Why Korea is Now Leading the Global Crypto Revolution with Charles Hoskin at KBW2025

Hi everybody. Good to see everybody here. You know, I love Korea. I was actually just in Mongolia this morning. I was out in the Altai Mountains with the Kazakh nomads and we were eagle hunting.

So I was riding a horse and I had this eagle on my arm and that was a lot of fun. No showers. So I was able to take one here, shaved, cleaned up a little bit. I love Korea. You know, I started in Hong Kong and Japan and I did the thing that we all did back in the day.

I'd go from Wan Chai to Osaka and back and forth. And Cardano got started there back in 2015. It was a lot of fun. I got to see all of Japan, but we always knew our neighbors to the west were going to be big and it was really interesting once the Golden Week laws got passed in Japan, a huge amount of business from Japan moved over into Korea. And then it moved from Korea to uh Singapore and then Singapore later to the Middle East.

And this market's grown tremendously. Actually, there's 15 million Koreans who hold cryptocurrencies. Isn't that crazy? 1/3 of the country. And there's been a lot of really impressive regulatory work.

There was the CFTIA back in 2020 and then that was followed up by the uh Virtual Asset User Protection Act in 2024 and now we have the DABA. So it's been cool to watch how Korea in its own has built out this comprehensive regulatory framework. The reason I know a lot about this framework is that I've been working a lot with the US Senate on a regulatory framework for the United States. We got the GENIUS Act recently passed, which is a stable coin regulation there and uh now we're working on the Clarity Act and some of the work in Korea actually came up as a reference point. So congratulations the people in the United States Senate actually know about you and read your work and see the things there.

So it's fun to think that Korea actually has some influence on the United States in that respect and congratulations for that. That was hard work. But let's look at the industry as a whole. Being in it for almost 15 years now, it's been fun to watch it go from basically nothing to half billion users and 4 trillion dollars, give or take. And when we look at where we're going over the next 10 years, we're standing at this inflection point where there's no longer going to be TradFi and DeFi, Web2 and Web3.

It's all just going to merge together and you're going to have Fi in the new web. And really the core of crypto, what we we're trying to solve, the problems we're trying to solve, hasn't changed. And that's about trust. The core of crypto's trust. When I signed up in 2010, we talked about trust.

We didn't trust the government. We had the 2008 financial crisis. We later on had Occupy Wall Street. We had all the shenanigans throughout the years. And the absence of trust said we need to build a better system for that.

So this blockchain technology, that made sense to us. And then when you have trust, you can rebuild the economic, political and social systems of the world. You can talk about new money, sound money. You can take talk about verified voting. You can talk about services like social networks that can't be censored.

You can talk about app stores that don't have bias behind them. Cuz the thing is when you look at the world right now, we're all starting to realize that everything's a little rigged. Every little thing you look at, there's somebody behind it who has decided that it has to work that way to benefit themselves or their friends. And we're getting tired of it, which is why everybody's so unhappy. Yeah.

We're really getting tired of it. So we can complain about it, we can vote about it and that doesn't seem to do much or you can just do something about it. So the totality of the cryptocurrency industry has been for the last 15 years and why we've gone from nobody to 500 million people where we overcame the US government. We beat them. The Biden administration tried to kill us.

They tried to sue everybody. We beat them. And now they're embracing us. The President of the United States issued a meme coin. That's that's winning, guys.

Crypto's on top. Why did we win? We won because at the end of the day, people are just tired. They want a system they can believe in. They want votes that count.

They want money that's sound. So all these years that I've been in, really it's bifurcated in kind of two eras. One was the building era where we were talking about foundational technologies. And in parallel, it was the adoption of can we get enough people that are true believers to actually carry this through and get the resilience to decentralization and the scale required to actually rewrite society. So here's your report card.

In terms of technology, we're almost there. We're three generations in. We're almost done with the third generation and the fourth generation is about to begin and at the end of that generation, cryptocurrency will have the technical backbone required to operate at a scale of billions of people, preserve and protect your identity, your privacy and restore your self-sovereignty. That's an amazing, incredible accomplishment and it's the accomplishment of not one blockchain, but all of them working together in their own way. We had to have the smart contract revolution.

