Cardano founder Charles Hoskinson has laid out a bold vision for the crypto space, saying its success is as inevitable as the internet’s was and will “fundamentally change everything”.

Hoskinson foresees cryptocurrency platforms like Cardano or Algorand processing billions of transactions each year, containing trillions of dollars in value.

“We’re future-proofing programmable finance, and this financial operating system is going to be social and it’s going to be institutional and it’s going to be Fortune 500.

“It’s going to run nation-states, at some point. It’s inevitable,” he said in a livestream recorded over the weekend.


 

Industry maturing

The currency legacy financial system is “nuts”, Hoskinson asserted, with its negative interest rates, hyperinflation, unaccountable banks that are “too big to fail” and tons of corruption and nepotism.

“It’s just craziness … so there’s an inevitability to our industry as a whole, and there’s a maturing of our industry.”

The crypto industry is “decoupling” from Bitcoin, Hoskinson said (perhaps optimistically) and recognising that there’s no end-all, be-all.

“At its core, this industry is about redesigning the way the money in your pocket works and redesigning the way you express yourself and relate to others,” he said.

“It’s about giving you back your economic identity … It’s about the belief that we can build a different system for the world that’s better than the one we have right now.

“One where we’re all treated equally and fairly, where we have access to opportunity no matter where we’re from, because people deserve that.”
 

‘This experiment hasn’t failed’

Third-generation protocols are “waking up”, he said, and will fundamentally change everything.

Cardano, currently the No. 4 cryptocurrency, is scheduled to launch smart contracts via its Alonzo hard fork in September.

That will let decentralised applications (dapps) run on Cardano, similar to how Ethereum is used to power crypto exchanges like Uniswap; lending and borrowing platforms like Aave and Compound; and NFTs on marketplaces like OpenSea and Rarible.

“We will see hundreds and eventually thousands and eventually tens of thousands of unique and interesting applications launch, and those applications will reach into the geographies that we have invested half a decade into opening up,” such as Ethiopia, Ghana, Malaysia, Indonesia and Vietnam, Hoskinson said.

Soon millions of people will be using crypto-powered platforms for everything from lending and banking to social networking and telecommunications, he predicted.

“Cryptos not going anywhere. These markets aren’t going anywhere. This experiment hasn’t failed,” he said, referring to last month’s crash.
 

‘A contagion that’s infected the world’

“It’s a contagion that has infected the world, and it will ultimately change the DNA of the world, leaving behind something fundamentally different than when we found it.”

Ultimately, central banks and conventional banks will “fade away”, Hoskinson predicted, with what he called a corrupt, slow and inefficient system being replaced with one full of creativity and innovation.

“We’re going to change the world. It’s just that simple.

“We didn’t ask permission. We came here and we’re going to get it done together … it’s no longer a question of if, it’s when and how these dinosaurs will find a way to survive in this new order.”