12 Years After the TEDx: Charles Hoskinson Returns to Bermuda

Added: 2026-05-26

[00:00:00]Okay. Hi, everybody.

[00:00:02]Microphone works. How about that?

[00:00:05]Well, it's been 12 years since I stood in Bermuda. 12 years. I came here back in October of 2014.

[00:00:12]And I came for a TED Talk, a TEDx Talk.

[00:00:15]It was right here in the Princess Hotel.

[00:00:17]And they said, "Hey, can you tell us about that cryptocurrency thing?"

[00:00:20]Because cryptocurrencies were very small at the time. And I I had to do some research this morning cuz I wanted to check the numbers just to see how small we were.

[00:00:29]So, back in that day, Bitcoin was $375.

[00:00:34]There were 5 million people worldwide who are using cryptocurrencies. There were less than 500 cryptocurrency projects. And cryptocurrency had just gone through a collapse.

[00:00:45]Uh it was Mount Gox collapse. We were at $1,200. It was on the downtrend. And article after article was being written, "Bitcoin is dead. Bitcoin's a scam." Our good friend Paul Krugman called us rat poison. Uh it was uh it was a lovely time.

[00:01:01]And now we look 12 years later, and what are the numbers? Well, Bitcoin's over 80,000. We have 560 million people using cryptocurrencies or holding cryptocurrencies.

[00:01:12]Over 50 million tokens have been issued.

[00:01:14]There's 18,000 active projects worldwide.

[00:01:18]My company has an office in Argentina.

[00:01:21]We look there, it's a $700 billion economy. And there's a hundred billion dollars of cryptocurrencies in it, mostly stablecoins.

[00:01:28]All of our employees in Argentina refuse to be paid in the local currency. They want to be paid in stablecoin.

[00:01:35]We pay our rent there in stablecoin. I was in Vietnam last year. I've been to 75 countries since I delivered that speech 12 years ago.

[00:01:44]And over 30% of the population has used or uses cryptocurrencies. Nigeria is the second largest consumer of cryptocurrencies in the world, 32% of the population, a third.

[00:01:56]And when you look at young people, more than half people over under 25 have done something in crypto. I was a senator I was with a senator in Florida who shall remain nameless, and she told me that her young son uses prediction markets. And she's like, "We got to figure out this prediction market regulation because the kids are using it."

[00:02:16]And they didn't even exist back then.

[00:02:17]DAOs were concept that I mentioned in my speech.

[00:02:21]And at the time, there were no DAOs because Ethereum hadn't yet the launch.

[00:02:26]There was no smart contract platform.

[00:02:27]Now there's 18,000 DAOs.

[00:02:30]And they control collectively 30 billion dollars in assets.

[00:02:36]The totality of the crypto market space in 2014 when I delivered that speech was 5 billion dollars.

[00:02:43]The DAOs, decentralized autonomous organizations, hold six times the value than the entire lifetime value of the value of the entire cryptocurrency industry.

[00:02:52]So, from one perspective, it's the fastest growing vertical in human history outside of AI. When you look at the valuations, the participation, the global impact.

[00:03:02]And actually governments are getting involved. Right here in Bermuda, the BMA thanks to Burton others has been one of the world leaders in thinking about where does the regulation need to go. In my own country, the state of Wyoming's passed 35 laws, everything from a DAO law to a full reserve bank law. And when you look to Asia, the Singapore Monetary Authority, when you look to the Middle East, ADGM, VARA, these other places, Switzerland, FINMA, there's been amazing regulation passed. And even on the federal level in the United States, we got the GENIUS Act done.

[00:03:33]Maybe we get the clarity done, who knows. We're trying uh as a nation. We're trying to figure it out.

[00:03:40]The president issued a stable both a stablecoin and a memecoin, Trumpcoin.

[00:03:46]We went from they hate us to they like extracting money from us.

[00:03:51]It's It's So, it's been a remarkable when you take a look at the growth on one hand. On the other hand, we're trying to figure out where do we take this revolution cuz back in the day when I was there, 15 years ago when I entered the industry, it's about decentralization.

[00:04:07]The promise of Web3 is you own your own bank.

[00:04:11]The promise of Web3 is you have custody of the asset.

