Cardano founder Charles Hoskinson has officially launched Midnight, describing it as the “first fourth-generation cryptocurrency” and claiming that it has already become “a billion dollar ecosystem on its way to a $10 billion ecosystem.”
On a Dec. 9 live streaming from Colorado, recorded after being forced to cancel an appearance at Abu Dhabi Finance Week due to severe food poisoning and a plane malfunction, Hoskinson framed the launch as both a technical milestone and an ideological statement on how cryptocurrencies should be built and distributed.
Cardano founder praises Midnight’s Fair Launch
Despite saying he “hadn’t eaten in two days” and was “a little faded,” the Cardano founder focused on the scale and duration of the effort behind Midnight. “We worked on it for six years,” he said, noting “a lot of false starts” and several technology changes before the team converged on “a roadmap and a technology stack that we think will be the technology stack of the future.” The Midnight rollout, he pointed out, is structured in four phases, with the project now “in the very early stages” of that plan.
According to Cardan’s founder, the next phase will significantly expand Midnight’s capabilities. In the coming months, the team plans to set up a federated mainnet and a boosted testnet, then activate “hybrid DApps with any ecosystem.”
He said that “the next nine months are going to be a lot of fun” but also “a lot of work for all of us,” pointing to features such as “true hybrid applications, true multi-source consensus, [and] real post-quantum folding schemes” that aim to “advance the state-of-the-art of all zero-knowledge stacks.” The overarching goal, he argued, is “to create a natural, easy path for people.” [to] get their privacy back.”
Privacy and chain-independent interoperability are at the core of how Hoskinson positions Midnight. He said users are “beginning to realize and wake up that their privacy is not a guarantee and cannot be taken for granted,” and criticized existing systems as “designed from the ground up to take your privacy away.”
Midnight, on the other hand, is framed as infrastructure that can be used by “any blockchain in the space.” “What makes Midnight so special is the fact that Midnight is for everyone,” he said. “It applies equally to Solana users and Avalanche users and Ethereum users and Binance users and Cardano users and Bitcoin users and everyone else in between.”
The Cardano repeatedly emphasized the distribution and launch mechanisms as a deliberate rejection of the venture model that dominates much of the industry. He emphasized that Midnight was marketed “in a completely decentralized way,” with “no ICO, no insiders, no VC participation.”
The result, he says, is that “every user enjoys the fact that it had a fair launch and a fair distribution and that every person was on an equal footing through the Glacier Drop, the Scavenger Hunt and now the Exchange distributions.”
Based on that, he argued that “in 2025 it is still possible to launch a cryptocurrency like Satoshi did” and “it is still possible to build something with vision and values where we can do better and not hand the world over to centralized actors, the old finance.”
Hoskinson warns against exceeding regulations
He also used the Midnight launch to issue a broader warning about regulation and the direction of the industry if privacy-protecting infrastructure is not defended. “Right now the laws are being written. They’re being written the wrong way,” he said. “If the regulations are written the wrong way, everything that makes cryptocurrency special will be taken away from us.”
Hoskinson rejected a future where “only custodial wallets” exist, “every person must be KYC and AML,” and “only five or ten protocols are pre-selected,” and “an armchair is controlled by a small cabal of international bankers.” Instead, he said, “I want to live in a world where the protocols preserve and protect your rights as a human being, your freedom of choice as a human being, your economic identity as a human being.”
Hoskinson described Midnight as “probably the fastest growing and most high-profile project we’ve ever built,” pointing to “hundreds of ambassadors” coming online and a rapidly filling Discord, which he framed as a rallying point for those who believe in “freedom of association, commerce and expression.”
He ended with a direct call to action: “I want you to join the Discord. I want you to be an ambassador and tell everyone that we can do better. And I want you to build on Midnight.” Wherever the network developers come from, he said, “just build something and show the world that you can do interesting and cool things,” adding that for him and his team, “we’re in it for life.”
At the time of writing, Cardano was trading at $0.4621.
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