Cardano founder Charles Hoskinson delivered a keynote at Consensus 2026 in Miami, urging the cryptocurrency industry to end internal feuding and focus on making the technology usable for mainstream audiences. He argued that the sector is stagnating because projects compete for existing users rather than building for the billions still outside crypto.
“It’s for the whole industry. I’m just so tired of the adversarial nature,” Hoskinson said. “I don’t care about your token and your project, and how you’re the next big Layer 1. Good for you, but there have been 11 million tokens issued over the years. We have enough of them.”
Hoskinson stressed that crypto must now deliver on original promises such as self-custody, self-sovereign identity, and decentralization—without becoming a mirror of traditional finance. He criticized Wall Street’s growing influence, noting that BlackRock’s Bitcoin ETF alone holds over $65 billion.
At the heart of his solution is a better user experience. Hoskinson pointed out that crypto still forces users to manage seed phrases, navigate exchanges, choose networks, and understand DeFi risks before doing anything useful. “The number one problem that people say again and again … is, I’m gonna fuck it up. The safety side,” he said. He compared this with Web2 giants like Google Wallet, which has around 1.5 billion users and one-click setup.
The keynote centered on abstraction. While crediting Ethereum for advancing account and chain abstraction, and Near Protocol for embedding these at the protocol level, Hoskinson warned that abstraction often delegates visibility to third parties. To avoid recreating the surveillance model of Web2, abstraction must be paired with privacy. He introduced Midnight Passport, a framework combining mobile-native key management, recovery, self-sovereign identity, selective disclosure, wallet credentials, name services, and multi-chain signatures. The idea is to let users scan a QR code and securely interact with networks like Bitcoin, Ethereum, Solana, and XRP.
Hoskinson also highlighted the role of AI agents, predicting they will outnumber humans online by 2035 and handle most commerce and searches. He called agents “the single best thing ever to happen to cryptocurrencies,” because they can offload the complexity of DeFi. Midnight Passport is being built for both humans and agents, enabling rules for identity, data access, and execution.
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