There's a law, a regulation, or some bureaucracy that stands in the way, and in many cases these things hold and stabilize our society, but they make us less resilient, less adaptable, and also slow down progress and the ability to chase the future.
When there is a marketplace for completely new systems that in many cases are orders of magnitude more efficient and at a much lower cost, then that is going to result in a huge competitive advantage for the nations first to adopt them. The first countries to hold national elections online that are credible, free, fair, and auditable will likely be African nations. The first countries to have an end-to-end digital identity and economy, there's a great potential for that to be African nations. Not Germany, not France, not England, not the United States, not China, not Japan.
This is an all-you-can-eat buffet of innovation, progress, and new systems. And why our industry, the blockchain industry, is so interconnected to this is that's functionally what we do. We find ways to build trust amongst those who don't trust each other. We find ways to innovate everything from monetary policy to the concept of identity to the concept of property.
So years ago, we built infrastructure in Ethiopia, amongst other places throughout the continent, and we did that knowing that that infrastructure would be used to service large-scale government deals. So the push model where we push these things to the citizens of countries, but also for us to be able to begin a systemic campaign of innovation throughout the continent. The other magic of Cardano is Cardano comes built in with a funding system called Catalyst. Today, right now, at the current price of ADA, over a quarter billion dollars, 250 million dollars, is available for grants for those who wish to build infrastructure, applications, and services and products in the Cardano ecosystem.
It is our belief and hope that over the next five years, a meaningful percentage of the entrepreneurs who deploy infrastructure—it could be a peer-to-peer lending system, it could be a remittance system, it could be an ATM network, it can be basic internet access, it could be micro ISPs, it can be power generation, whatever it might be—will likely come from a pan-African view. And this is not only a goal, but it's something we're investing heavily in with partners like Ice Addis, which gives us access to entrepreneurs in more than 25 countries in Africa.
Over the next five years, our staff on the ground in Africa will likely scale from the dozens to the hundreds, if not the thousands. And instead of just having one headquarters, it's likely we'll have at least four or five headquarters throughout the continent. For example, we've already started a campaign to build up resources and access and personnel in the country of Ghana. I will also try to do the same in places like Rwanda and so forth.
And what we found in every place we go is a welcoming attitude and a lot of grace and intelligence. For example, the Prime Minister of Ethiopia is a cryptographer. My country is ruled by a person in his late 70s. Ethiopia is ruled by a person who could actually read the academic papers my cryptographers write. This is a stark contrast in both age as well as outlook, reminding me much of the early days of Singapore and the wisdom and judgment that was going into the growth and management of that country. And I think the exact same thing can be done with a helping hand here and there, in a way that benefits maximally as many people as possible.
So we're super excited, and we've been investing in everything from identity. The Prism team, our entry point into identity, has over a dozen people. That team is expanding by 30 people. To our ability to tender and bid for contracts, we wanted to seal some flagship contracts first, and those are coming to a close, and which will bring millions of people into Cardano. And then those will stabilize as a foundation for which we can do business with dozens of entities and countries, both public and private. And the people responsible for that are scaling up very rapidly to training far more developers, to training far more entrepreneurs, and then giving those entrepreneurs access to marketplaces and capital so that they can liquefy the wealth of Africa and be able to benefit from it.
You see, many people tend to look at this as a charity problem. I think that's both the wrong way and also fundamentally dehumanizing. I look at this as ultimately a new market, a new frontier upon which we can find new partners to work with. It is not our goal to save people or to give away. It's our goal to build, partner, collaborate, and create wealth and share that with our partners.
I cannot imagine what it means to be born in Zambia or Zimbabwe or South Africa. It's not my life and it's not my experience. But there are millions who have that life and experience. What I can imagine, though, is how to build a great business with people born from those places, and for us to build wealth together. That's the point of blockchain technology. It's a great unifier. It's a great engine of trust. It's a great engine of economic progress and creation.
We have literally, as entrepreneurs, without permission, government aid, or centralized coordination, built an ecosystem worth one trillion dollars, looking at the market capitalization of cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin and Ethereum and Cardano and others. And that's just 10 years into this game. We've also spurred a movement with tens of millions of people all across the planet, from nomads in Mongolia to shepherds and other places. And each and every one of them understands the principles and concepts and can run their entire life from a cell phone without relying upon a central agency.
And over the next 10 years, we could see another order of magnitude. The totality of our ecosystem could be 10 trillion, 15 trillion, 20 trillion dollars. And the majority of that could be owned by those in developing nations such as Ethiopia, such as Uganda, such as Chile. And as a consequence, that is the greatest achievement of systems in the last century, bettering lives of all and reducing the problems of all.
So it's very exciting to be here. It's very exciting to be part of these events and to see the rollout in a very short period of time. We're going to go ahead and announce an Africa Special, our company, and we'll be able to show everybody all the different programs and pilots and projects and partners and kind of the vision of what we're going to invest next three to five years.
It is the privilege of a lifetime as an entrepreneur to be able to participate in these markets in this way. I literally get to wake up every single day and talk to the most ambitious, honest, and hard-working people I've ever met in my life, and find ways to build systems with them that not only make their lives better but produce wealth for all of us. And if I'm right in my hypothesis, I believe that Africa will make the Chinese miracle that we witnessed over the last three decades become the African miracle, which will dwarf anything China has accomplished and perhaps make Africa one of the most valuable continents in human history.
It happened before with the great Mansa Musa, and I think it definitely can happen again, only if we build the right systems. And it would be a travesty if those systems allowed that wealth to only aggregate in one place. In my view, it is incredibly important that we remember the first principle of the cryptocurrency space: that we are all truly equal and there is no centralized power. That's the magic of the systems that we build and engineer, is that everybody has a say no matter where they come from or who they are, and everybody has a seat at the table in being able to decide the trajectory of their life and to keep the fruits of their labors.
So thank you so much for coming, and I hope you enjoy this conference as much as I do. And I hope you choose to invest in Africa as much as I have. I think it's the best investment any business can make, and I also believe it's the most rewarding work any person can do. Cheers.