Charles Hoskinson Plans New Political Action Committee (PAC) To Get Involved In Local Wyoming Politics This Year

Charles Hoskinson, a billionaire and founder of the Cardano cryptocurrency platform, has big plans to get involved in local Wyoming politics this year.

Charles Hoskinson, a billionaire and founder of the Cardano cryptocurrency platform, is launching the Wyoming Integrity Political Action Committee (PAC) this year.

Hoskinson, who owns a ranch in Wheatland and has family in Gillette, told Cowboy State Daily that the PAC will be built around supporting candidates who can bring more transparent bidding policies to Wyoming.

His financial means and existing connections nearly guarantee he will be a major player in the 2026 election cycle.

“The largest Wyoming blockchain company is excluded, not even allowed to bid, by criteria that we’re going to show with the University of Wyoming, we satisfied,” Hoskinson said.

Hoskinson’s company also has a digital assets laboratory, where it works with the University of Wyoming in developing this sector.

Wyoming Stable Token Executive Director Anthony Apollo said that the vendors determined pre-qualified to bid were networks that the state’s Blockchain Selection Working Group determined to be “in-scope” for the initial deployment of Wyoming’s stable token.

Sen. Chris Rothfuss, D-Laramie, who was instrumental in developing Wyoming’s digital asset laws, told Cowboy State Daily last November the process offered a clear set of criteria established by subject matter experts to evaluate candidate blockchains for issuing the stable token.

Apollo told the Legislature last December that Cardano passed four of the five criteria to be a pre-qualified vendor but failed the freeze and seize test.

This is the seizure of a questionable cryptocurrency asset, a capability that would likely be required by the Securities and Exchange Commission during an investigation, to forestall any money laundering. Cardano argued in a November letter to the Stablecoin Commission that the Blockchain Selection Working Group had taken an extremely narrow interpretation to this requirement.

Although Cardano did have a product at the time that met this criteria, it was still in a test mode, and the agency explicitly stated that it needed all required technologies fully functional on the blockchain to be considered.

But Hoskinson said it was never communicated they needed this capability fully ready and nowhere in the state’s emergency rules does it state this capability was required to pre-qualify.

Cardano can now, however, demonstrate it has this technology, which Hoskinson plans to showcase at the Symposium on Friday.

“Just to say that this is an example of a misintegrity by process and by individual,” Hoskinson said.

Unfortunately, none of this will allow Cardano to bid on the project.

Hoskinson had already played a role as a member of a subcommission to help develop rules for the Wyoming stable token. When he noticed some early signs that conflicts of interest could arise in the future, Hoskinson said he was reassured by others that this wouldn’t be a problem.

Hoskinson believes that Apollo, who is a former employee of Consensus, a company which developed Ethereum, one of the companies selected, has been biased against other platforms from the start, adding that the director had even mentioned during one of his first meetings that the stable token should just be built on Ethereum first.

Hoskinson also said the qualifications needed to participate as a vendor were never publicly published. He pushed for all the functional and non-functional requirements to participate be published by the commission so that any cryptocurrency platform that wanted to bid for the stable token could build a prototype demonstrating whether they could support Wyoming’s requirements.

Apollo told Cowboy State Daily that “While potential vendors may be frustrated that their favored blockchain” not being selected or because their organization was not qualified, there is no flexibility to make any exceptions at this point.

“Wyoming deserves the highest caliber of delivery from the parties it engages,” he said.

Apollo also said it’s “factually inaccurate” to characterize the commission's assessment and selection of candidate blockchains based on his previous employment experience alone.

“I was one voice of ten in our working group, and I am not a voting member of the Commission who ultimately ratified the selection criteria and blockchains in-scope for initial issuance,” Apollo said.

Not one of the other companies pre-qualified were incorporated first in Wyoming, something Cardano did in 2018.

What Hoskinson also finds frustrating is that he planned to bid $1 and never intended to make any profit off the project.

He sees options for pursuing a class action lawsuit against the state for what happened but doesn’t believe doing that would be a worthwhile endeavor.

“That’s a net-loss for everybody,” he said. It’s a loss for the state, it’s a loss for me. We all have to spend a lot of money. And what’s the end result? That we get a second shake with a bunch of biased people?”

Hoskinson said he also found it no coincidence that Ripple, which has an adversarial relationship with Ethereum, was also left out.

Ripple, a much bigger clone of Stellar, was also snubbed from the stable token bidding. Ripple, which is worth about $120 billion, owns a