Charles Hoskinson, founder of Cardano and co-founder of Ethereum, used a Wednesday keynote at Consensus 2026 in Miami to frame Midnight Passport as an attempt to make crypto easier to use without surrendering self-custody, identity control or privacy. His remarks focused less on one blockchain competing with another and more on what he described as the “connecting tissue” needed for broader crypto adoption.
Hoskinson Outlines Midnight Passport Vision
Hoskinson argued that crypto’s core user experience remains too fragile for mainstream adoption, especially when compared with Web2 products that have billions of users and familiar recovery flows. He contrasted the complexity of wallets, seed phrases, exchanges, compliance checks and DeFi discovery with consumer apps such as Google Wallet, which he said has roughly 1.5 billion users. “The number one problem that people say again and again and again when they think about cryptocurrencies, whether you’re an experienced user and you’ve been in the industry a long time or you’re a completely new person, you’ve heard about the industry is, I’m gonna fuck it up. The safety side.”
The proposed answer, in Hoskinson’s framing, is Midnight Passport: a framework combining mobile hardware security, wallet creation, identity credentials, recovery, encryption and multi-chain support. He described a setup process designed around QR-code onboarding and trusted execution environments already present in modern phones. “Scan a QR code. You get access to it on your phone. Set up the recovery service at the same time.” In that model, users would not manually manage private keys; the keys would reside in the phone’s secure hardware, with recovery services configured from the start.
Hoskinson emphasized that the goal is not to make Midnight Passport exclusive to Cardano or any single network. He said the system should support wallets across Bitcoin, Ethereum, Solana, XRP and other ecosystems through multi-chain signatures and related tooling. “I don’t care what networks you want to use. I don’t care what assets you want to have. I want you to have control of those assets.” He added that users should also control their identity and data, describing that as central to the original purpose of crypto rather than an optional feature.
Privacy, Identity and Abstraction Take Center Stage
A major theme of the keynote was abstraction, including account abstraction and chain abstraction, which Hoskinson said are necessary to remove complexity from the user experience. He credited Ethereum contributors with pushing standards in this area and pointed to Near Protocol as an example of account and chain abstraction being implemented at the protocol level, citing $71 million in transaction fees over a year and billions of dollars traded through Near intents. But he warned that abstraction carries a cost if privacy is not built in, because delegated systems can learn what users buy, where they are, what they prefer and how they operate.
Hoskinson tied Midnight Passport to self-sovereign identity and selective disclosure, arguing that users should be able to prove specific facts without exposing full identity documents each time they interact with a service. He described passports and driver’s licenses as “breeder documents” that anchor identity but also place control in the hands of the issuer. “So you should own the root of identity, right? And then you create an economy around verifying credentials. You create an economy around verifying who you are.” In his view, that model would let users encrypt data client-side, store it locally or with cloud providers, and disclose only what a given interaction requires.
The keynote also connected Midnight Passport to AI agents, which Hoskinson said will become a major force in internet activity and crypto usage. He argued that agents will need wallets, identities and rule sets, but that their usefulness depends on access to sensitive personal context. “For an agent to be effective, an agent has to know you. The more the agent knows about you, the more problematic that is because an agent knows everything.” Hoskinson said Midnight Passport is being developed not only for people but also for agents, allowing privacy controls and usage rules to be set before data is shared or acted upon.
Hoskinson closed by positioning Midnight as a privacy, abstraction and rules framework intended to work across chains and institutional contexts rather than as a narrow product pitch. He said Midnight’s design includes cooperative tokenomics, support for payment in multiple currencies, and work under the Linux Foundation Decentralized Trust on Nightstream, including post-quantum research. “I wanna get everybody into a system where they have self-custody, they own their own identity, they own their own wallet, and they have privacy. And once they have that, then I don’t care who wins, because then we all won.”
Why AI agents and blockchains need privacy.
Full @IOHK_Charles keynote.
Come build on Midnight! pic.twitter.com/XRqz4umgQB
— Stake with Pride 🌈 Midnight + Cardano (@StakeWithPride) May 6, 2026
AI Transparency Note: This article was prepared with the assistance of an AI system based on the sources listed and was reviewed, edited, and approved by a human editor before publication. All quotes, data points, and factual claims are intended to be grounded in the cited source material; however, errors cannot be ruled out entirely.
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