Cardano founder Charles Hoskinson used the closing minutes of a wide-ranging “ask-me-anything” session on Wednesday to give the community a granular look at two long-running alliance talks that have often generated more speculation than substance: a multisided collaboration with Ripple’s XRP ecosystem and an oracle integration with Chainlink.
Hoskinson, responding to a viewer who asked, “Charles, are partnerships of Ripple and Chainlink still being discussed?”, made it clear that progress has been uneven. “Ripple, yes. Chainlink we’re working hard on that,” he said.
XRP Integration Makes Progress
On Ripple, Hoskinson sounded decidedly upbeat, describing a concrete roadmap that reaches from native wallet support to token distribution and a new role for Ripple’s forthcoming RLUSD stablecoin. He confirmed that “we’re going to add XRP support for Lace, so if you’re an XRP user you can hold your XRP in the Lace wallet,” referring to IOG’s flagship light wallet launched last year.
He went further, noting that “XRP is going to be part of the Midnight airdrop,” the privacy-focused sidechain announced by Input Output Global. Even the stablecoin is on the table: “we’re in talks with RLUSD so I mean, uh, that’s as good as it gets,” he said, hinting that Cardano infrastructure might natively support Ripple’s fiat-pegged asset.
Hoskinson attributed the new momentum partly to personal rapport inside Ripple’s technical brain-trust. “David Schwarz just invited me to speak at one of their conferences and we’re on very good terms,” he disclosed.
The founder also revealed that “the Flare [Network] people want to come to Cardano and do oracles with us,” underscoring that the partnership has broadened beyond Ripple and broadens to the entire XRP Ledger ecosystem.
Chainlink Progress Remains Trapped
The conversation took a different turn when Hoskinson addressed Chainlink. Although he stressed that relations remain cordial—“I have [Sergey] Nazarov’s private number… we meet and we’re like ‘Yeah, we need to work together’”—the substance of the collaboration still hangs in limbo.
Chainlink, he explained, “has us on the list for integration” and is migrating to “some new framework that’s kind of like Rosetta with Coinbase to do these integrations.” The result is a moving target: “for some reason it’s just always like three to six months off.”
Hoskinson dismissed any notion that the delay stems from politics or money. “There’s no component of it where there’s an interpersonal issue… there’s no component where there’s an economic issue,” he insisted. Instead, he pointed to Chainlink’s bifurcated codebase—“they have like a legacy way of doing it [and] they’re moving towards a new way”—which makes it “hard to predict… what the integration’s going to take.”
Even staffing up the effort has not forced the process across the finish line. “No matter how many people I throw at it… it just, for some reason, doesn’t get over the line,” he admitted, conceding that Cardano is “kind of in this no man’s land” while it waits for Chainlink’s next-generation tooling to stabilize.
Despite the frustration, Hoskinson reiterated his desire for Chainlink to become a premier oracle on Cardano, though he added that “there’s also Pyth [Network] and then there’s Flare and others” in play. He softened the critique with an anecdote about the two founders’ similarities, quipping that “Sergey and I… have the same fashion style, we have the same beard, we’re the same body mass… there’s no bad blood.”
At press time, ADA traded at $0.72.
