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Charles Hoskinson rang in 2026 from his Wyoming ranch with a message that sounded, at first blush, like an exit. It wasn’t. The Cardano founder said he is “not leaving the cryptocurrency space,” but he is walking away from day-to-day life on X and retooling how he shows up publicly, arguing that his visibility has become a liability for Cardano and Midnight adoption.

Cardano Founder Plans To Move Into The Background

Hoskinson opened the New Year’s livestream titled “Happy New Year and Farewell” with a post-mortem on 2025, framing it as a year in which parts of the industry chased success faster than it built systems capable of delivering on crypto’s broader promises. In his telling, the space “lost our way” by letting incentives and spectacle override first principles.

He was also explicit about what the “farewell” refers to and what it does not. “So, to get this right off the bat, I’m not leaving the cryptocurrency space,” Hoskinson said. “I’m cognizant and aware that every single time I make a live stream or I say something, it gets misconstrued. So, let’s just definitively put that on the table. I’m not going anywhere. I’m not leaving.”

Instead, he described a strategic retreat from hyper-online discourse, claiming that the “weaponization” of his persona creates a barrier for would-be users who might otherwise participate in Cardano or Midnight.

The problem, he argued, is that public perception increasingly substitutes for product evaluation: “We don’t ask what it do. We ask who made it… If we hate them, what that thing is is evil and wrong. If we love them, what that thing is must be good.”

The clearest operational change is his decision to step back from X entirely. “I’ve outgrown X,” he said. “So it’s my farewell to that platform and I’ll turn it over to curators and AI. It’ll go into silent mode for probably a few weeks to a few months as we build up that infrastructure because I have more important things to do, but I’m going to uninstall the app and never think of it again.”

Hoskinson said he plans to focus instead on “long form writing,” AMAs, livestreams, and experimenting with new media formats, floating Twitch as one possible outlet. The goal, as he framed it, is to preserve community connection while reducing the surface area for what he described as increasingly hostile, toxic cycles during down markets.

Beyond the social pivot, Hoskinson emphasized a shift into “deep focus,” saying he has returned to a level of product specificity he hasn’t had “in a very long time.” He cited drafting a “specification for a zkVM,” working on “adding privacy to intents,” and thinking through “chain abstraction” and the roles across “application and permission and solver and settlement” layers.

He repeatedly anchored that renewed focus to scale targets, explicitly tying his 2026 mindset to Midnight’s longer-term arc. “Every day I wake up and I ask, ‘How do I build something a million people can use?’ And then I ask, ‘How do I build something a billion people can use?’” he said, adding that he has been thinking through what it would take for Midnight to reach “a billion users and a trillion dollars of transactions on the platform by 2030.”

Happy New Year and Farewell https://t.co/lfCJ2T09h0

— Charles Hoskinson (@IOHK_Charles) January 1, 2026

Personal Changes For 2026

Hoskinson also made the personal operational changes unusually concrete. He said he traveled “more than 260 days” in 2025, averaged “only five and a half hours of sleep a night,” and described that pace as unsustainable. After Japan and Hong Kong, he said, he intends to travel less and spend more time at his ranch or farm, focusing on health, reading, and calmer reflection.

The closing stretch blended motivation with ecosystem-specific claims about the year ahead: he said “we finally launched Midnight,” pointed to RealFi efforts that “gave out a million loans over the last 18 months” in Uganda and Kenya, and framed 2026 as the year “Leios ships,” “Hydra gets good,” and Cardano’s “decentralized governance becomes hardened” as the community gains “full agency.”

But he also delivered a blunt cultural critique that doubles as a signal to his audience about what he wants his next chapter to optimize for. “If all you can think about is the price, you’ve already lost,” Hoskinson said. “Even if it goes up, you’ve lost. Not just at crypto, but at life.”

At press time, ADA traded at $0.34.

