No IQ Required: Hoskinson Dismisses Claims He Ghosted Cardano for Midnight

Charles Hoskinson, founder of Input Output Global (IOG), has officially had it with the tinfoil hat crowd convinced that Cardano has been quietly filed under "completed" in some corporate drawer somewhere.

Taking to X, the Cardano chief finally put the kibosh on whispers that his company had defected entirely to Midnight, the privacy-centric sidechain that recently stumbled into mainnet territory.

When a community ambassador asked why folks kept insisting Hoskinson and IOG had pulled a vanishing act on Cardano, Hoskinson's reply was vintage Hoskinson: critics pushed the narrative, he said, "because there is no IQ requirement to use a computer."

The speculation picked up steam after two conveniently suspicious events. Midnight's mainnet debut had Hoskinson and several IOG bigwigs hyping the project like it was the second coming of peer-to-peer digital cash. At the same time, IOG hit pause on Project Acropolis and binned the proposed tiered pricing structure, reallocating brainpower toward chain-abstraction tech and the Ouroboros Leios protocol research.

Leios still occupies a cozy spot on Cardano's 2026 roadmap, aiming to deliver some serious muscle in transaction throughput and overall network efficiency.

For the record, IOG confirmed it would return 4.1 million ADA—that's roughly $8 million for those doing crypto math in their heads—to the Cardano treasury, funds originally earmarked for Acropolis and pricing shenanigans. Engineers are still cranking out Leios updates, and Hoskinson's stance remains crystal: this whole mess boils down to folks misreading shifting priorities, not some dramatic exit from Cardano.

So there you have it. Turns out some internet detectives might need to step away from the keyboard, maybe touch some actual grass, beforeaccusing people of abandoning ship—unless, of course, that ship is metaphorically named "reading comprehension."