Charles Hoskinson says Cardano is getting into a brand new part centered on what he described as a “ChatGPT for privateness,” positioning the Midnight challenge as a cross-ecosystem utility layer designed to make superior cryptography usable at scale.
Cardano Is Coming into A New Section
Talking in a Dec. 18 livestream titled “Rays of Sunshine in 2026,” the Cardano founder argued that Midnight marks a shift away from incremental efficiency battles towards privacy-first, hybrid functions that may plug into Ethereum, Solana, Bitcoin, and past.
“I wished to make a video to speak about the great things and discuss the truth that we’re main the marketplace for the primary time in a very long time,” Hoskinson mentioned. “And it feels proper. This time actually does.”
The guts of the pitch was that Midnight’s early traction is not only a hype spike, however an indication the market is uninterested in the same old crypto incentive loop and in search of a brand new “paradigm.” “Individuals deep down inside, they know {that a} new era is beginning,” he mentioned. “We want a brand new paradigm and now we have to have a reset and now we have to launch issues and do issues in another way. And so they’re simply uninterested in the way in which issues have occurred earlier than. They’re uninterested in it.”
Hoskinson hung out distinguishing Midnight from the class it can inevitably be filed underneath. “Whenever you checked out Midnight, Midnight is just not a privateness coin,” he mentioned. “Midnight is what’s going to allow rational privateness and selective disclosure, but it surely’s a lot extra. It’s the platform for intents. It’s the platform for hybrid functions. It’s the platform for capability trade, for twin tokenomics. It’s the platform for multi-resource consensus.”
He acknowledged the underlying toolkit—“snarks,” “roll-ups,” “recursion and folding”—however argued these buzzwords miss the purpose. “It’s by no means been about roll-ups, recursion, folding, snarks from a scalability perspective,” he mentioned. “It’s about actual world functions.” The declare, in his telling, is that Midnight is likely one of the few tasks positioned to deal with “trillions of {dollars} value of transactions,” exactly as a result of it targets functions the place selective disclosure and privateness are options, not trade-offs.
To make the case that Midnight is already outperforming comparable narratives, Hoskinson cited market-cap and quantity figures for different ZK and privacy-adjacent tasks and contrasted them with Midnight’s reported exercise. He cited Starkware at $410 million market cap with $72 million quantity, zkSync at $279 million market cap with $29 million quantity, and Mina at $97 million market cap—earlier than highlighting his personal challenge: “Midnight, $1 billion market cap, $1.8 billion buying and selling. It doesn’t even have Binance Spot but.”
A serious cause he believes the market has leaned in, Hoskinson argued, is launch construction—particularly, avoiding the usual concern that insiders will overwhelm liquidity. “And so they mentioned, nicely, can I consider in it? Is there an ICO? Is there an insider? Who the f*** goes to dump on me?” he mentioned. “They only gave it away. Eight totally different ecosystems, seven chains. All of the VCs wished in, they obtained nothing. They didn’t get in. We gave it to the folks.”
He later tied distribution on to noticed buying and selling depth. “We’ve got about 1.5 million folks that obtained evening tokens,” he mentioned. “That’s why the quantity is so f***ing excessive.”
Midnight Is The ‘ChatGPT For Privateness’
For Cardano itself, Hoskinson’s most pointed strategic declare was that “higher, sooner, cheaper” is just not a sturdy wedge—even when upcoming upgrades land. “Let’s say Leios ships and Hydra ships and we’re higher, sooner, and cheaper. Nice,” he mentioned. “What cause does somebody have to depart Solana? And what cause does somebody have to depart Ethereum? As a result of the transaction price is 3% much less. Okay.”
As a substitute, he argued Cardano can win by being first to construct hybrid functions that route by way of Midnight and unlock privacy-first monetary primitives. “They might undergo midnight to Cardano and so they get privateness,” he mentioned. “They do one thing new and totally different […] personal prediction markets, personal DEXs, personal stablecoins.”
He prolonged that considering to Bitcoin-adjacent flows: “Perhaps simply perhaps all these Bitcoin individuals are going to need to commerce on a non-public DEX as a substitute of a public DEX,” he mentioned. “And perhaps we’ll have volumes within the billions of {dollars} of turnaround each single day.”
Hoskinson repeatedly returned to a simplifying metaphor: Midnight as an abstraction layer that makes heavy cryptography usable. “Everyone else will get jealous. In order that they’ll go use Midnight too as a result of it’s the ChatGPT of privateness,” he mentioned. “Simply ship stuff and stuff comes out.” He later described a product-like cadence of enchancment: “You mainly simply have this API. You ship one thing in, you get one thing again. And each six months it will get higher.”
He additionally framed 2026 as an execution 12 months, sketching an outward-facing enlargement plan the place Midnight is built-in throughout main ecosystems in tight succession: “We’re going to do Cardano Midnight. Present them the way it’s achieved. Then we’re gonna do Midnight Ethereum. Two months later, three months later, Midnight Solana… Midnight Avalanche… Midnight Bitcoin.”
The broader ambition, he mentioned, is to maneuver crypto previous siloed tribal finance towards one interoperable market. “That is the final era,” Hoskinson mentioned. “It’s gonna unify the marketplaces and it’s gonna do away with DeFi and TradFi. And there’s simply going to be Fi.”
At press time, Cardano traded at $0.36.
Featured picture created with DALL.E, chart from TradingView.com
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