Cardano founder Charles Hoskinson’s incredible fortune revealed: how much is he worth today?

Cardano and Ethereum co-founder Charles Hoskinson has an estimated fortune of over $500 million. However, Hoskinson’s actual fortune could be considerably higher or lower due to the anonymous nature of crypto-currency investments.

Who is Charles Hoskinson?

Born in 1987, Charles Hoskinson is a technology entrepreneur and mathematician who co-founded Ethereum and went on to found IOHK, a blockchain engineering company that develops the Cardano crypto-currency platform.

Hoksinson had an early start in the crypto-currency industry, having launched the Bitcoin Education Project in 2013. He was attracted to bitcoin because of its limited supply, which gave the currency the quality to serve as a digital form of gold.

In late 2013, he became one of the original five founders of Ethereum, but was removed from the team just a year later due to disputes over whether Ethereum should accept venture capital investment and be for-profit (Hoskinson’s position) or continue to exist as a non-profit (Vitalik Buterin’s position).

In 2014, Hoskinson and Jeremy Wood founded Input Output Global, a company dedicated to building blockchain products and services. IOHK began developing the Cardano Proof-of-Stake (PoS) blockchain ecosystem in 2015 and launched it in 2017 with the goal of dethroning Ethereum as the leading smart contract platform. Hoskinson currently serves as CEO of IOHK, while Wood serves as the company’s chief strategy officer (CSO).

How wealthy will Charles Hoskinson be in 2023?

Charles Hoskinson’s fortune was estimated at $500-600 million by Forbes magazine in early 2018. This was the last time one of the major news outlets reported on Honskions fortune. Still, it gives us a glimpse of what his wealth might be today.

Keep in mind that we are going to use fairly liberal assumptions about Charles Hoskinson’s wealth. In other words, we will assume that most of his wealth is tied up in Cardano’s ADA chips. This should not be an unreasonable assumption, as Charles Hoskinson has repeatedly expressed his strong belief in the project, not to mention that he is by far the most influential figure in the Cardano ecosystem, being the CEO of IOHK and the founder of Cardano.

This leads us to the following conclusion. At the time the Forbes article came out, in early February 2018, the price of ADA was about $0.377, and Hoskinon’s fortune was – as mentioned earlier – estimated at $500-600 million.

Today, five years after the fact, ADA is trading at about $0.360. This means that Charles Hoskinson’s fortune, if it was really invested primarily in ADA, has not moved much. In fact, ADA is currently trading at only -4.5% of its February 7, 2018 price. In other words, if he has retained ADA coins, Hoskinson’s wealth has not changed much and is still expected to be in the $500 million region in 2023.

It should be noted that the price of ADA has fluctuated widely over the years, reaching an all-time high of $3.10 in 2021. Following our previous reasoning, the ATH price of ADA would place Hoskinson’s peak wealth at over $4.1 billion. Although the digital currency has since lost much of its value, it still has many of the qualities of a good investment, especially over a long-term horizon.

In April 2022, Charles Hoskinson responded to a Twitter user named “CryptoFinally“, which asked the broader community about their wealth goals. “1 trillion dollars“, Hoskinson responded.

1 trillion

Charles Hoskinson (@IOHK_Charles) April 21, 2022

Charles Hoskinson was no stranger to philanthropic causes. He donated $20 million to Carnegie Mellon University to build the Hoskinson Center for Formal Mathematics.

Charles Hoskinson’s enterprises

During his ten-year cryptographic career, Charles Hoskinson has been involved in several of the most important cryptographic projects in the industry. Here is a brief description of each of them.

Ethereum

Ethereum (ETH) is the second largest crypto-currency by market capitalization, controlling a market share of $189 billion as of mid-February 2023. Ethereum started as a Proof-of-Work (PoW) network, but moved to Proof-of-Stake (PoS) in the Merge upgrade in 2022. Charles Hoskinson was one of the co-founders of Ethereum and left the company after a dispute over whether the platform should be run as a for-profit or non-profit organization.

IOHK

IOHK (later renamed Input Output) is a blockchain engineering company that develops crypto-currencies and related technologies. Founded in 2015 by Hoskinson, it is responsible for the development of several blockchain projects, the most prominent of which is Cardano.

Cardano

Cardano is a crypto-currency platform that was created by IOHK and launched in 2017. It uses a PoS consensus algorithm to validate transactions and create new blocks on the blockchain. The platform is designed to be more secure, sustainable, and scalable than previous blockchain networks, and it aims to surpass Ethereum as the leading smart contract platform.

Cardano’s native crypto-currency is called ADA, which is used to pay for transactions and to participate in the governance of the platform through voting. At the time of writing, Cardano has a market capitalization of $16.8 billion and ranks 8th among the largest cryptocurrencies.

Our algorithm predicts that ADA could reach $2 by early 2024, which would certainly make it a good investment if it comes true. However, that’s still a long way from the $100 mark that some investors hope to see.

In addition to Ethereum, Cardano and IOHK, Hoskinson has been involved in several other projects and activities over the years. In 2020, he spoke at the World Economic Forum in Davos, explaining how blockchain technology could bring social change.

The bottom line: Hoskinson’s fortunes haven’t changed much in the past two years.

Given the scarcity of updates regarding Hoskinson’s investments or involvement in various projects over the past five years, it is safe to assume that the Cardano founder’s wealth is primarily related to crypto ADA. In this sense, Charles Hoskinson is similar to Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin, who has invested most of his fortune in ETH.