Cardano Founder Explains Why Not Sell ADA For NIGHT

After the successful Midnight (NIGHT) token airdrop, Cardano founder Charles Hoskinson is getting a familiar question from ADA holders: if NIGHT is the new token tied to Cardano’s privacy network, why not sell ADA and move across? In a Dec. 21 appearance on the Discover Crypto podcast, he argued the premise is flawed because Midnight is designed to extend ADA, not replace it.

Why Not Sell Cardano For NIGHT

“They’re complimentary. They do different things,” Hoskinson said. “Midnight is the ChatGPT of privacy. That’s its job. It’s a blockchain to blockchain infrastructure module. So, what Midnight does is it actually makes Cardano applications have privacy.”

That distinction is central to his pitch: Midnight is positioned less as a liquidity siphon and more as an infrastructure module that gives Cardano-native apps a feature set they can use to differentiate in an increasingly crowded DeFi landscape. Hoskinson argued that early adopters are more likely to be Cardano applications precisely because they need a lever to compete for users, rather than larger incumbents elsewhere that tend to be slower-moving.

“Which ones do you think are going to adopt privacy first? Uniswap and PancakeSwap and all these giant things that are slow moving and they’re very conservative because they have a lot of users of value flow,” he said. “No, it’ll be Cardano applications. Because they need to gain users and so this is how they leapfrog the competition.”

From there, Hoskinson broadened the argument into a cross-chain liquidity thesis, leaning heavily on Bitcoin DeFi as a source of potential inflows. He described Bitcoin as relatively “agnostic” capital that will route to wherever yield, credit, and utility are most accessible, and claimed Cardano’s UTXO model makes it a more natural destination than account-based chains.

“When you look at Bitcoin… it doesn’t care if it goes to Ethereum or Solana or Cardano or other places to get yield,” he said. “It’s going to go to the closest continent and the closest continent is Cardano because it’s a UTXO system and Bitcoin is UTXO system. So through Cardano DeFi in particular upgraded with Midnight suddenly Bitcoin’s going to get privacy preserving yield and credit.”

He added that the same privacy-preserving yield concept could extend beyond Bitcoin. “And it’s the same for XRP and these other things,” Hoskinson said, arguing that Midnight’s privacy tooling is intended to “hybridize” on-chain and off-chain infrastructure rather than “steal TVL or steal luster from other systems.”

In practical terms, Hoskinson also tied the ADA-versus-NIGHT decision to distribution and security. He emphasized that Cardano “launched Midnight,” framing it as evidence the ecosystem can execute large-scale initiatives while positioning ADA holders for preferential participation.

“If you’re an ADA holder, you get first access to all of these things and you get the largest proportion of the airdrop,” he said. “And also, Cardano secures Midnight. So, that means ADA holders get NIGHT tokens.”

How High Can ADA Go?

Hoskinson was also pressed on Cardano price expectations. While he refrained to name any price targets, he used that moment to lay out what he described as a “value leakage” theory tied to Bitcoin’s institutional bid. He said Bitcoin is the only asset he feels comfortable forecasting with any confidence, arguing that large allocators are structurally “stuck” in Bitcoin exposure via ETFs and buy-and-hold mandates, which changes the old cycle mechanic where retail would rotate profits from BTC into alts.

In that setup, he suggested the main route for capital to spill from Bitcoin into other ecosystems is not spot rotation, but Bitcoin DeFi yield: if Cardano can offer yield and credit inside a risk profile that institutional holders can tolerate, demand can “leak” outward from BTC without investors selling BTC outright. That is the basis for his view that chains embracing Bitcoin DeFi could move more in sync with Bitcoin, while others could remain decorrelated, even if Bitcoin continues higher.

The broader message was less about discouraging trading behavior and more about presenting a structural rationale for staying exposed to ADA. In Hoskinson’s framing, Midnight is not meant to displace ADA; it is meant to expand the set of use cases Cardano applications can offer, while keeping ADA holders economically involved through security ties and token distribution.

At press time, ADA traded at $0.36.