[00:04:14]The promise of Web3 is you own your own identity. You're in control. You're in charge.

[00:04:20]Then when we see all this growth, when we talk about those 560 million users, over 400 million of them are on Binance.

[00:04:27]And the vast majority of those users, they custody their tokens there.

[00:04:32]So, they don't own their own wallet.

[00:04:34]They're not their own bank. And the fastest area of growth in our industry is what we like to call the Web 2.5 component of the industry.

[00:04:42]So, it's not quite Web3. It's not quite Web2.

[00:04:45]But if you look at it, Binance is a Web 2.5 company. Yes, they have 400 million customers and a regulated exchange and a CEO and a board of directors, but they also have Binance Smart Chain.

[00:04:55]Tether is the same. Circle is the same.

[00:04:58]They have Arc.

[00:05:00]When you look at where this industry is going, the richest people are in Web 2.5. Tether makes more money than Goldman Sachs and they have 200 employees. CZ is richer than Bill Gates.

[00:05:12]It's pretty remarkable when you think about it. That's where the growth is right now. So, people are chasing that.

[00:05:17]Regulators are chasing that. They understand it and they can work with it, but for a person like me, it's divorced from why I got involved.

[00:05:26]I wanted to be here to bank the unbanked. My speech was about a mid con.

[00:05:31]Just an everyday person living in Afghanistan.

[00:05:34]And I tried to contrast him to a person named Jeremy who lived in the United States and say, "Well, Jeremy's banked and I met is not."

[00:05:41]So, what's their lived experience?

[00:05:44]One person gets cheap credit. One person can send money for free. One person it's easy for them to pay for things and have economic agency. And the other person has to get credit at 85% interest rates.

[00:05:56]The other person has to spend 8 to 15% of the underlying value of the asset to move it to somebody.

[00:06:03]They're both human beings. They both have dignity.

[00:06:06]Why in God's name would we want to live in a society where we segregate the world into the banked and the unbanked?

[00:06:13]I went to Africa 12 years. We were in Kenya, Ethiopia, all kinds of places and we built products and we tried to tackle and solve this problem and figure out how do we get microfinance cheaper, how do we bank the unbanked, all these things. And we found a lot of great allies in the cryptocurrency space. But we haven't yet to merge these two systems together and the promise of Web 2.5 is we actually exacerbate the problem instead of make it better.

[00:06:39]It's the same brands, the BlackRocks and all these large financial institutions that are coming together and they're creating closed systems.

[00:06:48]Invitation-only systems and guess what? We're entering great powers conflict again. My father grew up in that world. Some of you did.

[00:06:57]I grew up in a rules-based international society. When we had peace, the Soviet Union collapsed which meant we had the World Bank and courts. You had rights. If two nation-states had a fight with each other, they would adjudicate over paper.

[00:07:12]Great powers conflict, they just kill each other.

[00:07:15]Now where are we at in 2026?

[00:07:18]Russia invades Ukraine.

[00:07:20]We have issues in the Middle East.

[00:07:21]America invades Iran.

[00:07:23]Probably within the next 24 months China's going to try to take Taiwan or at least to make a play for it.

[00:07:30]These are great powers and every time they conflict with each other, you, the regulated financial actors, what are you told? Fire your customers.

[00:07:39]You have to pick a side.

[00:07:40]Do Do pick the China side or do you pick the US side?

[00:07:44]Imagine that. You spend all this time building, creating branches, complying with regulation, finding customers, competing, and you love your balance sheet. You're proud of the accomplishments. And then a geopolitical conflict happens and they say, "Get rid of people that you know, love, and trust, and you've earned their trust."

[00:08:05]Running Cardano, I experienced this firsthand. When we first started building my third blockchain, Cardano, we had developers in St. Petersburg.

[00:08:14]They're friends of mine. They're good people. They went to Moscow State. They had PhDs, mathematicians, and computer scientists.

[00:08:21]They have absolutely no concern or care about geopolitics.

[00:08:26]In fact, we connected more about Pokémon and Magic the Gathering than we did about Putin.

[00:08:32]And now there's a conflict and they're embargoed. I can't pay them.

[00:08:35]I can't know them. I can't be their friend.

