Hoskinson says Midnight will outgrow Zcash
Cardano's founder expects the privacy-focused Midnight chain to surpass Zcash, citing selective disclosure, AI agents and cross-chain links, though NIGHT's market value remains far smaller.
Key points
- Charles Hoskinson said Midnight will be bigger than Zcash, without defining what bigger means.
- NIGHT has a market cap of $437 million, ranking 122nd, while ZEC sits in the top 10 at $26.4 billion.
- Midnight's mainnet went live in March as a specialised layer-1 partner chain with its own ledger.
- VIA Labs deployed universal cross-chain messaging on Midnight in August, linking it to over 130 networks.
- Hoskinson called Midnight probably Input Output's most exciting project of the year in an April 14 livestream.
Cardano founder Charles Hoskinson has predicted that Midnight, a privacy-focused blockchain project, will eventually become bigger than Zcash, U.Today reports. He did not define what bigger means, and the comparison currently favours Zcash by a wide margin on market value.
Hoskinson tied the forecast to a combination of privacy technology, artificial intelligence, cross-chain functionality and Cardano infrastructure. In a post, he listed selective disclosure, private agents, abstraction through a DeFi kernel for all major chains, zero-knowledge proofs alongside trusted execution environments and multi-party computation, and Cardano's round-the-clock uptime with Leios. He signed off with the phrase LFG 2027.
The market figures show the gap he is talking about. NIGHT, Midnight's token, has a market capitalisation of $437 million, making it the 122nd largest cryptocurrency, according to CoinGecko data cited by the outlet. ZEC, by contrast, has become a fixture in the top 10 with a market cap of $26.4 billion.
Hoskinson's prediction
Midnight's mainnet went live in March. The article notes it differs from what the label Cardano privacy chain might suggest: it is a specialised layer-1 partner chain running alongside Cardano, keeping its own ledger and processing transactions independently, while retaining important architectural connections to Cardano.
During an extensive livestream on 14 April, Hoskinson described Midnight as arguably the most exciting project Input Output was working on in 2026. He also praised the speed of its rollout, saying tokens usually take two to three years to go through such trials, whereas Midnight lives in fast mode.
Cross-chain expansion features heavily in his latest remarks, particularly the reference to a DeFi kernel for all major chains. In August, VIA Labs deployed its universal cross-chain messaging system on Midnight, an integration the Midnight Foundation says connects it with more than 130 public and private networks.
Market cap gap
Hoskinson has previously argued that Midnight's economics are built around cooperation rather than competition. He said its capacity exchange will accept Bitcoin, Ether, Solana, Avalanche and BNB, describing a tokenomics of cooperation instead of an adversarial one, and cast Midnight as effectively a privacy layer for the wider industry and a layer two to everyone.