Charles Hoskinson Claims Weiss Recently Increased Ratings, Asserts Midnight Will Be Greater Than ZCash
Charles Hoskinson stated that Weiss has recently significantly increased its ratings and asserted that Midnight will be greater than ZCash, citing reasons such as selective disclosure, private agents, abstraction aimed at mainstream chains and DeFi core, ZK plus TEE plus MPC, and Cardano's all-weather operation layered with Leios. He anchors the timeline to 2027.
Weiss Crypto has listed midnight-3:native as one of the best trades possible in the next 24 months. Hoskinson directly connects this rating change to his product comparison: not a privacy coin with a switch for full privacy, but default verifiable with on-demand disclosure.
Midnight is a partner chain of Cardano, not a layer two, launching its genesis block on March 17, 2026, and opening to the public later that month. The network has its own ledger, consensus, and contract environment, with a dual-token system placing speculative governance on NIGHT and transaction fees on DUST, which requires zero-knowledge proofs to spend.
Hoskinson claims to have personally invested about $200 million, not following mainstream venture capital paths, with tokens distributed to approximately 37 million wallets through airdrops across eight chains. The tech stack absorbs Halo 2 from ZCash, adding trusted execution environments and multi-party computation, aiming for institutional auditability and user default privacy.
He previously stated he would not target privacy fundamentalist users of Monero and ZCash, aiming instead to cover a large audience that "doesn't yet know they need privacy." The product narrative ties private agents with cross-chain abstraction, allowing applications on chains like Bitcoin, Ethereum, Solana, and XRP to utilize the same privacy core.
Leios supports the throughput story: adding endorsement blocks and committee validation on Ouroboros Praos, with public materials indicating a throughput range of 10 to 65 times; a dedicated public testnet was launched in June 2026, with the goal for the 2026/27 cycle to push implementation to mainnet candidates and pursue hard fork governance, with the mainnet launch date still dependent on governance rather than unilateral announcements.
In market mechanisms, what is bought is a cross-chain core narrative that can simultaneously discuss compliance and privacy, while what is sold is the switch narrative of pure privacy coins. Funds flow in from the ADA ecosystem, NIGHT speculative trading, and transactions driven by ratings; beneficiaries are issuers who can sell selective disclosure to banks and RWA, while pressured are privacy coins that can only maintain premiums through anonymous faith and struggle to access regulated funds. Event-driven factors come from the rating upgrade combined with the 2027 roadmap, rather than a single on-chain settlement.
Source: Public Information
ABAB AI Insight
After leaving the early Ethereum team, Hoskinson turned IOG into a company focused on formal methods and long-cycle protocol papers, leading to Cardano being long priced by the market as "slow but with papers." Midnight represents the same organizational capability shifted towards commercializable privacy primitives: transforming years of ZK, partner chains, and cross-chain bridges into a product line that can be quoted externally, rather than writing another sidechain for internal use.
The funding path involves the founder personally investing about $200 million along with a massive airdrop, rather than handing control to dollar funds. This approach distributes tokens to tens of millions of addresses across eight chains, resulting in a narrative entry and subsequent NIGHT/DUST division of labor: governance and valuation go public, while fees go private, avoiding transaction costs burning through speculative trading. Leios ties Cardano's main chain throughput commitments to the same timeline, preventing the privacy partner chain from stagnating on a low TPS demo network.
The benchmark is ZCash's protocol-level shielding and Ethereum's post-facto privacy. ZCash sells a cryptographic switch, while consortium chains like Canton sell permissioned backbones. Midnight positions itself in the middle: permissions occur within contract and address strategies, while the backbone remains permissionless. The industry phase shifts privacy from "coin faith" to "multi-chain infrastructure modules," with expansion and control occurring simultaneously.
The structural judgment pertains to the reconstruction of the industry chain. Privacy is no longer competing as an independent L1 with Bitcoin and Ethereum for users, but as a pluggable core embedded into existing settlement layers. The mechanism requires verifiable disclosure to meet regulatory and institutional funding demands; pure anonymity cannot pass KYC, and pure transparency cannot maintain commercial secrets. Whoever first integrates ZK, TEE, MPC, and cross-chain abstraction into a DeFi core will set the pricing for compliant transactions across multiple chains.
ABAB News · Cognitive Laws
Switchable privacy sells faith, selective disclosure sells licenses.
The rating upgrade is not for coins, but for modules that can be invoked by institutions.
Once throughput commitments are tied to privacy cores, the main chain becomes an accessory.