Speaking on Tuesday on the main stage of the Blockchain Futurist Conference, Cardano founder Charles Hoskinson declared that the industry is “standing on the threshold of a fourth generation” of blockchain – one defined not by faster ledgers alone but by programmable privacy, cooperative token-economics and the arrival of mainstream users.
Addressing a packed hall draped in trading-floor décor, the Input Output CEO opened with trademark humor – “I’m wearing my Canada Goose jacket. It felt really appropriate for Canada.” – before turning to the changes he believes will redraw the map for the next 500 million to one billion crypto participants.
“Apple, Google, Meta, Microsoft… the Magnificent Seven are finally ready to put crypto infrastructure into every phone and desktop once US market-structure rules settle over the next 12 to 24 months,” he said, arguing that Washington’s recent debates on stablecoin reserves and exchange oversight have removed the last excuse for big-tech inertia.
Cardano Is Ready For The ‘Fourth Generation’
Hoskinson structured his talk as a tour through three prior eras: Bitcoin’s invention of “email for money,” Ethereum’s smart-contract renaissance, and the third generation’s push for scalability, interoperability and on-chain governance. Yet, he warned, those advances left a blind spot: “Everything in life has a public side, but everything in life also has a private side […] If your solution collapses to the centralized server you are not decentralized.”
The fourth generation, he argued, must therefore embed zero-knowledge cryptography, selective disclosure and hybrid on-/off-chain architectures so that supply-chain data, medical records or a DAO’s HR files can remain confidential without sacrificing auditability. Midnight – the data-protection sidechain now in public devnet – is Cardano’s own answer. According to last month’s ecosystem report, Midnight has already hosted hackathons and partner integrations ahead of a full release slated for later this year.
The privacy push lands as regulated stablecoins cement themselves as crypto’s primary dollar rails. Total capitalization reached $246 billion this week, led by Tether’s $150 billion USDT. Hoskinson called today’s stablecoins “just tokenized Treasuries” and predicted that the same mechanics will sweep into tokenized equities, bonds and real estate, a $10 trillion “tsunami wave of demand” that banks from JPMorgan to BlackRock are preparing to channel on-chain.
Perhaps the most striking departure from crypto’s combative past was Hoskinson’s appeal for networks to share rather than poach users. “For Cardano to be successful, it can’t just be Cardano and Midnight. It’s got to be Cardano and Midnight and Bitcoin, XRP, Solana, Ethereum… That’s how we get it done.” He described fee abstraction – the ability to pay validators in “whatever damn currency you want” – as a prerequisite for frictionless cross-chain commerce.
Hoskinson closed by recalling the collegial spirit of Bitcoin’s pre-2013 days and urging builders to “start talking about what problems we want to solve, who we want to solve them for, and how we solve them together.”
With privacy tech maturing, real-world assets queuing at the door and big-tech distribution finally plausible, the Cardano founder cast the next cycle as less of a speculative rush than a systems-integration challenge – one in which the measure of success will be “institutional legitimacy” rather than token price alone. “Welcome to the beginning of the fourth generation,” Hoskinson concluded his keynote.
At press time, ADA traded at $0.82.
