Midnight

追加: 2026-05-05

[00:00:00]Hi, this is Charles Hoskinson broadcasting live from warm, sunny Colorado. Always warm, always sunny, sometimes Colorado. Today is April 14th, 2026.

[00:00:13]It's hard to believe it's already 2026 and it's hard to believe how long we've been doing this and it's uh pretty surreal when you think about it. Wanted to make a video talk a little bit about um the next 90 days, 180 days in midnight. Uh, as many of you know, Midnight is probably the most exciting project that we're working on this year.

[00:00:32]Uh, but you know, uh, there's a lot of cool stuff on Cardano and obviously we got Real Fi coming. Uh, so it's, uh, it's hard to pick which one of your kids you love the most, but uh, there's some cool stuff going on. Uh, and what's really nifty is Midnight launched and we're on schedule. So, the token launched December and we've achieved near ubiquitous liquidity. Uh there's still some jurisdictions like Korea and Japan to come online and that's going to be a lot of fun and some legacy exchanges like Coinbase which I think it'll come online sooner than people expect. Um but we got Binance Spot and Kraken and a lot of these other people.

[00:01:08]So Midnight has the capacity to trade up to 9 billion per day as we saw at the all-time high in liquidity. So there's no longer liquidity issues which is extraordinary for a brand new token. Uh 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. Um then uh the other part of his launch of the mainet uh so the federated guarded mainet launched as planned end of March.

[00:01:36]We have a whole bunch of things to do and everybody's working overtime right now to get through that backlog and in parallel a ton of community efforts have been launched. Uh, so we have the Night Force, which is the ambassador program for Midnight. And 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 at with Cardano when we started Cardano to kind of build a nice retail army of uh ambassadors to represent. Uh, but then we also have builder club. I was just in it, and we were every few weeks have cohorts of projects come through of people building on Midnight.

[00:02:13]uh geographically very dis diverse uh industry very diverse everything from healthc care to real estate to NFT marketplaces and traditional web 3 uh we're real happy about that we have four major R&D projects going on for the next major iteration midnight roadmap uh namely uh we're looking at really the midnight defy kernel uh the midnight passport program uh midnight with minotaur and its future consensus site and nightstream uh and all of them are making meaningful and very significant progress and we'll have a lot to show and tell at consensus but we're real excited that we get to finally see input outputs arc division uh so heavily utilized in uh all of this so we're having a lot of fun with that uh but overall the project's on schedule uh it's hitting the milestones KPIs that I expected uh it's going to be a wild year you know there's going to be huge volatility in the underlying asset uh very clear that certain actors in the market seem to trying to depress the price and you can see that with the PERS markets and um how selling patterns work. Maybe competitors uh may not be but it hasn't really meaningfully impacted or affected the road map or the project's roll out and these are ephemeral things. You can push a spring down and push a spring down and push a spring down but at some point spring bounces back up and in this case it's grabbing a stab of the eye. Uh, Midnight's here to stay and it's a tremendous project. I have never encountered so much enthusiasm and excitement uh as well as just progress in such a short period of time. Uh, when you talk to the Midnight Ambassadors, the Night Force, or you talk to just rank and file midnight people, they get it. We need simplicity, we need rules, and we need privacy. And it truly is a new generation. I haven't seen energy like this since the early Ethereum days, to be frank. uh and the rate at which this project has grown has been truly remarkable. Now, from our part, myself included, we're working hard. Um so, 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 like, uh and how 1.3 needs to look like, as well as the documentation of Midnight, amongst many other things. Uh so the pedagogy is evolving very rapidly and we're taking a leadership position as an ecosystem and teaching people about how privacy works under the hood and the combinations of privacy enhancing systems. So ZK systems with MPC systems with uh with trusted execution environments amongst many other things and how do you put these together and have privacy at scale that's practical and easy to use. Uh, we have a lot of north stars. For example, I want the ability to create an account within 60 seconds and have actually be useful, have it work on your phone, never have to have 24 keywords or manage cryptographic material. I want it to work with one drive and Google drive and all these other wonderful services that billions of people use. We had a lot of strategic partners that, you know, where and when it makes sense to bring them in, bring them in and uh they can take the experience to the next level. Uh, but 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.

