Cardano Creator Charles Hoskinson Outlines Plan to Create Financial Operating System Through Crypto Asset ADA

Charles Hoskinson, the founder of Cardano, says the decentralized cryptocurrency project’s end goal is to provide a secure framework that offers people full-fledged economic identities.

In a new interview with Slot Leader, Hoskinson refers to Cardano (ADA) as a “financial operating system” that can adopt new services and scale seamlessly to account for any influx of new users.

“The general idea is that the system should be an end-to-end stack for economic identity. So what that means is that if some person in Senegal, or some person in Rwanda, or wherever, enters the system, they should be able to have some place to place their data and their identity, to build a reputation. They should have some way of getting credit. They should have some way of interfacing with a currency that’s reasonably stable, that they can send to anybody in the world. They should have the ability to interface with exchanges. If they have a business, they should have the ability to securitize that business, so they have banking services, insurance services, credit services, remittance services.”

Earlier this month, IOHK, the technology company behind Cardano, announced the formation of a public $250,000 fund to encourage developers to build decentralized applications (DApps) for the Cardano blockchain. The fund is in service of the Cardano blockchain’s upcoming “Voltaire” phase, which will introduce voting and treasury systems. Those systems will allow the Cardano community to decide on software updates, project funding and technical improvements.

The Voltaire phase will also add another element to Cardano’s vision of a complete economic identity, Hoskinson explains.

“This is kind of the vision of it, is that it’s a one-stop shop, and then once you’re in it, you don’t have to leave it, and it’ll do more and more and more of your financial life and your economic life, and it gives you identity, identity that a government can’t take from you. Identity that’s not revocable. Identity that you can’t lose.”

Hoskinson, who serves as the chief executive of IOHK, also provides a rundown of future areas for the project.

“We’re looking at things like supply-chain systems, so we can track and trace agricultural goods. We’re looking at voting systems.  We’re looking at credential management systems. [In] the country of Georgia, we have a deal we’ve done where 50,000 students a year will be onboarded into PRISM, which is a component of Cardano’s stack, so you can authenticate if they have college degrees or not. We’re also looking at financial applications as well. There are a whole bunch of DeFi things that are going to come, like stablecoins, oracles and DEXs – the usual suspects that we see from the Ethereum space.”

Featured Image: Shutterstock/Pasuwan