Cardano Founder Reflects On Betrayal, Plans To Step Back

In a deeply personal thread posted to X on Sunday, Cardano creator Charles Hoskinson said the past weeks’ accusations over the handling of unclaimed initial-coin-offering (ICO) funds had revealed “who [his] friends truly are” and left him determined to curtail his once-ubiquitous social-media presence.

“The one advantage in a crisis or an event that tests people is that you rapidly get to see who your friends truly are and who’s fair-weather,” he wrote, adding that the absence of public support from some long-time associates “dims the light quite a bit and makes me want to dramatically alter how I engage.” He indicated that, once an independent audit of the token-sale history is published, his X account will be managed by a media team and his long-running “ask-me-anything” sessions will be reformatted.

“I’ll still be at events and take the time for pictures and handshakes,” Hoskinson concluded, “but it’s different now. This one has deeply hurt me and it’s not going to heal anytime soon.”

The Dispute Over Unclaimed Cardano Tokens

Between September 2015 and January 2017 Cardano raised roughly $62 million by selling 25.9 billion ADA vouchers—most of them in Japan—through Tokyo-based Attain Corporation. Buyers later redeemed the vouchers inside the Daedalus wallet when the network launched. Attain ran the sale for the project’s founding entities (IOHK, now IOG; the Cardano Foundation; and EMURGO) under full KYC/AML checks, a structure highlighted in contemporary investor materials and later research from Messari.

The current controversy revolves around an estimated 318–350 million ADA—about 0.2 percent of the ICO allocation—that remained unclaimed years after launch. On 7 May, NFT artist Masato Alexander alleged that Hoskinson had “effectively ERASED” the original UTXOs during the 2021 Allegra hard-fork upgrade and swept the tokens into Cardano’s reserves, later staking most of them and directing only a fraction to Intersect, the ecosystem’s new governance body.

Hoskinson has rejected those claims as “lies,” insisting that 99.8 percent of the sale tokens were eventually redeemed by their rightful owners and that the remaining balance was moved—first into a custodial account and ultimately to Intersect—only after Attain’s bankruptcy left no party able to process late redemptions safely. “These funds were not stolen,” he wrote, warning Alexander and others that repetition of the accusation would trigger litigation. “If you continue to imply that IO stole funds, I will sue you. This is my last warning.”

In a separate post on 13 May he explained that because the legacy on-chain redemption mechanism was insecure once Attain closed, the team “swept” the unredeemed vouchers off-chain, re-verifying claimants through local counsel and exchange partners. “The sweep reset the process and ensured all the remaining unredeemed buyers had an opportunity to go through compliance again,” Hoskinson wrote, characterising the measure as a consumer-protection step rather than a seizure.

According to Hoskinson, an “externally audited report” covering every tranche of the voucher sale, each redemption transaction and the subsequent transfers of unclaimed ADA is now in its final stages. The document is to be distributed to IOG, the Cardano Foundation, EMURGO and Intersect before being released publicly. Until that review is published, he said, Cardano’s development company will make no further substantive comment and will focus on potential legal remedies against what he calls “defamation.”

At press time, ADA traded at $0.7199.