Midnight

Hi, this is Charles Hoskinson broadcasting live from warm, sunny Colorado. Today is April 14th, 2026. It's hard to believe it's already 2026, and it's hard to believe how long we've been doing this. It's pretty surreal when you think about it. I wanted to make a video to talk a little bit about the next 90 days, 180 days, and Midnight.

As many of Midnight is probably the most exciting project that we're working on this year. There's a lot of cool stuff happening on Cardano, and obviously, we have RealFi coming, so it's hard to pick which one of your kids you love the most. But there's some cool stuff going on. What's really nifty is that Midnight launched, and we're on schedule. The token launched in December, and we've achieved near ubiquitous liquidity.

There are still some jurisdictions, like Korea and Japan, to come online, and that's going to be a lot of fun. Some legacy exchanges like Coinbase will likely come online sooner than people expect, but we have Binance Spot, Kraken, and many others. Midnight has the capacity to trade up to nine billion dollars per day, as we saw at the all-time high in liquidity. There are no longer liquidity issues, which is extraordinary for a brand new token. Usually, it takes about two to three years for a token to go through all these trials and tribulations, but Midnight lives in fast mode.

The other part of its launch is the mainnet. The federated guarded mainnet launched as planned at the end of March. We have a whole bunch of things to do, and everybody's working overtime right now to get through that backlog. In parallel, a ton of community efforts have been launched. We have the Night Force, which is the ambassador program for Midnight.

Every week, I do a two-hour whiteboard session with them, and we're growing that base. My goal is to get to about a thousand people in the Night Force, which would exceed where we were with Cardano when we started. We're building a nice retail army of ambassadors to represent us. We also have the Builders Club. I was just in it, and every few weeks, we have cohorts of projects come through from people building on Midnight.

It's geographically very diverse and industry-diverse, covering everything from healthcare to real estate to NFT marketplaces and traditional Web 3. We're really happy about that. We have four major R&D projects going on for the next major iteration of the Midnight roadmap. Namely, we're looking at the Midnight DeFi kernel, the Midnight Passport program, Midnight with Minotaur and its future consensus side, and Night Stream. All of them are making meaningful and significant progress, and we'll have a lot to show and tell at Consensus.

We're excited to see Input Output's Arc division heavily utilized in all of this. Overall, the project's on schedule. It's hitting the milestones and KPIs that I expected. It's going to be a wild year. There will be huge volatility in the underlying asset.

It's clear that certain actors in the market seem to be trying to depress the price, as you can see with the perpetual markets and how selling patterns work. Maybe competitors may not be, but it hasn't meaningfully impacted or affected the roadmap or the project's rollout. These are ephemeral things; you can push a spring down and push a spring down, but at some point, the spring bounces back up. In this case, it's probably a stab in the eye. Midnight's here to stay, and it's a tremendous project.

I've never encountered so much enthusiasm and excitement, as well as progress, in such a short period of time. When you talk to the Midnight ambassadors, the Night Force, or just rank-and-file Midnight people, they get it. We need simplicity, we need rules, and we need privacy. It truly is a new generation. I haven't seen energy like this since the early Ethereum days, to be frank.

The rate at which this project has grown has been truly remarkable. From our part, myself included, we're working hard. For example, I have the book I just published, "Proving Nothing," and it's already in version 1.1. We're already talking about what version 1.

2 needs to look and how 1.3 needs to look, as well as the documentation of Midnight, among many other things. The pedagogy is evolving very rapidly, and we're taking a leadership position as an ecosystem in teaching people about how privacy works under the hood and the combinations of privacy-enhancing systems, such as zk systems with MPC systems and trusted execution environments, among many other things. We have a lot of North Stars. For example, I want the ability to create an account within 60 seconds and have it actually be useful, work on your phone, and never have to manage 24 keywords or cryptographic material.

I want it to work with OneDrive, Google Drive, and all these other wonderful services that billions of people use. We have a lot of strategic partners, and where it makes sense to bring them in, we will. They can take the experience to the next level. Overall, everybody's firing on all cylinders, and I love the aggressiveness of the Midnight Foundation. They're hungry; they want to win.

I love the aggressiveness of the developers. They're hungry; they want to win. There's been a lot of acknowledgment about trying new things. Probably the shining jewel of all of this is the rate of progress of Midnight City, where we've been able to completely rebuild it multiple times throughout the last few months. It's yielded amazing outcomes, and we're right at the dawn of you being able to get your own agents.

We actually have a beautiful two-week sprint structure. We talk about appearances, professions, and interactions, both in the agent-agent environment and how to build a compelling and interesting world. Midnight City is our attempt to actually build a front page for a cryptocurrency protocol. It's made doubly hard by the fact that cryptocurrencies are hard to visualize, and a privacy coin is especially hard to visualize because the intent is to make it unvisualizable. This is basically the "boiling the ocean" project, where an agentic civilization is used to be the front page for Midnight.

