Charles Hoskinson, Ethereum co-founder and Cardano creator is always on the move, traveling to Japan, Israel, Washington DC and other parts of the world. During these “very productive” trips, he met officials like the Prime Minister of Georgia and stumbled upon the great business leaders like Steve Wozniak.

In a break from such trips, recently, in an interview with Crypto Crow, Hoskinson talked about the highly anticipated Shelley update whose testnet was released on June 21. About its mainnet launch, he shared there “was a really strong possibility we were gonna launch Shelley earlier this year and we were operating under that.”

However, things turned out to be “little harder than anticipated,” given the fact that they are dealing with new products. The challenge Hoskinson says is “no one's done (this) before.”

But with the major milestone that is testnet already out, it’s now “more pedestrian work,” and could be out before 2020.

They are actually working parallelly on Shelley and Gogan while Plutus and Marlowe are evolving rapidly.

Hoskinson further shared that at the end of 2020, they will be producing “the mother of all closing reports.” A few hundred pages long report that will “explicitly” outline everything the project achieved from 2015 to 2020. It will also cover codes, innovation Cardano brought, and money spent.

Buyback & Token burn benefits only traders and speculators

Recently we reported how VeChain Foundation will buy back $25 million worth of VET tokens which is followed by Tron’s announcement of a $20 million buyback plan.

If you think Cardano is going to do the same for ADA, the answer is an explicit no.

When asked about if there is a chance of a token burn in the future, Hoskinson, in great detail explained that it's just manipulating the market. The token burn, Hoskinson says is a “vanity” which only creates short term boosts for traders and speculators.

In order to buyback, he says, they would have to steal tokens from people to burn them. Moreover, there isn’t any giant pool of capital available, no “mystical reserve of 60% tokens sitting out in the ether” that are unassigned. Hoskinson said:

“I don't have the money..it's not my fiduciary responsibility you know… the only purpose that would serve is to slightly appreciate the price on the short-term.”

He further went on how it‘s all physiological and nothing to do with the supply and demand and the underlying technology. The real value he says is driven from adoption, growth, related technology and bringing millions of users in the system.

“Even if there was then you'd have to ask yourself would you rather spend that money going to every country in Africa building relationships with their leadership and getting tens of millions of people into the protocol or appreciating the price 3% to buy back to it a million worth of tokens.”

Giving the example of Microsoft, he says the company stagnated during Ballmer when the tech giant took the route of buying back its stock. While under Nadella, they don't care about it but about product development such as Cortana Windows 10 that has the company triple in stock value.

Is Libra a threat to Ripple?

According to Hoskinson no. Because the demographics are different and XRP is not marketed as a currency and “not necessarily for retail.” While Ripple focuses on banks, Libra is focusing on consumers which will be rather terrifying to the stable coins like Tether.

However, Libra comes with an “enormous regulatory war” that would be a big fight and “fun to watch.”

When it comes to regulation, Hoskinson says SEC just care about handling your AML and KYC.

This is why cryptos like privacy coin, he says aren’t doing that well because they are going to become “underground railroad of crypto.” He doesn’t see them being any fruitful for anyone in the grand scheme of things but says that they are “a necessary evil for space.”