Charles Hoskinson has ignited fresh debates across the crypto industry after claiming that Cardano is now more decentralized than Bitcoin. In his recent livestream, he pointed to Cardano’s evolving infrastructure and governance model as evidence that the network has surpassed Bitcoin in decentralization metrics.
He highlighted Cardano’s decentralized governance system as phenomenal. For context, the governance system empowers ADA holders to vote on critical protocol upgrades and funding decisions. In 2025, this system enabled the community to approve a decentralized budget for the 2026 fiscal year, a landmark achievement that Hoskinson has repeatedly praised.
Leios and Midnight Power Cardano’s Expansion
Meanwhile, he also highlighted two major developments within the ecosystem that make Cardano unique, such as Leios and Midnight. Leios, a significant consensus protocol upgrade, is designed to dramatically improve scalability without weakening decentralization or security.
The upgrade targets throughput of up to 10,000 transactions per second by parallelizing transaction processing, enabling faster decentralized application (dApp) performance while preserving the network’s distributed structure. At the same time, Midnight, a privacy-focused sidechain built on Cardano, is expanding the network’s appeal to enterprises.
Midnight is designed to support compliant and private decentralized applications, offering selective disclosure features for businesses and regulated entities. The launch of Midnight’s native token, NIGHT, in December 2025 marked a key milestone, with its market capitalization surging past $1 billion shortly after listing on major exchanges, according to Hoskinson.
He stressed that the success of the token’s debut demonstrated that Cardano can launch Tier 1 projects with strong market traction and institutional relationships, including collaborations with companies such as Google. As such, he declared that Cardano is still in the game and will continue to fight, dismissing criticisms from skeptics who suggest the token is no longer in the conversation of major blockchain projects.
Recently, Hoskinson disclosed that the mainnet launch of Midnight will occur by the end of March 2026. Combined with the scalability boost from Leios, these developments strengthen Cardano’s infrastructure while maintaining decentralization at scale.
Bitcoin: The Benchmark For Decentralization
Meanwhile, Bitcoin has long been viewed as the gold standard for decentralization. As an open-source and censorship-resistant network, Bitcoin makes it virtually impossible for any single entity to freeze assets or block transactions.
The protocol was originally designed to enable individuals to conduct financial transactions without relying on banks or governments, thereby reinforcing its reputation as a truly decentralized monetary system.
However, Bitcoin is yet to fully solve the blockchain trilemma, the balance between decentralization, security, and scalability. While it remains highly secure and decentralized at the base layer, its transaction throughput limitations and reliance on secondary solutions for scaling continue to spark debate. In recent years, Bitcoin mining has increasingly consolidated into large-scale industrial operations with significant hash power.
While the network still maintains a global node infrastructure, critics argue that this consolidation risks turning Bitcoin into what some describe as “DINO” (decentralized in name only), as a small number of powerful mining entities could potentially influence protocol decisions. Another growing challenge to Bitcoin’s decentralization is regulatory pressure, as stricter policies on mining operations, energy usage, and crypto transactions may further centralize influence in certain jurisdictions.
Meanwhile, Cardano operates on a proof-of-stake model, allowing ADA holders to delegate to independent stake pools distributed globally. This structure spreads validation power across a broad base of participants and integrates formal on-chain governance into the protocol’s design.
However, while Hoskinson has claimed that Cardano is now more decentralized than Bitcoin due to its recent innovations, the wider crypto market is keenly watching how this assertion plays out in the future.
Evans Kelvin
The CoinRemark Team
