Cardano and Ethereum co-founder Charles Hoskinson has an estimated net worth of more than $500 million. However, Hoskinson’s actual net worth could be considerably higher or lower due to the anonymous nature of cryptocurrency investments.

Who is Charles Hoskinson?

In 2014 Hoskinson joined the Ethereum founding team but later left the project over the dispute over the Ethereum business model, and launched Cardano as its competitor in 2017. Image source: CoinDesk

Born in 1987, Charles Hoskinson is a technology entrepreneur and mathematician who co-founded Ethereum and later founded IOHK, a blockchain engineering company that develops the Cardano cryptocurrency platform.

Hoksinson had an early start in the cryptocurrency industry, having started the Bitcoin Education Project in 2013. He was attracted to Bitcoin because of its limited supply, which gave the currency the necessary quality of serving as a digital form of gold.

In late 2013 he became one of the five original founders of Ethereum but was removed from the team just a year later due to disputes about whether Ethereum should accept venture capital investments and be a for-profit (Hoskinson’s position) or continue existing as a nonprofit company (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 Proof-of-Stake (PoS) blockchain ecosystem Cardano in 2015 and launched it in 2017 with the goal of unseating Ethereum as the leading smart contract platform. Hoskinson currently serves as the CEO of IOHK, while Wood acts as the company’s Chief Strategy Officer (CSO).

What is Charles Hoskinson’s net worth in 2023?

Hoskinson’s net worth was estimated at $500–600 million by Forbes magazine in early 2018. That was the last time that one of the major news outlets reported on Honskions's net worth. Still, this gives us some insight into what his net worth could be today.

Keep in mind that we are we’ll be using quite liberal assumptions regarding Hoskinson's wealth. That is, we are going to assume that most of his wealth is tied to Cardano’s ADA tokens. That claim shouldn’t be unreasonable, as Hoskinson has on numerous occasions expressed his strong belief in the project, not to mention he is by far the most influential figure in the Cardano ecosystem, being the CEO of IOHK and Cardano’s founder.

That brings us to the following conclusion. At the time that the Forbes article came out in early February 2018, ADA’s price was roughly $0.377, and Hoskinon’s net worth was – as mentioned before – estimated at $500–600 million.

Now, five years after the fact, ADA is trading at roughly $0.360. That means that Hoskinson’s wealth, if truly invested mostly in ADA, actually didn’t move very much. In fact, ADA is currently trading just -4.5% removed from its February 7 price from 2018. In other words, if he held on to ADA coins, Hoskinson’s net worth didn’t change very much and should still be in the $500 million region in 2023.

It is worth noting that ADA’s price fluctuated quite a bit over the years, reaching an all-time high of $3.10 in 2021. Following our previous line of reasoning, the ATH price of ADA would put Hoskinson’s peak net worth at over $4.1 billion. While the digital currency has since lost a big chunk of its value, it still possesses several qualities of a good investment, especially on a longer-term time horizon.

In April 2022, Hoskinson responded to a Twitter user by the name of “CryptoFinally”, who asked the broader community about their net worth goals. “$1 trillion,” Hoskinson replied.

1 trillion

— Charles Hoskinson (@IOHK_Charles) April 21, 2022

Hoskinson is no stranger to philanthropic causes. Most prominently, he donated $20 million to Carnegie Mellon University to build the Hoskinson Center for Formal Mathematics.

Charles Hoskinson’s crypto ventures

During his decade-long crypto career, Hoskinson participated in several of the most prominent crypto projects in the industry. Here’s a brief description of each.

Ethereum 

Ethereum (ETH) is the second-largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization, controlling a $189 billion market share as of mid-February 2023. Ethereum started out as a Proof-of-Work (PoW) network but transitioned to Proof-of-Stake (PoS) during the Merge upgrade in 2022. 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 nonprofit organization.

IOHK

IOHK (later renamed to Input Output) is a blockchain engineering company that develops cryptocurrencies and related technologies. It was founded in 2015 by Hoskinson, and it’s responsible for the development of several blockchain projects – most prominently Cardano.

Cardano

Cardano is a cryptocurrency 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 overtake Ethereum as the leading smart contract platform. 

Cardano's native cryptocurrency is called ADA, which is used to pay for transactions and for participating in the platform's governance through voting. As of writing, Cardano has a market cap of $16.8 billion and sits in the 8th spot among the largest cryptos. 

Our algorithm predicts that ADA could reach $2 by early 2024, which would certainly make ADA a good investment if comes to pass. However, that is still a far cry from the $100 mark some investors hope to see.

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

The bottom line: Hoskinson’s net worth hasn’t changed much in the past couple of years

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

If you want to learn more about the net worth of other crypto personalities, check our articles on Bitcoin founder Satoshi Nakamoto, former CEO of FTX Sam Bankman-Fried, and TRON founder Justin Sun.