We had to have a consensus revolution, the proof-of-stake revolution. We had to think about zero-knowledge proofs in completely different ways. We had to figure out new accounting systems like UTXO and extend them to have smart contracts. We had to figure out how to get the EVM to actually work and not blow up every 15 minutes. It was a lot of work.

A lot of sleepless nights, a lot of incredible effort went into that. But the end result of all of that magic has been that people can wake up today, they can go to ChatGPT or their favorite AI and say, "I want to be a dapp developer." They can sit down in 30 minutes, hour, they can actually write some Solidity code or some Aiken or whatever the heck their preference is and deploy something on a testnet. Actually have something that works, something that's built. That's pretty magical when you think about it because it was not possible even 5 years ago.

But now not only is it possible, it's going to lead to a revolution where so many thousands of people are going to do that, wake up and they're going to build millions of applications eventually that we're going to transform every facet of society. We are missing some things though. We're missing selective disclosure. We're missing computational privacy. So often I get asked, I do a lot of interviews these days and they say, "Charles, what's the next big market?

Where are we going to make money? I mean, what token should we invest in? You know, where is the Where's all this going?" It's like, "Yeah, I know what you're asking." Well, the third generation is about scalability, interoperability and governance and we're starting to learn how to do all that stuff.

You see stuff like Sui and Aptos and Solana and they're pretty fast. And we're learning how to do that at scale without sacrificing decentralization and that's what things like Ouroboros Leios are about or some of these sharded protocols are about that you see floating around. In terms of interoperability, we're getting really good at that. We're starting to figure out how to get blockchains to talk to each other, move state around, all this stuff. We just saw that Eigen Cloud presentation.

That's a great example of interoperability. AVS, it's get stuff to talk to each other. It doesn't matter where you've run it, it just runs. You don't particularly care about the infrastructure. Okay, so that's good.

Governance, you have all these DAOs, Metagov, Cardano had its constitutional conventions, now fully decentralized on the governance side. People are figuring that part of it out too. So when you look to the next generation, we want all that prior stuff. We want ability to do millions if not billions of transactions. We want the ability to stay resilient and be up 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.

We want to be fully decentralized and resilient and censorship resistant. All this stuff. But also, we want privacy and identity. These are the two missing things in the cryptocurrency space. So by no coincidence, you'll notice on the sponsor board, there's a lot of logos there and they say stuff like privacy and ZK and selective disclosure like Espresso was there and a few others.

There's a lot of people entering that space cuz very rightfully so, they realize that this is the last mile of crypto. Crypto does so many things incredibly well. Crypto is so magical, but it's public. Everything that you put into a cryptocurrency, everybody else knows. Everybody else sees.

Do you want your trades to be seen? Do you want your Amazon shopping cart to be seen? Do you want your Google searches to be publicly known? Probably not. Look at stable coins.

180 million transactions a month, 240 plus billion dollars of them issued. It's the killer app of the crypto space. Every time you buy something with a stable coin, currently it's forever known by everyone, everywhere. Is that a good thing? No.

I thought we hated CBDCs. I thought we wanted our privacy. So privacy matters, man and you need to have a selective disclosure regime. You need to have some ability to say, "Okay, well this person gets to know, but not this person." Even if it's just one person, you.

That's Monero. You need programmability there. So that's the last generation because we figured out scale. We have a half billion people using this technology. The next generation when it comes, Google is coming in.

They just announced their own blockchain. Microsoft is coming in. Apple's coming in. Amazon's coming in. They're coming.

We meet with them, we talk with them. They're going to bring 3 billion users. The technology that we have as an industry, collectively, will allow us to service those users. But we can't service them at scale yet with privacy. So the fourth and last generation before the technology side catches up, that's going to be the private side.

But you can't just do privacy. You're missing something else. You have identity. And for a long time people have been talking about this. If you buy cryptocurrencies in Korea, you do it lawfully, you have to connect your real-life human identity, your bank account, to your trading account.

