Hi, this is Charles Hoskinson broadcasting live from warm, sunny Colorado. Always warm, always sunny, sometimes Colorado. Today is March 25th, 2025. We are in Midnight launch week, and Midnight is doing some amazing stuff. I want to show you what happens when you have a hungry commercial team that really wants to win. Boy, do they want to win.
This is something they tweeted out: Midnight loves Monument Bank. Monument is set to become the first UK regulated bank to tokenize retail customer deposits on a public blockchain, representing interest-bearing savings as digital tokens while remaining fully backed, redeemable in the Great Britain pound, and protected under existing regulatory frameworks built on Midnight's privacy-enhancing blockchain infrastructure. This approach ensures that transaction data remains shielded and accessible only to authorized participants, enabling the use of blockchain technology while maintaining the confidentiality and compliance required in regulated financial services.
The initial target begins with 250 million pounds in tokenized deposits and represents the first phase in a broader rollout to expand access to tokenized financial products. Over time, this includes enabling exposure to asset classes such as private equity and structured products and introducing more flexible lending models, capabilities historically reserved for institutional and private bank clients. Together, this partnership demonstrates how regulated financial institutions can bring traditional financial products on-chain, unlocking a more flexible, accessible, programmable financial system without compromising privacy or regulatory standards. Midnight and Monument—it's a monumental deal. We're really proud of it, and I'm especially proud of the Midnight Foundation team. Everybody carried water on that one. Scott, Fahmi, and all the people in the trenches, Ollie—it was a lot of work on their side.
This is not a small deal. Monument is a big bank, and it's very regulated. It operates in a highly regulated ecosystem. For them to be able to do 250 million pounds of tokenized deposits into the Midnight ecosystem is the beginning of what we call Web 2.5. You have a Web 2 business like Goldman Sachs or Morgan Stanley, and you have a Web 3 business like Uniswap or SundaeSwap. Web 2.5 is when you put these things together, and that's what Tether's done, that's what Circle's done. They all have their own chains or their own extensions, but you'll notice something: the most valuable businesses in the entire cryptocurrency space are Web 2.5. CZ is now richer than Bill Gates. Think about that. Say it again: CZ is now richer than Bill Gates because Binance is a Web 2.5 business. It's a regulated entity with 400 million customers, but they have Binance Chain and all these other things they've built out.
Tether makes as much money as Goldman Sachs, but they only have a few hundred employees. They're one of the most profitable businesses in human history, including OnlyFans. So what does that say? It says that that's a Web 2.5, and it's the same when you look at Circle or all these other things. The problem is there's no home for Web 2.5. There's no place for these things to exist because they need compliance, they need privacy, they need abstraction. They have to be able to deal with the legacy system and the blockchain system. They need a very simplified onboarding procedure where you meet customers where they're at, not where you want them to be. And then you have a compliance desk; you're a regulated entity.
Midnight was built as the open blockchain for this. There are closed systems like Arc or Canton, and they're perfectly fine and legitimate, but it's kind of a club, and you have to be invited into that club. You don't have to be invited into Midnight. It's open infrastructure. It's very much like the old smart contract days when people were trying to figure out if it was going to be Corda or Fabric and these permissioned blockchains, or if it was going to be Ethereum, Solana, or Cardano—stuff like that. The open systems want to win, so I think for Web 2.5, open systems need to win as well. This is one of the pillars of Midnight's commercialization strategy. You can't just say it; you have to do it, and you have to do it at scale—many customers, hundreds of millions of pounds worth of assets to billions, and the ability to open up into a larger and larger set of things.
This is a flagship deal, and we take it very seriously. A lot of white glove treatment goes into it, and it just shows how we think about the commercialization of an ecosystem. You don't just welcome people in; you say, "How do we make this work for everybody? How do we give white glove treatment? How do we ensure they get what they need to be successful and work well?" I'm very happy that the Midnight Foundation not only has the ability and the desire to do this, but they can demonstrate time and again what you have to do to make that happen. They're going to keep doing that.
Now, there's a very natural question: what does this mean for Cardano? Well, Cardano is a hybrid system with Midnight. Midnight relies upon Cardano for security, and Midnight, by definition, is a multi-chain play. Part of Midnight lives on Cardano, and part of Midnight lives on its own system. So, when we do deals like this, almost always there's a Cardano component to the infrastructure. It's not exclusive to Midnight. There will be some Monument working its way gradually into the Cardano ecosystem as well. So, there's a beautiful halo effect.
I'll also remind you that half of the glacier drop distribution was allocated to ADA. At the current market price, that's about a half-billion-dollar allocation to Cardano holders. So, as Midnight goes up, that can easily enter the billions to tens of billions of dollars. If you are a Cardano stake pool operator, as the incentivized testnet turns on and later on the full decentralization, that's part of your block rewards because we're selling security from Cardano to Midnight. This is what partnership looks like. We enjoy each other's successes; we learn from each other, and we both financially benefit from that. That's why it's called a partner chain. You see, it's a partnership, and that's what Cardano needs more of.
We're very happy that Midnight is leading the way. It's the vanguard, the tip of the spear. It's showing how to do commercialization; it's showing how to get real-world assets into the cryptocurrency space. There's a lot of customers, and this is a lot of value. We're just turning on the network version one right now, and every three months you'll see much more drip out. We have a lot of stuff in the back rooms we haven't brought out yet. We have a lot of relationships we're really excited about. It's going to be a wild year, and we've shown you every step of the way—from the F&O operators like Google Cloud and Telegram and MoneyGram to now Monument being one of the largest blockchain deals ever made and actually one of the most meaningful and consequential blockchain deals ever made, especially for a new chain.
We haven't even started with the Web 3 stuff yet and the app chain stuff yet. Adding privacy to Bitcoin—that's going to be fun. The same goes for XRP and all these other large ecosystems with a lot of value. We're really looking forward to bringing those things to bear. So, it's a good day. I'm very proud of the team and what they've done and contributed. This is how you get it done. Deals like this make a big difference. Congratulations to the Midnight Foundation; you guys did good. This is your day. Congratulations to everyone who worked on Midnight to get us to this launch week. It's been a long and exhausting week, but we've seen an enormous amount of progress. This will just be one checkpoint in many to come, one milestone in many to come. We have to get this technology to everyone, everywhere. Thank you very much.
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