Cardano founder Charles Hoskinson has framed 2026 as a critical "make-or-break" year for the cryptocurrency industry and specifically for the Cardano network's decentralized finance (DeFi) ambitions. In a recent interview with Scott Melker on The Wolf of All Streets show, Hoskinson revealed personal losses of around $2.5 billion in paper value over the past four years, attributing the decline to regulatory chaos, political interference, and market events that "battered and burned" retail investors.
Hoskinson criticized the period from 2022 to 2025, highlighting the FTX and Luna collapses as events that destroyed trust. He pointed to aggressive and unclear U.S. regulation that created fear, alongside "photo-op policymaking" and government-led memecoins that hurt the industry's credibility. He noted a stark market split where Bitcoin advanced through institutional adoption and ETFs, while most altcoins, including Cardano's ADA, stagnated under enforcement pressure and uncertainty.
For Cardano specifically, Hoskinson acknowledged a clear mismatch between its $13.88 billion market valuation and its limited DeFi activity. He cited the network's late arrival to smart contracts and a lack of key integrations with major bridges, oracles, and leading stablecoins like USDT and USDC as primary reasons for its dormant DeFi ecosystem. "Cardano is not yet integrated with a lot of the big bridges and oracles and stablecoins and these types of things," he stated.
Looking ahead, Hoskinson outlined a path for Cardano's resurgence in 2026, which he views as a reset rather than a traditional bull market driven by speculation. Key planned developments include decentralized finance links for Bitcoin and XRP, the mainnet launch of the privacy-focused Midnight project, and scalability upgrades like Hydra and Ouroboros Leios that promise a sixty-fold increase in transaction capacity. Furthermore, the community has approved 1.5 million ADA in funding to support DeFi projects, and integrations with the Pyth Oracle are planned to boost liquidity.
Despite the challenges, Hoskinson remains optimistic, comparing crypto's potential transformation to Amazon's evolution. He concluded, "This is the make-or-break year for the soul of crypto." At the time of reporting, ADA was trading at $0.39, down 1.08% over 24 hours.
