Cardano Founder Claims Midnight Will Eclipse All Privacy Projects Within One Year

Charles Hoskinson just dropped a bombshell—and the entire privacy coin sector is scrambling.

In a bold declaration, the Cardano founder stated that Midnight, Cardano's new privacy-focused sidechain, could outshine every existing privacy project in the crypto space within the next 12 months. That's a direct shot across the bow of giants like Monero and Zcash, not to mention a dozen other 'confidential' Layer-1 and Layer-2 solutions.

Why Midnight Could Be a Game-Changer

Midnight isn't just another privacy coin. It's built as a data-protection-focused blockchain that uses zero-knowledge proofs and a unique regulatory-compliant design. The pitch? Give users and developers ironclad data privacy while still allowing for necessary compliance—something that has been the Achilles' heel of purely anonymous networks. It aims to make private smart contracts and compliant DeFi not just possible, but mainstream.

Hoskinson's confidence stems from Cardano's methodical, peer-reviewed development approach finally hitting its stride. The ecosystem is moving from theory to deployment, and Midnight represents a critical piece of its real-world utility puzzle.

The Looming Privacy Wars

If Hoskinson's one-year timeline holds, we're looking at a massive consolidation in the privacy niche. Projects that have relied solely on anonymity may find themselves sidelined by a solution that promises privacy without painting a regulatory target on its back. It cuts through the traditional trade-off between secrecy and legitimacy.

For investors, it's a stark reminder: in crypto, technological elegance often beats first-mover advantage. A lot of money has been poured into privacy protocols that might become obsolete overnight—a classic case of building a better mousetrap after the mice have already taken over the house.

The race is on. Midnight's launch and adoption over the coming months will either validate a visionary prediction or become a costly footnote in crypto's relentless hype cycle. Either way, the privacy landscape is about to get a lot more interesting.

Why Cardano’s Midnight ‘Eclipses’ All Privacy Projects

Hoskinson told attendees that while crypto spent the past decade perfecting transparent ledgers, it never built a first-class “private side” that real businesses and regulators can work with. “When you have the yin and yang, well, we only built one side of the yin and yang. We only built the transparent side. We didn’t build the private side,” he said. “So the challenge is that blockchains, every single one of them, they’re missing something. They’re missing a component that’s required for real-life business.”

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.”

Midnight, he said, is designed to supply those primitives without demanding wholesale migration to a new Layer 1. Hoskinson described the network as built for “hybrid applications” across multiple ecosystems, claiming Midnight’s launch architecture connected it to “eight different ecosystems, seven different blockchains,” so users can stay on chains like Solana, Cardano, Bitcoin, or ethereum while invoking Midnight’s privacy features.

He also positioned Midnight as a catalyst for Cardano’s DeFi ambitions, acknowledging a participation gap between staking and on-chain application usage. “There’s 1.4 million people staking, but only about 50,000 people participating on a monthly basis in our DeFi ecosystem,” Hoskinson said, adding that the next phase is to upgrade a subset of leading Cardano dApps so they can tap Midnight and market privacy-native products—such as private DEXs, prediction markets, or stablecoins—to users from other ecosystems.

On rollout, Hoskinson said the first stage of Midnight launched in December and that the first mainnet is “very soon” to follow. He highlighted what he characterized as an unusually retail-heavy distribution: “We never sold a single token. We just gave it away,” he said, claiming ADA holders received more than 50% of supply and that early trading activity surpassed $9 billion in volume and more than $1 billion in value.

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.