Charles Hoskinson used a late-night livestream from Wyoming on April 23 to push a blunt argument: Cardano’s next chapter should focus less on abstract decentralization talk and more on fixing a core structural weakness that still defines much of crypto — reliance on centralized off‑chain infrastructure.
Framing his remarks around “My First Impressions of Web3,” a January 2022 essay by Signal co‑founder Moxie Marlinspike, Hoskinson said Marlinspike’s critique helped convince him to acquire BlockFrost, a popular Cardano API provider. He unpacked Marlinspike’s central point: users don’t want to run their own servers, protocols move slowly, and so supposedly decentralized ecosystems often centralize around convenient platforms — creating “the worst of both worlds,” centralized control with distributed friction.
“Is Cardano any different?” Hoskinson asked. His answer: no. That, he said, is the uncomfortable truth Marlinspike highlights — and it’s precisely why Cardano’s current treasury debates matter. Proposals for funding BlockFrost, Midnight, partner chains and other initiatives are not random grant requests, Hoskinson argued, but pieces of a coordinated strategy to rebuild the off‑chain layer in a way that avoids recreating Web2 chokepoints.
On tech priorities, Hoskinson argued Midnight should come first. Midnight, he said, brings the cryptographic building blocks — multi‑party computation (MPC), zero‑knowledge proofs, and trusted execution environments (TEEs) — needed for a more coherent trust model and stronger privacy. But he warned that advanced cryptography alone won’t solve the problem if the infrastructure layer continues to depend on centralized service providers.
That’s where BlockFrost fits in. Hoskinson envisions the company evolving into “a decentralized infrastructure network” — effectively a decentralized alternative to today’s developer platforms that sit between users and blockchains. “BlockFrost’s destiny, should we fund it, is to become the decentralized infra Alchemy that we all wish we would have had,” he said, framing the goal as a philosophically consistent option that Moxie could endorse.
Hoskinson reinforced the point with economics: Alchemy’s February 2022 funding round — $200 million that pushed its valuation to roughly $10 billion from about $3.5 billion — showed how real control points in crypto often sit off‑chain, in companies that host, index and shape the user experience. Those firms, he argued, can end up defining how networks are used, irrespective of on‑chain decentralization.
Tying the argument back to Cardano governance, Hoskinson said the treasury votes in front of the community are a coordinated attempt to decentralize the application layer, improve scalability, link Cardano to other systems and build off‑chain infrastructure that doesn’t re‑entrench Web2-style centralization. “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.
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