Charles Hoskinson, billionaire and founder of the Cardano cryptocurrency platform, has major plans to get involved in the local Wyoming policy this year.
Hoskinson, who has a ranch in Wheatland and has a family in Gillette, plans to launch the Wyoming Integrity Political Action Committee this year.
He told Cowboy State Daily that the CAP will be built around candidates to support candidates who can provide more transparent tenders in Wyoming.
The financial means and existing Hoskinson connections almost guarantee that he will be a major player in the electoral cycle of 2026.
What is the goal?
Hoskinson, who has invested about $ 100 million in his own money in a health clinic in Gillette, said he was at a time in his life when he spent most of his capital and his time in Wyoming.
One of the main priorities of the CAP will be to support transparent purchasing practices by the Wyoming State government, he said. Although this is not the most exciting subject on the surface, Hoskinson stresses that better supply policies could bring a much more solid government and a quality of life in Wyoming without ever having to increase taxes.
“Supply is an excellent bipartite problem on which you can cut everyone’s teeth,” said Hoskinson. “This is a unifying question because it is not a republican against democrat, nor this branch of the republican party against this branch of the republican party. These are the inhabitants of Wyoming against all sellers. You unify people on an image, on a message.
Hoskinson was a first player on the Wyoming cryptocurrency scene and played an important role by helping the state to continue its own stable token.
Stable tokens are a type of cryptocurrency where the goal is to maintain static value. In the case of Wyoming, a unique stable token was worth $ 1.
Last fall, the Wyoming stable tokens commission announced that it had started to take requests for proposals (RFP) of pre-qualified suppliers for the stable token of the State, which it identified as Solana, Avalanche, suis, Stellar and Ethereum. In short, not only was Cardano not chosen to be a supplier of the project, but he was not even authorized to bid.
“It is not purchases, that is to say a non-candidacy contract built for the benefit of a small group of people,” said Hoskinson.
With advanced technologies of all kinds accelerating at a rapid rate in recent years, Hoskinson fears that Wyoming can be benefited by more technologically advanced suppliers in the future if it is not protecting itself.
In 2023, Hoskinson opened a health clinic for anti-aging and regenerative medicine in Gillette. The investment of $ 100 million has become a multi-specialty practice with more than 10,000 patients.
Hoskinson said he was amazed at the time of the doctors he hired to make his clinic approved for license granting in Wyoming, another bureaucratic problem that he wants his PAC helps to solve.
“I don’t think it’s a partisan issue, as a republican or democratic question,” he said. “In fact, people who probably made this decision died.”
Hoskinson also wants to eliminate corruption and theft in government, and update many state processes to better adapt modern problems and needs, including the management of fauna and fauna of fish and allowances hunting beacons.
He is also concerned with several million dollars investments that the founder of Microsoft, Bill Gates and the owner of Meta, Mark Zuckerberg, carried out in Wyoming on recent projects like a Terrapower Natrium reactor in Kemmerer and a data center Facebook in Cheyenne because he does not believe that Wyoming is adequately prepared to regulate them.
“What is the state going to help them with this particular project outside the politicians who present themselves with helmets and shovels and say:” Look at this, it’s great, it will create all these Jobs? “” Hoskinson questioned, adding that he thought that the state must examine more carefully the potential negative side effects of projects like these.
Again, he thinks that all these problems can be resolved with better supply policies.
“If you create purchases in this particular way, you will end up with bad results,” said Hoskinson. “And this results in the loss of 500 jobs, the loss of 1,000 jobs, the loss of 2,000. How many times has it occurred before dropping the state in depression?” »»
Problem of the problem
On Friday, Hoskinson will be the star lecturer to launch the very first program of series of Blockchain Wyoming Blockchain Conference Wyoming University. He plans to discuss his own negative experience with state supply policies during the event.
“The largest wyoming blockchain company is excluded, not even authorized to tender, by criteria that we are going to show with the University of Wyoming, we have satisfied,” said Hoskinson.
Hoskinson’s company also has a digital asset laboratory, where it works with the University of Wyoming in the development of this sector.
The executive director of Wyoming Stable Token, Anthony Apollo, said that the suppliers had determined prequalified prequalified if the working group of the selection of the blockchain of the state was “in the frame” for the initial deployment of the stable token of the Wyoming .
