Charles Hoskinson
Basics
- Cardano & IOHK, founder
- Ethereum, co-founder, funded Vitalik after reading a first draft of the whitepaper. He was initially the CEO of Ethereum before being fired. Reasons of the firing are complicated. Ethereum at the time was 6 months old with a $15 million market cap. Hoskinson then founded IOHK and IOHK subsequently led the development of Ethereum Classic.
- Ethereum Classic, dev team. While IOHK continues to lead Ethereum Classic’s development, its primary focus is now on Cardano.
- Bitshares, involved in the early stages. There is a long history between Dan Larimer and Charles Hoskinson. In fact, before Ethereum, Hoskinson actually worked with Larimer on Bitshares but also left on bad terms.
- Charles Hoskinson and Polymath are teaming up to launch Polymesh, a regulation compliant security token platform; announced at Consensus this week, the platform will be different from Polymath's security platform in its capital market focus. Charles will be Polymesh’s “co-architect,” according to a press statement.
- According to Forbes "Meet the Crypto's Richest" from 5-2-2018 (just around the end of the bull market of 2017:
In April 2013, when Charles Hoskinson quit his consulting gig to start an online school the Bitcoin Education Project, "my parents thought I was crazy," he says. "Everybody thought I was crazy. But I said, No, no, I got it all figured out."
Smart or lucky, Hoskinson wound up meeting Vitalik Buterin at the online school and became one of the eight original cofounders of Ethereum. Soon after, disagreements arose about how to structure the project. "It was a boardroom brawl," he says. Hoskinson wanted to accept venture capital and create a for-profit entity with a more formal governing structure. Buterin wanted to keep Ethereum a nonprofit organization with an open-source, decentralized governance. Hoskinson left Ethereum in June 2014.
"At the time I was pretty pissed off," says Hoskinson, 30. "Ether went up [to a market cap of] $120 billion, so what the hell do I know?"
After taking a six-month sabbatical — in which he contemplated going back to mathematics — he was approached by former Ethereum colleague Jeremy Wood to form a new project called IOHK, an engineering company that builds cryptocurrencies and blockchains for corporations, government entities and academic institutions.
"We put in a few hundred thousand dollars initially and started getting contracts to build cryptocurrencies," says Hoskinson. With all their revenue coming in the form of Bitcoin, IOHK saw huge returns as the coin soared in value.
"When the crypto market exploded, we decided to liquidate," Hoskinson says. He refuses to share when they sold. "Relative to our burn rate, though, IOHK can now stay open for decades."
IOHK's key project: Cardano, a public blockchain and smart-contract platform which hosts the Ada cryptocurrency. At $16 billion, Ada is now the fifth-largest in market cap, just two spots behind Ethereum. IOHK's position in Ada is worth over $1 billion. IOHK also runs Ethereum Classic, which has a market cap of around $3 billion."
"Charles Hoskinson wanted to be a mathematician, before becoming disillusioned with the profession and taking an increasing interest in Bitcoin. Born in Hawaii, and raised in Colorado, Hoskinson already had experience of raising money for an early version of a decentralized exchange when he was introduced to Ethereum, and Buterin, by Anthony Di Iorio.
He became one of the original five Ethereum co-founders, and was named CEO in December 2013—taking a leading role in setting up the Swiss Foundation, and its legal framework. Hoskinson was an early advocate of Ethereum as a pro-profit corporation, which chimed badly with many of the others, and ultimately led to his departure. “It was a huge crush to him when he was told to leave,” said Russo—who spoke to all the founders about the circumstances surrounding the decision.
Hoskinson went on to support Ethereum Classic, the rival blockchain that was born out of Ethereum’s controversial hard fork in 2016. In tandem, he launched Cardano. “He's convinced that Cardano will be the real Ethereum killer. And the thing that succeeds in bringing decentralized applications,” said Russo."
