Cardano Founder Says Midnight Could Eclipse All Privacy Projects Within A Year

Cardano founder Charles Hoskinson used the opening of a Midnight workshop in Sapporo (Japan tour) on Jan. 25 to frame Midnight as Cardano’s “crown jewel” and a missing primitive for mainstream crypto adoption, arguing the privacy layer is positioned to outpace incumbent privacy-focused networks within 12 months.

In his telling, the gap sits at the intersection of privacy-enhancing technology (PET), compliance, and an emerging “abstraction” stack aimed at making crypto usable without forcing consumers to learn how blockchains work. Hoskinson argued that regulated activity like KYC/KYB/AML requires selective disclosure, but public chains force a tradeoff between compliance and privacy. “If you share information about yourself on a public network, everyone in the world, everywhere in the world, gets to see that,” he said. “That doesn’t make any sense. That doesn’t make sense to do commerce.”

He extended the same logic to intent-based execution and account abstraction-style UX, where users describe outcomes and a solver network routes liquidity and settlement across chains. “If I know your intentions, I can trade against you,” Hoskinson said, warning that revealing price bounds or execution constraints invites adverse selection. “Never tell me your intention because I can use it against you. So, intentions also require privacy.”

Hoskinson closed with his boldest projection: “Within a year, Midnight is going to eclipse anybody in the privacy space because we know how to solve these problems,” he said, attributing the edge to the depth of Cardano’s research bench.

“Because we hired 168 scientists, and they happen to have spent the last four decades of their life chasing this. One of the guys working on this wrote the first computer game online. He was at Stanford when they were building the internet, […]. He wrote Pong, and it was the first online game. That’s the legacy we have. Now, 40 years later, he’s a fellow in the Royal Society, the same society that Sir Isaac Newton was a member of. He’s working on this, as is that 22-year-old graduate student, as is the developer here in Japan, and everyone in between, and that’s why we’re going to win. It’s not a US cryptocurrency. It’s global,” Hoskison said.

At press time, ADA traded at $0.3512.