Charles Hoskinson, founder of Cardano (ADA), used his keynote speech at the annual Coinfest Asia conference in Bali to deliver a message the crypto community had been anticipating. Acknowledging recent market stagnation in prices and delays to key legislation such as the CLARITY Act — a proposed U.S. bill intended to clarify which digital assets are regulated as securities versus commodities, whose progress has stalled in Congress — the Cardano co-founder argued that the market is now entering a fourth phase of maturation.

Four Pillars to Reach the Web 2.5 Convergence

According to Hoskinson, the completed third generation of blockchain technology achieved important goals in stability, governance, and interoperability. The biggest challenge, however, still lies ahead: the crypto industry must find a way to connect traditional finance (TradFi) assets with stablecoins, DeFi infrastructure, and major-cap crypto assets. Hoskinson describes this fusion as a "Web 2.5" convergence — merging the best of both worlds. The framing speaks to a broader industry push toward tokenizing real-world assets, as major financial institutions have increasingly explored blockchain-based settlement and stablecoin issuance in recent years.

In his Coinfest Asia keynote, he named four pillars needed to reach this goal by 2030:

• Privacy with compliance
• Selective disclosure
• Chain abstraction
• Sovereign AI agents

Hoskinson argued that these four areas are inevitably tied together and must be nurtured jointly as crypto's niche fields. Together, they could make the crypto sphere safer for retail customers and more compliant with the developing legal framework. As a concrete example of this fourth-generation structure, he cited the Midnight sidechain, launched this year — a Cardano-linked network built around Zero-Knowledge (ZK) technology designed to let users prove specific facts about transactions without revealing the underlying data, an approach aimed at reconciling privacy with regulatory requirements.

A $10 Trillion Projection by 2030

Noting a considerable disconnect between recent retail participation in the cryptocurrency market and Bitcoin's (BTC) recent upswings, Hoskinson said AI agents could considerably simplify the experience of navigating the Web3 space. This includes automatically flagging scams and executing professional-level strategies. The emphasis aligns with a wider wave of interest in autonomous AI agents operating on blockchain rails, an area multiple crypto projects have begun building toward.

By 2030, Cardano's founder predicts an influx of 2 billion new users as the regulated and unregulated digital asset markets converge with traditional finance. That convergence, he estimates, could bring roughly $10 trillion in market capitalization. Hoskinson also expects the next five years to offer four to five times more opportunities than the last fifteen years. These are, notably, the founder's own projections rather than consensus forecasts, and such long-range estimates in crypto have historically varied widely across industry figures.

He also addressed the decentralization of the IT sector, saying that major companies do not necessarily hold a significant advantage over independent developers and entrepreneurs, because the game is based on knowledge rather than location. Artificial intelligence tools, he said, are powerful enough to bridge that gap for knowledgeable users.

Hoskinson closed his keynote with a rebellious conclusion: "The crypto revolution is not over — it is only getting started, and the future should be decentralized and accessible to everyone."

His Midnight vision is intended to play a major role in that future through its selective disclosure technique and Zero-Knowledge (ZK) technology. In Hoskinson's view, crypto's future is AI-powered and retail-driven. For readers tracking how this plays out, the practical near-term markers include the fate of legislation like the CLARITY Act, broader institutional adoption of stablecoins and tokenized assets, and the pace at which privacy-preserving, compliance-oriented networks such as Midnight gain real-world usage.