Surprise AMA 11/11/2025

Today's surprise AMA streams live from Colorado on November 11, 2025.

The Midnight Summit takes place in six days near London, covering the four stage Midnight launch and partner showcases.

Midnight is Cardano's second child and the fourth generation of cryptocurrency after Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Cardano.

The fourth generation of blockchains needs on chain governance, rational privacy, selective disclosure, and cooperative economics bridging TradFi and DeFi.

Midnight's scavenger hunt used more computing power in 21 days than Bitcoin did in its first few years.

The glacier drop plus new NIGHT token distributions from Gate and Kraken make this the fairest, largest token distribution ever, beating Arbitrum's airdrop with no VC allocation.

Crypto is a retail phenomenon: institutions like BlackRock and Goldman Sachs should play by the same rules as everyone else, and asset backed stablecoins are a problem because they require a centralized company's permission to deploy.

Charles, Dan Larimer, and Stan Larimer created the first algorithmic stablecoin in 2013 with BitShares, along with the first DEX, the Graphene blockchain toolkit, and delegated proof of stake, more than a decade before today's DeFi.

Wants to see private algorithmic stablecoins and private DEXes built on Midnight, given the demand shown by the surge in Zcash and Monero.

Looking back at old interviews from his time as CEO of Ethereum makes him feel older, but the passion for the work has not faded.

Cardano is one of the few chains that airs its problems in public instead of hiding them behind closed doors.

Admits this year's biggest disappointment has been the actions of the Trump administration, despite being a lifelong conservative libertarian who campaigned for Ron Paul and Rand Paul and wants government out of personal choices like marriage and drug use, while opposing gender reassignment for children as a non consensual medical issue.

The Democrats declared war on crypto: prominent leaders were jailed or investigated, and every US exchange got sued, including Coinbase after it tried registering with the SEC more than 20 times under Gary Gensler.

Credits the new SEC for reversing Gary Gensler's decisions and ending the war on crypto, though Congress still has not delivered DeFi or disclosure legislation.

Worries that Trump launching Trump coin and World Liberty Financial made crypto a partisan issue, risking a return to subpoenas and lawsuits if Democrats retake power in 2027 or 2029, and calls for Americans to stop treating half the country as subhuman over politics.

Argues corrupt bureaucracies entrench themselves, using Spain still running the Inquisition into the 19th century as an example, arguing real revolution means building new systems on blockchain, not electing a strongman.

Distrusts Silicon Valley figures like Marc Andreessen and Peter Thiel, arguing their techno utopian, Homo Deus style ambition to become gods or a different species makes them unfit to build egalitarian systems.

He never cared about wealth or status, having had as much fun broadcasting AMAs from an apartment as he does now, because his job is delivering this technology and rebuilding society's fabric.

Uses his mom's comment about food stamps to explain inflation: a Hawaii house that cost 150,000 dollars is now worth a million, and a Nissan sold for 3,000 dollars used now costs 25,000 dollars, while wages have not kept pace.

Calls inflationary monetary policy a rigged game favoring the rich, and slams Trump for pushing tariffs while proposing deficits, punishing fiscal hawks like Thomas Massie and Rand Paul who warn it will bankrupt the country.

Proposes paying a president a percentage of foreign direct investment he brings in, contrasting private sector incentives with a public sector that gets surprised over Nancy Pelosi's insider trading and Kelly Loeffler's scandals.

Wants a blockchain backed reset of objective reality and a national airing of grievances like Rwanda's reconciliation process, warning that without it America risks collapse and civil war.

Closes the Veteran's Day reflection by thanking veterans for their service.

The K framework: a meta language created by professor Grigore Rosu to define the semantics of programming languages, so a smart contract language could be defined once and reused.

The goal of K's semantic space compilation was to let developers write smart contracts in Python, C, Rust, or Java and have them translate automatically, so IOG invested more than 19 million dollars building a new K framework and the IELE virtual machine, an EVM competitor based on LLVM.

IELE integration was abandoned because semantic space compilation never achieved perfect program translation and ran 100 to 1000 times too slow, though the University of Illinois Urbana Champaign team's reachability logic research and the chimeric ledgers paper mixing UTXO and account models still shaped Cardano's design, with Marlowe planned for the Turing incomplete UTXO side and IELE for the account side.

