Hello from Las Vegas

Hi, this is Charles Hoskinson broadcasting live from hot and dry, very sunny Las Vegas. I’m here for Rare Evo, a wonderful event that’s just getting started this week, as well as all the governance workshops we’re having with the Cardano community. Yesterday, we had a lovely time with the Cardano community. Thirty-eight percent of all the voting power was in one room, and most of the major DREPs were there. We had a great conversation about the problems of governance, covering everything from the budget to communication to the lack of executive function.

It was really cool to see people come alive and write down a litany of different concerns that can be resolved through constitutional updates, changes to off-chain processes, as well as some reforms in the governing institutions. As we look towards the future, something very exciting has been announced and enabled as of yesterday: the soft launch of the Glacier Drop. I wanted to spend a little bit of time explaining how monumental and remarkable it has already been. The Glacier Drop is the single most complex piece of software we’ve ever written for on-chain logic. The reason being is that it involves eight different ecosystems and seven blockchains.

We’re talking about addresses in cryptography in Bitcoin, Solana, Ethereum, Cardano, B&B, Avalanche, XRP, and so forth. There are many different combinations and paths for people to work their way through. We realized that due to interest and excitement, there would be escalating concerns about paths to redeem in these ecosystems. So, we wanted to build a Glacier Drop application that provided as comprehensive an experience as possible. Things would turn on over time to allow different redemption paths, whether that be a redemption path through certain custodians or exchanges that participated, through preferred wallets, or through hardware.

One of the hardest issues has been that hardware support is inconsistent and fragmented across the seven different ecosystems. There are different implementations for things like Trezor and Ledger from Cardano to Bitcoin to Ethereum. These are not unified applications but rather a family of modules, and some were written many years ago. In the case of the Cardano implementation, the primary implementation was written more than five years ago. There are families of hardware within the hardware ecosystems.

For example, the Ledger Nano S is a significantly less capable device than modern ledgers, and Trezor does not sign payloads in the Cardano ecosystem, whereas it can in others. Given all of this, you build up a corpus of capabilities over time. The reason why there’s a 60-day redemption window is to give us ample time to do rolling deployments daily and weekly for new capabilities and integrate those new capabilities into new redemption paths. Overall, even though this is a soft launch and there are still big chunks of people waiting on the sidelines, over 18,000 unique redemptions have occurred for a total of nearly 400 million night, which is truly extraordinary when you think about this just being launched soft yesterday. There’s overwhelming interest and demand in the Midnight Glacier Drop.

In the coming weeks, as these new capabilities come online—both at the wallet level in the Glacier Drop application itself and in the hardware support side—we anticipate seeing a very strong redemption continue and a very large community for all of the night holders. This is the single largest drop ever done in the history of Cardano. Additionally, this drop is bringing in many people from across the cryptocurrency space into Cardano. In many cases, this is the first time in history they’ve even thought about Cardano or used Cardano technology in any way. The next 60 days are going to be quite busy, and a lot of people are very excited.

Sometimes that excitement boils over to Twitter, and they say things and do things that are quite unique and interesting. Nonetheless, I’m excited myself. I really enjoy the fact that after six years of hard work, we’ve gotten here, and the engineers were able to deliver a truly remarkable application. I don’t believe anyone has built a smart contract and a technology stack quite the Glacier Drop mechanism, given that it involves eight ecosystems and seven different blockchains. Also, the fact that all of this runs on Hydra is the first time that’s ever been done in the history of Cardano.

Many of you don’t know that one of the things that makes the Glacier Drop possible for Cardano, given the enormous size of the state of the system and the amount of transaction volume, is the utilization of Hydra technology. It took about a year to productize and enhance Hydra to a point where it was capable of running in this mode on Cardano’s mainnet. Hydra is not a toy. It’s not running on a test net. It’s not a hypothetical scenario.

It is the launching vehicle with Cardano for a massive new ecosystem, and that’s something I’m very proud of. I’m glad that the Glacier Drop team was able to bring that to market. If you’ve already redeemed, thank you so much for doing so. You’re in line. I get the numbers every day.

If you’re waiting to redeem for a variety of reasons, either for a lack of support or perhaps your money’s in custody on an exchange and you’re waiting to see if an exchange will support that, we’ll see what we can do, but ultimately it’s up to them. If you are in the hardware wallet class and you haven’t found a way through the process quite yet, be patient. There’s no rush. If you redeem today or you redeem right at the end of the redemption period, there is no difference in the amount of night you get, the thawing period, or any other matter. This is not a line where it’s first come, first served.

You have a place reserved, so don’t worry about it. Just come on back and give it a shot at the end of August, and I’m sure everybody will be fine. I’d like to thank the team. The Midnight team worked remarkably hard. The Midnight Foundation, Shielded, and the many partners that came together have had a roller coaster over the last three months.

The amount of work they put in consumed weekends. Oftentimes, many people were working late into the night, especially in the last two weeks when the go/no-go was made for this. They tried to do everything in a way that created a great experience but also satisfied the many regulatory and business requirements behind this endeavor. What people don’t understand is that the user experience was built hand in glove to try to satisfy dozens of different concerns at the same time, some of which are incompatible with each other. To be able to put all that together and create something that is somewhat smooth is a near-impossible task, and the team came together to do this.

