Input Output CEO Charles Hoskinson said Midnight could eventually surpass Cardano (ADA) in market capitalization, a prospect he said could also bring users and activity to Cardano’s broader ecosystem.
During an AMA on Saturday, Nov. 7, Hoskinson answered, “It absolutely is,” when asked whether Midnight might pass Cardano. He offered no timetable or price target, and said future demand for Midnight’s NIGHT token and its price were unknown.
Hoskinson argued that Midnight’s future success could demonstrate Cardano’s ability to support a successful project. He also said Midnight might contend with leading privacy networks, raising a possible place among the top three to five. That was his assessment, not a measured ranking. He cited demand for privacy and compliance as part of the project’s appeal, but did not estimate how Midnight’s adoption might affect demand for ADA.
Midnight’s official FAQ describes it as a partner-chain layer 1 that operates alongside Cardano. The FAQ says Midnight handles transactions separately from Cardano and that NIGHT is live on both networks.
Recent market data show a gap between the reported valuations, although the figures cover different windows. CoinGecko’s UTC history lists Cardano’s Nov. 12 close at $0.174204 and its market capitalization at $6,549,771,736. CoinCodex put NIGHT’s market capitalization at $744.11 million for its Nov. 11-12 daily window, without specifying a time zone, so the two snapshots are not synchronized.
Hoskinson also used Bitcoin and Litecoin as a historical analogy, saying Bitcoin had kept its leading position while Litecoin did not displace it. EconoTimes previously covered Hoskinson’s October tease of a Midnight concept.
In March, the Midnight Foundation announced that Monument Bank was targeting up to £250 million in tokenized deposits for the first phase of a project on Midnight. The announcement described a plan, not completed tokenization. It outlined three phases but did not give dates for the later stages.
