Hi, this is Charles Hoskinson broadcasting live from warm, sunny Colorado. Today is December 18th, 2025. We're seven days from Christmas, and we're looking forward to a new year. We're reflecting on this past year, and I made some videos recently from a position of frustration and disappointment, especially regarding the industry as a whole. A lot has happened; it's been probably the toughest year of my life. But I didn't want to make a video just to say how tough it is. I wanted to talk about the good stuff and the fact that we're leading the market for the first time in a long time, and it feels right.
The Midnight Project is a little bit of everything to everyone. We decided to do something different. Let me tell you a tale of two projects to give you some context. Back in the day, there was a project called ALEO. They had a lot of smart people and even poached a couple of our team members, like Eduardo. They did a proof of work, proof of stake privacy coin and implemented zexe, and they had a lot of fanfare—$300 million from Coinbase and A16Z. All these super smart people, all these built-in advantages. But now, the market cap is $77 million, and they have about $5.8 million in trading volume. It's not a bad project; they’re doing interesting things, but the markets are tough.
Then there's Ellie Ben Sassan, a very good friend and a smart guy. Starks are revolutionary; they've really pushed the state of the art. Their market cap is $410 million with $72 million in volume. ZKYNC, the OGs in Ethereum scalability and rollups, have a market cap of $279 million and $29 million in volume. Mina, the recursive snark project, has a market cap of $97 million with trading volumes fluctuating between $10 million and $15 million. They have Binance spot and Coinbase listings.
Now, look at Midnight: a $1 billion market cap and $1.8 billion in trading volume, and it doesn't even have Binance spot yet. When you look at all these references—Angel List, Naval Ravikant, A16Z, Vitalik Buterin, Intel Ventures—why is Midnight where it sits? Because people know it's different. You add up all those capitalizations together, and guess what? We're larger than that, and we just started as an ecosystem. We have unprecedented volume because people know a new generation is starting. We need a new paradigm, a reset, and people are tired of the way things have happened before. They want something new.
Midnight is not just a privacy coin; it will enable rational privacy and selective disclosure, but it's so much more. It's the platform for intents, hybrid applications, capacity exchange, dual tokconomics, and multi-resource consensus. Yes, there are snarks, rollups, recursion, and folding, but it's never been just about those from a scalability perspective. It's about real-world applications. People know that Midnight is one of the few projects with the potential to run trillions of dollars worth of transactions. They want to believe in it. They want to know if there's an ICO or if there's an insider who might dump on them. We just gave it away—eight different ecosystems, seven chains. All the VCs wanted in, but they got nothing. We just let the people have it and build up the ecosystem and community.
Japan hasn't even turned on yet; that's where they love me the most. We have amazing announcements coming from Hong Kong, and all the integrations are on the way—tier one stable coins, bridges, and oracles. We just announced Pith, with many more to come. The core of all this is that we're doing something different and new. I've been fortunate enough to be here for the first, second, third, and now the fourth generation of this industry. This is the last generation that will solve the cryptocurrency problem. It's going to bring retail in, unify the marketplaces, and eliminate the distinctions between DeFi and TradFi—there will just be finance. I believe that because all the pieces are there. We have the relationships, partnerships, pragmatism, and the hybridization of technology. We figured out how to put all the pieces together.
Every day, we talk about how to bring more people to the table because Midnight is not just about Midnight. It's about bringing the industry together, doing things differently, and returning to first principles. Every person who touches it gets better. People ask, "Won't this kill Cardano?" No, this is what's going to 10x the Cardano DeFi ecosystem.
Let's do a thought experiment: if Leo ships and Hydra ships, and we're better, faster, and cheaper, what reason does someone have to leave Solana or Ethereum? Because the transaction fee is 3% less? That's not going to get users to migrate. They won't leave because they can go through Midnight to Cardano and get privacy. Midnight, in my view, will be through hybrid applications. If Cardano is first to upgrade, Cardano applications utilizing Midnight will attract all kinds of new users and experiences—private prediction markets, private DEXes, private stable coins.
Maybe, just maybe, when you think about Bitcoin DeFi, all those Bitcoin people will want to trade on a private DEX instead of a public one. Perhaps that matters to them. Maybe we'll see volumes in the billions of dollars every single day. That is the market opportunity. It's not about being better, faster, or cheaper because that's commoditization. Even if you're better, faster, or cheaper, there's always a way to be better in 18 months. It's about doing new things that people have never seen before.
You don't compete with BlackBerry by building a better hardware keyboard; you compete by building multi-touch. I believe that over the next 12 months, this is the model that's going to win. Be friends with everybody, cooperate, put your heart on your sleeve, give it away, and let them do the right thing. We see $1.8 billion in trading volume today, and we're not even on Binance spot or Coinbase. Coinbase invested in ALEO and won't list us for that reason, but they’re losing $20 million annually in trading fees by not listing us.
