Cardano founder Charles Hoskinson said he has completed all work planned for the network and fulfilled every promise he made. Some ADA investors disagree, however, as the token remains more than 94% below its record high from 2021.

Hoskinson made the remarks during a YouTube question-and-answer AMA session, where he debated viewers who were dissatisfied with Cardano's progress. The comments were reported by Cryptopolitan.

In a post dated November 12, 2026, Angry Crypto Show (@angrycryptoshow) quoted Hoskinson as saying:

“Roadmap is complete. Everything I said is gonna be built—has been built. It reached 4x the value of Honda. Millions of people have used it, millions of people continue to use it, and it is self-determining and self-governing.”

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Dispute over Cardano's comparison with Bitcoin

During the YouTube session, a viewer identified as shevilkid1738 said Hoskinson had previously promised that Cardano would become larger than Bitcoin. Hoskinson rejected that characterization.

“I never promised that. I said I'd love for it to happen, and I believe that Cardano is a better store of value than Bitcoin is for a variety of reasons,” he said.

“I don't promise price appreciation, or people overturning things. I say it's absolutely possible.”

The viewer also asked when Hoskinson's responsibility to investors would end. Hoskinson replied that Cardano's roadmap was “complete” and said that everything he had said would be built already existed.

He said Cardano had millions of users and had once been worth four times as much as Honda. Hoskinson also suggested that many investors were frustrated because they wanted him to increase ADA's price.

The exchange captures the wider dispute around the project: Hoskinson measures delivery in completed development work, while many ADA holders measure it in the token's market performance.

ADA remains near $0.17

ADA's decline helps explain the investors' frustration. The token was trading at about $0.17 when Hoskinson held the AMA, compared with its record high of $3.10 in September 2021. That represents a loss of about 94.5% from the peak. ADA was also down 86% from its highest price in 2024.

Cardano has continued to receive blockchain upgrades despite the decline in ADA's price. Its RealFi mainnet launched on October 1, 2026, and the network has undergone several other changes. Those developments have not restored ADA to the price levels previously seen by investors.

That gap between ongoing technical delivery and market performance sits at the center of the disagreement, with upgrades such as RealFi weighed against a token price that remains far below its 2021 peak.

IOG contract ends

Hoskinson said his original work on Cardano was complete because the contract signed in 2015 with Input Output Global (IOG), the company where he serves as chief executive officer, had expired.

He said Cardano development would continue under new funding arrangements. Planned work includes building more applications and developing Leios, a project intended to help the network process more transactions at higher speed. That work will no longer be financed through the original contract.

The expiry of the 2015 agreement marks a structural milestone for the project: core development that IOG carried out under that contract now moves to the new funding arrangements Hoskinson referenced. How those arrangements take shape, how quickly Leios advances, and whether activity in Cardano's decentralized finance services grows are the key developments to watch as the network moves beyond its original roadmap.

Critics remain concerned about the limited use of Cardano's decentralized finance services. They have also questioned whether Hoskinson spends too much time on other projects, including Midnight.