I don't trust Charles Hoskinson even a little because he is a snake-oil salesman and a self-promoter and a little unstable and he mainly wants to engage to pimp his own brand.
But he did work on Bitshares in the early days, he does have connection to a POS researcher out of Edinburgh, he was briefly involved in Ethereum before the crowdsale (he got fired for being shady or unreliable ), and he does insert himself into these things, when he isn't speaking at every and any conference that will give him airtime.
He does not seem like a self promoter to me. Every time I've seen someone ask him to speculate on the price of say, Cardano he has declined giving the reason that he's no good at price predictions. He's a great advocate of decentralization and I think we should be supporting him.