In his latest live streamed AMA, Cardano founder Charles Hoskinson declared that Midnight—the smart-contract side-chain he has long touted as the network’s privacy and compliance pillar—will ignite what he called “the single biggest economic event in the history of Cardano” and that the decisive launch sequence will culminate by November.
That bottleneck, he argued, is the direct result of a 2022 pivot toward fully decentralized legislation and judiciary functions without restoring any counterpart executive layer. “I’m not working for $200 an hour,” he snapped, warning that Input Output (IO) will increasingly focus on “building on Cardano” rather than subsidising core infrastructure unless incentives change.
The AMA also laid bare Hoskinson’s personal fatigue. “I’m tired—been on a ten-year death-march,” he confessed, revealing plans for a six-month sabbatical once Midnight is safely live and the 2026 budget overhaul begins. Nonetheless, he affirmed that IO will keep delivering imminent upgrades: Ouroboros Leios, Babel fees, Lace mobile, StarStream virtual machine integration, and node-diversity initiatives aimed at sharding mempools.
Although Hoskinson teased that internal testing could push certain Midnight components live earlier than November, he framed that month as the point at which the foundation, TGE and ecosystem incentives align in public view. By then, the Midnight Foundation will have announced “over a hundred” launch partners—Brave Software being the latest named—and the capacity-token dual-model will begin routing privacy-preserving transactions back to Cardano’s Layer 1.
If the rollout succeeds, Hoskinson predicts not just a surge of users and fees but a re-rating of Cardano’s strategic value in sovereign-grade finance and regulated DeFi. “Cardano plus Midnight together plus Bitcoin—we solve all those problems,” he said.
At press time, ADA traded at $0.66.
