Charles Hoskinson, founder of Cardano, has announced a new privacy-focused layer 1 blockchain named Midnight. The network is officially launching this week after generating its genesis block on Monday.
Hoskinson talks about the obstacles to adoption
Midnight, a blockchain backed by Hoskinson, was launched on Monday to address one of the concerns in the crypto’s core design. Cardano’s founder plans to counter it by making it private, simple, and safer to use.
The new blockchain is built by Input Output Global (IOG), a blockchain and engineering firm by Cardano, reflecting what Hoskinson claims to be lacking in the industry. His view focuses on the weak privacy features on most blockchains that prevent the technology’s full adoption.
“Crypto has spent more than a decade solving the wrong problems and failing to break into the real-world economy,” Hoskinson stated in an interview.
Midnight addressed the real concerns
Hoskinson wanted to identify what was stopping the change. “The question I’ve been asking for eight years is: why didn’t the revolution happen?”
According to him, the biggest obstacle here is the usability of the technology over the commonly portrayed concerns of regulatory frameworks or market volatility. With the current model, users work with complex wallets while working with irreversible loss and working in a transparent environment, with every transaction easily seen by all.
Hoskinson invested roughly $200 million in project Midnight, focused on making blockchain usable for institutions by making their transactions partially private instead of fully transparent.
Currently, the world’s most financial domains stay off-chain, making it difficult for businesses and institutions to keep their confidentiality. Midnight uses zero-knowledge proofs (ZK proofs) to help users get a balance between privacy and compliance. Hoskinson called this “selective disclosure.”
Rather than competing with major networks like Bitcoin or Ethereum, Hoskinson wants to make it work alongside them, to enjoy crypto as if it fits our everyday life. “You shouldn’t need to understand how crypto works to use it. You tap, authenticate, and it just works,” he added.
Can private and public coexist on the blockchain?
The fear of losing money has been a part of crypto, where consumer experience is no longer addressed. The Cardano founder wanted the users to have one choice: to be able to choose what sensitive information to keep private.
Users are given the chance to answer simple yes-or-no questions and verify them cryptographically, building a model of a hybrid ledger where both transparency and confidentiality co-exist.
“Public blockchains expose too much; private systems sacrifice verifiability,” Hoskinson said. “Midnight removes that trade-off.”
What this means for the ecosystem
The network states that it provides developers with a new programming language called Compact, so that they can ‘customize’ and develop unique privacy features without requiring deep expertise in zero-knowledge cryptography.
For businesses, they could run payroll systems on blockchain while protecting sensitive information of employees, including their salaries, and financial institutions could move funds without exposing positions. With a hybrid model, identity systems could verify users even without storing personal data, while disclosing what is necessary.
Monument Bank, a London-based institution, recently made a move by announcing its intention to tokenize up to £250 million (approximately $330 million) of its retail deposits on the Midnight public blockchain.
This marks one of the first instances where a regulated bank has placed customer funds onto a public blockchain while simultaneously preserving existing regulatory safeguards.
