Bitcoin Needs Its Own Bretton Woods, Says Cardano Founder

Cardano founder Charles Hoskinson has issued a full-throated call for a “crypto-native Bretton Woods,” arguing that Bitcoin should anchor an algorithmic stable-value system completely outside the orbit of commercial banks and custodians. Speaking during a panel on BTC-focused decentralized finance, Hoskinson traced the asset’s raison d’être back to the 2008 financial crisis and castigated any resurgence of traditional finance within the digital-asset space.

Bitcoin Must Back A New Bretton Woods

“The reason Bitcoin exists is we had a divorce from the legacy financial system after 2008—and it was not a good divorce,” he said. “Asset-backed stablecoins that are centralized are like having to give your kids to your ex for the weekend. I hate the centralization of them […] the banking industry is leaking its way back into crypto, putting all the things we tried to get away from right back in.”

Hoskinson framed centralized, dollar-backed tokens as antithetical to Bitcoin’s founding ethos and instead championed algorithmic alternatives. Recalling his collaboration with Dan Larimer on BitUSD—one of the sector’s first over-collateralized, on-chain dollars—he said the experiment “showed the art of the possible.” Cardano’s own Djed, he added, “has worked pretty well.” Yet his “dream” remains an algorithmic stablecoin whose collateral is pure BTC:

“I always dreamed of finding a way to have Bitcoin be an algorithmic stablecoin, where you use Bitcoin to create a stable value—similar to how the Bretton Woods agreement worked when gold backed US dollars. That’s how you create sound money. You connect it to an anchor point. There’s no third-party custodian, and it just flows the way you want it to.”

Hoskinson next turned to tokenized real-world assets—property, intellectual-property rights, “hard and soft assets”—arguing that Bitcoiners will demand access without relinquishing their coins. The solution, he said, lies in non-custodial lending protocols that treat BTC as pristine collateral: “Figure out lending protocols where they can lend out, get some stablecoin, do something, participate, get a yield, get the yield back in Bitcoin, get their Bitcoin back. There’s a path there.”

A Supply Squeeze In The Making

That path, Hoskinson predicted, will converge with an aggressive wave of institutional and sovereign accumulation. “The scarcity of Bitcoin is going to grow dramatically over the next 24 to 36 months as the U.S starts buying it, as corporations start buying it,” he said, referencing the pending US market-structure bill he expects in August. “The demand for Bitcoin will be so furious… that’s going to lead to a shortage.”

In such an environment, long-time holders would rather lever their coins than incur capital-gains tax: “If you’re that 10,000 BTC person who bought under a dollar […] you really do not want to divest at $120,000 and pay that tax bill. You’d much rather lend it—tax-neutral—get a yield, pay taxes on that yield, and live off Bitcoin as it appreciates.”

Hoskinson’s monetary critique was unabashedly libertarian. Citing Ron Paul as an early influence, he contrasted BTC’s engineered scarcity with the erosion of dollar purchasing power: “Our government’s deteriorating [savings] by 8 to 10% per fucking year. It is the biggest Ponzi scheme in human history to say we should tolerate that […] Bitcoin is the first hard money of my lifetime. We just need to clean a few of the edges up—and that’s what Bitcoin DeFi is doing for all of us.”

Hoskinson’s comments come amid a renewed focus on decentralized finance applications for BTC via Cardano. Whether BTC finds its own “Bretton Woods” remains to be seen—but for Hoskinson, the mission is clear: a hard money system built without compromise.

At press time, BTC traded at $104,960.

Featured image created with DALL.E, chart from TradingView.com