Cardano creator Charles Hoskinson said U.S. President Donald Trump's administration has put the American crypto industry in a worse position than it was under Trump's predecessor, former President Joe Biden.
Hoskinson, CEO and founder of Input Output Group, the company behind the Cardano blockchain and a co-founder of Ethereum, didn’t hold back in a wide-ranging interview with CoinDesk TV, sharply criticizing the Trump administration’s handling of the Trump Coin launch and his crypto policy. It's the continuation of an ongoing turnaround by Hoskinson, who said shortly after Trump was elected in November 2024 that he would be working with Trump's officials before souring on the administration last year.
While Trump's election win created early optimism for the crypto industry, it was quickly dashed when Trump's memecoin was rolled out ahead of the 2025 inauguration, said Hoskinson, who will speak at CoinDesk's Consensus Hong Kong conference next month.
“The very first thing he did is launch Trump Coin and it just felt like the extractiveness has now been institutionalized,” he said. “The U.S. government is participating in it as opposed to some Pump.Fun person.” Pump.Fun is among the first memecoin launchpads that attracted massive retail investors to the sector by making the creation of these coins easier.
Since the launch of the Trump Coin in January of last year, the memecoin has lost over 80% of its value from its peak, leading to massive losses for some buyers. The launch also created the hype for memecoin — tokens without any utilities — during the beginning of last year, which quickly led to many such token rollouts, scams and the eventual crash of the entire subsector that left investors holding their bags.
Hoskinson believes this rollout of Trump’s and Melania Trump’s coins also severely damaged the chance for meaningful bipartisan reform in early 2025. If the memecoins hadn't been launched, things might have turned out quite differently for the crypto industry.
“I think it would have been extremely different because we would have probably passed not only the GENIUS Act but also the Clarity Act, and there was a window of time where crypto legislation could have been intrinsically bipartisan” he said, pointing to the two most important bills for crypto regulatory frameworks, both of which hit a snag due to Democrats' concerns over Trump's crypto business ties. The Clarity Act is the name of the U.S. House of Representatives version of crypto market structure legislation, passed on a bipartisan basis in 2025. The Senate is working on its own version of this legislation, which will address how federal regulators can oversee the crypto markets.
Now, due to the impact of those memecoins on most investors, efforts to regulate crypto have stalled, and the sector has become a wedge issue, he said. While Hoskinson isn't against launching those memecoins, his point is that Trump could've waited until the new regulatory framework and the outcome could've been much better for the industry.
“If you launch something and it's mostly an extractive venture, then what you've effectively done is you've collapsed crypto from a public perception, to crypto equals Trump equals bad, you know, amongst the left,” he said. “You can't alienate half the country and then expect them to show up.”
A U.S. Senate committee plans to hold a key hearing on Thursday to try and pass crypto market structure legislation, but it's unclear whether it has the votes to do so. Trump's involvement in crypto is only one of the issues — but a key issue — holding up what had previously looked to be a bipartisan effort.
However, some observers, including CoinFund President Chris Perkins, argue that the delay in passing the Clarity Act is not necessarily a bad thing.
“It’s really hard to legislate today in a post-Chevron era,” he said, “in the past, you could have a bill, and then the regulators could fill in the gaps, but nobody trusts that anymore.”
In 2024, the Chevron Deference, a major legal doctrine, was overturned by the U.S. Supreme Court. For 40 years, if Congress passed a law that was vague, the courts would defer to the experts at the federal agencies to interpret or fill in the gaps. Now judges, not agency experts, have the final say on what a vague law means.
Perkins said this makes the bill even more complicated because “you need to be really detailed and prescriptive about what regulators can and cannot do.”
He thinks the bill gets modularized over time, explaining,“I don’t know if we’re going to have this one big crypto bill,” but he said that won’t hold the industry back. Pointing to CFTC Chairman Mike Selig and SEC Chairman Paul Atkins, he said, “We have awesome, incredible, capable, smart and knowledgeable CFTC and SEC chairs.”
This outcome appears to be unfolding currently in the Senate as a deadline to pass the bill approaches. On Monday, after Perkins' comments, Senators Cynthia Lummis and Ron Wyden introduced the Blockchain Regulatory Certainty Act, a bill protecting crypto developers from prosecution if they build tools that others use for criminal activities and from money transmitter laws, as a standalone bill.
Even if the legislation doesn’t get passed under this administration, Perkins said, “well you have three years of precedent, and it's really hard to just ignore things and roll them back. So I think we're going to be fine.”
The White House did not respond to requests for comment.
So what turned the longtime blockchain executive sour against the Trump administration? Mainly, the administration’s lack of structure and coordination with crypto industry leaders, according to Hoskinson.
“He [Trump] didn’t construct any structures to get really good advice from the industry. And he kind of created this predatory free-for-all,” Hoskinson said, describing a culture of political donations and jockeying for influence without clear policy goals. “There was no core philosophy.”
Hoskinson recounted some of his personal interactions with the administration and labeled them as “schizophrenic.”
He said that his invitations to White House events were extended and withdrawn without explanation during the early days of the administration. Additionally, when ADA, Cardano’s token, was named part of the administration’s crypto reserve, he stated that he and his team weren't contacted at all. "When the president said ADA is in the reserve, XRP is in the reserve, and Solana is in the reserve, and I was just like, okay, well sh*t, I'm just gonna get subpoenaed now when the Democrats get back in power, and they're going to think I had something to do with it. We had nothing to do with it. We never discussed it with them."
CoinFund's Perkins, however, shared his own experience working with the administration, which was more positive than Hoskinson's. He said, “across the board, the administration has been very supportive of innovation ... it’s literally a 180 degree difference between the last administration and this administration when it comes to being able to innovate.
The CFTC and SEC call Perkins when they want to learn more about crypto-related subjects, he said, something many executives in the industry said rarely happened under the Biden administration.
Perkins is a member of the CFTC’s Digital Asset Markets Subcommittee.
From Hoskinson's perspective, the lack of structure from the administration has led to an environment where crypto is unlikely to receive any regulatory framework anytime soon, as the Trump administration's behavior has likely caused more rifts than helped, he said.
He also criticized the appointment of David Sacks as the administration’s crypto czar, calling him unqualified. “If we can't get [the Clarity Act] passed this year, David Sacks should resign. He failed us as an industry,” Hoskinson said. He stated that the administration failed to establish an inclusive and balanced regulatory process. “It’s not just one person. Once you have that person, you have to bring the industry together,” he said.
The lack of regulatory clarity, he warned, is now likely to persist for years. “We lost our window, and I’m very pessimistic that we’re going to be able to get it back until probably 2029,” Hoskinson said, blaming both the White House and Congress. “The House was very disengaged. They’re just like, hey, we passed the Clarity Act, done.”
Hoskinson likened the Trump administration’s approach to crypto to its foreign policy — improvised and unchecked. He referenced the recent operation in Venezuela, asking, “What is our strategy here? Can we at least get an explanation of, like, what is the plan now?”
Ultimately, Hoskinson sees a deeper problem.
“There's no accountability. There's no respect for the rule of law, and there's no respect for the balance of power,” he said.
The lack of leadership, Hoskinson argued, has left the crypto industry politically weaponized and without a path forward. “Crypto equals corruption. It's a wealth transfer mechanism for Trump and his friends. And that didn’t help any of us.”
