Charles Hoskinson is marketing his latest project 'Midnight Protocol' as more than just a Cardano sidechain.
The founder of Cardano positions this privacy-focused platform as a shared infrastructure layer, indicating the potential to extend programmable privacy to competing blockchains, including Bitcoin and XRP Ledger.
Hoskinson expands on cross-chain privacy technology.
On December 27, Hoskinson posted on X, asserting that "Midnight's zero-knowledge proof architecture can enhance capabilities rather than replace competing ecosystems."
He stated that by integrating Midnight with the XRP Ledger, the network can achieve privacy-preserving and compliant decentralized finance, capable of competing with traditional banking systems. He also emphasized that Midnight provides programmable privacy features not currently available in Bitcoin.
Hoskinson also positioned Midnight as a catalyst for Cardano. He suggested that this protocol would contribute to improving Cardano's monthly active user count and total locked value by expanding the ecosystem's reach beyond the native chain.
"Midnight enhances everything it touches. By adding Midnight to XRP's DeFi, we can overwhelm traditional banks. Adding Midnight to Bitcoin can realize the world that Satoshi envisioned. Adding Midnight to Cardano will dramatically strengthen our DeFi ecosystem, boosting MAU, transactions, and TVL by tenfold. This is because we will be the first to scale private DeFi to the market," he stated.
Going beyond the framework of interoperability, Hoskinson referred to the market size for real asset tokenization. He stated that the estimated $10 trillion market for real assets would greatly benefit from Midnight's privacy design.
In this context, he criticized traditional financial institutions for continuing to partner with Canton Network (a permissioned blockchain), arguing that partial solutions do not meet the adoption criteria for institutional investors.
"There are no half-hearted solutions or half-hearted technologies. What we need is an end-to-end strategy, excellent partners, and a strong community," Hoskinson said.
This strategy marks a shift in direction for Hoskinson, who has traditionally focused on building Cardano's ecosystem.
By marketing Midnight as a privacy layer that enhances other layer 1 blockchains, he aims to target access to liquidity and user bases outside of Cardano.
This transition coincided with a surge in speculative interest in Midnight's native token, "NIGHT."
According to CoinGecko's data, the asset has recently outperformed Bitcoin and Ethereum on the platform's trending search list.
However, the token has been trading with high volatility since its launch earlier this month. According to BeInCrypto's data, as of the time of writing, the token price has dropped over 80% to $0.08.
