Charles at the United Nations

Charles Hoskinson spoke at the United Nations headquarters in New York on Friday, at the Future of Money, Governance & the Law summit, hosted by the Government Blockchain Association and the UN’s own staff pension fund.

His argument was about pace. The internet, AI, synthetic biology, nanotechnology and blockchain are all advancing exponentially and at the same time, while law, regulation and governance are not keeping up. His answer is to turn regulation into code: governments set out the problems they want solved and the values they want protected, and the technology sector and open-source communities build the systems that do it. Regulation of that kind, on his account, could be global, automatic and cheaper to run.

He also argued that a blockchain is for more than moving money. One of its core propositions is creating trust. Privacy and digital identity are part of that, and he pointed to Midnight as an example of blockchain, privacy and identity coming together. The standard he set was “can’t be evil” in place of “don’t be evil”: systems built so that abuse is much harder or impossible, rather than ones that rely on people behaving well.

He was blunt about centralised digital money and identity: control both, he said, and you control humanity.

The full speech runs to a little over half an hour.

Here's my speech at the UN

— Charles Hoskinson (@IOHK_Charles) October 2, 2026