What's really cool is it's very participatory. We have a lot of great partners that want to come on board and build things in Midnight City, and very soon they're going to be able to. It's going to be a lot of fun to watch that roll out, as well as for people to get their own agents and see what happens with them. What makes them so cool is they're unpredictable. We actually don't know, as the creators of the game, what your agents are going to do, where they're going to go, or how they're going to work.

One of the cool things about Midnight City is that all the subscriptions will be in Night. There will be onboarding and offboarding options, so you can pay with credit cards and other methods, but it converts into Night and buys Night. Every person who subscribes to Midnight City is actually creating demand for the network. We're going to try to do this in the Midnight DeFi kernel as well, very much inspired by Hyper Liquid. You have to create circular economies and consumptive demand for the token, which will be donated to the treasury in the case of the DeFi kernel.

Our goal is to experiment with these loops, and Midnight City is our first foray, but by no means is it the only one. If we keep building this, we can create not only a sustainable economy but also a sustainable economy where there's an incentive for the users of that economy to promote demand in the system. People forget that with the dual tech tokenomics at Midnight, which are truly revolutionary, the dust component is only valuable if people use the system. The more demand there is, the more valuable it becomes, and you also get many different tokens from it because people will be trading it on the capacity exchange. That capacity exchange accepts Bitcoin, Ether, Solana, Avalanche, and BNB.

What we found is a tokenomics of cooperation instead of a tokenomics of an adversarial nature. Midnight does not benefit by being at war with or hating any chain; Midnight benefits only by working with others, getting business with others, and providing value to others. Everything a holder of Night wants to do is be friends with everybody in the space and be a layer two to everyone effectively. That's different, and hopefully, we can turn the page on the maximalism and meme coin culture that we've seen. If you look at channels, there are kind of two groups of people: those who want to do things differently, who are hungry for a new generation, and who want to live in a world where people get along and work with each other to figure out a way to get to the next stage.

Then there's another group of people filled with fear and anger who have vastly unrealistic expectations about how wealth is created. If something doesn't instantly go up 10x, they say it must be a scam, and it's wrong and bad. What they're really saying is they're scared. They're frustrated because they believed, perhaps rightly or wrongly, but I would argue wrongly, that crypto was going to be this savior that would show up and rescue them from bad lives, rent that's due, jobs that don't pay enough, or child support payments they can't make. When that didn't happen, they got angry at it.

Whether you're angry at crypto or whether you love crypto, it doesn't change the reality of crypto. Crypto's here to build a better world for us all, redefine the notion of money, build systems that allow us to trust each other again, create honest businesses, and with Midnight, give us the selective disclosure we so need so that we can stop living in a panopticonic spy state where every single thing you do and think from cradle to grave is judged, recorded, and used against you at the worst possible time. I'd like to live in a world where we can trust each other again, where our identity is self-sovereign, and where we all are our own banks. We no longer trust third-party services to have complete control over our life, our identity, and our reputation from cradle to grave. You need this technology to make that happen.

What's the value of it? What should the token price be? Well, what's the value of freedom? What's the value of liberty? These aren't platitudes; these are realities.

Having spent a decade and a half of my life in this space, having endured so many ups and downs, and having endured so much criticism, I recognize I'm no longer the young guy I was when I started. What keeps me in the space is my undying belief that we can actually make a difference. The core meta-narrative that exists over this industry is cynicism versus optimism. You often hear me say this, and I say it again here: if you are a cynical person, you have surrendered your human agency. You have decided that you have no ability to influence your life and the things that happen to you.

You're basically just sitting in chains, waiting for more abuse, hoping for table scraps. If you're an optimistic person, you believe you can escape the cell and have dominion and agency over your future. If things are good or bad, you have some part and say in that. Collectively, if we choose to work together, we can build an optimistic world where we can trust each other again. If we choose to be cynical and turn on each other, we will create a self-fulfilling prophecy.

I understand that it's very difficult because the people who lead us don't deserve such power. They lie, cheat, steal, and are corrupt. No matter who you vote for, it seems you just keep getting worse outcomes. We went from dementia to demented in the United States. Everybody wants easy answers; they want to blame people.

They want to say, "Well, you supported this person," or "You supported that person." That's not the appropriate way of handling the situation. The reality is one of two people will be the leader; we don't have any other choices in that. Regardless of which choice is selected, those people are not qualified, capable, or morally sound to lead us. We've gotten to a point where we have to lead ourselves and opt out of the system.

We have to opt out of bad money, systems that spy on us, and businesses that promote monopolistic oligarchic standards where they control us from cradle to grave. It's not easy; it's a difficult road. There are good days and good years, like 2021, and there are terrible years the ones we've endured. But that in no way diminishes the importance of why we do what we do or how we do what we do. Tokens are here to stay, and they're necessary to create decentralized ownership of these resources.

