Charles Hoskinson - Midnight - TOKEN2049 Singapore 2025

Hello Singapore. You guys love the weather, the monsoon rains that come down on you. Actually, it's quite nice here. It's not too hot. I'm very glad they're holding this in September, not in the heart of summer.

Uh, first and foremost, I have a really cool booth here that we spent quite a bit of time building with a lot of love. So, thank you to Stevie and thank you to all the people in the events team, uh, Carol and others who worked really hard to put that booth together. Uh, and it showcases not only what we do with Cardano, which is what most people know me for, uh, but also a lot of our sub smaller projects that we have. And one project that I started with my brother, I do a few things with him these days, is a company called Hosk Brew. Stands for Hoskinson Homebrew.

And we actually make video games with that. But not just any video games. if we make Nintendo games, like the original Nintendo, cuz programming is hard and let's make it harder by doing 8-bit assembly. So, for the first time in 30 years, we bought the intellectual property of a video game that my brother and I played when we were kids. It was called Crystal Minds, and we made a sequel to it called Crystal Minds 2.

And I actually have here some of these games. Anybody want them? Yeah, people love free [ __ ] Okay. All right. [Laughter] All right.

One over here. Oh, brilliant catch. All right. One more. One more in the center.

It's like a baseball game. Those are actual Nintendo games. You need an actual Nintendo to play them. It's not an emulated game. God help us.

All right. So, I've been in the industry a really, really long time. Long enough to remember when we had to pay for our own coffee and we didn't have conferences like this and nobody really cared about us. In fact, they didn't want to make laws or even put us in jail. We were so small.

They're like, "Ah, screw those crypto guys." And it's been extraordinary to watch the industry grow and evolve the last 15 years. uh you know, we've gone from Bitcoin being a dollar to Bitcoin being over 120,000 and nothing to a $4 trillion ecosystem with half a billion people in it, which is really magical when you think about it. And it is important when we have major milestones and major growth milestones to reflect a little bit on where we're going and what needs to be resolved, what needs to be solved, what needs to be built. Here's what's going to happen over the next 5 years.

We're going to go from half a billion people in the cryptocurrency industry to over a billion. We go from this mostly being a retailled movement to an institutional movement. And you already see this with Franklin Templeton and Black Rockck and all the big tech companies like Google and others. In fact, we just did a presentation yesterday. It was Google Cloud.

They're in the web 3 space. They want to be part of this as does Microsoft. as does Amazon. The rest with them they will bring hundreds of billions and eventually billions of customers into the space. The big challenge for us over the last four years was regulation.

We have this thing called the United States of America. If you haven't heard of it, you should come. You should take a look at it. It's pretty cool, pretty big. Somebody laughed.

And apparently that country decided to go to war with the cryptocurrency space. And they fought us for years after years. They would say these insane things like, "Come in and register." And Coinbase said, "Okay, tell us what to do." They met over 20 times with the SEC.

And then the SEC ghosted them and sued them for not registering. Every exchange in the United States was sued. Everybody got a subpoena. They went to war with our industry. They fought us.

And you know what we did? We found a new president and we won. So [ __ ] them. And we went from the United States of America hates cryptos trying to kill all of us, put us all out of business to the Genius Act being passed and soon the Clarity Act is going to be passed to the president of the United States issuing his own memecoin to them actually wanting to work with us. Problem is, it's kind of like a dog that chases cars all the time.

We've gotten so used to hating the government now like we are the man and we caught the car and we're like what do we do with this car and we're having to sort this out. So a lot of entrepreneurs come to me they say what's the next big opportunity for the cryptocurrency space and I tell them it's dealing with success. We won but now we actually have to do something about winning. It's easy to be the rebel. It's easy to be the contrarian.

It's easy to be the critic. the cynic, the person on the outside looking in saying, "If I was elected, if I'm the powerful person, if I'm the king, I would do things differently." And just like Cartman in South Park, who finally won the election and became class president, we now have to lead. We have a seat at the table. There's no greater example of that than when I was in Salt.

I was an audit the Fed guy with Ron Paul and all these other things. I was like, "Screw the Fed, you know, GAO audit, abolish the Fed." And then I'm sitting in a meeting with Hannah Tulli and uh uh uh Sergey and Ilia and all these other guys and two Federal Reserve governors and they're talking to us about Fed policy. And I say, "How did I get here? This is crazy.

I wanted to get rid of these guys. Now they're talking to us." So, we have to lead as an industry. We have to win as an industry. Uh we have to figure out a vision for the future.

And what that means is we have to actually collaborate and talk to each other. The age of strife and competition is over. There's no more Salana versus Ethereum versus Cardano versus Bitcoin and maximalism this and maximalism that. Nobody gives a [ __ ] anymore. Now there is how do we on board the next 500 million people, the next billion people, the next two billion people and how do we rewrite the economic, political and social systems of the world and what principles and properties do these systems have.