It's one of those universal KYC'd countries. So you're not strangers to this. And most countries have national ID cards. Most countries they have some concept of an identifier. Compliance, we have things like KYC, know your customer, KYB, know your business, KYT, know your transaction, AML, anti-money laundering, anti-terrorist financing, word salad of things.

What they're really saying is I want to know who you are and why you're doing what you do. It's the mainstay of the entire financial industry. So in the cryptocurrency space, we created a standard called DIDs. We created disclosure regimes called anon creds. In fact, Google's working on a great project called Longfellow, where they're actually trying to take this concept to the next generation and put it into their wallet.

So is Samsung actually. It has lovely thing called Knox in your Samsung phones. They've actually been in the blockchain space for a long time. So how do you take that identifier and you put it in with the privacy? Because if you put those two pieces together, you have selective disclosure.

You actually have the ability to automate compliance and automate the laws and create one universal regime for what's private, what's not private, who you want to do business with, how you want to do business with those people. It's pretty magical when you think about it. And what's cool is you get this emergence. Because every time you invent this new technology, you don't just replicate the past, you enable a new feature for the future. For example, when you reinvent identity, you don't have to just be talking about human identity.

You talk about sensors, IoT sensors. You talk about agents on the web, AI. You can talk about animals. You can talk about nation-states. You can talk about individuals.

A universal identifier can apply to all those people. When you talk about privacy that's programmable, you can come up with all kinds of regimes for how things when and where are disclosed. And also, you can start extracting semantic value of the data. So you can keep things private, but you can get the value of it. Like training an AI model on private data.

You can do clinical trials on health data, but keep it anonymized. You can do all kinds of stuff. It's pretty magical when you have these capabilities. And what crypto does is it's the great unifier. Because it's not like these are new ideas.

In many cases these ideas have been around for decades. And there's some researcher over here and some engineer over there and some failed venture over here. And they just are floating around in the ether of failed ideas or didn't yet quite start. And what crypto can do is gobble all of them up, bring them together, and then bring them to market as a unified whole. I think that has been the enduring legacy as I've traversed the cryptocurrency space for the last decade and a half, has been not that we've been innovative, and we've certainly innovated certain things.

It's that we have conducted entrepreneurial and technological entrepreneur archaeology. And what we've done is we've collected all these amazing things from the past. The Cypherpunk movement from the 1980s is what came up with digital money. The first digital money venture was DigiCash, David Chaum and his people in the mid-90s. All these failures, all these things that didn't take off, we hoovered them up and we readapted them, we redeployed them.

Smart contracts, that was Nick Szabo. It wasn't Vitalik Buterin. It's the 1990s this idea. We took them. We modernized them, we updated them, we changed them.

So many of you are entrepreneurs in this audience, and many of you attended this conference to promote your ventures or to decide whether to join a venture, invest in a venture, partner with a venture, try to figure out how to wayfind this space. This event is 17,000 people, so there's certainly a lot of people you can meet, play around with. And what's magical about it is that everything that's old is new again. So when I hear these things, I say, "Oh well, but somebody 10 years ago thought of that." Now people have found a new way to re-express it and bring it back, to resurrect it.

And that's really the magic, I think, of the blockchain space. Is it allows people to find the idea that is required for them to realize their dream as they rebuild society and rebuild the economic, political, and social systems of society. It's not about tokens. It's not about number go up. It's not about the value appreciation.

Cryptocurrencies were interesting to me in bear markets, they were interesting to me in bull markets. It was interesting to me when we had dollar Bitcoin, it was interesting to me when we had $250 Bitcoin, $20,000 Bitcoin. Hell, we're going to $250,000 Bitcoin. It's not about the token price. It's not about the value.

It's about what you can do with these things, and it's about how these people can come together and take great ideas, and those ideas can flourish and grow. I've seen so many thousands of entrepreneurs who were so passionate about small things or big things, and it ate away and gnawed at them. And what crypto did is it gave them a platform to stand on and tools to stand on to actually change everything around them. And if they followed it to its highest pursuit, everything else takes its way out. Wasn't too long ago Vitalik Buterin was a very young kid playing World of Warcraft who was upset that Google that Blizzard Entertainment decided arbitrarily and capriciously to change one of the game rules, and then he realized the evils of centralization.

