Charles Hoskinson used his latest livestream to argue that Cardano’s next phase should focus less on abstract decentralization rhetoric and more on fixing a structural weakness he says still defines crypto: the reliance on centralized off-chain infrastructure. In the process, he tied that critique directly to Cardano’s treasury debates around BlockFrost, Midnight, partner chains and the broader direction of the network.
Cardano Can Succeed Where Web3 Fell BackThat line became the throughline of Hoskinson’s own case for Cardano. He acknowledged that the problem is not unique to Ethereum, even though Marlinspike’s original examples focused on Infura, Alchemy, MetaMask and OpenSea. “So, we’ll stop for a moment and we’ll ask is Cardano any different?” Hoskinson said. “The answer is no. That’s the uncomfortable hidden truth that Moxy’s talking about.”
That is where BlockFrost entered the picture. Hoskinson said the company’s long-term role should be to become “a decentralized infrastructure network,” effectively a decentralized alternative to the developer platforms that now sit between users and blockchains. “BlockFrost destiny, should we fund it, is to become the decentralized infra Alchemy that we all wish we would have had,” he said, “and something that Moxy could write about as the proper good alternative, the thing that actually is philosophically consistent.”
He bolstered that point with the economics of crypto infrastructure. Citing a February 2022 funding round, Hoskinson noted that Alchemy reached a $10 billion valuation after raising $200 million, up sharply from a prior $3.5 billion valuation. For Hoskinson, those numbers were not just venture-market trivia. They were evidence that the real control points in crypto often live outside the chain itself, in the companies that host, index and shape the interfaces through which users interact with the network.
“There’s always going to be a part that’s offchain,” he said. “It bothered me deeply to say that we are these web three people, but we’ve created an incentive system for companies to accelerate and grow and basically take the off-chain component and define and sculpt the user experience.”
At press time, ADA traded at $0.25.