[00:08:39]We saw this in Ethiopia. We had an office there for years. Then conflict breaks out. The TPLF was 100 miles from Addis Ababa.

[00:08:47]Who do you side with? Allegations of genocide here and embargoes here. We had to leave the country.

[00:08:53]People who work for us for 6 years, they're gone.

[00:08:57]This is not progress when you regress to great powers conflict.

[00:09:01]The promise of cryptocurrencies is not that they can make you rich and improve your balance sheet and it's a new exciting market.

[00:09:10]The promise is it restores humanity to globalism because it creates a synthetic reality where regardless of the local politics of things, the ineptitude of the government, people can agree to work together in a neutral safe space and everyone is treated equally.

[00:09:30]I am the creator of four cryptocurrencies now, BitShares, Ethereum, Cardano, and Midnight. And all of them, I have the same rights as a newly minted person.

[00:09:41]That's never been a case that the founder of the system, the billionaire, the big guy, uses it the same way as the poorest person, the unbanked person.

[00:09:52]There's a magic to this, and that's what makes cryptocurrency special. It's what makes them unique. And when we go to a world of custodianship, and we go to a world of just turn it all over to another bank and another club, you lose that property.

[00:10:06]Because what they do is they add some extra stuff that's not in the protocol, and they decide the winners and losers.

[00:10:13]And it's not just people, it's companies.

[00:10:16]If you're on the wrong side of geopolitics, you lose half of your customers.

[00:10:21]Billions of people that you can no longer know and work with.

[00:10:25]It's not the world we signed up for in 2026. And if you add AI to this, the discrimination's no longer an aggregate, it's personal. Because you can put social credit in it. And if your score goes too low, they shut off your bank account.

[00:10:40]This is literally what China's doing with their system.

[00:10:44]And they'll export it to every place that touches Belt and Road, and America's doing the same with Palantir.

[00:10:50]There's no difference. It's just whether the the government does it or the private industry does it.

[00:10:55]We've seen the deplatforming.

[00:10:57]Being in this industry, I was deplatformed. I had $300 million in a bank account in the US financial institution. Got a phone call, and they said, "We have to shut your account off.

[00:11:07]You have 2 weeks to move your money."

[00:11:10]I said, "I'm not being sued. I have no compliance issues. What the hell is the problem?" CEO of Merrill Lynch called that bank cuz they're affiliated. Still shut my account down.

[00:11:22]To this day, I still have no idea why.

[00:11:24]Even talked to the chair of the Fed. I was in a round table with them at SALT last year. They can't figure it out.

[00:11:30]Somebody told them in Treasury, get rid of the crypto accounts.

[00:11:34]I'm supposed to be a guy who can't be unbanked. I have the power politically to stop that. But yet I was.

[00:11:42]So what the hell chance do regular people have for these things?

[00:11:46]And why would we go running into a system blithely where that's the way it's going to be?

[00:11:53]So I thought about it for a long time.

[00:11:55]Instead of just complaining about things, why don't we solve the problem?

[00:11:58]I was here in the beginning 375 dollar Bitcoin and I told everybody this industry is going to be big. You should be involved in it. If you took my advice, you probably did pretty good.

[00:12:08]Good enough to be able to sponsor this place. Good enough to be able to retire and have somebody else come here.

[00:12:14]So what do we do about it? Here's what we do about it.

[00:12:18]We build an open system for web 2.5. We build a system that has privacy at its core and we build a system that everybody can use it.

[00:12:26]So we spent eight years, two years in research and development and six years in engineering, and we built an open system called midnight.

[00:12:35]And what I wanted it to be is the non-choice choice.

[00:12:39]What does that mean? There's 18,000 active projects. You guys run regulated businesses. Which one do you pick?

[00:12:45]Ethereum, Solana, Bitcoin?

[00:12:47]And if you pick that one, how do you know in two years there's not going to be another sexy one and you have to go spend half a billion dollars tearing all your stuff out and migrating?

[00:12:55]It's a hard choice, right? So what if you pick something it just works with everything? Guess what? It's called chain abstraction and account abstraction. That's rule number one.

[00:13:04]Make it abstract, so you don't have to make a choice. What you pick works with everything.

