Hi, this is Charles Hoskinson broadcasting live from rough and rugged Wyoming. I'm getting some coffee right here and wanted to make a video real quick to talk a bit about the Midnight community and all the lovely stuff there. I've been added to the stage properly, so I hope you guys can see me.
Midnight is doing incredibly well, and in fact, we are getting very close to the official launch of Midnight. At the Midnight Summit on November 17th, we’re going to discuss the roadmap and how Midnight gets launched. Just like when we launched Cardano, there were stages for Cardano, and with Midnight, we took a long roadmap and compressed the entire launch down to a very short period of defined things. There are going to be four stages, and we’ll talk all about them at the Midnight Summit. I don’t want to spoil that, so please do wait for November 17th.
The long and short of it is that this year, the first phase will launch. A very natural question has been asked: what does it mean to be a Midnight community member? It’s somewhat related to being a Cardano member, but it’s different in that it’s its own blockchain and its own culture. It’s just like being an IGON fan or a Snack fan; there’s a connection there. As the father of Cardano, I created Cardano, and as the father of Midnight, I created Midnight. It feels like my second kid is just about to be born, and I’m really excited. I’m fired up and giddy.
There were some phenomenal things we did with Cardano, like the Cardano Ambassadors program and the Cardano effect. We built up a very strong roadmap, vision, and culture with the launch of Cardano. When we look at Midnight, we have an enormous amount of lessons learned. Just like with your second kid, you have a lot of lessons from the mistakes made with the first kid that you don’t repeat. We’d like to go back to first principles regarding how we engage and build with the community. This time around, there’s a friendly foundation and a friendly ecosystem to work with. We don’t have a lot of the pitfalls and legacy concerns, so we can be a lot better and a lot more systematic.
In particular, I want to start a Midnight Ambassador program and a really nice Midnight podcast that creates weekly content. I love the idea of calling the podcast "The Night Shift," where every week we discuss the totality of the Midnight ecosystem, what’s going on, why it’s making progress, and who’s doing what where, showcasing various things. We’re going to get that started hopefully by January.
For Midnight Ambassadors, we can innovate the original ambassador program we had with Cardano, incorporating all the lessons learned from that. We can also have anonymous ambassadors because of the selective disclosure technology of Midnight. We’ll launch that in two phases: the public ones first and then the private ones second, allowing people to have aliases for proofability as an example of the power of the system as a whole.
Zcash is up over 1,000% this year; it’s growing by leaps and bounds. The reality is that the space as a whole is waking up to the value of privacy coins. People are realizing that this entire sector and segment—this concept of having rational privacy and owning your own identity, along with the ability to protect yourself from global surveillance—is extremely important. We have to get this over the line as an industry.
I don’t feel comfortable when people track every single stablecoin transaction. I don’t feel comfortable when how much you make for a living is publicly known by everybody everywhere forever. You have a human right to privacy in these matters to live in a society. We have to be able to selectively disclose, but the foundational right of privacy should always be preserved. What we have constructed with Midnight is going to be not just the best option but, as it evolves, the only option for that because the technology is so far ahead.
There are a lot of amazing ideas that have come together, and we have to build a community unique to Midnight that not only cares about this but can intelligently discuss it and explore what you can do for infrastructure, medical records, supply chains, stablecoins, and thousands of other applications. When you really think about it, it’s not a good idea for those records to be on a blockchain forever, known and revealed to everybody in the world, immutable, timestamped, and auditable. You need the value of a blockchain—the resilience, the decentralization, the censorship resistance—but at the same time, you need privacy. That’s why Midnight exists.
If we are successful with Cardano launching Midnight, it means that Cardano launched a blockchain and a project as valuable as itself, which means that Cardano is a viable place for people to launch $10 billion projects or $20 billion projects. The entire industry will see that, they’ll know that, and they’ll start talking about Cardano as a place to replicate the Midnight miracle. I want all of you in the Cardano ecosystem and beyond, and all the new ecosystems we’ve brought in, to be part of that story.
Together, over the next 90 days, we’re going to work together to create a culture. We’re going to create great information channels, and I’m going to personally be there every step of the way. I’m incredibly excited. Every week, I’m going to at least do a space or be part of some form of AMA in the official Midnight channels. We’ll figure out all the logistics and get those dates set. I don’t care where I am in the world; I’m going to find time for that. If you want to ask me any questions or engage with me directly, I’ll be there alongside other people in the community.
Together, over the next 90 days, we’re going to figure out what it means to be a Midnight community member. We’re going to build a culture, and we’re going to talk to each other. It’s a really exciting time. Then we’re going to broadcast it not only to the cryptocurrency space but to all the new people coming into the cryptocurrency space. This is a new generation—the fourth generation—that brought selective disclosure and rational privacy, and for the first time ever, this can be done in a cooperative way.
Midnight does not care where you come from. The whole concept of a capacity exchange and cross-chain applications means you can pay in Ether, Bitcoin, Soul, or ADA. It’s a safe place for everybody—legacy and Web 3—to come together and actually get things done while adding rational privacy to what they do.
Looking towards the next three to five years in the roadmap of Midnight, we’re going to have all kinds of wonders, from incredible scalability to seamless interoperability with layer 2 solutions, quantum resistance, next-generation folding schemes, and the unification of privacy-enhancing technologies like fully homomorphic encryption and multi-party computation into one homogeneous stack. This will allow people to have a turnkey library to handle and reason about how privacy should work.