We know what to do, and we have the people to do it. Most importantly, we have the community. Midnight is something special, and I wanted to share that there are rays of sunshine and hope. Sometimes you just know in your heart that you have the model right, and sometimes you know you have something special. I remember January 2014 at the Ethereum house with all the other guys; we knew we had something unique and different that would change the world. When I look at Midnight and the community we have, I see that same passion and enthusiasm.
What's exciting is that this makes every other cryptocurrency better. Cardano needs a few things to get back in the game, and Bitcoin DeFi will certainly help. Tier one integrations will help, and upgrades like Lace and Hydra will make us the most competitive and best platform to build on. But we will only win if we can do things differently. We get first access to this amazing new thing that's going to change everything, and that makes me happy.
You know what's going to happen? Everybody else will get jealous and want to use Midnight too because it's the ChatGPT of privacy. Just send stuff in, and stuff comes out. I'm proud of that. I'm going to take it to the whole world. I'm going to travel a lot next year. I'm going to Japan, from Hokkaido all the way down to Okinawa, talking to all our old friends there—people who bought in at $72 million and are now sitting on a $134 billion ecosystem. It's time to bring the old gang back together because we need to change the world.
We're not done. We need this for real fights. We need this for banking the unbanked. We need to create one universal cryptocurrency market. This technology needs to exist. Let's go get that done. Then we go to Korea and do that too. These markets love us. We're going to go to the rest of the industry, kicking and screaming if we have to. We're going to show them how it's done with Cardano Midnight, then Midnight Ethereum, two months later Midnight Solana, two months later Midnight Avalanche, and then Midnight Bitcoin.
Every single one of them will say, "We want that." They want homomorphic encryption, multi-party computation, zero-knowledge cryptography, private intents, and private DEXes. They need it. This is a big thing. I can pay in Solana, Ether, or Bitcoin. Predictable pricing. Why are we so good? We have the model figured out.
In the next 24 months, it's going to be so much work on our side every two to three months. That's why there's $1.8 billion worth of volume and why the market cap is where it is despite just launching. People know we're serious, and they know we have a mission. This is not just another token; this is what brings cryptocurrency back.
We're all tired. We got rugged by the president of the United States. We watched all this up and down, memecoin mania, NFT mania, and we're done. Every time we post a picture of an animal, a memecoin is created within 12 hours, and people extract value. We want to do real things. We want respect back. People in this industry want to go into Christmas and tell their families they work in crypto, and it be a good thing.
We're going to do it next year, and Midnight is the platform to get this done. Kicking and screaming if we have to, we're going to drag this whole industry with us back to respectability and credibility. The third generation is dead. Long live the third generation. The fourth generation is here—rational privacy, selective disclosure, and cooperation. We're going to bring the markets together, kicking and screaming, and we're going to bring the next two billion people in. Retail will return, and they will return to decentralization, first principles, truly resilient networks, and the freedom of association, commerce, and expression.
That's why we're worth more right now than ZK, Darkware, ALEO, and Mina combined. People know Charles Hoskinson is serious. I've been here longer than pretty much anyone else, and I'm only going to stay if it's a real industry. I'm tired of the corruption, nepotism, lies, scams, and rug pulls. I don't have to be here. I don't want to be in that world. I'm only going to be here if there's something real and meaningful.
I'm so tired of waiting for it; we're just going to build it ourselves. Looking to the future, it's going to get bigger and bigger. Thousands of people have already asked to be ambassadors for Midnight. We're going to pick our top 10 to 20, and they're going to come with me to Japan. Every step of the way, we're going to fight hard. Then they'll come with me to Hong Kong, and we'll march to a million people in our Discord.
We have about 1.5 million people who got Knight tokens, and that's why the volume is so high. We're going to march to 10 million, then to 100 million because I'm done with this nonsense. I want to be proud of this industry, proud of these people, proud of the products we build, and proud of the outcomes. I want tangible, hard, real numbers and facts to say we made a difference. Midnight can bring this to Ethereum, Solana, Bitcoin, and XRP. There's no discrimination here; we're taking everybody along for the ride.
Little by little, they're going to believe it. Little by little, we're going to get stronger and more integrated. They'll be wowed by the fact that we have the right technology, pulled all the right pieces together, and have the right team. We've been training for this day for six years and have endured so much.
That's the commitment for the next 12 months. We're going to fight like hell, push like hell, and when we end the year, it's going to be strong. We have to, or else it's not worth it. That's how it's going to be. I have an army—the Cardano army, the XRP nation, all the Bitcoiners, even the Maxis because they want privacy. We have the Ethereum people who deep down want us back.
