Someone once accused Cardano founder of using his own genesis keys to steal $619 million from the blockchain

In May 2025 an NFT artist named Masato Alexander posted a thread accusing Charles Hoskinson of rewriting the Cardano ledger during the Allegra hard fork in 2020
The claim was that Hoskinson used his genesis keys to delete original wallet balances from the 2017 ICO and move 318 million ADA worth $619 million into reserves he controlled
Alexander called it one of the largest ledger rewrites in blockchain history and compared it to the Ethereum DAO hack
The thread went viral and the Cardano community split in half overnight, with some calling for Hoskinson to step down and others defending him
Hoskinson responded the same day and said the ADA vouchers from the ICO had become unspendable after the hard fork, so they were moved into a custodial account that kept distributing them to the original buyers for 3 more years
He said 99.8% of all vouchers were redeemed by the people who bought them and the remaining 0.2% went to Intersect, a Cardano governance organization
He then sent Alexander a cease and desist letter and told him publicly "if you continue to imply that I stole funds, I will sue you"
The Cardano Foundation launched an external audit that cleared Hoskinson and IOHK of any misuse of funds and found no evidence of key misuse or financial misconduct
The genesis keys themselves were later burned before the Chang upgrade, meaning that level of access no longer exists on Cardano for anyone
A $619 million theft accusation, a community war, lawsuit threats, an audit and the whole thing turned out to be one artist misreading what happened during a hard fork