A major narrative is forming around Cardano’s next phase of DeFi growth — and privacy is at the center of it.
Charles Hoskinson, founder of Cardano, recently stated that $NIGHT , the native token of Midnight, could “10x the Cardano DeFi ecosystem.” His reasoning highlights one of crypto’s biggest unresolved gaps: programmable privacy.
The Real Problem: Users Don’t Want to Leave
Hoskinson made a crucial point — users don’t need to abandon Solana or Ethereum to benefit from Cardano’s ecosystem.
Instead, Midnight allows them to connect through Cardano while preserving privacy.
This reframes the competitive landscape. Rather than forcing users to migrate chains — a historically difficult and costly process — Cardano positions itself as a privacy layer that other ecosystems can tap into.
Midnight’s Differentiation: Privacy With Compliance
Midnight is designed to enable private smart contracts and confidential transactions while still supporting regulatory compliance. This is critical.
Most DeFi today is fully transparent, exposing:
Wallet balances
Transaction history
Trading strategies
Midnight introduces selective disclosure, meaning users and institutions can keep sensitive data private while still proving compliance when required. That’s something neither Ethereum nor Solana currently offer at scale in a native, composable way.
Why $NIGHT Matters
NIGHT isn’t just another utility token — it underpins the privacy execution layer of Midnight. If developers, users, and even institutions begin routing activity through Midnight for privacy-preserving DeFi, demand for NIGHT es alongside usage.
This creates a new growth vector for Cardano:
More developers building privacy-first dApps
More cross-chain users interacting via Midnight
More DeFi volume settling into the Cardano ecosystem
A New Role for Cardano
Rather than competing head-on as “just another L1,” Cardano positions itself as the privacy backbone of multi-chain DeFi.
Users don’t have to leave their favorite chains.
They just gain a new capability they didn’t have before.
If Midnight delivers as intended, NIGHT unlock an entirely new class of DeFi activity — and fundamentally expand Cardano’s relevance across the broader crypto ecosystem.
Privacy isn’t optional anymore.
It’s the next frontier.