CoinFund President Christopher Perkins is betting 2026 will be defined less by shiny new token narratives and more by balance sheets, regulation-enabled product launches, and the messy maturation of crypto into an industry that buys, sells, and consolidates itself. In a Dec. 31 thread on X, Perkins laid out seven predictions:

#1 Crypto ‘M&A Summer’ And A $25 Billion Deal Year

Perkins’ first and loudest call: 2026 will be “the year of crypto M&A.” He pegged 2025 M&A activity at roughly $8.6 billion in total deal value, then projected 2026 will “reach $25bn,” framing it as a step-change rather than a modest grind higher.

He sketched consolidation pressure across multiple fronts, from “DAT/Labs/Foundation consolidation” to “DAT vs DAT (mNAV reckoning),” plus a two-way bridge between traditional finance and crypto. The direction of travel, in his telling, is straightforward: TradFi firms trying to catch up and crypto firms buying their way into regulated capabilities.

“TradFi → Crypto (ugh, I’m behind and need to catch up),” he wrote. “Crypto (DATs, Exchanges) → TradFi (we need operating companies, securities capabilities and licenses, too!).” He also flagged “Asia→US” as a theme, arguing that a clearer regulatory environment will pull international players toward the US market.

“2021 was stablecoin summer; 2026 is going to be M&A summer,” Perkins concluded.

#2 Stablecoins To $600 Billion

Perkins’ second prediction is a market-cap doubling in stablecoins, “surpassing $600bn (2x).” His reasoning hinges less on retail use and more on issuer economics and market plumbing.

“For every stablecoin, someone is making net interest income. Who wouldn’t want one?” he wrote. “As markets tokenize, you’ll need stablecoins to buy and sell them. Watch the growth accelerate in 2026.”

The subtext is that stablecoins become the default settlement asset for on-chain financial activity—especially if more real-world assets and market structures migrate on-chain—while issuer incentives remain strong.

#3 A $2 Billion-Plus Crypto Hack As A Policy Catalyst

Perkins also forecast a major security event: “A major hack >$2bn will shake confidence, lead to a drawdown and catalyze to policy changes.” He pointed to what he described as worsening trends, citing $3.4 billion in hacking during 2025, “a 51% increase,” then argued the attack surface grows as tokenization and stablecoins bring “hundreds of billions more” on-chain.

He went further than the usual call for better security practices, floating a provocative historical reference as a possible policy direction. “Maybe it’s time for a new change to policy, like Letters of Marque and Reprisal,” he wrote. “Just sayin’….” The implication: if losses scale up, the policy response could become more aggressive—and less abstract.

#4 Regulated Derivatives Return

On market structure, Perkins predicted US crypto derivatives will come “back to the US in a major way,” with a “big battle for marketshare” as “new players enter the space.” Even as he expects the US share of global derivatives volume to triple, he argued CME’s slice of US crypto futures could fall amid broader competition.

His thesis is rooted in regulatory momentum and institutional trading behavior. “Now that the regulatory path is clear, there will be a proliferation of new regulated futures products launched in the US,” Perkins wrote. “As crypto enters its institutional era, demand will be off the charts because basis trading will be their first step. This will breathe life back into alts.”

#5 No Market-Structure Bill

Not everything is acceleration. Perkins’ fifth prediction: a comprehensive market structure bill “will not be passed,” blaming political calendar gravity. “Sorry guys, this one is going to be too difficult. Midterms will take the oxygen out of the room,” he wrote.

#6 New ATHs For Bitcoin And ETH

Despite that, he still expects new highs in the majors, calling for bitcoin at $150,000 and ether above $5,000. “BTC and $ETH will hit ATHs,” Perkins wrote. “BTC hits $150,000; ETH makes passes $5,000. Institutional adoption makes this possible.”

#7 NFTs Return, But Not As Jpegs

Finally, Perkins forecast an NFT revival with a format change. “NFTs will make a comeback, but version 2.0 will not be jpegs,” he wrote, carving out an exception for CryptoPunks while dismissing a broader JPEG-led resurgence. Instead, he expects “financial, non-fungible tokens,” potentially tied to “individualized, tokenized security/yield vaults.”

At press time, the total crypto market cap stood at $2.94 trillion.