When you look at this conference, you see all these amazing companies and under them they have amazing capabilities. They have privacy and selective disclosure. And many of these systems truly are decentralized or aspire to be that way. They have smart contracts. They have NFTTS.

They have meme capability. You can build any token you want. The I have stem cells at my booths. Those are the biological analogy of what cryptocurrencies are. Stem cells can become anything.

They can be heart tissue or brain tissue. They can be uh muscle tissue. And a token can be anything. It could be a currency. It could be a commodity.

It could be intellectual property. So the world is getting tokenized. The world is getting blockchained. But we as an industry, we have to come together and we have to ask ourselves, where do we go from here now that we're in the room? Now that we have a seat at the table, now that we're helping write the laws, now that we're working with the big guys, what do we tell them?

How do we change things? There almost has to be a consumer bill of rights of what your lived experience needs to be. Now, we have some great high priests from the past who told us what to do. Satoshi is the highest of them, the crypto pope. And one of the things that Satoshi believed in more than anything else is at its core this concept of inclusive accountability.

And what that translates to very succinctly is your ability to verify things. Pretty simple, hard to achieve. I send you a transaction. How do you know the coins exist? And how do you know I haven't double spent it?

Because you have a copy of the blockchain. So, you can check the transaction yourself. That's a pivotal thing. And the the first time in the history of the financial industry where an individual consumer for a digital ledger had the ability to do that. When we look to the next five years or 10 years, there's a natural question to ask, can we extend this capability of inclusive accountability beyond just a financial transaction and beyond the requirement of having a full node?

Can we extend that so that you on your cell phone, you on your laptop, you with a foreign network that you have no connection to can verify a proof on the wire and you know what you're looking at is real. Whether that be the tokens, the state of a smart contract, a person's identity when they assert they have a credential, they assert that they're a member of a country, whatever have you. In fact, as a little side note, we have this wallet called Lace and one of our vendors apparently had one of those North Korean employees. I just got the memo this morning and uh he was writing code and they tried to blackmail us and said give us all this USDC or else we're going to dox your code base. You know we said well it's open source you idiot.

It's great this space I would like to know that the people working for me and the contractors working for me have no formal ties to North Korea. That'd be really really nice, right? [ __ ] like that. The world needs trust again. So when we look to the future and these policy makers ask us in Singapore and in Japan and Korea and other places, what do we need?

We say, well, we need the ability to prove stuff. So for the last six years, we've been working on a collection of technologies we term midnight. You'll see the booth for it over there. You have this idea of a glacier drop. And it's a lot more than just some new token or new thing.

It's a new paradigm. The goal of Midnight is to give to the entire cryptocurrency space and long-term the entire legacy space a toolbox that you can use to sort out two big things. One, when you say something, you have the ability to prove that that thing is real. And two, to restore your privacy. The legacy world requires all this information to be collected about who you are in order to do business with you.

It's KYC and AML and all this other stuff and it's radically incompatible with the crypto world. Yet, we now have to merge the two in the next 5 years, next 10 years. So, we need some conception of how do we sort out what's private, what's not private, and how do you disclose? At the same time, in the crypto world requires the ability to prove things about things because there's 30 plus thousand blockchains and we want to live in a world of interoperability. We want to live in a world of liquidity.

We want to live in a world where your DEX has tokens from hundreds of different blockchains on it. We want to live in a world where your DeFi doesn't care where it gets the TVL from. So, how do we live in that world if the blockchains can't talk to each other? How do we live in that world if you can't prove properties about the underlying assets? We built Midnight to solve these two big problems.

We built Midnight to be a universal proof layer to be able to be used to fold different blockchains to be able to be used to make statements about the assets that it's managing and at the same time to give you the ability to write private smart contracts. So in a very simple language compact it's a variant of TypeScript and itself is a variant of JavaScript. So if you're a JS developer it's nothing you haven't seen before you can extend into Salana into Cardano into Bitcoin into Ethereum into Avalanche into BNB and more to come XRP as well. And you can add a privacy layer. You can add a disclosure layer to your system.

And what this means is we can start talking about settlement is compliance. If you have the money, you're in full compliance. We can start talking about reforming and revising these draconian stupid regimes of AML KYC, which were designed for 9 to5 paper marketplaces that run Monday to Friday, you know, in nation states. we can start talking about making those global in 24 hours a day and 7 days a week and being able to have customers any place in the world anytime you want it where you want it. It's just one of the many innovations that we've been working on.

The other thing is that we wanted to have a toolkit to pull all the privacy enhancing technologies in one place. You'll hear the word salad of things. Oblivious RAM, multi-party computation, trusted execution environments, fully homorphic encryption, all this stuff. Like, who the [ __ ] even knows how it works? It's all over the place, you know, and there's too much.