[00:05:34]They're hungry. They want to win. And there's been a lot of acknowledgments about how to try 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. Uh, and it's yielded amazing outcomes. And we're right at the dawn of you being able to get your own agents.

[00:05:54]And we actually have a beautiful two-week sprint structure. We talk about appearances, professions, and interactions and the interaction side, both Asian Asia and 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 first cryptocurrencies are hard to visualize and a privacy coin, a privacy cryptocurrency is especially hard to visualize because the intent is to make it unvisualizable.

[00:06:25]Uh so this is basically the boiling the ocean project where an agentic civilization is used to be the front page for a midnight. And what's really cool is it's very participatory. And so 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 and it's going to be a lot of fun to not only watch that roll out but also for people to get their own agents and have those agents work within the city and see what happens with them.

[00:06:52]And what makes them so cool is they're unpredictable. So we actually don't know as the creators of the game, creators of the page, what your agents are going to do, where they're going to go, how they're going to work. One of the cool things about Midnight City is all the subscriptions will be in night now.

[00:07:08]They'll be onboard and offboard things.

[00:07:10]So you can pay with credit card and all this other stuff, but it converts into night and buys night. So every person who subscribes to Midnight City is actually creating demand for the network. Um, and we're going to try to do this in the midnight defi kernel as well, very much inspired by hyperlquid.

[00:07:26]You have to create circular economies.

[00:07:28]You have to create consumptive demand for the token and have that donated to the treasury uh in the case of the DeFi kernel. And our goal is to experiment with these loops. And Midnight City is our first foray, but by no means is the only one. And I think uh if we keep building this, we can build not only a sustainable economy, but we can figure out how to build a sustainable economy where there's an incentive for the users of that economy to promote demand in the system. People forget with the dual tech tokconomics of midnight, which are truly revolutionary. The dust component is only valuable if people use the system.

[00:08:05]So the more demand, not only is it more valuable, but also you get many different tokens from it because people will be trading it on the capacity exchange and that capacity exchange will accept Bitcoin and Ether and Salana and Avalanche and BNB. So what we found is a tokconomics of cooperation instead of a tokconomics of an adversarial nature.

[00:08:30]Midnight does not benefit by being at war with or hating any chain. Midnight benefits only by working with others and getting business with others and providing value to others. So everything holder of Knight wants to be friends with everybody in the space and a layer two to everyone effectively. Uh and that's different and hopefully we can turn the page on the maximalism and the memecoin culture that we've seen.

[00:08:58]If you look at channels, there's kind of two groups of people. Uh people who want to do things differently and they're hungry for a new generation and they want to live in a world where people get along and work along with each other and we figure out a way to get to the next stage. And there's another group of people that are filled with fear and anger and they have vastly unrealistic expectations about how wealth is created. If something doesn't instantly go up a 10x, they say it must be a scam and it's wrong and it's bad. What they're really saying is they're scared.

[00:09:33]And what they're really saying is they're frustrated. They believed perhaps uh rightly or wrongly, but I would argue wrongly, uh that crypto was going to be this savior that would show up and rescue them from bad lives, rent that's due or job that doesn't pay enough or child support payments they can't make. and then suddenly it didn't do that and therefore they get angry at it. Whether you're angry at crypto or whether you love crypto, it doesn't change the reality of crypto. Crypto is here to build a better world for us all.

[00:10:08]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 and recorded and used against you in the worst possible time. I'd like to live in a world where we can trust each other again. And I'd like to live in a world where our identity is self-s sovereign and we all are our own banks and we no longer trust third party services to have complete control over our life, our identity, our reputation from cradle to grave. So you need this technology to make that happen. What's the value of it? What should the token price be?

[00:10:55]Well, what's the value of freedom?

[00:10:58]What's the value of liberty? These aren't platitudes. These are realities.

[00:11:02]Having spent a decade and a half of my life in this space, having endured so many ups and downs, having endured so much criticism, and recognizing I'm no longer the young guy I was when I started getting older, what keeps me in the space is my undying belief that we actually can make a difference.

[00:11:23]The core meta narrative that exists over this industry is cynicism versus optimism. You often hear me say this and 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.

