The general public battle between Charles Hoskinson and non-fungible-token artist Masato Alexander who alleged that the Cardano founder quietly redirected 318 million ADA—value roughly $619 million on the time—from legacy presale wallets into Cardano’s reserves throughout the 2021 Allegra onerous fork, is additional escalating. The Cardano founder has fired again with a string of messages on X that recast the affair as a calculated publicity seize for an Ethereum-based enterprise.
“So the defamation was nearly rising his visibility to fund-raise for an Ethereum venture??? You significantly can’t make this shit up,” Hoskinson wrote late Wednesday through X, attaching a screenshot of a non-public chat through which Alexander mentioned he was “making an attempt to lock in some funding for Akua and get some runway.”
The screenshot triggered a direct rebuttal from Alexander—“do you actually wanna be sharing DMs charles? put these on the pile”—and opened a window onto a second, beforehand unseen alternate. In that dialog Phil Harman, chief government of Anastasia Labs and a long-time Cardano developer, requested Alexander whether or not a Cardano model of Akua is likely to be potential. Harman later bristled at having the dialogue made public: “What’s the goal of releasing these DMs of me making an attempt to present you constructive recommendation about your dApp? … Sharing this as a gotcha is embarrassing.”
Akua—the venture for which Alexander is in search of financing—is described in a 28 February 2025 white paper as “a novel method to prediction markets centered on natural-disaster threat administration,” beginning with earthquakes and increasing to different phenomena. The protocol structure is designed for EVM compatibility, a element that Cardano neighborhood engineer Lucas (@rvcas) seized upon when he argued that Alexander’s accusations have been a advertising ploy: “Monad is making an attempt to drop an ETH dapp and that is his approach of getting consideration from that crowd … He’s financially motivated and possibly has no real curiosity from an integrity perspective.”
Hoskinson echoed that evaluation, calling the episode a smear orchestrated to courtroom Ethereum buyers. He has additionally threatened authorized motion and commissioned an impartial audit of the disputed treasury transactions, an train he says will present that greater than 99.8% of the unique vouchers have been redeemed and that the residual steadiness—about 18-24 million ADA—was in the end donated to Intersect, the brand new member-based governance physique.
Why The Cardano Token Vouchers Have been Swept
In an extended X submit on Wednesday, Hoskinson revisited the mechanics of the 2021 voucher sweep, arguing that Japanese retail patrons—many aged—had struggled with the unique redemption course of. “There was a industrial legal responsibility for finishing the redemption … If the customer couldn’t fairly use that technique, there was an ethical obligation to vary the redemption mechanism,” he wrote, including that two of the three genesis key-holders needed to signal the hard-fork improve that eliminated the unredeemed addresses.
Hoskinson maintains that no ADA was “stolen,” calling the narrative “absurd, goal-post-moving doublespeak” and condemning media headlines that steered in any other case. Alexander, against this, likens the voucher sweep to a unilateral rewrite of historical past that disadvantaged early buyers of their cash, arguing that solely about $7 million of the swept funds have surfaced at Intersect.
As reported by Bitcoinist on Wednesday, the ADA voucher audit redemption audit by world regulation agency McDermott Will & Emery (MW&E) and the audit heavyweight BDO will give a definitive reply when completed. A publication date is just not but recognized.
At press time, ADA traded at $0.7889.
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