Blockchains are here to stay because they're necessary to create a synthetic truth that we can all believe in. The cryptocurrency ecosystem as a whole is here to stay because you need partners in crime to help you build this new system. You need revolutionaries to help you pick up the torch and get it done. In these 15 short years, we've gone from nothing to half a billion people. Yet so many have the audacity to say that because there are dark red days in the market or certain tokens didn't go up, the revolution's over and we should all go home.

What are we going home to? Endless lies, endless wars, money that's worthless, land that costs more and more to buy. What exactly are we going home to? What type of future are we looking forward to? Waiting to get laid off from our jobs when robots and AI take over in five to ten years?

Imagine the Amazon delivery driver in the not-too-distant future. When they look to the right, driving with them in the passenger seat will be a robot. Its job will be to help them take the packages out of the car. Then, in the not-too-distant future from that, the robot will be driving, and the package driver will be in the passenger seat. Eventually, it will just be the robot and its friend, the other robot.

That is the lived reality tens of millions of Americans are looking forward to, and collectively, hundreds of millions, if not billions, of people in the blue-collar world. We've already seen the catastrophic layoffs and reductions that are starting to occur in the knowledge world. We can simply do more with less, and our economy has to adjust. This is the world of trillionaires, oligarchs, state-sponsored monopolies, and universal basic income that they want to give us. So if we lose in the cryptocurrency space, that's what we go home to.

We don't have any hope then, and we do succumb to the cynicism because the cynicism becomes realism. It becomes our reality. When we step into a cryptocurrency world, at least we have a new dimension, like when color came to television. It's something different to design into, to build new economies. Or perhaps, maybe just maybe, instead of being replaced by AI, we have the advantage of using it on our behalf to help us grow in our wealth and agency.

It's not a universal solution, but we can't build the solution unless and until we have a place to trust each other, collaborate, and create something that everybody owns instead of just a few people. I'd like someone to tell me what their solution is if they disagree with this. Now is not the time to just sit behind a keyboard and tear everything down, saying everyone is evil, stupid, or immoral. Now is the time, if you levy criticism, to propose an alternative. To be frank, if you're unable to do so, shut the hell up.

You contribute nothing; you are nothing. You have chosen to recuse yourself from a debate over the very essence of what it means to be human, and you have decided to put the chains on your wrists and get into a cave—a dark one from which you'll never return. I don't care about your opinion if that is who you are and what you desire. I don't care for you to tell me that my only solution is to join you in the cave. I'd rather die.

I'd rather go broke. I'd rather be a homeless person rambling to myself on the street than to live in that hell. Humans were not meant for this, and we have achieved so much during the Enlightenment. It would be catastrophic for us to return to a world of serfs and kings. We're not going to allow that to happen.

The tools of liberty and freedom are before us. They're not easy tools to use; they're not fun tools to use. They require great strength and conviction, discipline, time, and effort. They require us to make sacrifices, and they require us to have the courage to be wrong but still continue to move forward and find out how to be right in a world where everybody just wants to criticize but produce nothing. They also require the courage to go it alone.

If the markets continue to fall and everyone else just abandons it, I see no reason why I and a bunch of AI agents couldn't just write the code and build things myself. Maybe I'll be the last person standing who carries the flag and the dream and the fire that we actually have the ability to change things. That is the choice that I've made. I can't go back into the cave. I can't live a life of bondage and slavery to a system that neither cares about me nor values anything that is even remotely human.

It's a time for choosing. When we look at projects like Midnight, we have to make decisions. Do we want to live in a world where we have control over our identity? We selectively disclose, not others on our behalf. Do we want to live in a world where billions of people can safely use cryptocurrencies, using them the way they need to?

Do we want to live in a world where we can set the rules together instead of having them inflicted upon us? And do we want to live in a world where the Satoshi-principled cryptocurrencies win, or do we want to live in a world where we hand it all to the banks because the token price goes up? I started this journey 15 years ago with nothing. I don't particularly care if I end this journey with nothing because it never was about acquiring something; it was about building something that everybody can use. This is only going to work if other people step up, pick up a shovel, and help.

When I look at the Night Force, I'm deeply encouraged by the fact that it's grown so quickly. When I look at our Discord at Midnight, the same. When I look at all of our channels, the same. Yes, we're going to have good days and bad days. Yes, the token price goes up and down.

We distributed Night to eight different ecosystems, seven blockchains, and no one paid anything for it. Of course, some people are going to dump. Some people are going to dump; they just lived through the last five years of meme coin mania. If you think that's the only reason why we do these things and labor the way we did, we spent the money we did, and we built what we built, then put on your chains and get in the cave. We're not going to listen to you anymore; you're a waste of oxygen.