From the founder of Cardano to the search for an alien civilization, Charles Hoskinson's multifaceted life

Original author: Zen, PANews

With the ADA designated by Trump as one of the crypto strategic reserves, Cardano and its founder, Charles Hoskinson, are back in the media spotlight. As an early evangelist for Bitcoin, a founding member of Ethereum, and the creator of Cardano, Charles, a long-time billionaire, has often been known in alternative ways over the past few years: not only to find extraterrestrial civilizations, open medical research institutes, and even run thousands of acres of ranches, but also to get involved in traditional animal husbandry. When Cardano is once again a hot topic in the industry, Charles’s story deserves to be revisited.

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Early believers and evangelists of Bitcoin

In 2008, Charles Hoskinson was majoring in mathematics and analytic number theory at university, and in addition to mathematics, he was interested in studying monetary policy. That same year, he was involved in Republican Rep. Ron Paul’s “Campiagn for Liberty” ( Freedom Movement ). Ron advocated the abolition of the Federal Reserve Bank because, instead of controlling inflation, Ron believed that it was responsible for creating inflation, creating economic depressions, and hollowing out personal assets. A few years later, when he heard about Bitcoin, he didn’t pay attention to it at first, because he believed that the success of a currency was not due to technology or dreams, but to how many people were willing to use it.

It wasn’t until 2013 that Charles changed his mind and began to believe that Bitcoin would change people’s money transactions, business relationships, corporate behavior, property rights, and democratic models. He started buying Bitcoin, mining it, and founded the Bitcoin Education Project, which disseminates a range of Bitcoin education courses on the Internet for free, from monetary policy to blockchain technology, and has a partnership with Bitcoin Magazine.

! From Cardano Founder to the Search for Alien Civilizations, Charles Hoskinson’s Multifaceted Life

At that time, Bitcoin was still in its infancy, the community was small, and it wasn’t difficult for people in the industry to connect with each other. If you’re passionate enough, you can quickly get into the inner circle, and Charles is one of them. During this time, Charles also met a number of early Bitcoin evangelists and tech gurus through offline meetups, and started his first entrepreneurial venture, Bitshares, a decentralized trading platform.

Bitshares was co-founded by Charles and later founder of EOS, Daniel Larimer (nicknamed “BM”), before parting ways due to a different business philosophy. Charles later said that he believed that because of the introduction of venture capital, the company’s decision-making must also be held accountable to shareholders, and that a diversity of opinions would benefit the company’s growth, but BM preferred to make its own decisions and did not want others to interfere. In the early days of the business, BM’s father, Stan Larimer, was also involved in Bitshares, and the apartment where Charles lived was provided by Stan. As a result, Charles had to quit voluntarily after a disagreement of opinion.

The hasty departure of the “patriarch” of Ethereum’s genesis

In October 2013, Anthony Di Lorio of the Bitcoin Alliance of Canada, Mihai Alisie of Bitcoin Magazine brought together Charles and later Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin to start an ecological vision for a programming language for blockchain applications, and Gavin Wood, Jeffrey Wilcke, and Joe Lubin were later invited to participate in the discussion.

In January 2014, at the North American Bitcoin Conference in Miami, the Ethereum project was born in a gathering of nearly thirty people in Anthony’s rented beach cabin. At this time, Charles, as the CEO of Ethereum, has quietly completed the transformation from a crypto evangelist to a core player in the industry.

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However, as Ethereum moves forward with rapid development, it also has to face a critical management choice - whether to build Ethereum into a for-profit enterprise or operate as a non-profit model? This issue sparked a heated debate within the founding team. Charles argues that Ethereum should follow Google’s example and build a for-profit company in order to get more resources to accelerate its growth. Vitalik, on the other hand, insists that Ethereum should remain decentralized and adopt a non-profit model, and this long-term plan is also supported by the majority of internal members.

In the end, Charles chose to leave again due to disagreements, and his title of CEO of Ethereum was invalidated. At this time, Ethereum was only half a year old. Years later, Charles looks back on his position on Ethereum and admits that perhaps Vitalik’s non-profit model is a better path for Ethereum. Facts have also proved that the success of Ethereum is inseparable from the promotion of the community and the development of the open source ecosystem.

