Hoskinson Says Blockchain Will Absorb AI Within 5-10 Years

Charles Hoskinson sees a pattern from his own past repeating itself with artificial intelligence.

The Cardano creator contends that blockchain will eventually subsume AI, echoing how crypto previously consumed the field of cryptography.

Hoskinson's Case for an Upcoming AI Reckoning

During an appearance on the Deeptech Insights podcast this week, Hoskinson highlighted a mathematical issue he deems unsustainable: spending on data centers continues to increase tenfold annually, while the power grid cannot keep up with that growth.

He noted that organizations such as OpenAI and Anthropic must eventually become profitable, and the high expense of pretraining new models continually shrinks the route to profitability.

Hoskinson compared this situation to his own experience. He recalled that cryptographers initially rejected any link to cryptocurrency, until the financial success of crypto allowed it to recruit top talent from that field. He anticipates AI will undergo a comparable trajectory over the next five to ten years.

“Cryptocurrencies are going to eat AI because we solve all the hard problems that AI can’t solve,” Hoskinson stated, pointing to payments, alignment, and data provenance as the particular issues blockchains can address.

His point about alignment focuses on governance. He argued that individual AI firms now define their own rules for acceptable conduct and free speech, while a blockchain-based system could set common standards for participants.

Additionally, the same infrastructure could trace content origins and automatically handle royalty payments when AI systems use others' work.

Hoskinson proposed an alternative to constructing more data centers: aggregating ordinary phones and GPUs into a decentralized training network. He likened the current AI expansion to the late-1990s fiber optic surge, during which approximately 90% of newly installed cable remained unused for close to ten years.

He contended that a comparable trend might occur with data centers, transitioning to smaller models that operate locally on hardware such as Apple's M5 Mac Studio, with cryptocurrency serving as the coordination layer.

Hoskinson's Outlook for U.S. Crypto Regulation Is Bleak

Hoskinson also forecast that the CLARITY Act will not pass Congress until 2029, attributing this to three particular errors by the Trump administration, such as linking crypto's reputation too closely to tokens bearing Trump's name.

“…There’s no pressure, political pressure to pass this type of thing. they’ll just wait until the next session and force uh a heavily unfavorable bill including ethics provisions to Trump uh on them if they want clarity. Of course, Trump won’t make those concessions. So, actually, we’ll have to wait till 2029 to get a new Clarity Act passed because of the ineptitude of uh of what the White House did. And I was very public about this…,” Hoskinson noted.

This forecast came just one day after the Senate failed to move the CLARITY Act forward on September 15, missing the 60-vote threshold.