Pre-Trumping the Market: Charles Hoskinson Seeks to Capitalize on the Digital Assets Summit Snub

As more than a dozen top crypto executives strolled into the White House State Dining Room in March for the digital assets summit, one founder was left out.

As more than a dozen top crypto executives strolled into the White House State Dining Room in March for the digital assets summit, one founder was left out.

Charles Hoskinson, the mercurial polymath who co-founded Ethereum and then Cardano, was nowhere to be seen, which was odd. The White House, after all, had just floated the idea of including Cardano’s token in a crypto strategic reserve.

Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong, Strategy Executive Chairman Michael Saylor, and Ripple CEO Brad Garlinghouse, among others, did receive invitations to the round table session.

They met with President Donald Trump and his top crypto advisers, David Sacks and Bo Hines, plus Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent.

Hoskinson shrugged off the snub.

”A lot of people want to get close to David Sacks and Bo Hines and build relationships there,” Hoskinson told DL News in his hotel suite on the sidelines of Paris Blockchain Week.

“That’s the flavour of the week. It’s nice for optics, but it doesn’t translate into sustainable, permanent policy.”

Still, didn’t the billionaire blockchain builder relish the idea of some face time with Trump?

“I don’t need to make a deal with Trump,” Hoskinson, 37, said.

Offbeat pursuits

Such a stand may come off as mere bravado in other crypto billionaires. But Hoskinson has long cut a path as an industry maverick who’s as generous with his opinions as he is with his investments.

Wearing a white button-down shirt and coffee brown khakis on a spring afternoon, Hoskinson looked more like a middle manager on a casual Friday than the keyboard warrior who was one of the founders of Ethereum.

Charles Hoskinson makes frequent appearances at crypto conferences. Photo by Rita Franca/NurPhoto/Shutterstock (Franca/NurPhoto/Shutterstock/Franca/NurPhoto/Shutterstock)

For all the respect he’s garnered for his pioneering role in decentralised finance, he’s also drawn raised eyebrows for his offbeat pursuits.

He has touted the cultivation of glow-in-the-dark cannabis, injected himself with stem cells, and made music videos on his Wyoming ranch with Snoop Dogg, the crypto-loving hip hop icon.

In an exclusive interview with DL News he unpacked his latest pursuit — politics.

DeFi diplomat

Or more precisely, promoting blockchain technology — ie, Cardano — to lawmakers, regulators, and even the occasional head of state as a useful tool for government services.

To that end, Hoskinson has become a kind of DeFi diplomat winging around the world to offer his insight on forming, as he puts it, sustainable, permanent policy for blockchain technology.

In Washington, he said he’s gotten close to Senator Tim Scott, the influential chairman of the Senate Banking Committee, who is shepherding the landmark stablecoin bill through Congress.

In Japan, Hoskinson discussed technology and AI with Takuya Hirai, a member of the Diet, the nation’s legislature, and former minister of digital transformation.

And in Argentina, Hoskinson met with associates of Javier Milei, the pro-crypto president who got into hot water for endorsing a memecoin that quickly collapsed in a whopping $4.5 billion scandal.

‘We told all the Ethereum people years ago that the model made no sense.’

After a photograph of Hoskinson and Milei began circulating on X, Hoskinson explained on his YouTube channel that he had nothing to do with the memecoin launch.

Hoskinson isn’t just evangelising for decentralised finance. Input Output, the development company backing the Cardano network, operates in several nations.

And Hoskinson, like many of his peers, would love it if crypto laws and regulations were consistent from one jurisdiction to the next.

However, critics of the Cardano founder are sure to be sceptical of his proposition.

Cardano is worth almost $22 billion and a top 10 cryptocurrency. But the blockchain has its issues.

For starters, it’s been slow to develop, say critics. Cardano didn’t roll out smart contracts, the core offering on DeFi networks, until four years after the venture began in 2017. Haskell, Cardano’s programming language, is also notoriously challenging for developers to learn.

Meanwhile, DeFi applications on other blockchains have ballooned.

A mistake

Ethereum hosts more than $46 billion across over 1,000 DeFi apps, according to DefiLlama. Solana has $7 billion sloshing between hundreds of apps. Cardano only has $287 million over 39 apps.

As a result, Cardano has failed to generate the same level of respect as other blockchain networks.

In March, for instance, World Mobile, a decentralised telecoms company, announced it was expanding beyond Cardano and switching