At the Midnight Summit, Cardano founder and Input Output Global CEO Charles Hoskinson laid out a phased rollout of Midnight, a privacy and identity network that he describes as the next generation layer for cryptocurrencies. In central Dapp interviewHe positions Midnight as an extender of existing ecosystems rather than a competitor: “We’re here to make your life easier and allow you to do new things that your network doesn’t do… and you can pay with the token of that network,” pointing to interoperability with major chains like Ethereum, Solana, Bitcoin and XRP.
The Cardano Sidechain is being launched in four phases
Hoskinson’s deployment plan is a four-gate launch that aims to move from distributed to full decentralization through serial upgrades. The first gateway is liquidity and token delivery. The Cardano founder said overnight claims and initial market trading begin on December 8, 2025, the point at which midnight becomes discoverable price: “They get tokens, they can trade them on exchanges and DEXes… It creates a price signal.” […] It’s on CoinMarketCap, it’s a real thing. He linked this to Glacier drop and scavenger mine conversion paths, and estimates engagement at “over a million users,” acknowledging that wallet numbers are not clearly defined for individuals.
The second gateway is a unified mainnet targeted for the first quarter of 2026. Hoskinson described a production environment with hybrid operators — some nodes run by IOG and some by outside organizations, including a Fortune 500 participant — so that Midnight’s creator base can deploy applications with real users before eventual decentralization. Citing more than 100 partners already working on the Midnight project, the summit materials also listed the federated mainnet as the next milestone after NIGHT Liquidity.
The third gateway is an incentivized testnet for equity pool operators and validation of Midnight’s final consensus protocol. The protocol has formal proofs of liveliness and integrity and targets approximately 5,000 transactions per second with sub-second blocks, but has never been deployed on Substrate, Hoskinson said. “It would be irresponsible to just release that,” he said, arguing that both the algorithm and operator tools must be proven under incentives before the mainnet is approved.
The fourth gateway follows once the incentivized testnet is stabilized: a hard fork into the final consensus of the mainnet and a complete fullnetwork. The Cardano founder expects this phase to coincide with widespread access to the exchange and the transition from Cardano-adjacent rollout to public cross-chain privacy services: “Midnight wakes up…to midnight-Ethereum, midnight-Solana, midnight-Bitcoin.” […] Midnight-XRP“In his framework, this occurs when midnight becomes a neutral privacy layer consumed by other ecosystems rather than the product of a single community.
The midnight adoption strategy is based on double token economics. Night companions generate dustfuel consumed to account. Through “swapping capabilities,” DUST can be sold for other blockchain tokens or delegated by decentralized application creators so users can interact without purchasing cryptocurrencies first.
Hoskinson frames this as importing frictionless payment expectations from Web2 to Web3: “If you have a night […] your users […] You can use your DApp for free without needing a token […] This is something completely new in the cryptocurrency space.”
Hoskinson has also argued that AI makes privacy economically existential. Models are “moving…from your likeness and your output,” he said, enabling unpaid digital replicas and accelerating the displacement of jobs: “People are realizing this is an existential thing now.” […] I no longer have a job.
In response, Midnight’s selective disclosure package aims to let users reclaim data ownership and use zero-knowledge proofs to verify characteristics — such as humanity or eligibility — without revealing identity, countering what it described as heavy online sharing.
Governance is presented as a correction to the institutional friction in Cardano. Hoskinson said Midnight’s code management will be housed in the Linux organization and will be implemented by Midnight’s organization based on key performance indicators, with the goal of clearer accountability and faster delivery.
Hoskinson summarized the endpoint as the “cryptographic trifecta”: “Bitcoin is the layer of trust and value. […] Cardano computation layer […] Midnight privacy and identity layer. If the four gateways arrive as described — liquidity on December 8, the unified mainnet for Q1 2026, the incentivized testnet for Q2 2026, and then the final hard fork of the mainnet — the privacy thesis will move across the Midnight ecosystem from the roadmap to live infrastructure through 2026.
At press time, the Cardano token (ADA) was trading at $0.3898.
Featured image created with DALL.E, a chart from TradingView.com
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