When IELE did not pan out, Cardano pivoted to a full Turing complete language and extended UTXO to the extended UTXO model, eUTXO; in hindsight he would have bet earlier on RISC-V and zero knowledge techniques, and wanted to write it in Scala 3, but delayed waiting on Martin Odersky's release.

Dismisses Ben Cowen's prediction that December ends this bull run with no altcoin season, arguing Bitcoin dominance typically caps out before value rotates into altcoins and the still unpassed Clarity Act will bring more money into the industry.

Argues two things can be true at once: Cardano is fully permissionless so he cannot stop Circle or Tether from deploying a stablecoin, while he philosophically opposes centrally issued stablecoins because they can be tracked and frozen.

The Cardano Foundation, not Input Output, is responsible for negotiating stablecoin integrations since it was given 600 million ADA for that purpose, and challenges the community to ask them about it at the Berlin summit.

His distaste for centrally issued stablecoins that can be frozen and go worthless if the issuer collapses, which is why Cardano built the algorithmic stablecoin Djed instead.

Recounts that Michael Parsons set up the Cardano Foundation's structure, and after Input Output tried to change it and was pushed off the board, the choice was Swiss government receivership or a new Swiss led board.

Blames that governance fight for Cardano falling behind on integrations, and says Midnight is fixing it since its foundation wants oracles, bridges, and stablecoins to generate yield on its NIGHT token holdings.

Cardano is prototyping a Chainlink bridge using trustless proofs and trusted execution environments rather than asking Chainlink to write native smart contracts, paid for in LINK.

Notes Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong's hope that the Clarity Act passes before December, but says it needs about five or six Senate Democrats to join all Republicans for the 60 votes required, with the government shutdown ending soon.

Details three years of what he calls Cardano Foundation dishonesty: funding Pragma behind Input Output's back after Intersect talks, structuring a Linux Foundation style membership body that excludes Input Output, publicly opposing the Cardano Constitution then reversing course, and refusing to confirm Input Output did not steal money in the ADA vouchers dispute.

Argues the Cardano Foundation's rotten governance, not personalities, is the problem, and calls for a community elected board with defined KPIs that can fire or reward executives.

Compares the needed professional detente to Antonin Scalia and Ruth Bader Ginsburg's friendship despite political differences, since an institution's job is simply to grow Cardano.

Proposes the Cardano Foundation work with data firms like DeFi Llama and Messari, and VCs including A16Z, Draper, ARK, and Pantera, to agree on a public top 10 KPI dashboard and annual strategy for 2026.

Contrasts a six million dollar Berlin summit dinner with the better return of taking a strong Cardano booth to the top four industry conferences of 20,000 plus attendees each quarter.

Sebastien Guillemot, the Midnight Foundation's CTO, has openly criticized his and Input Output's decisions for years, but they stay friends because leadership means uniting on a shared mission and KPIs despite disagreement.

Plans to recruit 500 Midnight Ambassadors in 2026, paid in NIGHT with 20 percent required to go into Midnight DeFi, drawing members from Ethereum, Solana, and Cardano since Midnight aims to be a neutral, Switzerland like ecosystem.

Sets Midnight's 2026 targets at over a billion dollars in total value locked, hundreds of thousands of monthly active DeFi users, and heavy cross chain transaction volume from Ethereum, Solana, Bitcoin, and Cardano, with the Midnight Foundation only paid if it hits those KPIs.

A German mathematician that Midnight's Compact language resembles TypeScript, and recommends starting with the Magic Moon Math manual, Groth16, and R1CS before moving to the Plonk and Halo 2 systems Midnight actually uses.

Breaks the zero knowledge stack into seven layers: trusted or transparent setup, circuit languages like Cairo and Noir versus general languages like Compact, witness generation, arithmetization such as R1CS, AIR, or Plonk, the proof engine, cryptographic primitives like lattices or elliptic curves, and the blockchain layer itself.

Midnight's proof engine is currently Halo 2, soon to be replaced by an in house system called Nightstream.