New Journey: Charles and his Cardano “Independent Kingdom”

According to Charles, after leaving Ethereum, he considered returning to academia to complete his PhD. But fate seems to have had something else in place for him – during this gap in thinking about his life, Charles met Jeremy Wood, a former Ethereum colleague. The two hit it off and co-founded IOHK (Input Output Hong Kong), a company focused on blockchain and cryptocurrency engineering and research.

They started out with a few thousand dollars, but soon received a number of contracts to develop the blockchain, and IOHK was paid in Bitcoin. Fortunately, the Bitcoin market then ushered in a big bull run, and IOHK quickly turned a huge profit, giving them enough money to develop their own blockchain without relying on external funding. Thus, Cardano was born. It is worth mentioning that when he founded Cardano in 2017, Charles firmly refused to bring in venture capital, believing that the involvement of capital would violate the core principle of “decentralization” in the crypto industry. He said that VCs tend to get “their share of the profits” from the project first, which is contrary to the open spirit of cryptocurrency.

With the rapid growth of Cardano, IOHK has enough funds to sponsor research labs at the University of Edinburgh and Tokyo Institute of Technology, which eventually led to the creation of the Ouroboros consensus protocol, which has become the core mechanism of the Cardano blockchain. In 2018, Cardano also announced a partnership with the Ethiopian government to explore the possibilities of blockchain technology. However, the bear market at the time plunged the entire crypto industry into a slump, and Cardano entered a downturn. It wasn’t until 2021 that Cardano gradually recovered with the market, and its Ada token climbed to an all-time high of over $2.

! From Cardano Founder to Finding Alien Civilizations, Charles Hoskinson’s Multifaceted Life

It is worth mentioning that compared to other Layer 1s such as Ethereum and Solana, Cardano is often criticized as a “zombie chain” because of its unmatched transaction volume and activity, and is criticized for seemingly relying solely on the popularity of its creators. Even so, as of March 6, Cardano (Ada) still has a full float market capitalization of $42.7 billion, and its circulating market capitalization is over $34 billion.

The reason why Cardano is so popular in the Japanese market, and even called “Japanese Ethereum”, is largely related to its early funding model. It is reported that nearly 95% of the buyers in the Cardano public offering are from Japanese investors, also known as “retirement investment”, mainly because the public offering was led by the Japanese company Emurgo, at that time the regulatory environment in Japan was relatively relaxed compared to Europe and the United States, which also made Cardano misunderstood as a Japanese project. But as U.S. crypto policy becomes more open, Cardano is gradually playing down its image of Japan.

Political bets: JFK Jr. to Trump

In April 2024, Charles Hoskinson announced his support for Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (Robert F. Kennedy Jr., RFK Jr. ) as President of the United States. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. believes that intelligence agencies, tech platforms, and regulators have gone beyond their remit, which Charles believes resonates with the liberal foundations of his blockchain business, and he praised Kennedy’s delicate stance on various issues such as immigration policy and drug regulation. In August 2024, Charles also became a Trump supporter when Kennedy dropped out of the race and joined Trump’s camp.

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On November 9 last year, following Trump’s victory, Charles announced on his podcast that he would spend most of the next year working with the Trump administration to develop clear regulations for the cryptocurrency industry. He noted that he would do so with several other industry leaders. As soon as the news broke, the price of ADA soared, rising more than 40% in 24 hours to reach its highest level in 7 months at more than $0.6.

On March 2, U.S. President Donald Trump announced on social media that his executive order on digital assets directs the President’s Task Force to advance the strategic reserve of cryptocurrencies, including XRP, SOL, and ADA. Trump also said that he will make America great again by ensuring that the United States becomes the cryptocurrency capital of the world. As soon as the news broke, ADA skyrocketed, and its price rose from a high of $0.65 to above $1.10.

Charles Hoskinson later responded that he was ignorant of “the Trump team’s quest to include ADA in crypto reserves.” “We didn’t know about it, and no one talked to us about it. When I woke up on March 2nd, I received 150 congratulatory messages, but I really didn’t know what was going on.” Judging by the fact that he wasn’t invited to the White House Crypto Summit on March 8, perhaps Charles was really unexpected.

