Cardano Founder Charles Hoskinson Hails ShieldUSD Milestone as Midnight’s Privacy Tech Takes Center Stage
Cardano founder Charles Hoskinson issued a major endorsement of the network's privacy-focused ambitions today, March 17, 2026, declaring the ShieldUSD stablecoin milestone on the Midnight sidechain a critical breakthrough. His public praise spotlights the growing utility of Midnight's zero-knowledge proof platform as it targets production-grade financial applications, signaling a pivotal step for Cardano's push into confidential DeFi.
Why The Cardano Founder Is Bullish On ShieldUSD
The immediate trigger was an update from CTO at W3i Andrew Westberg, who said, “A minimum-viable shieldUSD contract has been deployed to the Midnight preview environment,” and added: “Right now, the constraints on contract size are limiting what we can do and requires a lot of consolidation transactions. We’re working closely with Midnight Foundation. We are able to successfully perform private transfers with selective disclosure for regulatory auditors.”
For Midnight, that is not some secondary feature. The network’s own documentation describes selective disclosure as a core design principle, allowing builders to prove validity or compliance without exposing the full underlying data on-chain. In practice, the idea is straightforward: transactions, balances, or identities can remain confidential to the public, while authorized parties can be shown only the information they are entitled to see. Midnight has framed that balance as essential for real-world financial use cases rather than purely crypto-native privacy experiments.
The stablecoin effort itself has been taking shape in public for months. In January, W3i Software announced shieldUSD, a privacy-preserving USD stablecoin for the Midnight Network, saying it would be co-issued by Moneta Digital and Norwegian Block Exchange. According to that announcement, shieldUSD is being built for financial workflows where confidentiality matters, including payroll, B2B settlement and institutional DeFi, while still supporting “compliance, auditability, and selective disclosure.” Midnight repeated that positioning in its January network update, presenting shieldUSD as one of the ecosystem projects intended to bring privacy-preserving finance into practical use.
That also helps explain why Hoskinson’s latest comment echoes his earlier rhetoric around Moneta’s USDM. Back in July 2025, he wrote that “Moneta’s USDM is becoming the most advanced stablecoin ever built.” Moneta describes USDM as a Cardano-native, fiat-backed stablecoin backed 1:1 by US dollar reserves, with Moneta Digital acting as issuer and redeemer. The latest Midnight work appears to extend that broader push from a regulated Cardano dollar into a privacy-preserving environment designed for more sensitive transaction flows.
Still, Westberg’s post made clear that the project is not presenting a finished product. The contract is only in Midnight’s Preview environment, which the network documents position as a development stage for builders migrating applications and testing new tooling rather than a live production venue. Midnight’s January roadmap update said the network is moving through its Hilo phase toward Kūkolu, the stage meant to introduce the first wave of production applications on a federated mainnet. In that context, the ShieldUSD deployment looks less like a launch and more like an early proof that Midnight’s compliance-friendly privacy model can be made concrete.
At press time, Cardano traded at $0.287.
