Hoskinson Presses Cardano Foundation on Who Owns 850,000 Veridian Shares

Gregaard’s Scorecard Meets Hoskinson’s Reply

The hole in this weekend’s Cardano ecosystem story is a list: nobody has said who owns the 850,000 Veridian shares the Cardano (ADA) Foundation tokenized before spinning the identity firm out as a for-profit company in October. Cardano Foundation CEO Frederik Gregaard and Cardano founder Charles Hoskinson traded public posts on X on Sunday, and the dispute reached holders while the Cardano (ADA) price sat just after a slide below $0.15, a level the token had not touched since June.

Gregaard’s post describes a network more capable than ever. It cites a multi-client node era, futures on ADA traded through the Chicago Mercantile Exchange (CME) since February 9, and CIP-0113, a token standard that embeds transfer rules directly into native assets. It closes on an appeal: “We should spend less time debating Cardano’s history and more energy making history,” Gregaard wrote on X.

@F_Gregaard · X post

Gregaard wrote on X.

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Hoskinson’s reply skipped the scorecard. It opened with the Midnight Network (NIGHT), the privacy-focused partner chain built by his firm Input Output Global, which he called the largest project on Cardano (ADA) and one the post never mentioned. “The largest project on Cardano is Midnight and it's not mentioned,” he replied on X. He defined accountability as a board drawn from the community holding a community organization spending community money to account. Then he tied the demand to Veridian: “Especially when the CF builds Veridian and then spins it out as a for-profit entity. I wonder who owns the shares?” The Foundation says the shares are tokenized as ledger-based securities under Swiss law; it has not named the holders. Cardano, a proof-of-stake network, has not publicly answered the ownership question. Hoskinson, who previously said the Cardano roadmap is complete with the token down 94% from its peak and denied promising ADA gains, framed his question as one of governance, not valuation. The two posts landed the same day, and neither closed what the other raised.

@IOHK_Charles · X post

He replied on X.

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On-Chain Numbers Under $0.15

The market backdrop sharpens the exchange. Cardano (ADA) briefly fell below $0.15 on Sunday, the first break of that level since June, roughly four months after the CME futures began trading, and live monitoring shows the token moving about 7.3% over the past day. The levels in our Cardano technical analysis now sit under the market. On-chain data puts Cardano’s decentralized finance deposits at $50.74 million as of November 11, with daily decentralized exchange volume at $1.65 million, figures that sit far below the adoption narrative both executives trade in. Gregaard’s post calls such metrics important but incomplete, pointing instead to work with Petrobras and UCLA, written from a schedule he described as stretched between London, the United States and Lisbon. The same post pitches Cardano to regulated issuers of tokenized stocks, a market in which clear ownership records sit at the center of the product.

That is where the Veridian question lands hardest. Tokenizing shares as ledger-based securities under Swiss law means ownership is recorded on a ledger, which is exactly the property a tokenized-stock issuer would market. The Foundation spun Veridian out in October and tokenized 850,000 of its shares under that same framework, yet neither the Foundation’s post nor Hoskinson’s reply names a single Veridian shareholder. A published list would test whether the Foundation’s record matches the standard it advertises.

The Undisclosed Veridian Shareholder List

The exchange matters less for what each post claims than for what neither discloses. Both men treat transparency as the standard: Gregaard by publishing a scorecard, Hoskinson by demanding a community board over community money. Yet the one record the disagreement turns on, the Veridian shareholder register, stays unnamed in both posts. The Foundation’s pitch to tokenized-stock issuers raises the cost of that gap, because a ledger marketed for clean ownership records is being asked whose names sit on its own. The disclosed list of Veridian shareholders is the one item that would close it, and as of Sunday neither post had supplied it.