Let me explain why I believe the relationship between the two is not as close as everyone imagines.

Indeed, Midnight's current settlement layer is built on Cardano, but the governance rights belong to the NIGHT token. Although ADA holders received a relatively large airdrop, the vast majority of voting and governance rights are still held by the development team and the NIGHT Foundation.

Additionally, Midnight's Gas is its own DUST token (mainly used for consumption) and does not utilize ADA. Therefore, from a product perspective, it is more of a 'Cardano-based, but not deeply bound to Cardano' partnership. In the future, the settlement layer could potentially migrate to any chain—there are no technical barriers to even moving to ETH, as the core logic is executed off-chain and the results are packaged on-chain.

To be frank, Midnight is essentially a high-performance VC chain with a certain degree of centralization attributes—just the type of chain that Charles publicly disapproved of in the past. Yet now he is personally involved, which indicates a reality: the purely idealistic path of Cardano is difficult to sustain, forcing it to compromise or even decline.

Looking at IOG's recent actions makes this even clearer.

The reason IG is renaming itself is not a spur-of-the-moment decision, but because they have found new financial backers and a new direction. You will notice that IGO and the core developers are now hardly mentioning ADA. As a blockchain technology research and development company, they do not rely on the rise of ADA to make money, but rather maintain their income by taking on new chains and developing new technologies. The delivery of ADA has long been completed, so their continued development of a new chain is essentially a normal business iteration and does not need to be bound to ADA.

Therefore, from an overall trend perspective, if you still hold a large amount of ADA, I sincerely suggest: consider changing your position as soon as possible.

This is not a bearish sentiment, but a judgment based on industrial logic, financial trends, and developer movements. #ADA #Cardano