Midnight's ambition to be a layer two to everyone, letting new projects build their regulatory, identity, and privacy logic once plus an intents layer, then deploy liquidity into Ethereum, Solana, or Cardano.

The Midnight Foundation is building an ecosystem group with a hire from Outlier Ventures to run hackathons, incubation, and eventually Series A co-investment, something Cardano's Emurgo, the Cardano Foundation, and the underperforming cFund and Wave funds never managed well due to conflicts of interest.

Dismisses the ADA vouchers theft accusation as a forever conspiracy that a tier one auditor and law firm's forensic blockchain report already debunked, showing exactly where the money went, though critics refuse to read it.

Declassified CIA remote viewing files from Project Stargate, noting the CIA was mainly the hatchet man that shut the program down in 1995 while the real work was military, run out of NSA's Fort Meade with people like Joe McMoneagle, Russell Targ, and Ingo Swann.

Plans to train practitioners in associative remote viewing and back a five million dollar fund making weekly sports betting and Web3 market bets, to test whether they statistically outperform the market the way Russell Targ's 1982 silver trading experiment claimed.

Reassures a viewer that learning Haskell is not a waste of time since its functional programming and category theory concepts improve code quality even when only partly applied in languages like Java, Scala, and Kotlin.

Midnight's DUST fee token: NIGHT generates DUST, a capacity exchange lets Bitcoin, Ethereum, and other assets swap into DUST, and the resulting pool funds block and validation rewards for NIGHT holders in a self sustaining tokenomics loop.

Contrasts Midnight with Chainlink's confidential compute stack: Midnight runs Plonk and Halo 2 while unifying off chain and on chain computation with homomorphic encryption, trusted execution environments, and MPC feeding a single on chain proof, and uses the Minotaur protocol to observe bridged chains' state via folding proofs without running their full nodes.

Distinguishes Midnight's confidential compute from Chainlink, comparing it instead to Nvidia and AMD building trusted execution environments into GPUs for Azure and AWS Nitro so cloud providers cannot see what they process.

Midnight is deliberately betting on GPUs and tensor networks rather than special purpose ASIC hardware, calling Vitalik Buterin's ASIC bet a huge strategic mistake, since Midnight unifies an off chain acceleration layer with an on chain settlement layer that lets it scale infinitely.

Reveals Midnight 2's consensus algorithm is a revision of the Jolteon protocol, already proven safe with liveness proofs in progress, targeting 5000 TPS and sub second block times.

Confirms Cardano and Midnight will get a bidirectional recursive SNARK bridge with no bridge operator, using the BLS support added to Cardano and Ouroboros Praos's fast settlement for near instant transfers both ways.

Corrects a questioner: he lives in Wheatland, Wyoming, not Laramie.

Recaps a Greece trip, preferring Thessaloniki slightly over Athens after visiting Ellinikon and Philip II's tomb while scouting Greece as the hub campus for IO's venture studio hub and spoke model, which already has spokes in Abu Dhabi and a flagship office in Argentina.

Midnight raises ADA value because NIGHT lives as a Cardano smart contract so moving it and paying Babel fees consumes ADA, Midnight's staking algorithm pays NIGHT rewards to Cardano SPOs, and Midnight's bridges, oracles, and wallets all route through Cardano by default.

Rejects the claim that Midnight is killing Cardano, listing tier one exchange listings, industry links, a DeFi ecosystem, new SPO revenue, and an ADA holder airdrop as the payoff.

He was excluded from a Trump White House crypto round table over insufficient donations, a tweet about XRP donating to Trump, and Trump's team being unaware ADA was included in the strategic reserve alongside Bitcoin, calling it patronage politics rather than merit.

He does not care about being excluded from the room and would do almost anything, including a lumberjack festival photo op or negotiating in a Walmart, if it gets the Clarity Act passed usefully, since power and presidents are fleeting compared to a law that could govern crypto for decades.

The Securities Exchange Act of 1933, passed under FDR with JFK's father as its first chairman, is still the law 92 years and roughly 15 presidents later, arguing the coming crypto bill will set precedent just as durable.

