Cardano founder Charles Hoskinson believes crypto needs to move beyond its traditional focus on faster transactions, cheaper payments and financial products. According to him, if the industry wants to attract billions of new users and potentially $10 trillion in capital, it must evolve. His latest comments at Wyoming Blockchain Symposium, 2026 conference touched on agentic commerce, interoperability, privacy and the next crypto bull market.
Agentic Commerce Is the Future
Hoskinson sees agentic commerce as one of the biggest opportunities for crypto adoption. He said AI agents will eventually handle everyday purchases and financial transactions for users.
Under this model, people could give an AI agent a budget and instructions. Meanwhile, the agent manages purchases automatically. Hoskinson expects this technology to become a major part of the economy by 2030. In his view, it could bring the next billion users into crypto.
You’ll Be Able to Have Wallets for Your Agents
Hoskinson said Midnight is expected to introduce agentic trading before the end of 2026. Users could create wallets for their AI agents and provide them with tokens. With these, those agents could trade across different platforms.
The concept would allow an agent to operate across both on-chain and off-chain environments. Therefore, it could potentially make blockchain transactions less dependent on direct human involvement.
Things Are No Longer Siloed
He also pointed to the growing interoperability between blockchain networks and other technologies. He argued that crypto ecosystems are becoming less isolated, allowing businesses to connect their existing systems with emerging blockchain infrastructure.
He specifically quoted Midnight as an example of an ecosystem that businesses could potentially integrate into. Rather than treating blockchain as a completely separate technology, they could use it as part of their own systems.
We Need a New Narrative for Cryptocurrencies
His take is that the industry needs to move beyond the traditional “better, faster, cheaper” pitch.
His argument is that mainstream adoption will require crypto to become useful in everyday life. Instead of simply offering another financial product, he wants the technology to make people’s lives “simpler, safer, more private, and easier”. Thus, there would be a more practical reason for billions of people to use it.
The Bear Market Is Gonna Go Away
Despite the current market downturn, Hoskinson remains confident that another bull market will eventually arrive.
His broader argument is that short-term market cycles should not overshadow the technological changes taking place across crypto. In his view, AI agents, interoperable blockchain networks and privacy-focused infrastructure could form the foundation for the industry’s next major adoption phase.
