Cardano Founder Says Genesis ADA Was Profit, Not Community Funds
Charles Hoskinson has drawn a firm line under one of Cardano’s longest-running controversies, declaring that the allocation of Genesis ADA to Input Output (IO) and EMURGO was private profit for early risk, not a community-controlled pool to be repurposed for new initiatives.
Cardano Founder Closes Door On Genesis ADA Criticism
In a November 30 livestream titled “Genesis ADA,” the Cardano founder called the topic “a closed matter” and rejected renewed calls to use Genesis ADA for current integrations such as oracles and stablecoin issuers.
“The Genesis ADA is profit for services rendered taking a risk, doing an activity and building an ecosystem,” he said. “It was a deal between us and the primary buyers of ADA, the Japanese who put up the initial wave of capital to get it done […] Those are the people that mattered in that transaction and every single one of them has been made whole.”
Hoskinson walked through the original funding structure: a Japanese crowd sale that raised about $72 million, converted into bitcoin, and a “tripartid” model comprising the Cardano Foundation (governance), EMURGO (commercialization) and IO (protocol development). Based on the crowd sale pricing, IO’s Genesis ADA allocation was worth around $8 million at the time.
“For the vast majority of the early days of Cardano, the Genesis ADA sat around 4 to 8 cents in value,” he said, arguing that the founding entities accepted extreme risk — regulatory, technical and reputational — in exchange for that upside. “To say that somehow we don’t deserve what we’ve gotten when what we got was about $8 million for delivering a $15 billion ecosystem, it’s a statement made of a Twitter mob with no basis in reality.”
He framed the core objection as a misunderstanding of the original terms. If the community now insists that 100% of Genesis ADA must be spent, he argued, “then where was the profit for taking the risk?” He listed Japan and US regulatory exposure, the possibility of protocol failure, insider and outsider security threats, and potential civil or even criminal liability in the early days.
“Let’s be very clear here,” he added. “99.9% of cryptocurrency ventures fail. Cardano is one of only a handful like XRP and Ethereum that have survived over the last 10 years and has value greater than $10 billion […] For a little over $40 million, a 10 plus billion dollar ecosystem has been created that at one point reached over a hundred billion dollars of value […] By any measurement, this has been an overwhelming success.”
Hoskinson also pushed back hard against the idea that IO and EMURGO should function as de facto public utilities whose entire balance sheets exist for Cardano’s “common good.”
“The books of my company and the books of EMURGO as private companies are none of the concern or business of the community as a whole,” he said. “We owe you nothing but the work we promise to do and will continue to do if you so choose. Those are the terms and conditions.”
He contrasted demands to forfeit profits with the existence of an already sizable on-chain treasury. “Demanding that whatever profit or revenue that we’ve made over the last 10 years be forfeited for a greater good while the community sits on a more than billion ADA treasury […] is a pretty absurd thing,” he said, noting that the treasury mechanism itself was part of the original design he proposed.
Why The Debate Now?
The immediate flashpoint is a joint request for 70 million ADA from the treasury to fund a package of integrations, including providers such as Pyth, RedStone and Circle. Some critics have argued that such work should be paid from Genesis holdings instead. Hoskinson called that retroactive expectation “pretty absurd” given that those companies “didn’t even exist at the time.”
He stressed that the 70 million ADA “will not cover the total fee of all the integrations” and that IO, the Midnight Foundation and others will “have to put skin in the game” because they are large ADA and KNIGHT holders who want to see yield on those assets.
Framing the broader governance vote, Hoskinson presented the current moment as a 2026 “reset” from the original tripartite structure to a new “pentad” executive layer involving EMURGO, the Midnight Foundation, the Cardano Foundation, IO and Intersect. The goal, he said, is to coordinate strategy and negotiations with “some of the largest most predatory and aggressive companies in this industry,” where Cardano must “speak with one voice” to secure key deals.
“The Genesis ADA is a closed issue. You have seen the end results of it and we have all moved on as founding entities,” he concluded. “We now have to decide, do we want to do something new and different […] and put a new structure for 2026 so that we can build the necessary infrastructure for the DeFi ecosystem? Or don’t we? It’s just that simple.”
At press time, ADA traded at $0.38.
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