In a long duration of two hours live broadcast On December 26, Cardano founder Charles Hoskinson addressed ongoing discussions regarding partnering with Ripple, advancing Chainlink integration, and bitcoin joining the Cardano ecosystem. Speaking from Gillette, Wyoming, Hoskinson provided new details and timelines for these initiatives, emphasizing security requirements and technical collaboration between multiple blockchains.
Update on possible partnership between Cardano and Ripple
Hoskinson described the relationship with Ripple as “the early days,” highlighting the desire to incorporate Ripple's infrastructure into Cardano's upcoming privacy-focused sidechain, Midnight. “We would like to include Ripple in the Midnight ecosystem,” he said, highlighting that his team and Ripple CTO David Schwartz have had technical conversations about how both platforms could benefit each other.
“There are conversations going on between the Midnight people and the Ripple people and also a lot of technology conversations. And we've been trying to learn more about how their stack works,” Hoskinson confirmed.
He also referenced Cardano's smart contract language, Marlowe, suggesting it could be of particular interest to Ripple developers. “There is some technology that we invented, in particular Marlowe, that would be tremendously useful with the Ripple ecosystem, and it would be very fun to see what we can do there and also some things in Ripple like Flare, for example, are very good, quite interesting,” he explained. .
However, Hoskinson noted that partnership deals take time to “ferment” and added: “The first step was just technical talks and that's what we did with David (Schwartz) who has been a huge help and a huge asset. Then at some point, once you get past that, there will be actual integration work and other things to do, but overall they have been easy to work with.”
Chain link integration
Addressing Chainlink's absence on the Cardano blockchain to date, Hoskinson recalled initial discussions in 2021 in which the two teams reached an agreement to integrate Oracle services. Despite initial enthusiasm, the project never fully materialized.
“We talk about integration. They agreed to do it, and for a long time I thought they were integrated into the chain,” Hoskinson said, describing how the initiative stalled. “When I don't think there's a business or integration or technical issue, something crossed over… we'll turn around and find out what happened there.”
He reiterated Cardano's interest in oracles (crucial infrastructure that feeds real-world data into the blockchain) and mentioned alternatives like Charlie3 and Flare. At the same time, Hoskinson reaffirmed that there is no bad blood between the parties.
“I know Sergey (Nazarov), the Chainlink ecosystem has always been very friendly to us,” he continued, reiterating his plans to reopen discussions.
Uniting bitcoin with Cardano
In one of the AMA's deeper technical segments, Hoskinson outlined plans to integrate bitcoin into the Cardano ecosystem, discussions involving multiple teams exploring trustless bridging solutions.
“Any time assets move from one blockchain to another, it is a point of attack,” he said, pointing to the series of exploits that have plagued cross-chain protocols in recent years. “We have witnessed literally billions of dollars in hacks.”
Hoskinson highlighted the importance of formal methods and security testing in building a strong btc-ADA bridge, warning that “the most important bridge project” cannot be accelerated to coincide with shorter market cycles. Instead, the goal is to reveal a reliable and cryptographically rigorous design for bitcoin 2025, the industry conference scheduled for May 2025.
“We can't put our fingerprints on it until we know that cryptography works,” he said, “because if we build something and within a year there's a billion dollars worth of bitcoin and it gets hacked, that's a catastrophe.” .”
In addition to core IO (Input Output) developers, several community-driven teams have been experimenting with bridging approaches under names like bitcoin OS. Hoskinson noted that these parallel efforts are welcome in an open ecosystem, although he emphasized that his own organization's effort is focused on “belt and suspenders” security. “We're really good at understanding what's real and what's not real, and at building things that stand the test of time,” he concluded.
At press time, ADA was trading at $0.90.
Featured image created with DALL.E, chart from TradingView.com