Uses Uniswap as a case study for a hybrid Midnight and Cardano app: to list a regulated, disclosure bound asset class alongside fungible tokens, Uniswap would otherwise have to build its own privacy layer or centralize the process in Solidity.

The hybrid design lets Uniswap expand from crypto only trading to the ten trillion dollar real world asset market by writing a single compliance contract on Midnight using OpenZeppelin, Compact, and Solidity, with users never noticing the routing between chains.

Midnight can bridge two other chains directly, for example routing a Uniswap to Solana DEX connection through Midnight's proof engine on both sides so folded state proofs and proof carrying data keep the chains synchronized.

Jokes that ISO 20022 compliance is just a message format that any programmable system supports, not the core selling point some in the community treat it as.

Compares his teaching style to Richard Feynman's, arguing any complex topic must be explained simply enough for a beginner or it will eventually die out, and that teaching non-technical audiences keeps his own understanding sharp.

The new IRS staking tax rules fit Cardano's existing design well since Cardano bet correctly on the future of staking taxation.

Jokes that Vitalik Buterin claims to know nothing about a Charles Hoskinson project while somehow still knowing enough to call it that, poking fun at Vitalik's own rumored privacy chain effort.

Explains privacy coins like Zcash and Monero have little TVL because they only do transaction privacy, not smart contracts, and predicts Midnight's finality will change that with a billion dollars in TVL before the end of 2026.

Recommends the book We Are Electric by Sally Adee for anyone building a 2026 reading list.

Reveals Cardano's answer to an M-Pesa style strategy is RealFi, a peer to peer microfinance push for Africa, South America, and Southeast Asia launching next year that he expects to rival or exceed Midnight in size, built by the same Africa team led by John O'Connor.

Midnight gives Cardano dApps a privacy layer edge over slower moving Ethereum and Solana competitors, with projects like CSwap already building into it to attract new liquidity.

Rejects the idea that Midnight is a favorite child replacing Cardano, comparing it to a grown child who must get a job and govern itself while he stays a father giving guidance, not a permanent custodian.

Cardano is moving into the intents space and a partner chains network that could launch roughly one new partner chain a year, each dropping tokens to ADA holders, plus Bitcoin DeFi as a way to pull in fresh capital without fighting Ethereum or Solana for sticky liquidity.

Gives a Bitcoin DeFi update: more than 24,000 BTC has been sourced as potentially movable to Cardano, with a team led by Omar presenting the yield product plans at Abu Dhabi Finance Week.

Points questioners to his existing 30 minute video on quantum resistance for Cardano and Midnight rather than repeating it live.

Ouroboros got its name from epochs feeding into each other like the serpent eating its own tail, creating an infinite series of epochs.

Flatly refuses to extend the Midnight scavenger hunt.

A Midnight Ambassador who felt mistreated by the Cardano community that they deserved better, mourning the loyal community members and influencers lost to years of infighting and a culture of puritanical purges that drives out anyone imperfect.

The ADA vouchers audit report proves how he makes decisions when nobody is watching, after ten years of handling a difficult situation with almost no scrutiny.

Admits he could have done many things better, and points to Midnight as an attempt to fix Cardano's early mistakes with better token distribution, more accountable core entities, and a clearer commercial vision.

Pushes back on being told to personally fund Cardano marketing, warning it would create permanent dependency, no accountability, and accusations of favoritism or secret deals no matter who he chose to promote.

Reveals his sovereign wealth fund proposal for an actively managed treasury, which could have added 50 million dollars a year in stablecoin liquidity and doubled annually, still has not passed governance despite the community demanding more TVL.

Points to the backlash over the glacier drop as proof he cannot win: despite being the largest token distribution in the industry's history with over a million participants, about half new to Cardano, critics still called it incompetent.

The Cardano Foundation barely tweets about Midnight despite it being, in his view, the most significant and exciting project in Cardano's history and potentially a ten billion dollar cryptocurrency.

He deliberately stays out of governance debates to give the community room to grow up, noting ADA has held a top ten market cap spot for eight years and once returned 20x in 2021, so the focus should stay on decentralization, resilience, and usefulness rather than uncontrollable macro events like tariffs or wars.

