Cardano founder Charles Hoskinson personally invested 200 million USD in Midnight, and this news caused quite a stir in the industry. Some say it's sentiment-driven, others say it's hype, but after spending two days sorting this out, I found it's not that simple.
How is this 200 million USD divided? 40% for attracting technical experts, 35% for developer incentives, and 25% reserved as regulatory capital, including a specific allocation of 50 million USD for a legal fund. This is not a configuration for speculating on coins; this is a firm commitment to confront the regulatory framework of traditional finance head-on.
Hoskinson stated clearly in an interview that he does not aim to attract users from Zcash and Monero; the goal is large-scale mainstream adoption.
@MidnightNetwork Why set it up this way? Because both DeFi and RWA have reached a bottleneck, and the core pain point is privacy. Without privacy, institutional funds dare not enter the market.
Think about it, if a fund wants to launch a product on-chain, if all transaction details are visible to the entire internet, who would invest? Competitors could easily copy your strategy.
But with this set of ZK technology from Midnight, institutions can prove compliance to regulators, demonstrate asset security to users, while protecting their business secrets. This capability is the prerequisite for institutional funds to enter the market.
What Hoskinson is betting on is this gap. He is not only looking at the privacy track but also at the entire financial system's migration to on-chain, where privacy will become a fundamental configuration.
Just like the current internet, no one would post their bank card passwords everywhere, and in the future of on-chain finance, not all data will run naked across the internet. What Midnight aims to do is pave the way for this migration process.
Looking back now at those institutions that participated, Google Cloud, MoneyGram, Vodafone, they ran nodes not to earn that small block reward, but to test whether this infrastructure is reliable, to accumulate experience, and to position themselves.
For us retail investors, this actually provides a very unique perspective. You are not looking at a 15-minute candlestick chart; you are looking at a narrative that might run for three to five years.
NIGHT now has a market value of over 800 million. If it can really pave the way for institutions to enter, how great is the imagination for this track?
