Hoskinson Says 2026 Will Be Breakout Year for Midnight, Leios, and Cardano DeFi

Charles Hoskinson, the founder of Cardano, is enthusiastic about 2026, suggesting it could be a major breakout year for Midnight and the network’s DeFi ecosystem

The Cardano founder made this bold assertion during a recent livestream, with excerpts later shared by popular community figure “Angry Crypto Show.”

In his commentary, Hoskinson stated that Cardano’s privacy-focused sidechain, Midnight, is “gonna kill it next year,” signaling his expectation for a significant milestone in 2026

Midnight Launch Underway

Midnight serves as a central pillar of Cardano’s multi-chain vision, offering enhanced confidentiality features and programmable privacy for developers and enterprises. Introduced in 2023, the project is now moving closer to its official rollout, beginning on December 8 with the launch of the NIGHT token and its initial exchange listings.

According to the Midnight roadmap, the team plans to debut a federated mainnet by Q1 next year, enabling developers to begin testing their decentralized applications (dApps). Following this phase, an incentivized testnet is scheduled for the next quarter, allowing stake pool operators (SPOs) to stress-test the network ahead of its full mainnet deployment, which is projected for later in the year

Leios Update

Hoskinson also highlighted the imminent arrival of Leios, Cardano’s long-awaited scalability upgrade. Set for release next year, Leios aims to significantly boost transaction throughput.

This update follows his recent announcement of a new 24/7 development model to accelerate work on the scalability feature. Hoskinson views Leios as Cardano’s most urgent upgrade. Consequently, the around-the-clock development structure will allow teams across multiple time zones to work continuously to ensure the upgrade launches as planned next year

Great DeFi Progress for Cardano and Midnight

Furthermore, Hoskinson noted that the DeFi ecosystem on both Midnight and Cardano will make major progress next year. The prospect of such development excites the Cardano community, which has long awaited it

At press time, Cardano-based DeFi projects hold a total value locked of $178 million, substantially lower than rival networks like Ethereum and Solana, which command $65.63 billion and $8.5 billion in TVL, respectively

However, the Cardano team is still working to introduce a Tier-1 stablecoin to the network to strengthen DeFi activity. Hoskinson is currently in discussions with Ripple executives about bringing RLUSD to Cardano, and reports indicate the talks are progressing

Potential Collaboration Between Cardano and Base

Meanwhile, Hoskinson also hinted at a potential collaboration between Cardano and Coinbase’s L2 network Base. His comments suggest that early discussions are already underway and that both sides may explore technical or strategic integrations in the future