This is perhaps the most important thing ever done in the industry because it’s the last thing the industry needs to do. It’s the last mile—the last part of the bridge across the river—to let people go from TradFi to DeFi. We can’t fumble this one as an industry. We’ve been fighting generation by generation for the last 15-plus years. We learned how to be decentralized, how to do smart contracts, how to scale and be interoperable, and how to govern. Now we have to learn how to do rational privacy and selective disclosure and introduce identity into the cryptocurrency space.
Once that’s done, nation-states, companies, and individuals alike can operate in the cryptocurrency space completely on a blockchain without fear, getting a math-based guarantee that their human rights and business rights are respected, honored, and immutable—just as immutable as the transactions.
November is going to be a very exciting month. It’s one of the best birthday gifts I’ve ever received to be here and watch the birth of something new. As we close out the year and look towards the future of Midnight, I can’t wait to work with all the new Midnight ambassadors from many different ecosystems, walks of life, and geographies. I can’t wait to watch "The Night Shift" become the standard canonical source for people to talk about the ecosystem as a whole and to see all the really cool things you guys can build.
One of the joys of Ethereum was that every week, somebody came up with some new incredible idea. I remember when I was there, I saw a person connect a door lock to an Ethereum smart contract. By sending a transaction to it, you could lock or unlock the door. That was just an amazing small thing, but to me, it was such a big thing because it was the first time a blockchain could talk to a door lock. You’d think, what else could it talk to? It could talk to a vending machine, a car, or a robot. A smart contract can be an autonomous control layer for the physical world as a whole.
That was just a small thing for a small team, and Ethereum and Cardano showed tens of thousands of new things and brought them into the blockchain industry. We now look at rational privacy and selective disclosure the exact same way. There’s a whole new family of video games, supply chains, medical record systems, ad tech, agentic workflows, and all kinds of stuff that has yet to enter the cryptocurrency space because it lacks that fundamental capability.
In just the next 90 to 180 days, as things turn on and we go through the launch roadmap of Midnight, we will see these things become a reality, and we will see thousands of people throughout the world realize those dreams. That’s a magical and truly amazing thing, and it’s a great honor to be at the ground floor of that and to witness the birth of something truly new and innovative.
On behalf of everybody at Input Output Group and everyone at Shielded, and everyone who has worked tirelessly for the last six years to be part of this dream, we would like to thank you all for your support, your patience, your trust, and ultimately your belief in a better world. This was our passion. It wasn’t easy. We had to figure out the infrastructure, build a roadmap, recruit an army of people, and navigate a very serpentine environment filled with failures, scams, and issues.
The cryptocurrency space has amazing highs and incredibly brutal lows. But we do what we do and care about what we care about because, at the end of the day, the cryptocurrency space isn’t just a space. It’s a composition of people with their rights, dreams, and hopes. The unifying feature is their belief that we can do better and that tomorrow can be better. We can build a society on objective reality and objective rules, and the economic, political, and social systems of the world can be changed.
What I learned from Cardano, watching our ecosystem come together—especially with CIP 1694, the constitution, and the birth of the Cardano government—is that when you trust people and give them a chance to do great things, by and large, they do great things. They come together. Now, as we look to the future, to Midnight and the next generation—the privacy generation and the selective disclosure generation—it’s the exact same premise.
So many ambassadors will come, so many great DApps are going to be built, and so much wonderful new innovative technology will be brought to bear. It’s going to fundamentally transform the Web 3 space and ultimately the TradFi space and beyond over the next three to five years. We’re going to witness the birth of something as big or bigger than Ethereum or Cardano. That’s really special to me; it’s pretty magical.
Just like there’s still a place for Bitcoin, there’s still a place for Cardano. Cardano is not going anywhere. Bitcoin didn’t go anywhere; in fact, it’s one of the most valuable assets of all time in human history, and it has a long road ahead of it with many upgrades coming. For example, Linear Leos will be at least a 50 to 60x improvement in throughput. Cardano continues to be one of the largest experiments in human history for decentralized governance of a cryptocurrency protocol.
There are many upgrades coming to the Cardano constitution, the way people vote, the way people innovate, and the smart contract model of Cardano continues to evolve. I believe that Cardano’s destiny is invariably tied to the growth of Bitcoin. Bitcoin DeFi is going to bring billions, if not tens of billions, of dollars of value into the Cardano ecosystem.
We will finally be able to add a development layer to Bitcoin, allowing it for the first time ever to be a complete system and bridge into the third generation. Using Midnight with Cardano and Bitcoin, we effectively have a social triumvirate to rewrite the rules of society, with Bitcoin being a value layer, Cardano being a compute layer, and Midnight being the privacy layer. These three things together will allow us to create nationwide applications for hundreds of millions of people that fundamentally protect who they are.
This has been my life’s work. I started in the Bitcoin space, moved to the Cardano space, and now I’m also in the Midnight space. I always return to the beginning. We’re still in the Bitcoin space, working on Bitcoin DeFi. We’re still in the Cardano space, and now with the second kid born, we’re in the Midnight space.
It’s pretty sobering to think that we actually have a line of sight to a new world—one where you’re in charge, one where we got rid of the middleman, and one where all of us can trust each other again because we have a blockchain to help us get there. Think about how far ahead humanity could be and how good life can be if we return to a world of objective reality, truth, and trust.
Thank you all so much for your help, love, trust, and support over the past six years. I invite you all to come to the Midnight Summit in London, England, on the 17th. I hope to see as many of you as possible there. We’ll talk about the future and get everything turned on. We’ll do it together, just like we did with Cardano.
The ship is strong. The seas may be rough, the winds may be hard, and it may take some time, but the stars are right. Each and every one of you has a place and purpose in this. We will get to the promised land together. Thank you so much.
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