The general public battle between Charles Hoskinson and non-fungible-token artist Masato Alexander who alleged that the Cardano founder quietly redirected 318 million ADA—value roughly $619 million on the time—from legacy presale wallets into Cardano’s reserves in the course of the 2021 Allegra onerous fork, is additional escalating. The Cardano founder has fired again with a string of messages on X that recast the affair as a calculated publicity seize for an Ethereum-based enterprise.
“So the defamation was nearly growing his visibility to fund-raise for an Ethereum mission??? You critically can’t make this shit up,” Hoskinson wrote late Wednesday by way of X, attaching a screenshot of a non-public chat wherein Alexander stated he was “attempting to lock in some funding for Akua and get some runway.”
The screenshot triggered a direct rebuttal from Alexander—“do you actually wanna be sharing DMs charles? put these on the pile”—and opened a window onto a second, beforehand unseen alternate. In that dialog Phil Harman, chief govt of Anastasia Labs and a long-time Cardano developer, requested Alexander whether or not a Cardano model of Akua may be doable. Harman later bristled at having the dialogue made public: “What’s the objective of releasing these DMs of me attempting to offer you constructive recommendation about your dApp? … Sharing this as a gotcha is embarrassing.”
Akua—the mission for which Alexander is looking for financing—is described in a 28 February 2025 white paper as “a novel method to prediction markets targeted on natural-disaster danger administration,” beginning with earthquakes and increasing to different phenomena. The protocol structure is designed for EVM compatibility, a element that Cardano neighborhood engineer Lucas (@rvcas) seized upon when he argued that Alexander’s accusations had been a advertising ploy: “Monad is attempting to drop an ETH dapp and that is his means of getting consideration from that crowd … He’s financially motivated and doubtless has no real curiosity from an integrity perspective.”
Hoskinson echoed that evaluation, calling the episode a smear orchestrated to court docket Ethereum buyers. He has additionally threatened authorized motion and commissioned an unbiased audit of the disputed treasury transactions, an train he says will present that greater than 99.8% of the unique vouchers had been redeemed and that the residual stability—about 18-24 million ADA—was finally donated to Intersect, the brand new member-based governance physique.
Why The Cardano Token Vouchers Had been Swept
In an extended X put up on Wednesday, Hoskinson revisited the mechanics of the 2021 voucher sweep, arguing that Japanese retail patrons—many aged—had struggled with the unique redemption course of. “There was a business legal responsibility for finishing the redemption … If the client couldn’t moderately use that technique, there was an ethical obligation to vary the redemption mechanism,” he wrote, including that two of the three genesis key-holders needed to signal the hard-fork improve that eliminated the unredeemed addresses.
Hoskinson maintains that no ADA was “stolen,” calling the narrative “absurd, goal-post-moving doublespeak” and condemning media headlines that prompt in any other case. Alexander, against this, likens the voucher sweep to a unilateral rewrite of historical past that disadvantaged early buyers of their cash, arguing that solely about $7 million of the swept funds have surfaced at Intersect.
As reported by Bitcoinist on Wednesday, the ADA voucher audit redemption audit by international legislation agency McDermott Will & Emery (MW&E) and the audit heavyweight BDO will give a definitive reply when completed. A publication date will not be but identified.
At press time, ADA traded at $0.7889.
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