Cardano [ADA]’s Charles Hoskinson: Cypriot crisis made him believe Bitcoin [BTC] is going to stay and it’s permanent

Charles Hoskinson, the Founder of Cardano and the Co-Founder of Ethereum, spoke about how he stepped into the cryptocurrency space and became the Co-Founder of the second biggest cryptocurrency in the market, during a conversation with Mpho Dagada.

The founder of the third generation cryptocurrency was fascinated when he got to know about Bitcoin [BTC] in the year 2011 and thought of it to be an interesting concept. During this timeframe, Charles said that he bought Bitcoin [BTC] and mined some as well.

However, the Cypriot crisis which occurred during the timeframe of 2012-2013 resulted in huge growth of Bitcoin. This led to Charles believe that Bitcoin “is going to stay” and that it is permanent.

He continued to say:

“…but I didn’t professionally get in until about 2013, that’s when the Cypriot crisis happened and Bitcoin went from nothing to over $250. And there was a huge wave of people entering the space… So either I get on the truck or its going to leave without me. I need to do something in the movement.”

This was followed by him starting an educational project called Bitcoin Educational Project. Charles created free content and uploaded it on Youtube and other mediums in order to get students and talk to people about Bitcoin and digital currency. The project ended up being a success with over 80,000 students and Charles met several cryptocurrency influencers throughout the project including Roger Ver and Andreas M Antonopoulos.

Moreover, in the year 2013, the Founder of IOHK was approached by a Chinese investor who offered him over half a million dollars to start a company. Charles considered creating a stable currency since Bitcoin was too volatile and a student said that merchants can’t really adopt it because of the same. The main idea behind the stale currency was to make Bitcoin “undefeatable“.

Charles said:

“The very first person to answer that was Dan Larimer on the forum posts that I created and He said: Oh, I have this thing called BitShares that I have just come up with. You might be interested. So, Dan and I, actually started talking and eventually I flew down to Virginia met with him.”

This led to the creation of a company called Invictus Innovations Inc., which was used to create BitShares. However, Charles eventually left the company as the two of them did not get along well. After this, the Founder said that he was approached by Anthony Di Lorio, asking him to create content. Anthony also asked Charles to read Vitalik’s white paper which eventually resulted in him meeting Vitalik and becoming the fifth person to join the Ethereum project.

He continued to say:

“[Anthony said] There’s this kid called Vitalik, at that time he was 19, and he’s writen this great white paper. I can’t really make heads or tails of it. Can you read it? Let me know what you think. And I said sure, Anthony. So I read the paper, was very rough but I said, there’s something here and that’s how I met Vitalik Buterin.”

This was followed by the whole team meeting up in Miami for the North American Bitcoin Conference in the month of January 2014 and this led to the birth of Ethereum. He said:

“The North American Bitcoin conference in January 2014. So Anthony rented a beach house, we all bought her own way. There we met everybody, Joseph Lubin, Gavin Wood came, a lot of the big guys now who were not so big guys back then came and that was really the birth of a Ethereum”