Charles Hoskinson, a billionaire and founder of the Cardano cryptocurrency platform, has big plans to get involved in local Wyoming politics this year.
Hoskinson, who owns a ranch in Wheatland and has family in Gillette, is planning on launching the Wyoming Integrity Political Action Committee (PAC) this year.
He told Cowboy State Daily that the PAC will be built around supporting candidates who can bring more transparent bidding policies to Wyoming.
Hoskinson’s financial means and existing connections nearly guarantee he will be a major player in the 2026 election cycle.
What’s The Goal?
Hoskinson, who’s invested around $100 million of his own money into a health clinic in Gillette, said he’s at a point in his life where he’s spending most of his capital and time in Wyoming.
One of the PAC’s top priorities will be supporting transparent procurement practices by the Wyoming state government, he said. Although it may not be the most exciting topic on the surface, Hoskinson stresses that better procurement policies could bring a much more fiscally-sound government and quality of life in Wyoming without ever having to raise taxes.
“Procurement is a great bipartisan issue you can cut everybody’s teeth on,” Hoskinson said. “It’s a unifying issue because it’s not Republican versus Democrat, or this branch of the Republican Party versus this branch of the Republican Party. It’s the people of Wyoming versus all the vendors. You unify people on an image, on a message.”
Hoskinson was an early player in Wyoming’s cryptocurrency scene and played an important role in helping the state pursue developing its own stable token.
Stable tokens are a type of cryptocurrency where the goal is to hold a static value. In Wyoming’s case, a single stable token would be worth $1.
Last fall, the Wyoming Stable Token Commission announced that it had begun taking requests for proposals (RFPs) from pre-qualified vendors for the state’s stable token, which it identified as Solana, Avalanche, Sui, Stellar and Ethereum. In short, not only was Cardano not picked to be a vendor for the project, it wasn’t even allowed to bid on it.
“That is not procurement, that is a no bid contract built to benefit a small group of people,” Hoskinson said.
With advanced technologies of all kinds accelerating at a rapid pace in recent years, Hoskinson worries that Wyoming could be taken advantage of by more technologically advanced vendors in the future if it doesn’t protect itself.
In 2023, Hoskinson opened up a health clinic for anti-aging and regenerative medicine in Gillette. The $100 million investment has become a multi-specialty practice with more than 10,000 patients.
Hoskinson said he was astounded by how long it took doctors he hired for his clinic to be approved for licensure in Wyoming, another bureaucratic problem he wants his PAC to help resolve.
“I don’t think that’s a partisan issue, like a Republican or a Democrat issue,” he said. “In fact, the people who probably made that decision are dead.”
Hoskinson also wants to root out corruption and theft in government, and update many of the state’s processes to better fit modern problems and needs, including Game and Fish wildlife management and hunting tag allocations.
He’s also concerned with the multi-million dollar investments that Microsoft founder Bill Gates and Meta owner Mark Zuckerberg have made in Wyoming on recent projects like a TerraPower natrium reactor in Kemmerer and a Facebook data center in Cheyenne, as he doesn’t believe Wyoming is adequately prepared to regulate them.
“What is the state going to do to help them with that particular project outside of the politicians showing up with the hard hats on and the shovels and saying, ‘look at this, this is great, it’s going to create all these jobs?’” Hoskinson questioned, adding he believes the state needs to take a harder look at the potential negative side effects of projects like these.
Once again, he believes all these issues can be resolved with better procurement policies.
“If you build procurement in this particular way, you’re going to end up with bad outcomes,” Hoskinson said. “And that translates to the loss of 500 jobs, the loss of 1,000 jobs, loss of 2,000. How many times did that happen before it knocks the state into a depression?”
Root Of The Problem
On Friday, Hoskinson will be the featured speaker to kick off the first ever Wyoming Blockchain Stampede Speaker Series program at the University of Wyoming. He plans to discuss his own negative experience with the state’s procurement policies at the event.
“The largest Wyoming blockchain company is excluded, not even allowed to bid, by criteria that we’re going to show with the University of Wyoming, we satisfied,” Hoskinson said.
Hoskinson’s company also has a digital assets laboratory, where it works with the University of Wyoming in developing this sector.
Wyoming Stable Token Executive Director Anthony Apollo said that the vendors determined pre-qualified to bid were networks that the state’s Blockchain Selection Working Group determined to be “in-scope” for the initial deployment of Wyoming’s stable token.