I’m quite proud of the enormous progress they’ve made. The other challenge was that certain parts of Cardano and Cardano’s infrastructure and ecosystem weren’t quite ready for something of this magnitude and scale. Instead of giving up, we took the time and effort to upgrade and modernize certain things to get them ready for this. I’m very proud of Midnight’s enormous contributions to the Cardano ecosystem as a whole. You see, Cardano is learning how to be a system at scale.

Wonderful design decisions were made in fundamental technologies like extended UTXO and the design of Plutus and Marlowe. But you need to build stuff like Midnight to get Cardano to the next level. Midnight at launch will be on the Cardano network, and it will be the largest, most prominent, most traded, and highest volume Cardano native token in circulation. We’re very excited about that and about the ability to finally live on the platform instead of just building it up. We’re excited about the fact that we’ve been able to upgrade and modernize so many things, whether it be enhancing wallets, getting better implementations for Cardano’s ledger implementation, or building massive smart contracts on Cardano and learning how to improve the tools so that they can sustain and maintain things like this or bridging mechanics that connect Cardano to talk to other ecosystems.

As I said before, this is the first time that something has been done on Cardano that’s relevant to Bitcoin, Ethereum, Solana, Avalanche, and others. Collectively, these represent hundreds of millions of people. Through this infrastructure, bridges, and these conversations, more trade and more activity will occur. Their users are now our users, and that’s a net win for everybody in the ecosystem. I’m very excited to roll into Rare Evo.

I’m excited to see where this momentum carries us. We have a very strong initial launch, and given that we have 60 days, there will be constant tuning, iterations, and refinements, with a lot of surprises and magic throughout. For those who miss the Glacier Drop, there will be a second opportunity with the scavenger hunt, and then we’re off to mainnet soon thereafter, and Midnight will go from a test net product to a mainnet product. It’s really cool to watch this launch happen. We did it without any VCs.

We did it without any insiders. We did it the right way, in a way where everybody could participate and where everyone has some ownership in it if they so choose. The Midnight community will grow very quickly because its principles are so strong. At the end of the day, we created Midnight because we believe in freedom of association, commerce, and expression. ACE isn’t just a buzzword; it’s a human right, and it matters.

Every single person has a god-given right to freedom and liberty. In a modern digital world, we’re slowly but surely descending into an AI-enhanced panopticon. It’s nice to have technology used to push back a little bit and restore our human dignity, cognitive liberties, and freedoms. Midnight is also the essential bridge between the legacy financial world and the Web 3 financial world, the world of DeFi. This bridge requires risk-aware tech.

It requires rational privacy and disclosure. It’s truly remarkable to watch this bridge grow and evolve, and this technology grow and evolve. Midnight is going to be the project that launches a thousand ships, pulling these pieces together and allowing the $10 trillion real-world asset revolution to begin, enabling all that liquidity, all that securitization, and all those regulated assets to finally enter the blockchain space in a responsible way. Furthermore, it’s going to be, just like Cardano before it, a bastion of technological innovation. We’re not content with Plutus and Halo 2.

We want to look to the future, and we know that there are many things coming down the pipe that we need to protect against, including quantum computers. Midnight will be the project that brings post-quantum folding to bear. It will take time and partners, but as you’ve seen, we’ve already partnered with eight ecosystems and brought them together for the first time in history. Because of that attitude, that mentality, and the amazing ability to make deals and bridge people, I have no doubt we’ll be able to bring together great coalitions in the future to build technology that will succeed Halo 2 and actually enter into a ubiquitous world of post-quantum zero knowledge that is both efficient and capable of running on consumer devices like cell phones and laptops. This will ensure that Satoshi’s principle of inclusive accountability is preserved and maintained across the cryptocurrency space forever as these chains reach mainstream adoption and also enable rational privacy so that you’re in the driver’s seat about what gets disclosed and how and to whom.

This is the most complex project of my career and perhaps one of the most exciting. It takes the things I truly love, like Cardano, and blends them with other concepts I’ve never been able to get involved in, the zero-knowledge space, and brings them to the rest of the industry. It allows every person to emphasize and be connected to what makes their technology special. The magic of Midnight is that you can pay in the currencies you care about. Whether it be Bitcoin, Ether, or Solana, you choose.

No one prescribes that, and everybody can come to get the benefit of the unique features of the ledger. That’s something magical, and it’s something that brings us together and gets us past the adversarial tokenomics of the past. Like many of you listening, I’m deeply fatigued with how tribal things have been and how sensitive things have become. There’s no reason for that. After all, about 97% is unified.

We’re all using wallets, addresses, public keys, and thinking about decentralization and the promise and perils of Web 3. What divides us is so much smaller than what unifies us. I love having a ledger that, at its very core, embraces that philosophy of cooperation. Midnight is friends to all, satellites to none. It’s a peaceful place where people can go to enhance what they have, create something special, unique, and new, preserve human rights, and continue the vision that Satoshi so long ago gave us.

We continue to refine and iterate. This is just one day in a long journey. It’s been a good day, and I’m proud of all the people that have been walking on this journey with us. I cannot wait to see the millions of people, eventually tens of millions and hundreds of millions, that will walk this journey with us as we move towards decentralizing the world as a whole. Thank you so much for everything all of you have done.

Thank you for your faith, your support, and being part of this. I can’t wait for the future, and I’ll see everyone at Rare Evo. Cheers.