Cardano whale slams Charles Hoskinson, calls for voting revolt
Whale, a delegated Cardano representative with substantial ADA holdings, has accused the project’s founder Charles Hoskinson and his Input Output Global (IOG) foundation of pointless expenditures worth millions of dollars.
Alongside a 2025 Summit proposal vote, Whale, who has deactivated their X account, promised to no longer support Input Output proposals going forward.
“We’re in a place where the founding entity has not delivered much for years and is requesting obscene amounts of funds to keep the same level of non-delivery going,” Whale wrote.
Whale, who controls about 6 million ADA worth of voting power, escalated the single vote of no confidence by asking delegators to entrust more ADA for automatic denials of all future IOG proposals.
Individual Cardano users can delegate their smaller stakes of ADA to delegated representatives who cast governance votes on their behalf.
Hoskinson responded to the attack, denying that Cardano was ignoring scaling — a long-standing criticism — reiterating that it was “underway.”
He also called Whale’s concerns and calls for a blanket denial of all future IOG proposals “pettiness on-chain.”
Hoskinson quickly escalated the debate, warning that Whale doesn’t speak on behalf of the Cardano community and stating that he was meeting with a defamation law firm.
Read more: The $500M question: Is Hoskinson quietly profiting off unsold ADA?
Whale blames IO with ‘obscene’ ADA spending
Another longtime ADA holder and Cardano liquidity provider, Cardano Rep, said he was updating his delegation choice in response to the debate.
Cardano Rep acknowledged that IOG might have places where it could improve, but said it was too early to withdraw support.
Others sided with Whale. Toshi, for example, said IOG made a true mistake by prioritizing governance upgrades over more fundamental scaling concerns, for instance.
Moreover, others questioned the wisdom of jumping straight to legal aspersions. One person expressed concern about Cardano media attention if news outlets published headlines about Hoskinson threatening Cardano users with legal confrontation.
Others pointed out that Craig Wright’s frequent legal threats worked against the BSV brand where Wright served as a figurehead.
Two days ago, Hoskinson also claimed that he was reviewing an audit report that he requested in response to a $500 million accounting scandal. He also says that he will read the audit aloud in a livestream as soon as it is ready.
Whale might just be flexing 6 million ADA in voting power — or might actually be right that IOG has underdelivered.
So far, Hoskinson seems convinced that IOG has made substantial progress and is happy to respond to Whale’s accusations directly on livestream.
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