[00:13:09]The second thing is all this privacy-enhancing technology, it was built to make business safer and to put rules into business.

[00:13:19]Zero-knowledge proofs, multi-party computation, trusted execution environments, these words.

[00:13:24]The reality of these words are you want to set as business people what the terms and conditions are to do business with you. Not because a regulator told you to do it, but because it's the right thing to do and it's the safe thing to do.

[00:13:37]Do you want to expose your balance sheets to contagion and risk? Do you want to accept customers who are criminals? No. No one should have to tell you don't do that.

[00:13:46]It's just common sense. You want sustainable business, right? So zero knowledge proofs and all these other things, you can set a rules-based system.

[00:13:55]And everybody has to follow it through selective disclosure and get their identity in. Makes sense. We had to wait for these things to exist. We miracles of science had to be done. We set up one of the largest research groups in the world for cryptocurrencies. 168 scientists, 250 papers, 10,000 citations. And you know what? We got there as an industry. We figured out how to build and link together all of these privacy-enhancing technologies.

[00:14:20]And at the same time the AI revolution's coming.

[00:14:23]And AI's even worse because it's non-deterministic.

[00:14:27]You tell it to do something and it works 90% of half the time.

[00:14:32]It's problem, right? So how do you get a proof that the AI is actually going to do what you want it to do? Turns out zero knowledge proofs can create determinism with AI.

[00:14:41]So when you give your AI a wallet and have it trade on your behalf, it can be regulated. A regulator's not going to figure that out. Even if they do, it'll be 10 years and it'll work the other 90% of half the time.

[00:14:55]Cuz innovation's too fast.

[00:14:58]So good systems, they have holism and they bring people together and they remind you of why we came here.

[00:15:04]The core of it is I want you to be your own bank. And where should your bank live? It should live here, on your cell phone.

[00:15:11]That's where you're at. 5 billion people.

[00:15:14]And how do you use it? How do you turn it on? You click the button.

[00:15:18]You put the finger there.

[00:15:20]And now we're in the phone.

[00:15:21]That's it.

[00:15:23]We trained everybody that this is the world. And it turns out that this device has more security in it than anything you've built in your bank.

[00:15:30]It's got trusted execution environments.

[00:15:32]It's got a hardened kernel. It's got trillions of dollars of software companies behind it. They update these things all the time. They're machines.

[00:15:40]It's a biometric sensor as well. It's a geotagging sensor. You have suitability guidelines. How do I blacklist that? How do I blacklist that? Knows where you're at. So, you can geotag it. Am I allowed to do business with this? It's all free.

[00:15:53]The consumer owns it. They have it. So, you take this passport idea, you put it on the phone, and you make it so easy that in 60 seconds it lives there.

[00:16:04]The account. And it works with every chain.

[00:16:07]You own your own coins. They're not on Binance.

[00:16:10]They're here, right? And if you have a ZK system with it, then you can prove any property of yourself.

[00:16:16]You can prove your identity. You can prove your age. You can prove you're a high net worth investor. You can prove that you're not affiliated with a certain group. As a zero-knowledge transaction. Now, the counterparty knows nothing more. They just know they're allowed to do business with you, but they don't know who you are. They don't have your name. They don't have any of these things because they don't need to know these things in a global society.

[00:16:37]And that's how you prevent discrimination.

[00:16:40]That's how you prevent people think I just don't like people from over there.

[00:16:44]If you don't know them, you can't discriminate against them. It's pretty common sense, right?

[00:16:49]It's all about safety then, and we can get to ground truth. And if it works with everything through multi-chain signatures, then it means you can spend into Bitcoin with it. You can spend into Ethereum with it. You can spend into stable coins with it. And here's the thing. If it works here on the phone, I can give this passport to an agent, and then they have the exact same system that the person has.

[00:17:11]So, if I want to delegate to them, delegate to them, and they could do it on my behalf. And if it links all the systems together, then it creates fair competition between them.

[00:17:23]I firmly believe the future is going to be decentralized. That's why I'm still here and I haven't retired to my damn bison ranch. They're trying to kill me, those bison.

[00:17:32]They're a lot of fun, though.

