After a wild 2021 for the crypto markets, Cardano creator Charles Hoskinson says he’s now a billionaire.
In a new ask-me-anything session, Hoskinson discusses a variety of topics ranging from the crypto “bloodbath” this week to new Chinese regulations.
Hoskinson is an early crypto adopter, co-founder of Ethereum and the founder of IOHK (Input Output Hong Kong), the company that created and develops Cardano.
When asked what it’s like to be a billionaire, the IOHK chief executive says he first scratched the surface of that status in the 2017 crypto bull market.
“It took me three years from when I started my first cryptocurrency company to become a millionaire, and I was first a billionaire in 2017. Very, very briefly. Markets collapsed and everything went to hell, but I was doing okay. And then [I] became a billionaire again in 2021.”
IOHK says it and Hoskinson received Cardano’s native crypto asset ADA for contract work on the project, and Hoskinson recently stated he owns no Ethereum.
In terms of the crypto price volatility this week, Hoskinson notes that the magnitude of crypto’s innovation prevents markets from staying stable and clearly sorting out winning investments from busts. Like the internet in previous decades, he explains, it will take time before the industry-leading projects emerge with stability.
“Welcome to crypto. That’s how crypto works. It goes way up, it goes way down. You guys can’t get 900% gains without expecting some pullbacks. That’s how the world works. Crypto’s very volatile. It’s very unstable, and as a consequence understand that it’s a frontier market, and the point here is we’re reconstructing society, and we all know that by doing that, there are trillions if not tens of trillions of dollars of collective value in the activity. But where does that value go?…
Markets have a hard time pricing innovation, and they have a hard time picking proper winners and losers, and there tends to be over-enthusiasm and over-justification for all kinds of things. And then there’s a pullback, and there are cycles and waves, and then people get overly pessimistic, and they throw the baby out with the bathwater just like they did with the dot com boom and bust. At some point we converge to something.”
Featured Image: Shutterstock/Tithi Luadthong