Sen. Chris Rothfuss, D-Laramie, who was instrumental in developing Wyoming’s digital asset laws, told Cowboy State Daily last November the process offered a clear set of criteria established by subject matter experts to evaluate candidate blockchains for issuing the stable token.
Apollo told the Legislature last December that Cardano passed four of the five criteria to be a pre-qualified vendor but failed the freeze and seize test.
This is the seizure of a questionable cryptocurrency asset, a capability that would likely be required by the Securities and Exchange Commission during an investigation, to forestall any money laundering. Cardano argued in a November letter to the Stablecoin Commission that the Blockchain Selection Working Group had taken an extremely narrow interpretation to this requirement.
Although Cardano did have a product at the time that met this criteria, it was still in a test mode, and the agency explicitly stated that it needed all required technologies fully functional on the blockchain to be considered.
But Hoskinson said it was never communicated they needed this capability fully ready and nowhere in the state’s emergency rules does it state this capability was required to pre-qualify.
Cardano can now, however, demonstrate it has this technology, which Hoskinson plans to showcase at the Symposium on Friday.
“Just to say that this is an example of a misintegrity by process and by individual,” Hoskinson said.
Unfortunately, none of this will allow Cardano to bid on the project.
Conflicts Of Interest?
Hoskinson had already played a role as a member of a subcommission to help develop rules for the Wyoming stable token. When he noticed some early signs that conflicts of interest could arise in the future, Hoskinson said he was reassured by others that this wouldn’t be a problem.
Hoskinson believes that Apollo, who is a former employee of Consensus, a company which developed Ethereum, one of the companies selected, has been biased against other platforms from the start, adding that the director had even mentioned during one of his first meetings that the stable token should just be built on Ethereum first.
Hoskinson also said the qualifications needed to participate as a vendor were never publicly published. He pushed for all the functional and non-functional requirements to participate be published by the commission so that any cryptocurrency platform that wanted to bid for the stable token could build a prototype demonstrating whether they could support Wyoming’s requirements.
Apollo told Cowboy State Daily that “While potential vendors may be frustrated that their favored blockchain” not being selected or because their organization was not qualified, there is no flexibility to make any exceptions at this point.
“Wyoming deserves the highest caliber of delivery from the parties it engages,” he said.
Apollo also said it’s “factually inaccurate” to characterize the commission's assessment and selection of candidate blockchains based on his previous employment experience alone.
“I was one voice of ten in our working group, and I am not a voting member of the Commission who ultimately ratified the selection criteria and blockchains in-scope for initial issuance,” Apollo said.
Not one of the other companies pre-qualified were incorporated first in Wyoming, something Cardano did in 2018.
What Hoskinson also finds frustrating is that he planned to bid $1 and never intended to make any profit off the project.
He sees options for pursuing a class action lawsuit against the state for what happened but doesn’t believe doing that would be a worthwhile endeavor.
“That’s a net-loss for everybody,” he said. It’s a loss for the state, it’s a loss for me. We all have to spend a lot of money. And what’s the end result? That we get a second shake with a bunch of biased people?”
Hoskinson said he also found it no coincidence that Ripple, which has had an adversarial relationship with Ethereum, was also left out.
Ripple, a much bigger clone of Stellar, was also snubbed from the stable token bidding. Ripple, which is worth about $120 billion, owns a stable coin that earned the right to be regulated by the New York Department of Finance, a significant regulatory undertaking. The company also recently met with President Donald Trump.
Unusual Arrangement
What’s peculiar about Wyoming’s effort to develop a stable token is that they are entering a product into private industry and competing against private companies on behalf of the state. The state gave the project a budget of $5.8 million to go against companies making billions of dollars a year on hundreds of different markets with trillions of dollars of liquidity.
Because of these challenges and what happened to him, Hoskinson believes it would be best for the current project to be shuttered and defunded so that a new procurement policy can be rolled out.
He also said what happened to him raises questions about what Wyoming’s procurement process will look like for the purchase of artificial intelligence technology, synthetic biology, humanoid robots and drones.
“You need an open procurement process, which is built to prevent large actors from coming in and co-opting the state and robbing the taxpayers in the state of Wyoming and taking their money and putting it in California or New York,” he said.
Leo Wolfson can be reached at leo@cowboystatedaily.com.
