Cardano sentiment flips bearish after Hoskinson goes off on CLARITY Act holdup

Hoskinson ranted for about 30 minutes in a YouTube stream on Sunday, criticizing the US crypto policy and industry peers who supported it, including Ripple CEO Brad Garlinghouse.

Cardano’s market mood flipped bearish on Monday and took the token to a 2% price slump following a brief rally that almost took it back to its 30-day high.

The comments from founder Charles Hoskinson telling off Garlinghouse and proponents of the CLARITY Act sparked bullish chatter on social media heading into this business week, according to social metrics platform Santiment.

Hoskinson’s YouTube interview rattles bulls periodically, ADA now trading red

Santiment Feed’s analysis showed a spike in positive commentary around ADA before, during, and after the broadcast. There were 29 bullish posts for every bearish one shortly after the interview aired, which took Cardano just $0.01 shy of $0.40. 

📊 There was a massive spike in bullish sentiment toward Cardano yesterday, followed by an immediate price drop. This was related to founder Charles Hoskinson's interview where he, among other topics:

📌 Expressed his concerns over the CLARITY Act
📌 Criticized Ripple CEO Brad… pic.twitter.com/7xVFbTcdtf

— Santiment (@santimentfeed) January 19, 2026

Monday’s wave of price losses washed away most of the profits that top market cap coins had collected over the weekend, but ADA was still counting wins. However, the dark cloud finally caught up to the token, causing an intraday 2.38% price dip as of the time of this reporting. The token was changing hands around $0.35 and is down 8% over the past seven days, per Coingecko data.

ADA had dropped to a low of $0.3355 in December. However, since then, the token has failed several times to flip the $0.4 resistance level, which is in line with an ascending trendline connecting the lowest price swings since June 2023. 

Hoskinson was highly critical of the CLARITY Act, saying the bill was deeply flawed even with its 137 revisions and that its structure favors regulators at the expense of developers and users. According to the Ethereum developer, the legislation would still grant excessive authority to the SEC, just like the previous administration had set it to be.

As reported by Cryptopolitan, the Senate Banking Committee postponed a planned markup session on the CLARITY Act last week after Coinbase Chief Executive Brian Armstrong withdrew his support for the bill. Chairman Tim Scott said last Wednesday that the panel would delay consideration of the bill to have more discussions with lawmakers and industry stakeholders.

Drawing a historical comparison, he cited the Securities Exchange Act of 1933 as an example of a law that hasn’t been changed for decades. “93 years later, have we been able to change it? No. You pass it, you own it forever. Sorry, Brad. It’s not better than chaos,” he surmised.

Taking a dig at Garlinghouse’s public support for passing the proposed legislation, Hoskinson argued that taking a compromise would entrench regulatory overreach into crypto businesses. 

“You still got people like Brad saying, well, it’s not perfect, but we just got to get something. Hand it to the same people who sued us. That’s better?” he detracted.

Does the Trump government have too much control over crypto? 

Away from the regulatory disputes, Hoskinson admitted he was on good terms with the Trump administration because he “signed up for freedom” and “a revolution.” However, he blasted the policymakers for trying to make “everything a custodial wallet” and “every transaction KYC.” 

During a separate interview last week, the Input Output Group CEO insisted the current administration has placed the US digital asset industry in a worse position than it was under former President Joe Biden. 

“The very first thing he did was to launch the Trump Coin, and it just felt like the extractiveness has now been institutionalized. The US government is participating in it as opposed to some Pump.fun person.” 

Hoskinson propounded that Trump’s and Melania Trump’s memecoins launch undermined the possibility of bipartisan cooperation on crypto policy in 2025. He believes Congress might have passed both the GENIUS Act and the CLARITY Act before the tokens debuted in markets.

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