All the grievances of the past are over. We have the pentad now, working together with people. All the egos and nonsense have to be set aside. Let's go win. Let's make this work for once. Let's do what we say we're going to do for once. Let's cash the checks we write for once. Let's let this industry do something meaningful.
Yes, there will still be scams, ups and downs, good days and bad days in the market. But I don't care anymore because we have clarity of purpose. When you have clarity, vision, discipline, and an army of people willing to wake up every day and get it done, you get it done.
We're going to wake up every day and get it done. We'll go to Japan, Hong Kong, Canada, Australia, Germany, England, Italy, Argentina, Venezuela, Chile, Brazil, and Guatemala. We're going to go all around the world, one person after another, and win them over. It's different this time because you're in charge. You bring your thing, and we make your thing better.
We make Ether better. We make Bitcoin better. I don't care what your thing is; we will bring it and make it better. We'll show them how to do it with Cardano, and then we'll show the rest of the world how to do it. That's what we must do, and we're going to be proud of this.
At the end of the day, we'll look back on December 18th, 2026, and ask, "Was it worth it? Did we win? Did we accomplish?" And we'll say, "Goddamn it, we did. We're proud of this. We made it happen." That's what we have to do as an industry so that people can say, "I work in the cryptocurrency industry," and it be a good thing.
Not, "I lost my money, and you guys are scammers." I don't care about the cynical people on cryptocurrency Reddit. Be part of the solution or part of the problem. Shut up, go home, get out of your basement, stop living off your mom, get a real job, and get a real life. I'm done with you garbage people. I don't have time for Twitter trolls.
We're locked in. Either you're part of the solution or part of the problem. You being on Reddit, telling all these pieces of garbage how bad everything is—yeah, we know the president's corrupt. We know there's geopolitical problems. We know Coffeezilla has the expose of the week on the bad person. Who cares? Do we want to change the world or not?
You're not going to do it in your mom's basement on Reddit. You're going to do it by building on Midnight. You have to write the smart contract, get people involved, and do it sustainably and stably. If it's Ether, it's Ether. I care about use, utility, and consumption. I care about getting millions of people to wake up every day and say, "I want my life back."
I do not want to live in a world where everything about me is known forever and used against me when it's inconvenient for someone in power. I don't want to live in a world where I'm told I can't love the people I love. I don't want to live in a world where my expressions are criminalized, and if I tweet the wrong things, I'm thrown in prison.
Reddit crowd, grow up. Tell me, do you have a better solution? Let's go. Put it on the table. Do you have a better solution? What do you bring? I put my money where my mouth is. I spent hundreds of millions of dollars and six years of my life. I brought the greatest scientists and engineers together. We got technology from Zcash, Aptos, Polkadot, Near, and Cardano, and we put it all together.
No matter what it is, we found a way to put this together. We want to live in a world where this works. That's why the volume is so high and why the price is high despite just launching. When they tried to dump on us, it didn't work because people on the other side said, "You know what? This guy has a point."
We don't want to look back at this period of our history and say we had a true chance to liberate ourselves from the madness of those who have controlled the human race forever, and we gave it all up for a bag of silver that turned out to be worthless. I'm not going to live in that world. I don't care if I go broke in the process.
I'm a lifer because I don't want to live in a world where this doesn't work. I don't want to look at all these markets and see the same corrupt bankers robbing us and collapsing the economy. We're sent on $338 trillion of debt globally, heading north to $500 trillion. War after war is grinding all the poor people to dust.
We live in a bifurcated economy in America. The millionaires and billionaires are doing just fine, while everybody else is staring down humanoid robots and AI taking their jobs in 10 years. Nobody cares because they've been replaced by a new class of slaves—mechanical ones. This is the world we're being offered. We're taking our privacy back, our world back, and our money back.
This is the rally cry for 2026. You can go to Reddit and cry to mama, or you can pick up a shovel and get it done. Join the Midnight Discord, midnight.network. Start building on the test net. Become an ambassador. Learn how this technology works. Let's figure out how to get our freedom of association, commerce, and expression back.
This is one man who's thoroughly done after all this time and angry with the way things are, telling you that I'm a lifer. I'm going to put it all on the line, and I don't care how it turns out because I do not want to live in a world where these people win. Whoever stands with me, stands with me. We're going to get this done.
I want $10 trillion of real-world assets in this industry by 2035. I want the majority of them on Midnight. I want the majority of private DEX transactions on Midnight. I want the majority of private prediction markets on Midnight. I want all medical records brokered and controlled by Midnight so we get our medical stuff back.
I want Midnight to be the ad chain and the control layer for all AI stuff. I'm done with all that nonsense. I want it on Midnight because I know it has principles and integrity. We're going to get it done one way or another. That is 2026, and Cardano's right behind it.
We're going to supercharge our DeFi ecosystem with all these commercially critical integrations. We're open to the entire world, and we're going to show them how it's done. Someone has to show them how that
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