[00:11:46]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.

[00:12:00]And 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.

[00:12:13]If we choose to be cynical and we turn on each other, we will create a self-fulfilling prophecy.

[00:12:20]And I understand that it's very difficult because the people who lead us don't deserve such power. They lie. They cheat. They steal. They're corrupt. And no matter who you vote for, it seems like you just keep getting worse and worse outcomes. We went from dementia to demented in the United States.

[00:12:43]And 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 than that. And regardless of which choice is selected, those people are not qualified, capable, or morally sound to lead us. So, 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. We have to opt out of systems that spy on us. And we have to opt out on systems that rob us of our agency and opt out of businesses that promote monopolistic oligarchistic 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's terrible years like the ones that 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.

[00:13:47]Tokens are here to stay and they're necessary to create decentralized ownership of these resources.

[00:13:53]Blockchains are here to stay because they're necessary to create a synthetic truth that we can all believe in. and cryptocurrencies. The ecosystem as a whole is here to stay because you need partners in crime to help you build this system, 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 because there's dark red days in the market or certain tokens didn't go up that the revolution's over and we should all go home. What are we going home to?

[00:14:34]What are we going home to? Endless lies, endless wars, money that's worthless, land that costs more and more to buy.

[00:14:47]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 5 to 10 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.

[00:15:13]Its job will be to help them take the packages out of the car. And then in the not too distant future from that not too distant future the robot will be driving and the package driver will be in the passenger seat and have the clock go a little bit further. There's just the robot and its friend, the other robot.

[00:15:38]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 bluecollar world. And we've already seen the catastrophic layoff and reductions that are starting to occur in the knowledge world. We can just simply do more with less and our economy has to adjust. This is the world of trillionaires of oligarchs. state sponsored monopolies of 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 the television, 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 our 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 and a place to collaborate with each other and we have the ability to 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 and say everyone's evil and stupid or immoral or idealistic.

[00:17:21]Now is the time if you levy criticism to propose an alternative.

[00:17:27]And 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 of a debate over the very essence of what it means to be human.

[00:17:43]And you have decided to put the chains on your wrists and get into a cave, a dark one, from which you will never return.

[00:17:52]I don't care about your opinion if that is who you are and what you desire. And I don't care for you to tell me that my only solution is to join you in the cave.

[00:18:06]I'd rather die.

[00:18:09]I'd rather go broke.

[00:18:11]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 surfs and kings.

[00:18:31]We're not going to allow that to happen.

[00:18:34]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.

[00:18:44]And they require 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.

[00:19:09]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 just build things myself. Maybe I'll be the last person standing who carries the flag in the dream and the fire that we actually have the ability to change things.

[00:19:33]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.

[00:19:51]It's a time for choosing. And 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 and they can use them the way that they need to use them? Do we want to live in a world where we can set the rules together instead of being 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 token price go up?

[00:20:32]I started this journey 15 years ago with nothing.

[00:20:37]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.

[00:20:52]This is only going to work if other people step up, pick up a shovel, and they help.

[00:21:01]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.

[00:21:14]Yes, we're going to have good days and bad days. Yes, the token price goes up and down. We distributed Knight to eight different ecosystems, seven blockchains, and no one paid anything for it. Of course, some people are going to dump.

[00:21:28]They just lived through the last 5 years of memecoin mania. And if you think that's the only reason why we do these things and we 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.

[00:21:47]We're here to change the world regardless of the time, the cost, or the effort. And we're here to make it a better place because we have some big challenges before us. Huge ones. Ones that the human race has never faced and that will completely redefine what it means to be human in the 21st century. We have never seen such miracles and horrors before us and we have never encountered such an existential crisis.

[00:22:19]There are some based upon cynicism who think this is it. It's over.

[00:22:25]There are others like myself and because of optimism believe that we can build that shining city on a hill.

[00:22:34]We just have to travel there. And the road ahead may have twists and turns.

[00:22:39]The road ahead may be dark at times and terrifying, but let's never lose sight of that city we can build together. So, thank you all for listening. Thank you all for being part of this. And I can't wait to share with you all the amazing things on the horizon. We will get there. Cheers.