[00:17:34]And I still go to the conference circuit. After all these years, I really shouldn't. I'm getting old.

[00:17:40]But I do because I'm passionate about this and the job is not done. I didn't sign up to make the big bigger the rich richer. I signed up so that every single person can be given economic identity.

[00:17:53]Every single person, regardless of what language they speak, where they're born, what culture they come to, and that we can do business with every single person.

[00:18:02]That's how you create peace in the world. When you trade with people, you get to know people.

[00:18:09]I spent the last 12 years running around, as I mentioned, 75 countries. I've had the great privilege of going all throughout Africa and South America, Asia. I was in the Altai Mountains in Mongolia with these eagle hunters. They were using eagles to hunt foxes.

[00:18:26]And I met kings and heads of state, entitled people.

[00:18:31]And the magic thing is that I got to know people really when we did business together. We opened an office in Argentina. We got to know them.

[00:18:39]And that's what makes it so special and magical. And I just want everybody else to have that cuz I'm tired of living in a world where we're all just filled with hate and cynicism, and we're all just against each other, and we're all just fighting, and we all think that the future is going to be worse. We have the most amazing technology at our fingertips. We literally have a truth engine, blockchains.

[00:18:59]Everything that goes in it is timestamped, immutable, irreversible.

[00:19:04]You all have this. No generation of humans has ever had this capability before you. There's no reason to hate each other and be at war. There's no reason not to have peace. There's no reason for anyone in 2026 to be unbanked to pay 85% interest. Your cynicism tells you we can never achieve this. Yet, you have the very technology in your phone to do it.

[00:19:30]So, that's why I'm still here. That's why we built midnight. That's why we fight hard. And that's why I love coming to events like this. I was just in consensus and you're speeching speaking to the converted. They're all crypto people and they're excited. You got to go to the high finance conferences with the cynical people who say, "Well, that just never way it's going to be." And you know what you'll find is you'll find a lot more allies than you think.

[00:19:52]Cuz even nation-states feel it.

[00:19:55]I had dinner once with the Prime Minister of Georgia.

[00:19:58]And I said, "Hey, did you ever consider issuing a digital lari?"

[00:20:02]He said, "We tried." And the IMF called us, said they'll pull all our credit if we issue it.

[00:20:08]Imagine that. You're the head of state, elected leader, you have enough power to define your own monetary policy, and then a transnational body shows up and says, "Actually, you're not in charge."

[00:20:19]It's like Bane. Do you feel in charge?

[00:20:25]You think nation-states like that?

[00:20:28]Think Bermuda likes that?

[00:20:29]Think Argentina likes that?

[00:20:32]No.

[00:20:33]There's a lot of allies here.

[00:20:35]And if we band together, we use this technology the right way, you know what?

[00:20:38]We can do it a third way. Not the American way, not the Chinese way, but the blockchain way.

[00:20:44]And the benefit is every single person gets brought in.

[00:20:48]And we start bringing trillions and trillions of dollars in. We started with 5 billion, now we're at 2 trillion.

[00:20:54]You wake up another 12 years from now, we'll be at 100 trillion in our industry.

[00:20:58]And billions of people in our industry.

[00:21:00]And a global system and no one can go back.

[00:21:03]So, you guys are just as revolutionary as the people there at Consensus and we were 15 years ago and you're the ones who are going to get it done because you have to make decisions for your customers and you have to choose between closed systems and open systems. You have to choose between standards for all or standards for few. And you have to make some decisions about where the regulations are going to go and how to write them.

[00:21:27]They're small victories. Never discount them.

[00:21:30]But each and all matter.

[00:21:33]And that's why I'm still here after all these years and still going the circuit and still fight.

[00:21:38]And I think we're winning. I really do.

[00:21:41]We're past the hard parts of will you survive and are you legitimate? And now we're in the different parts where we have to be a bit cerebral and take a step back and ask where are we going to go and how are we going to get there?

[00:21:52]And the good news is we have all the technology we could ever need.

[00:21:56]We now just need the will to get it done. So, thank you all for being part of this.

[00:22:01]The future will be decentralized. 560 million is not bad.

[00:22:07]Please help me get it to 5 billion.

[00:22:09]Thank you.