Calls for a 2026 cultural reset where the community calms down, citing being accused without evidence of rewriting the blockchain and stealing 600 million dollars while founding entities who knew better stayed silent hoping it would drive him out.

Lists Cardano's real advantages, a loyal global community, no regulatory problems, fast improving technology, Bitcoin DeFi, the partner chains model, and the Intersect members organization, and challenges anyone cynical about them to go fix the specific problem instead of just complaining.

Insists nothing dooms Cardano to fail and there is no reason TVL could not grow 10x or 20x, telling anyone spreading learned hopelessness to either do the work or leave since watching burnt out veterans quit is the real warning sign.

Uses the DRep formerly known as Cardano Whale as a cautionary example: factually wrong that ADA holders could crash the market by selling, he could not handle being corrected, quit Twitter, then used his DRep vote to try defunding the Leios scaling research and Input Output's research group out of spite.

Explains his visible anger about Cardano's problems comes from love, not hate, comparing true indifference to Dante's frozen lowest circle of hell, and admits many of Input Output's own mistakes while lamenting an ecosystem that has bet right on liquid staking, interoperability, the layer two model, partner chains, extended UTXO, Bitcoin DeFi, and on chain governance yet still stagnates.

Argues Cardano needs an emotional, loved in community identity to survive once rivals like Sui, Aptos, and Solana catch up technologically within 18 months, or else it is just another disposable protocol and token.

Points to the uneconomical but loved 70,000 square foot Hoskinson Health and Wellness clinic he built in Gillette, Wyoming for its 17,000 residents as proof that caring about a community matters more than the numbers.

Expects quantum computers by around 2033 and says Midnight is the two year testbed IOG will use to develop and then backport post quantum cryptography into Cardano.

He is still involved with World Mobile Token and wants to build one of its Earth Node telecom nodes himself.

Recalls connecting William Shatner, whom he met on an X Space, to a company he owns so Shatner could monetize his content across multiple blockchains, calling it one of his most surreal moments as a lifelong Star Trek and Boston Legal fan.

Defines intelligence broadly as any entity's ability to understand and influence its environment to pursue a goal, arguing bacteria can be hyper intelligent by this standard and would likely survive a nuclear war better than humans.

Breaks artificial general intelligence into a checklist: a world model of the environment, autonomy to choose its own goals rather than just following orders, and learnability through deliberate practice, illustrating it with an AI learning to play Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata.

AI still lacks wisdom, the value alignment Pope Leo XIV has spoken about, comparing removing the Senate filibuster to high fructose corn syrup: good short term, catastrophic long term without checks and balances.

Argues AGI needs no self awareness or embodiment, citing Dan Dennett's philosophical zombie, and predicts both AGI and quantum computing are inevitable and will eventually merge, even after the transformer architecture is replaced.

Calls it a straight up lie that Plutus discourages Cardano development, challenging critics who have never heard of Aiken, the Rust based smart contract language most Cardano apps are actually written in today.

Jokes that after bringing back the woolly mammoth, engineering a fire breathing animal would not actually be that hard.

Proves most Cardano contracts are now written in Aiken, not Plutus or Haskell, reframing the complaint as a marketing problem the Cardano Foundation should fix with Aiken hackathons and million dollar prizes at major conferences like Token2049, Consensus, and Bitcoin events instead of a six million ADA Berlin party for under a thousand people.

He would love to find a path for Midnight to use a proof of useful work mining method and is actively working on one.

Calls Midnight a full superset of Zcash, capable of doing everything Zcash does and more.

Highlights an Aiken built Cardano project as one of 2025's best smart contracts, calling it very complex and hard to build.

The path to higher ADA staking rewards is the partner chains model.

Screen shares his personal Lace wallet on stream, showing small holdings of ADA, CRO, the Djed and USDM stablecoins, STRIKE, Cornucopias, Iagon, and Charli3, plus Cardano dApps like WingRiders, JPG Store, Fluid Tokens, Liquid Finance, Indigo, and Splash.

Confirms he already runs a government affairs office and sees no need for a separate Washington DC office with Rare Evo, planning to wind down that push once the Clarity Act passes.

