Charles Hoskinson used a late-night livestream from Wyoming on April 23 to argue that Cardano’s next phase should stop leaning on abstract decentralization talking points and instead tackle a concrete structural flaw he says still plagues crypto: dependence on centralized off‑chain infrastructure.
Framing his comments 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. He spent much of the broadcast unpacking Marlinspike’s central claim: most users won’t run their own servers, protocols evolve slowly, and end‑user experiences routinely rely on centralized companies—creating “the worst of both worlds,” as Marlinspike put it: “Centralized control but still distributed enough to become mired in time.”
“So, we’ll stop for a moment and we’ll ask is Cardano any different?” Hoskinson asked on the stream. His answer: no. Cardano, he said, faces the same hidden truth—the chain can be decentralized while much of the user experience and infrastructure remains concentrated in off‑chain platforms.
Moving from diagnosis to strategy, Hoskinson argued that Cardano must prioritize Midnight—an initiative he says brings essential cryptographic tooling (multi‑party computation, zero‑knowledge proofs and trusted execution environments) needed to build a more coherent trust model. But he cautioned that cryptography and privacy alone won’t fix the problem if application infrastructure continues to depend on centralized services.
That’s where BlockFrost comes in. Hoskinson described BlockFrost’s long‑term purpose as evolving into “a decentralized infrastructure network” that could replace today’s developer platforms—an on‑chain‑friendly alternative to services like Infura and Alchemy. “BlockFrost destiny, should we fund it, is to become the decentralized infra Alchemy that we all wish we would have had,” he said, arguing it could be the kind of solution Marlinspike would endorse as philosophically consistent with Web3’s goals.
He bolstered the point with venture economics: citing a February 2022 funding round, Hoskinson noted Alchemy’s $200 million raise and $10 billion valuation (up from $3.5 billion), using those figures to illustrate how control over indexing, hosting and developer tooling can concentrate power off‑chain even when the underlying ledger is decentralized.
Hoskinson tied this thesis directly to ongoing Cardano treasury votes, saying current proposals—around BlockFrost, Midnight, partner chains and related projects—are not isolated funding requests but part of an end‑to‑end push to decentralize the application layer, boost scalability, interoperate with other systems and build off‑chain infrastructure that avoids recreating Web2 chokepoints. “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 was trading at $0.25.
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