Charles Hoskinson, founder of Cardano and CEO of Input Output, used an April 23 livestream to revisit a 2022 essay by Signal co-founder Moxie Marlinspike, arguing that the piece still captures a core weakness in crypto infrastructure: much of Web3 depends on centralized off-chain services. In the broadcast, Hoskinson said Marlinspike’s critique directly informed his support for BlockFrost, a Cardano infrastructure provider he now frames as part of a broader push to decentralize the application layer that users actually rely on. The comments came as Hoskinson urged Cardano stakeholders to back treasury proposals tied to partner-chain and infrastructure work, including BlockFrost.
Hoskinson Reframes Moxie’s Web3 Warning
Hoskinson spent much of the livestream reading and commenting on Marlinspike’s essay, “My first impressions of web3,” which was published in January 2022 at the height of the prior cycle’s NFT boom. He described Marlinspike, the Signal co-founder and information security expert, as “absolutely brilliant” and said the essay remained relevant because it highlighted an “uncomfortable hidden truth” for blockchains, including Cardano. According to Hoskinson, the central issue is that end users do not run their own infrastructure, even in systems built around decentralization.
Quoting at length from the essay, Hoskinson emphasized Marlinspike’s point that decentralized protocols often give way to centralized service providers because users want convenience. “People don’t want to run their own servers and never will,” Marlinspike wrote. “Even nerds do not want to run their own servers at this point. Even organizations building software full-time do not want to run their own servers at this point.” Hoskinson said that diagnosis applies not only to Ethereum, the primary subject of the original essay, but also to Cardano and Bitcoin whenever apps depend on remote nodes, APIs, and hosted services.
He also highlighted Marlinspike’s critique of how wallets and apps interact with blockchain data in practice. In the essay, Marlinspike wrote: “So much work, energy, and time has gone into creating a trustless distributed consensus mechanism, but virtually all clients that wish to access it do so by simply trusting the outputs from these two companies without any further verification. It also doesn’t seem like the best privacy situation.” Hoskinson said that observation was the key takeaway for him, adding that “under the hood, there’s onchain and there’s offchain,” and that not everything a dapp needs “lives on your blockchain.”
BlockFrost Cast as Cardano’s Infra Answer
Hoskinson said Marlinspike’s essay “convinced me to buy Block Frost,” referring to BlockFrost, the Cardano infrastructure company best known for API access and developer tooling. In the livestream, he argued that infrastructure providers have accrued outsize power across crypto because they shape the real user experience, even when settlement occurs onchain. To illustrate the point, he cited Alchemy’s past private-market valuation, saying infrastructure companies serving the off-chain layer have reached “$10 billion, $20 billion, $30 billion” scale because “they’re basically running the show.”
He presented BlockFrost as Cardano’s attempt to avoid that outcome by decentralizing infrastructure itself rather than denying the need for it. “Block Frost destiny, should we fund it, is to become the decentralized infra alchemy that we all wish we would have had and something that Moxy could write about as the proper good alternative, the thing that actually is philosophically consistent,” Hoskinson said. He tied that goal to Cardano’s wider partner-chain strategy, saying BlockFrostcould evolve into “a decentralized infrastructure network” for the broader crypto industry using a dual-token model similar to Midnight, Cardano’s privacy-focused sidechain project.
In Hoskinson’s telling, this is not simply a product pitch but part of a larger architectural thesis for Cardano. “We said you’re going to be your own bank, run your own money, that you’re going to run your own infrastructure, but we didn’t do that,” he said. “We have to finish the job. So, we have to have a decentralized infura, a decentralized alchemy, and we have to bring that to bear to everyone in this space.” He added that a $2 million ask for BlockFrostshould be viewed in the context of much larger ecosystem spending, though the livestream did not provide a formal proposal document or treasury vote details beyond his appeal for support.
Hoskinson also linked the BlockFrostpush to Cardano’s broader scaling and interoperability roadmap, including Midnight, Hydra, and Bitcoin connectivity efforts. He argued that Cardano paid a “high bar” to adopt the extended UTXO model and should now build the off-chain systems needed to realize that design’s full value. Still, the livestream reflected Hoskinson’s position rather than an independently verified assessment of BlockFrost’s future market role, and he acknowledged that some voters may oppose the proposal because of competing interests, disagreements on priorities, or concerns about project founders.
Hoskinson’s latest remarks amount to a renewed attempt to turn a widely cited Web3 critique into an argument for Cardano-specific infrastructure spending. By reviving Marlinspike’s essay, he is effectively saying the industry already knows where centralization forms, and that the next phase is to redesign those choke points rather than pretend they do not exist. Whether Cardano stakeholders accept that framing — and whether BlockFrost can become the kind of decentralized API layer Hoskinson described — will depend less on rhetoric than on governance approvals and technical execution.
AI Transparency Note: This article was prepared with the assistance of an AI system based on the sources listed and was reviewed, edited, and approved by a human editor before publication. All quotes, data points, and factual claims are intended to be grounded in the cited source material; however, errors cannot be ruled out entirely.
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