Cardano founder Charles Hoskinson laid out his 2026 outlook in a new Altcoin Daily interview that has been picking up traction across crypto social media. The conversation covered Bitcoin’s next leg, why 2025 failed to deliver a classic altcoin cycle, and why Hoskinson thinks privacy-focused infrastructure could become the next major narrative.
Hoskinson said he sees Bitcoin reaching $250,000 in 2026, mainly because institutional demand is still building while Bitcoin’s supply remains constrained. In his view, the same forces that helped Bitcoin push higher this cycle could keep pressing the price upward, especially as more traditional channels open for capital to enter.
He pointed to Morgan Stanley’s move to allow its private wealth advisors to advise clients on crypto allocations. The framing matters here: when a major name sets an allocation band like 1% to 5% across a large advisor base, other firms often follow to stay competitive. Hoskinson described that as a steady new stream of demand that does not rely on retail hype.
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What went wrong in 2025, in his view
Hoskinson described 2025 as a year that promised a big payoff but never “sealed the deal.” His core argument was that institutions showed up, but mostly stuck with Bitcoin, and that broke the classic rotation pattern that tends to push money into altcoins 6 to 12 months after Bitcoin runs.
In the same segment, he argued that policy messaging and market structure also hurt retail participation. He described 2025 as messy and politicized, with inconsistent signals around reserves, councils, and broader coordination. The outcome, in his view, was a cycle where Bitcoin printed strength while most altcoins failed to get a broad wave of fresh buyers.
He singled out Solana and XRP as exceptions that held up better than most, with Solana benefiting from meme-coin activity and XRP benefiting from a post-Gensler reset narrative.
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The bridge problem: getting Bitcoin value into the altcoin market
Hoskinson’s bigger point was not just “Bitcoin up.” It was that the crypto market still needs a mechanism that moves Bitcoin value into the rest of the ecosystem without forcing institutions to give up custody.
He talked about Bitcoin DeFi as a pathway, but said the infrastructure is not complete yet. The missing piece, in his framing, is a non-custodial credit layer where Bitcoin can be used as collateral to borrow stablecoins, then deploy those stablecoins into DeFi for yield. If that loop becomes efficient and scalable, he expects capital to “leak” outward into altcoins through on-chain activity instead of the old retail rotation model.
He also raised a separate risk factor: if an AI-driven tech bubble pops, the correlation between tech equities and crypto could drag the whole sector lower. That is one reason he described macro conditions as uncertain even while keeping a bullish long-term view.
A new narrative for 2026: privacy becomes the battleground
Hoskinson argued that crypto moves forward in generational waves, where new functionality creates a new narrative and a new set of winners. In his view, 2026 is shaping up as “the year of privacy,” with demand rising for selective disclosure, better privacy tooling, and applications that can support regulated activity without exposing everything on a public ledger.
He tied that privacy shift to real-world assets as well, arguing that tokenized assets and regulated finance need privacy-preserving rails to scale. He also claimed that private DEXs could become major volume centers over time, potentially challenging centralized exchange activity on certain flows.
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Midnight’s role and the “fourth generation” pitch
A big portion of the interview focused on Midnight, which Hoskinson framed as a “fourth generation” system built around rational privacy, identity with selective disclosure, and cross-ecosystem cooperation.
The concept he kept coming back to was practical privacy: privacy that can run in different modes depending on the use case, rather than a single all-or-nothing setting. He also emphasized making privacy tooling feel like an API layer that apps can integrate without rebuilding everything from scratch.
One example he used was a regulated trading flow where compliance checks happen through privacy-preserving proofs before assets settle on an app like a DEX. The idea is that apps keep their core codebase mostly intact while pushing compliance and privacy logic into a specialized layer.
He also talked about Midnight’s development approach, including compatibility goals across multiple chains and a design that aims to reduce friction for developers through familiar tooling.
Stablecoins as the new “gateway drug”
Hoskinson also argued that stablecoins are now a bigger onboarding engine than Bitcoin for new crypto users. He pointed to growth expectations for stablecoin supply over the next several years and argued that even a fraction of that liquidity moving into on-chain activity can materially change DeFi totals and market structure.
In his view, stablecoin adoption in parts of the world where dollar exposure matters is a real demand driver for crypto rails, and that demand can exist independently of Bitcoin’s price cycle.
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