Senator Chris Rothfuss, D-Laramie, who played a decisive role in the development of Wyoming digital asset law, told Cowboy State Daily last November that the process offered a clear set of criteria established by experts In this area to assess the candidates’ blockchains to issue the stable token.
Apollo declared to the Legislative Assembly last December that Cardano had adopted four of the five criteria to be a prequalified supplier but failed the frost and entry test.
This is the seizure of a questionable cryptocurrency asset, a capacity that would probably be required by the Securities and Exchange Commission during an investigation, to prevent any money laundering. Cardano argued in a letter in November to the Stablecoin commission that the blockchain selection group had brought an extremely close interpretation to this requirement.
Although Cardano had a product at the time that met these criteria, it was still in test mode, and the agency explicitly declared that it needed all the technologies required fully functional on the blockchain.
But Hoskinson said that it had never been communicated that they needed this fully ready and nowhere capacity in state emergency rules, he indicates that this capacity was necessary to pre-qualify.
Cardano can now demonstrate that he has this technology, that Hoskinson plans to present the symposium on Friday.
“Just to say that this is an example of misregrity by process and by individual,” said Hoskinson.
Unfortunately, none of this will allow Cardano to bid on the project.
Conflicts of interest?
Hoskinson had already played a role as a member of a subcommittee to help develop rules for the stable Wyoming token. When he noticed early signs that conflicts of interest could occur in the future, Hoskinson said that he had been reassured by others that it would not be a problem.
Hoskinson believes that Apollo, who is a former consensus employee, a company that has developed Ethereum, one of the selected companies, has been biased against other platforms from the start, adding that the director had even mentioned during the ‘One of its first meetings that the stable token must first be built on Ethereum.
Hoskinson also said that the qualifications necessary to participate as a supplier had never been published publicly. He put pressure for all the functional and non-functional requirements to participate are published by the Commission so that any cryptocurrency platform that wanted to bid for the stable token could build a prototype demonstrating if it could meet the requirements of Wyoming.
Apollo told Cowboy State Daily that “although potential suppliers can be frustrated that their favored blockchain” not being selected or because their organization was not qualified, there is no flexibility to make exceptions at this stage.
“The Wyoming deserves the highest caliber of delivery of the parties it engages,” he said.
Apollo also said that it was “factually inaccurate” to characterize the evaluation and selection of the candidate blockchain commission according to his previous professional experience.
“I was a ten voice in our working group, and I am not a voting member of the commission who finally ratified the selection criteria and the blockchains as part of the initial program,” said Apollo.
None of the other pre-qualified companies was first formed in Wyoming, which Cardano did in 2018.
What Hoskinson also finds frustrating is that he planned to bid $ 1 and never intend to make profits on the project.
He sees options to continue a collective appeal against the State for what has happened, but does not think that it is an interesting company.
“It’s a loss of line for everyone,” he said. It is a loss for the state, it is a loss for me. We must all spend a lot of money. And what is the end result? What do we get a second shock with a bunch of biased people?
Hoskinson said he was also not coincidence that Ripple, who had a contradictory relationship with Ethereum, was also left out.
Ripple, a much larger clone of Stellar, was also snubbed from auction of stable tokens. Ripple, which is worth around 120 billion dollars, has a stable part which has obtained the right to be regulated by the New York Ministry of Finance, an important regulatory company. The company also recently met President Donald Trump.
Unusual arrangement
What is particular in the efforts of Wyoming to develop a stable token is that they enter a product in private industry and compete with private companies on behalf of the State. The State gave the project a budget of $ 5.8 million to go against companies earning billions of dollars a year on hundreds of different markets with billions of dollars in liquidity.
Due to these challenges and what has happened to him, Hoskinson thinks that it would be preferable that the current project is closed and funded so that a new supply policy can be deployed.
He also declared that what happened to him raises questions about what the Wyoming supply process will look like for the purchase of artificial intelligence technologies, synthetic biology, robots and humanoid drones.
“You need an open supply process, which is built to prevent major players from coming and coopting the State and stealing taxpayers in the state of Wyoming and taking their money and putting it in California or New York, “he said.
Leo Wolfson can be reached leo@cowboystatedily.com.
