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In a powerful keynote delivered at Money20/20 Amsterdam, one of the world’s largest and most influential financial conferences, Charles Hoskinson shared his vision for the next generation of blockchain. “We’re getting rid of TradFi, we’re getting rid of DeFi. It’s just going to be finance,” he declared, signaling a unification of two worlds once seen as incompatible.

Charles used the stage to champion a fourth generation of blockchain, one built on privacy, identity, interoperability, and scale. His message was clear: this is not about tearing down legacy finance, but rebuilding it for a more open, programmable, and inclusive future.

He opened his  talk by reflecting how decentralized finance has come a long way. 

Tracing the evolution of the space, he described how the first generation of blockchain, with the the birth of Bitcoin, solved the long-standing problem of decentralized value transfer, likening it to “email for money.” At the time, it “seemed like a small thing,” he said, “but it’s actually a huge thing. For 30-plus years, people were trying to figure this out.” In solving that challenge, the seeds for an entirely new financial system were planted.

The second generation brought programmability with Ethereum, launching the smart contract revolution. But these early networks lacked scalability, privacy, and interoperability. That gave rise to the third generation—platforms like Cardano- which were purposefully designed to overcome these limitations, and to help serve millions of users more efficiently.

Now, the industry is entering its fourth generation. But there’s a major challenge in its path to global adoption. “We need systems that are both public and private,” Charles said. “With privacy, you also need identity. You can’t separate the two.”

He  spoke about the importance of selective disclosure in finance, where privacy isn’t about secrecy but about control. In traditional systems governed by GDPR, HIPAA, or financial KYC/AML regulations, disclosure is carefully managed. Blockchain, in contrast, has been transparent by default - a mismatch for compliance-heavy environments. “Your transaction is not just about settlement. It’s about oversight, suspicious activity reporting, and disclosure regimes,” he said. “So how’s that compatible with a system where everything is public?”

A merger of decentralized identity and programmable privacy offers a solution to this challenge. Drawing on the W3C’s self-sovereign identity standards and zero-knowledge proofs, Charles described how individuals and institutions could prove attributes- such as age, citizenship, or accredited investor status- without revealing sensitive personal information. “We can prove arbitrary properties without revealing the underlying person,” he said. “It’s private by default, and you disclose only to the people you want, with the granularity you choose.”

Charles highlighted the vast economic inefficiencies created by today’s compliance overhead- estimated at $500 billion annually- and painted a picture of a more elegant, programmable, and inclusive future. “Settlement should be compliance. When I get the money, it’s good to go. Somebody else’s problem. That’s the world we should live in.”

Looking ahead, Charles envisions a borderless, tokenized financial system where assets- whether real estate, music royalties, or microfinance loans- are interoperable and liquid, running on global rails open 24/7. “Whether it's Snoop Dogg tokenizing his royalties or Taylor Swift preselling concert revenue, the possibilities are limitless.”

He urged traditional finance to stop seeing crypto as a threat and instead see it as a way to reimagine business models and regain trust. “This is a reset, a second chance for finance to dream again. The core of crypto’s superpower is its ability to rally and coordinate people without central authority. And now, with privacy and compliance built in, we can invite the world in.”

The fourth generation of blockchain is not simply a technological upgrade. It is a philosophical and regulatory transformation, one where finance is finally rebuilt on transparency, privacy, and fairness. “This is not about putting banks out of business. It’s about liberating customers and making liquidity universal.”