And that set him on a path to create Ethereum. It was a small thing. But for him, it was a big thing. And so for me, it was the same. I was part of the Ron Paul movement, and I just hated the Federal Reserve.

There's a great irony. I was just at the SALT conference and I was with two of the Federal Reserve governors, and we were talking about monetary policy, and I had one of those, "How did I get here?" moments [laughter] just the other day. But we wanted to audit those bastards, and we still do. We will.

We will get GAO done somehow. But it allowed me to live out my dreams. And what crypto did is it brought people together. I'd never been to Japan before. And I went to Japan.

I don't speak Japanese. Yet somehow we raised money for Cardano. I don't know how that happened. We built this amazing community, and then it grew from 10,000 people to 4.3 million.

And now we have an on-chain government. We just did a constitutional convention in Argentina. We brought people from 50 countries together to write a constitution. How does that work? That's the serendipity and magic of what you have.

So don't allow avarice for a moment to get in the way of what really makes cryptocurrency special. We're almost at a point where that first category is done. All the technologies where you need it to be. Once we have the privacy and once we have the selective disclosure, you can rebuild anything in the world. You can rebuild your country.

You can rebuild the world order. You can solve problems at the scale of dozens of countries. You can solve global warming. You can solve AI if you want to. How do you align all these AI models?

That's a hard problem. You can solve it with what we have. Now, you can't do it alone. It's why you're here. It's why you're talking to people.

But you can meet the people here. And you can find ways to fund and grow and make what you're building thrive. So I love coming and speaking, and sometimes I'm here to pitch something. So I guess formally I should pitch Midnight. It's great product.

If you have one of the eight ecosystems we're dropping to, like Bitcoin or Ethereum or Solana, please do redeem the glacier drop. But I also love talking about the philosophy from time to time, because I think sometimes we forget about it. It wasn't too long ago when I went to my first cryptocurrency conference in San Jose. Uh and that was back in 2013, and we were so poor, we had to pay for our own coffee. Okay, it was like 12 guys, one girl.

It was a pretty crazy time. But now we're here, 17,000 people. And um I'm not nostalgic for the past, but I do hope that the lessons of it percolate up to you as you build your ventures and you build your things. You have something very special, and this is a very special and unique time in the history of our industry. We have an invitation at the seat to rewrite the way the world works.

You're the first generation in human history where you have that power. Don't forget that. Your generation is going to decide how money works, what human rights are, what your privacy means or doesn't mean, who owns your data, how you vote, how to hold your government accountable. All those rules, once they're set, they're closed. Might take decades or centuries or another world war to open them up again.

But they're open right now. That's a special thing. You're all members of that. You're part of that, as one community, one group. And within this room, within this conference, there's enough brainpower, horsepower, and capital to actually do it.

And if you don't believe me, remember I was in the room when there was just a few people, and we grew from nothing to $4 trillion and half a billion people. The president's son spoke here. Think about how much progress that is in 15 years. And all the leaders in this industry, we were all nobodies 10 years ago. Nobody knew our names, nobody knew who we were, we had no money, no credibility, and now the Federal Reserve talks to us.

Now they ask us what laws should be passed. What qualifies us? That we stuck around, and we kept the dream going on. So, there's no reason 10 years from now you couldn't be the same person. That's it.

And that's something to think about. So, thank you for coming. Korea's an amazing place. Korea has had an outsized influence on the cryptocurrency industry, and will continue to do so. In terms of adoption, it's in the top 10 countries in the world.

There's over 100 trillion won here invested in cryptocurrencies. It's grown over 90% in the last 24 months. It's going to continue to grow. And this country is going to have a lot to say, and it has a seat at the table, and Korea could even tell the United States what to do. It's pretty magical, and that's because of each and every person here.

So, never forget that, never forget that you have agency, and that the future will be decentralized. Thank you so much.

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