Charles Hoskinson is touting his latest venture, Midnight Protocol, as more than just a sidechain for Cardano.
Instead, Cardano founders are positioning their privacy-focused platform as a shared infrastructure layer that can extend programmable privacy to competing blockchain networks such as Bitcoin and the XRP Ledger.
Hoskinson moves beyond Cardano with cross-chain privacy strategy
In a Dec. 27 post about X, Hoskinson argued that Midnight’s zero-knowledge proof architecture has the potential to enhance, rather than replace, competing ecosystems.
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He said that integrating Midnight with the XRP Ledger will enable compliant, private, and decentralized finance, allowing the network to challenge the traditional banking system. He extended the discussion to Bitcoin, saying Midnight offers programmable privacy features that Bitcoin currently lacks.
Hoskinson also framed Midnight as a catalyst for Cardano itself. He suggested that the protocol could help raise Cardano’s monthly active user count and total locked value by extending the ecosystem’s utility beyond its native chain.
“Midnight makes what it touches better. Adding Midnight to XRP DeFi will blow traditional banks out of the water. Adding Midnight to Bitcoin will enable the world Satoshi imagined. Adding Midnight to Cardano will significantly strengthen our DeFi ecosystem and increase our MAUs, transactions and TVL by 10x as we are the first to bring private DeFi to market at scale,” he claimed.
Beyond interoperability, Hoskinson pointed to the magnitude of the opportunity in tokenizing real-world assets. He said the estimated $10 trillion real-world asset market will greatly benefit from Midnight’s privacy-preserving design.
In that context, he criticized traditional financial companies continuing to partner with permissioned blockchains, the Canton Network, as partial solutions do not meet what is needed for institutional implementation.
“There are no half-measures or half-baked technologies. You need an end-to-end strategy, great partners, and great communities,” Hoskinson said.
This strategy marks a shift for Hoskinson, who has previously focused on building within the Cardano ecosystem.
Hoskinson aims to access liquidity and user base beyond Cardano’s existing network by promoting Midnight as a privacy layer that powers other layer 1 blockchains.
This shift coincided with increased speculative interest in Midnight’s native token, NIGHT.
According to CoinGecko data, the asset recently surpassed Bitcoin and Ethereum in search volume on the platform’s trending list.
However, the token has traded with high volatility since its launch earlier this month. At the time of writing, the token price has fallen over 80% to $0.08, according to BeInCrypto data.