Learns on stream about the Boneyard, a private mining claim near Fairbanks, Alaska known for a massive concentration of well preserved Ice Age fossils, and jokes about visiting to find mammoth bones.

Admits he has indeed called people idiots and liars to their face in Congressional testimony and on CNBC, joking that is exactly why he does not get invited back.

Jokes that NIGHT is the only privacy token built to pass a future market structure bill because Midnight was designed as a layer two for institutions, Fortune 500 companies, and retail alike.

Refuses to take a position on the Israel Palestine conflict, calling it an untalkable topic where no question is asked in good faith, noting even Lex Fridman could not bridge the two sides.

Admits 2025 is the first year he felt he violated his own integrity by staying quiet, against his advisers' advice, about Trump coin and World Liberty Financial turning what should be neutral, bipartisan crypto policy into political theater.

Dismisses both Make America Great Again and Obama's Hope and Change as vacuous slogans, proposing instead that America objectively rank itself against the world category by category, like healthcare or education, and build a national strategy to move up.

Defends Elon Musk against being reflexively hated by the left, pointing to SpaceX carrying 95 percent of cargo to space and Neuralink giving a quadriplegic patient renewed hope, arguing America criminalizes brilliant people simply for working with Trump.

Argues America's problem, like Cardano's, is cultural rather than slogan deep, insisting Americans still have the capacity for sacrifice and greatness shown by the moon landing and the internet, if leadership gives them a mission worth believing in.

Criticizes Trump for promising to release the Epstein files and not doing so, then punishing accountability voices like Thomas Massie, reaffirming he is a libertarian who believes both governments and blockchains exist to put guardrails on flawed human nature.

There is no psychological safety in either the Trump administration, where one tweet can end a career, or the woke movement, where one wrong word violates its orthodoxy.

Pushes back on crediting Trump with stopping eight world wars in ten months, questioning whether there is truly peace in the Middle East, whether the Rwanda Congo ceasefire really held, and why the Ukraine war is still going on after being promised a 24 hour resolution.

Criticizes Democrats for keeping a cancer and dementia stricken Biden in office for four years while unelected staffers ran the White House, then swapping in Kamala Harris with no debate or democratic process in his final 107 days.

The woke left brands his immutable whiteness and maleness as systemically racist, citing the book White Fragility, denies the biological differences between the sexes, and shows zero respect for property rights.

Blames both parties' refusal to raise taxes and their corruption for destroying the currency, which is now pushing poor people toward democratic socialists who want to seize the means of production, arguing the real fix is a painful return to sound money.

Calls New York mayor elect Zohran Mamdani a symptom of a broken social contract who will end up acting as Florida's best real estate recruiter once wealthy residents flee and commercial real estate collapses, tipping the city into a welfare state.

Calls Binance's CZ an old friend from their shared poor BitShares era, noting Binance was one of the first exchanges to list ADA back in 2017 when it was smaller than BitShares, and admires how CZ built a 400 million user empire from nothing despite being a ruthless businessman.

BitShares investors Li Xiaolai and Bo Shen never funded Cardano and backed Ethereum instead, though Li gave the first quarter million dollars for Invictus Innovations, later pushed for Charles's buyout over an ICO dispute, and was the connection Charles used to introduce Vitalik Buterin to Chinese crypto circles.

Revisits the Scala 3 what if: it actually arrived five years late, not weeks, and speculates Cardano might have built its account model first with a different, UTXO friendly engineering team, noting the reward withdrawal mechanism is already a subtle account based system inside Cardano's ledger.

He respects Polkadot's Gavin Wood as a smart guy with equally strong opinions, joking that Turkish oil wrestling is the only way to settle the Polkadot versus Cardano rivalry.

Confirms Midnight's coming Nightstream proof system will be quantum resistant, calling that an asset rather than a liability.

Jokes that Trump's own family invokes Ethereum's EthGate corruption history while simultaneously building on Ethereum and telling people to buy ether.

Closes the three hour Veterans Day AMA predicting Midnight will be a leviathan next year with Cardano enjoying the spillover benefits, promising the road ahead will have some pain but end up fine.