Exclusive: Cardano founder on assassination of ‘very charismatic’ Charlie Kirk

Cardano co-founder Charles Hoskinson said the killing of conservative commentator Charlie Kirk should be a moment to lower the temperature and talk across divides. 

"The appropriate response is de-escalation," he said in an interview with TheStreet Roundtable 's  Alp Gasimov .

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"You have to bring people together and say, look, we need to have a conversation about how this doesn't happen again."

Hoskinson said Kirk was "very charismatic," "born Christian," and "had a bright political future."

"He was going to be a senator, governor, and probably run for president at some point and he would have had a fair shot of winning as he matured and grew as a person."

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'Don't use the corpse to push your agenda'

Hoskinson warned against turning the event into partisan ammunition. "Do not use the corpse of somebody to push your political agenda," he said. "It's wrong for the left to look at this as a gun control issue. And it's wrong for the right to say all political violence belongs to the left."

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He emphasized that violence "exists on the right and it exists on the left," recalling incidents involving politicians from both parties. "Every side has to give something up. And it's okay to give something up," he said.

Conspiracies, trust and an information vacuum

Hoskinson said a collapse in trust leaves audiences primed for conspiracy.

"We live in a world where we can see an event," he said, "but our trust in institutions is so lowand our faith in people is so low that everybody instantly goes conspiratorial."

He argued conflicting narratives — including around the Jan. 6 Capitol riot — deepen polarization: "It's just political theater. It's all kayfabe."

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'Politics has to stop being a business'

The solution, he said, is structural reform. "We have to change the way we elect people. We have to change the way that we vote," Hoskinson said. He called for "linear preference ordering instead of plurality so that we can get more third parties in," and for getting "all of this corporate money out of politics."

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"You can't get anything done if it costs twenty billion dollars to run an election," he said. "That's not a democracy. It's some sort of Frankenstein's monster."