Cardano Founder on Strategy to Attract Retail Investors

• Charles Hoskinson urges the crypto industry to return to its foundational principles if it wants to attract retail investors.
• Hoskinson and the Cardano team are promoting decentralization and the Midnight Network as they seek retail adoption.

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Cardano founder Charles Hoskinson outlined fundamental principles on how the crypto ecosystem can attract retail investors. Hoskinson noted that retail investors no longer respond to hype-driven cycles or promises of 100x returns. 

Cardano Founder on How to Attract Crypto Retailers

In a recent livestream, Hoskinson urged the industry to deliver practical benefits that address real-world problems. 

To Hoskinson, blockchain foundational concepts like self-custody, sound money, and access to real, sustainable yields must return to the industry. Only then can the crypto industry attract retail clients back to the market. 

The Cardano founder also highlighted that retail users will only embrace crypto when it clearly enhances their financial autonomy.

Hoskinson said retail investors always like to control their assets when the infrastructure is right. This further shows the importance of decentralized technologies. These can help achieve the goal of onboarding the average user.

To the Cardano founder, leaders in the industry must avoid too good to be true promises to achieve long term growth. 

He thinks that only the restoration of these core values will bring retail investors back into the crypto space.

Hoskinson’s latest remarks come after his accusation that certain institutions were responsible for the recent crypto crash. The Cardano founder accused these firms of engaging in pump-and-dump schemes and profiting from both sides of the trades. 

As indicated in our earlier discussion, Hoskinson also accused the Trump administration of disrupting the four-year crypto market cycle. He claimed a heavy-handed embrace from the administration caused irrational exuberance.

Furthermore, Hoskinson said many retail investors have not fully returned to the market since the collapse of LUNA and FTX. He argued that most remain unaware of the extent of institutional manipulation, even among those who have reentered.

How Cardano is Encouraging Retail Adoption

On their part, Hoskinson and the Cardano team are working to attract retail participation. Some of the main routes to do this are through the Cardano blockchain and the Midnight project.

In a recent update, we covered, Hoskinson unveiled a one-year roadmap for the Midnight network mainnet launch, divided into four phases. He said the NIGHT token launch will begin on December 8, followed by exchange listings and trading with liquidity pools.

Hoskinson has consistently promoted Midnight as a privacy-focused platform that protects user data. In a previous article, we discussed that the Cardano Midnight Foundation collaborated with Google Cloud to advance privacy-enhancing infrastructure. 

As part of its development efforts, Cardano has moved to full decentralization through CIP-1694. As detailed in our last news piece, the DRep expansion and new voting tools pushed broader community control in 2025.

Meanwhile, ADA, the native token of Cardano, has recovered from recent lows, even reclaiming $0.5. The ADA price surged 0.9% to $0.44 over the past 24 hours.