All-rounders who “don’t do their jobs”: aliens, cattle breeding, and plant genetic modification

After achieving success in the cryptocurrency and blockchain space and becoming a billionaire, Charles Hoskinson is also actively involved in philanthropy. In 2021, he donated approximately $20 million to Carnegie Mellon University to establish the Hoskinson Center for Mathematics. In addition, in 2023, he also funded $1.5 million and traveled with Harvard astrophysicist Avi Loeb to Papua New Guinea in search of “meteor fragments” that crashed into the Pacific Ocean in 2014, although the results were not satisfactory - the Loeb team claimed to have found tiny metal balls of objects created by extraterrestrial life on the ocean floor, but according to the statement of the American Astronomical Society, the chemical composition provided by the Loeb analysis is closest to that of human-produced coal ash.

! From Cardano Founder to Finding Extraterrestrial Civilizations, Charles Hoskinson’s Multifaceted Life

In addition to the search for extraterrestrial life, Charles Hoskinson has engaged in a variety of jobs and new ventures, including but not limited to animal husbandry, catering, medical care, plant genetic engineering, and private jet chartering.

Charles owns an 11, 000-acre ranch near Whitland, Wyoming, and raises more than five hundred bison. Due to the lack of good dining options in nearby towns, he simply opened his own Nessie restaurant and whiskey lounge in Whitland. Charles has also repeatedly emphasized that his restaurant will be crypto-friendly. In addition, Charles, who was born into a family of physicians (his father and brother were both doctors), opened the Hoskinson Health and Wellness Clinic in Gillette, Wyoming, which focused on anti-aging and regenerative medicine, which reportedly cost $18 million.

“If you want to solve the problem of global warming or improve the environment, then it makes sense to participate in plant genetic engineering.” Charles, who has also been fascinated by glow-in-the-dark plants in recent years, says that genetically modified plants not only produce organic lighting, but also sequester carbon, eliminate toxic chemicals, and provide other environmental benefits. According to Charles, the plant species his team has successfully engineered include cultivated tobacco and Arabidopsis.

However, according to a report, in 2022, Charles Hoskinson’s private jet flew a total of 562 hours and covered a distance of about 456,000 kilometers, which is greater than the distance between the Moon and the Earth’s apogee. He ranks among the top 15 in the nation in terms of pollution caused by private jets, surpassing billionaires such as Mark Zuckerberg and Kim Kardashian and Hollywood celebrities. Charles says it’s because his private jet is good enough to work with third-party companies to lease it to private clients, and he says his regulars include rock band Metallica and Hollywood superstar Dwayne Johnson.

In response, Charles quipped in a video, “My personal energy consumption is probably quite high, not only because I have a jet, but also because I have a large ranch in Wyoming with 500 bison in it.”

A blockchain pioneer who has been controversial and falsified resumes?

Last August, before Robert F. Kennedy Jr. dropped out of the race, he had an interview conversation with Charles. And before the broadcast, there was a lot of criticism, with many complaining that RFK Jr. should not talk to “scammers”.

There are many people who are popular, and Charles Hoskinson has always been controversial. Speaking from personal experience, well-known crypto journalist Laura Shin criticized Charles in her book “The Cryptopian”, which delves into the early history of Bitcoin. The book notes that there is no evidence that Hoskinson pursued a Ph.D., and that his highest education may have been a bachelor’s degree. In addition, Laura accused Charles of exaggerating his resume and falsely claiming ties to the CIA and DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency), the veracity of which is questionable.

Faced with skepticism, Charles sarcastically said on social media: “This book is a good work of fiction, but to surpass Tolkien [author of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings] and George W. R· R. Martin (author of A Song of Ice and Fire) is still a little hard.” Laura hit back, emphasizing that everything she did was fact-checked.

Controversy aside, Cardano is still evolving, although its technical prowess and market positioning are still being discussed from different angles. And as an important figure in the blockchain industry, whether his past boast is true or not, whether he made the right choice or not, there is no doubt that his story has become an important chapter in the crypto world.

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