There's too many moving pieces. So, you need one place that you can stick it. And what you need is you need to start talking around people. You start talking around experiences and tents and data. So we built midnight for that as well to kind of be this way to link everything up together aggregate with the offchain and the onchain and pull it together.

So at the end of the year the network is going to start launching and we already have the test net running and I wanted to come to token to kind of share that with all of you and say hey this is the next generation of the cryptocurrency space. been around for every generation from Bitcoin to Ethereum to the third gen with like Cardano and Salana and the others and this is the last mile and this is the most important generation because this is the adult generation. This is where we take the legacy side of the world and the DeFi side of the world and we combine them together. This is the framework, the thinking process that starts the conversation about how do we actually rebuild the world? For example, wouldn't you like a voting system where you can check your own vote?

Wouldn't you like a supply chain system where at any time you can query it and get proofs that tell you things like it's carbon neutral or it's fair trade or kids weren't used to source that lithium? Wouldn't you like to go to the supermarket and when you get your meat and scan the QR code, you can verify that that's grass-fed and it's not GMO and not filled with all kinds of weird hormones and [ __ ] That's the kind of stuff that we'd like to do. And the technology people for a really long time been telling us that this is coming. That's what Midnight was built for, to sort all these things out. It's not lost on me traveling 243 days this year.

I've been basically living in hotels that if I get hurt or sick, where am I going to go? I'm going to go to a hospital in a country that speaks language I don't speak. How do they get my medical records? How do I know that doctors there are qualified to treat me? It's kind of a scary thought.

Well, would be nice to have a system where that just works magically. If money can move globally, information should move globally. And information just can't move. Information has to move in the way Satoshi wanted it, which is with inclusive accountability. It has to move with proofs.

These are the kinds of things that make blockchain real. These are the kinds of things that make it easy for the legacy economy to work with our economy because you know what? They gave us the victory. They said, "You know what? You won.

We'll pass the Clarity Act. We'll actually open up regulation for you. We're going to embrace you. All the big companies are running cryptocurrency nodes now. All the big companies have blockchain research groups.

There's no us versus them. It's now on our shoulders as an industry to work together and figure all these components out and figure out what we want. We talk about regulation. They say, "What should we do? What should we do?"

I say, "Regulation moving forward should be APIs and SDKs. It should be a public private partnership." Well, the regulator comes to us and says, "This is what we want. You guys as an industry write the smart contracts, make them open source, and if you want to comply, just call it as an API. Don't hire a lawyer, hire an engineer.

settlement is compliance. Pretty simple, right? We could actually make that happen in the next 5 years in Korea, here in Singapore, in Abu Dhabi, and yes, even the United States if we push hard enough for it. And then the Europeans will find a way to suck it up. They love regulating there.

They really do. But you know what? That's no longer their concern. They told us we can do it. So, I built Midnight for that.

It's my life's work along with Cardano. And I'd love for you guys to check it out. Here's the really crazy thing is you probably actually already own it. Instead of doing an ICO, instead of going to venture capitalists and playing the [ __ ] up weird token game, I realized I'm crazy rich. And when you're crazy rich, you know you can do you just give [ __ ] away.

So, I distributed it with an airdrop. Eight different ecosystems, seven chains, 33.5 million accounts are eligible. airdrops going on right now and just go check it out and see if you if you hold Bitcoin, if you hold Ether, if you hold Soul, if you hold AA, you hold BNB, you hold Cardano, XRP, Brave, the BATS token, you probably actually are eligible for some night. So all I ask is become part of that, redeem some, build something, and after you build something, then start dreaming about where the world needs to go.

In closing, we have a small window of time, not huge, small, next few years where we're going to decide how humanity is going to live for the next century. That's it. We're at the finish line and we can decide if humanity wants to live in a dystopian hellscape where everything is a SAS product. You own nothing and you're basically told what your rights are and you don't own your own identity or data or credit score. And at any given moment you can be blacklisted or censored or deplatformed.

We kind of tasted that during co we tasted that in many different respects or we can decide in the world of liberty blockchain can restore that but we don't get it for free. We have to build it. It's a participatory thing. The reason this conference exists is not because a government agency did this or a government initiative did this. This is the result of the emergent decisions of hundreds of millions of people over the last 15 years deciding to build this industry.

There is no reason with the money we have, the crowds we have that we can't rebuild the world in a more fair way and in a way where ownership comes back to the people. I will always believe in decentralization and I will always believe in the power of you. And that's why I created midnight to remind the world that you should own your own identity. You should own your own data and your freedoms of association, commerce, and expression are God-given, not government-given. They can't be taken from you.

And if people try to, we'll take them back. So do what you will with it. And know that sometimes winning is harder than losing. Cheers.