Charles Hoskinson says Cardano’s upcoming Midnight Network could supercharge the chain’s DeFi ecosystem — not cannibalize it.
In a recent livestream, Cardano’s founder pushed back against fears that Midnight would undermine the broader Cardano ecosystem. Instead, Hoskinson argued, Midnight will “10x” DeFi activity on Cardano by bringing privacy-first users and projects into the fold. He described Midnight as the “ChatGPT of privacy,” a tooling layer that lets decentralized applications on Cardano add privacy capabilities and potentially outpace competitors on other chains.
Hoskinson also highlighted a migration angle: Midnight could entice users from Ethereum, Solana and other networks to move to Cardano to access privacy features. He stressed that ADA and Midnight’s NIGHT token are complementary — investors should not treat Midnight as a reason to sell ADA for NIGHT, he said, because the two tokens serve different roles. He further expects Midnight won’t siphon Cardano’s TVL, viewing ADA as the underlying on-chain/off-chain infrastructure provider.
Early market signals appear encouraging. DEX aggregator DEX Hunter flagged surging DeFi volumes since the NIGHT token launch, and stakeholder Rami said trading volumes are “exploding” and will likely keep rising as additional NIGHT liquidity and new trading pairs arrive. Rami also noted DEXs on the network are faster than before and new oracle systems are coming online.
Broader ecosystem advances may amplify Midnight’s impact. Cardano’s core organizations recently proposed an infrastructure budget to accelerate stablecoins, custody, analytics, bridges and pricing oracles. The Midnight Foundation’s president, Fahmi Syed, said a legal contract has been received for a stablecoin partner — fueling speculation it could be USDT or USDC — a development that would likely drive meaningful network activity if confirmed.
Hoskinson also pointed to Cardano’s technical fit for Bitcoin-flavored DeFi, arguing that shared UTXO architecture could facilitate Bitcoin DeFi growth on Cardano and further increase ADA utility. For now, Cardano still lags many chains in total value locked: DeFiLlama ranks it 31st by TVL.
Market snapshot: ADA was trading around $0.35 at the time of writing, down just over 2% in the past 24 hours, per CoinMarketCap.
Takeaway: Midnight aims to add privacy and new user flows to Cardano rather than supplant its native token or core infrastructure. If stablecoin partnerships and rising DEX activity continue, the network could see a marked DeFi acceleration — though Cardano still has work to do to climb the TVL rankings.
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