Cardano Founder Charles Hoskinson Burns $80 Million Memecoin Named After Himself

Charles Hoskinson, founder of Cardano and CEO of Input Output (IOG), has publicly burned a massive trove of a memecoin named in his honor.

Cardano founder Charles Hoskinson has burned a massive trove of a memecoin named in his honor, showcasing the ease with which such tokens can be airdropped into a newly created wallet.

The tokens, simply called CHARLES, made their way into Hoskinson’s wallet after he showcased the Lace wallet platform during a live demonstration. That demonstration involved creating a new Cardano wallet, backing it up with his PGP key, and briefly revealing the paper wallet on camera. Hoskinson intended this act to highlight Cardano’s security capabilities rather than serve as an invitation to distribute unsolicited tokens.

However, to Hoskinson’s dismay, a community member quickly scanned the QR code and sent him a large quantity of CHARLES tokens. To his further surprise, those tokens swiftly attracted substantial trading activity.

According to Hoskinson, the tokens amassed a fully diluted market value of around $71 million and a 24-hour trading volume of over $5 million, all within a single day. This flurry of activity led to what Hoskinson described as a “million percent up” trend in the tokens' market valuation.

“Boy did you trade it… literally in a day, a million percent up, everybody’s playing with it,” said Hoskinson, referring to the mania surrounding this memecoin.

Despite sitting on what many would interpret as a paper valuation worth tens of millions, Hoskinson showed little interest in leveraging or liquidating those tokens for personal gain. Instead, he chose to destroy them through a public act of burning.

Hoskinson explained that he wrote a quick script, which his team member Lucas verified and refined, to send the tokens to a script address with no ability to retrieve funds—a “black hole” contract.

Hoskinson demonstrated the process step by step, verifying the address, setting the total amount of around 900 billion CHARLES tokens (90% of the supply), adding a note reading “thanks for all the fish” before entering his password to finalize the transaction.

Once the tokens were sent, he shared on screen the outgoing transaction and remarked that destroying such an amount of nominally valued tokens cost him just 1.42 ADA in network fees. “I think this is the first time in my life I’ve ever burnt $60 million, $70 million, $80 million of value,” he said, noting how quickly the token’s market-tracked value had shifted, at one point crossing $80 million in perceived worth.

He acknowledged the irony with a jest: “A lesser man would have found a way to slow drip that out, got a few million dollars here and there. I don’t do that. Homie don’t play that way.”

Throughout the demonstration, Hoskinson also showcased that he had tested the burning script with other tokens such as HOSKY and AGENT SNEK before carrying out the final burn of the CHARLES tokens. As soon as the transaction appeared on the blockchain explorer, he confirmed the tokens were indeed gone, observing that “there’s no way to pull funds out of it” once they arrive in the burner script’s address.

At the end of the broadcast, he called upon the community not to repeat such stunts in the future, even if he admitted the spectacle of it all had been entertaining in a bizarre sense.

At press time, Cardano traded at $0.95.