The public feud between Charles Hoskinson and non-fungible-token artist Masato Alexander, who claimed that the Cardano founder secretly redirected 318 million ADA—worth approximately $619 million at the time—from legacy presale wallets into Cardano’s reserves during the 2021 Allegra hard fork, is escalating. The Cardano founder has responded with a series of messages on X, recasting the incident as a premeditated publicity stunt for an Ethereum-based enterprise.
“So the slander was simply to increase his awareness in order to raise funds for an Ethereum project??? “You can’t make this shit up,” Hoskinson responded late Wednesday via X, adding a screenshot of a private discussion in which Alexander stated he was “trying to lock in some funding for Akua and get some runway.”
The screenshot prompted an immediate rebuttal from Alexander—”Do you really want to be sharing DMs, Charles?” “Put these on the pile”—and opened a gateway to a second, previously undisclosed exchange. In that conversation, Phil Harman, CEO of Anastasia Labs and a long-time Cardano developer, asked Alexander if a Cardano version of Akua was possible. Harman expressed dissatisfaction with the public release of his direct messages offering constructive feedback on his dApp. It’s embarrassing to share this as a gotcha.
Akua, the project Alexander is seeking funding for, is characterized in a white paper dated February 28, 2025, as “a novel approach to prediction markets focused on natural-disaster risk management,” beginning with earthquakes and expanding to other occurrences. Cardano community engineer Lucas (@rvcas) suggested that Alexander’s charges were a marketing gimmick, citing the protocol architecture’s EVM compatibility. “Monad is trying to drop an ETH dapp and this is his way of getting attention from that crowd…” He is monetarily motivated and most likely has no genuine interest in maintaining integrity.”
Hoskinson agreed, calling the incident a smear campaign aimed at courting Ethereum investors. He has also threatened legal action and ordered an independent audit of the disputed treasury transactions, which he claims will reveal that more than 99.8% of the original vouchers were redeemed and that the remaining balance—roughly 18-24 million ADA—was eventually donated to Intersect, the new member-based governance body.
What Happened to the Cardano Token Vouchers?
In a lengthy X post on Wednesday, Hoskinson reviewed the mechanics of the 2021 voucher sweep, claiming that Japanese retail buyers, many of whom were old, had struggled with the previous redemption process. “There was a commercial liability in completing the redemption…” If the buyer couldn’t rationally employ that approach, there was a moral need to change the redemption mechanism,” he said, adding that two of the three genesis key holders were required to sign the hard-fork upgrade that eliminated the unredeemed addresses.
People in Japan are, on average, older than in America or other comparable jurisdictions (here’s a video explaining the issue in South Korea, but the math is the same in Japan https://t.co/P3uoilxcGz). By the time the sweep was done, over 9500 of the buyers of the 9,900+… https://t.co/QZmeDMo0eS
— Charles Hoskinson (@IOHK_Charles) May 21, 2025
Hoskinson contends that no ADA was “stolen,” describing the narrative as “absurd, goal-post-moving doublespeak” and decrying media headlines that said differently. Alexander, on the other hand, compares the voucher sweep to a unilateral rewrite of history that deprived early investors of their coins, claiming that only roughly $7 million of the swept monies have returned to Intersect.
