{"id":27018,"date":"2025-05-15T18:01:45","date_gmt":"2025-05-15T18:01:45","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/dogewisperer.com\/?p=27018"},"modified":"2025-05-15T18:01:45","modified_gmt":"2025-05-15T18:01:45","slug":"cardano-founder-targets-cryptos-three-demons-with-midnight-network","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dogewisperer.com\/?p=27018","title":{"rendered":"Cardano Founder Targets Crypto\u2019s \u2018Three Demons\u2019 With Midnight Network"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

In an appearance at Consensus 2025, Charles Hoskinson, founder of Cardano and CEO of Input Output, outlined what he considers the three existential threats\u2014or \u201cdemons\u201d\u2014that must be vanquished for the crypto industry to achieve meaningful, global adoption: privacy, economic fragmentation, and what he called \u201cPonzonomics.\u201d<\/p>\n

His proposed answer<\/a> to these challenges is the long-gestating Midnight network, which he described as a multi-chain, privacy-centric infrastructure designed to stitch together the fractured blockchain landscape without succumbing to the incentives that have plagued previous generations of crypto projects.<\/p>\n

Cardano Fights The 3 \u2018Demons Of Crypto\u2019<\/h2>\n

\u201cThe number one demon is this concept of privacy,\u201d Hoskinson declared. He praised the industry\u2019s success in creating immutable public ledgers but warned that \u201cwe overdid it.\u201d Pointing to stablecoins like USDT and USDC, where every transaction is transparently visible, he likened the current system to a \u201cpanopticon of financial surveillance<\/a>.\u201d Hoskinson questioned whether users truly want all of their activity\u2014financial, medical, or otherwise\u2014permanently etched into public ledgers. \u201cIt\u2019s kind of obvious,\u201d he said, \u201cbut all these Tether transactions, all these Circle transactions\u2026 they\u2019re all public and trackable.\u201d<\/p>\n

To address this, Midnight was developed as a privacy layer over the past six years within Input Output and has since been spun out into its own dedicated engineering subsidiary, Shielded. A new coordinating entity, the Midnight Foundation<\/a>, is now led by Fahmy Syed. But privacy alone is not sufficient, Hoskinson argued. Any viable infrastructure must also accommodate the realities of network effects and interoperability, which led him to the second demon: the adversarial mindset that permeates much of crypto economics.<\/p>\n

Rather than attempting to supplant dominant ecosystems like Ethereum or Solana, Midnight is designed to integrate with them. \u201cIt talks to Solana, it talks to Ethereum, it talks to Avalanche, it talks to Cardano, it talks to BNB and XRP and so forth,\u201d Hoskinson said. Developers can pay transaction fees in the native currencies of their respective chains, allowing them to use Midnight\u2019s infrastructure without migrating assets or liquidity. The goal, he explained, is for blockchain developers to treat Midnight the way AI startups treat OpenAI APIs\u2014callable infrastructure, rather than a parallel ecosystem that demands ideological allegiance.<\/p>\n

This collaborative approach, which he called \u201ccooperative economics,\u201d is a direct challenge to the winner-take-all mentality of many Web3 projects. \u201cNo matter how much money Microsoft spends, they don\u2019t seem to be able to break up that Google search monopoly,\u201d he noted. Midnight, by contrast, seeks to serve as connective tissue, not a replacement organ.<\/p>\n

The third demon, in Hoskinson\u2019s view, is what he dubbed years ago \u201cPonzonomics\u201d\u2014a critique of crypto\u2019s reliance on tokenomics built to enrich insiders and early investors rather than to build sustainable infrastructure. \u201cWe didn\u2019t do a VC raise,\u201d he reminded the audience. \u201cInstead of doing an ICO or venture capital, I\u2019ll just spend my own money, build it, release it, finish, and do an airdrop.\u201d That airdrop will target users across eight major chains<\/a>, potentially reaching 37 million wallets. \u201cSo the odds are people listening to this probably already hold it once the airdrop happens.\u201d<\/p>\n

Beyond technical design and economic structure, Hoskinson emphasized that the future of any blockchain protocol hinges on community and ideology. \u201cTo 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,\u201d he said. The survival of projects like Dogecoin and Bitcoin, he argued, stems not from technical superiority but from strong, enduring communities. \u201cYou can\u2019t astroturf it,\u201d he said. \u201cYou can\u2019t just open up your checkbook and pay people a lot of money and somehow they love you. That\u2019s a transactional relationship. They\u2019ll be there until they\u2019re not.\u201d<\/p>\n

Hoskinson contrasted this with Cardano\u2019s core philosophy: enabling people to vote, govern, and allocate resources through a constitutionally anchored system. \u201cWe have an on-chain treasury, and we get to decide year by year what the roadmap<\/a>\u00a0going to be,\u201d he said. This, he claimed, has helped Cardano weather multiple bear markets while retaining a committed community.<\/p>\n

Midnight, with its emphasis on privacy, cross-chain cooperation, and anti-speculative economics, is the culmination of these ideological pillars. \u201cIt\u2019s really exciting,\u201d Hoskinson concluded. \u201cWe can now have supply chains, secure voting systems, health care record systems, financial systems\u2026 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.\u201d<\/p>\n

At press time, Cardano traded at $0.78.<\/p>\n

\"Cardano<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In an appearance at Consensus 2025, Charles Hoskinson, founder of Cardano and CEO of Input Output, outlined what he considers the three existential threats\u2014or \u201cdemons\u201d\u2014that must be vanquished for the crypto industry to achieve meaningful, global adoption: privacy, economic fragmentation, and what he called \u201cPonzonomics.\u201d His proposed answer to these challenges is the long-gestating Midnight […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"iawp_total_views":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[3,4,5],"class_list":["post-27018","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news","tag-crypto","tag-doge","tag-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dogewisperer.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27018","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dogewisperer.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dogewisperer.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dogewisperer.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dogewisperer.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=27018"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/dogewisperer.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27018\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dogewisperer.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=27018"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dogewisperer.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=27018"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dogewisperer.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=27018"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}