In an appearance at Consensus 2025, Charles Hoskinson, founder of Cardano and CEO of Input Output, outlined what he considers the three existential threats—or “demons”—that must be vanquished for the crypto industry to achieve meaningful, global adoption: privacy, economic fragmentation, and what he called “Ponzonomics.”
Rather than attempting to supplant dominant ecosystems like Ethereum or Solana, Midnight is designed to integrate with them. “It talks to Solana, it talks to Ethereum, it talks to Avalanche, it talks to Cardano, it talks to BNB and XRP and so forth,” Hoskinson said. Developers can pay transaction fees in the native currencies of their respective chains, allowing them to use Midnight’s infrastructure without migrating assets or liquidity. The goal, he explained, is for blockchain developers to treat Midnight the way AI startups treat OpenAI APIs—callable infrastructure, rather than a parallel ecosystem that demands ideological allegiance.
This collaborative approach, which he called “cooperative economics,” is a direct challenge to the winner-take-all mentality of many Web3 projects. “No matter how much money Microsoft spends, they don’t seem to be able to break up that Google search monopoly,” he noted. Midnight, by contrast, seeks to serve as connective tissue, not a replacement organ.
Beyond technical design and economic structure, Hoskinson emphasized that the future of any blockchain protocol hinges on community and ideology. “To be useful, you have to have good governance. To be useful, you have to be adaptable as a complex adaptive system and resilient and grow,” he said. The survival of projects like Dogecoin and Bitcoin, he argued, stems not from technical superiority but from strong, enduring communities. “You can’t astroturf it,” he said. “You can’t just open up your checkbook and pay people a lot of money and somehow they love you. That’s a transactional relationship. They’ll be there until they’re not.”
Midnight, with its emphasis on privacy, cross-chain cooperation, and anti-speculative economics, is the culmination of these ideological pillars. “It’s really exciting,” Hoskinson concluded. “We can now have supply chains, secure voting systems, health care record systems, financial systems… where you, your accountant, your CFO, your organization gets to see one set of books, but then the world sees another. But you preserve everything that makes cryptocurrency special: the auditability, the verifiability, the provability.”
At press time, Cardano traded at $0.78.
