Cardano Founder Praises ShieldUSD Milestone On Midnight
Charles Hoskinson is once more spotlighting privacy-preserving stablecoins as one among Cardano’s most consequential bets, this time tying his reward on to recent progress on Midnight.
In a post on X on March 16, the Cardano founder referred to as the trouble “one of the thrilling initiatives” and stated it was “a bellwether for the rising utility of Midnight as a growth platform.” That issues as a result of Midnight has been positioned by its builders as a privacy-first chain constructed round zero-knowledge proofs and selective disclosure, with production-grade monetary purposes considered as one among its core targets.
Why The Cardano Founder Is Bullish On ShieldUSD
The instant set off was an replace from CTO at W3i Andrew Westberg, who stated, “A minimum-viable shieldUSD contract has been deployed to the Midnight preview environment,” and added: “Right now, the constraints on contract dimension are limiting what we are able to do and requires a variety of consolidation transactions. We’re working intently with Midnight Foundation. We are capable of efficiently carry out personal transfers with selective disclosure for regulatory auditors.”
For Midnight, that isn’t some secondary function. The community’s personal documentation describes selective disclosure as a core design precept, permitting builders to show validity or compliance with out exposing the total underlying knowledge on-chain. In observe, the concept is easy: transactions, balances, or identities can stay confidential to the general public, whereas approved events could be proven solely the knowledge they’re entitled to see. Midnight has framed that stability as important for real-world monetary use circumstances moderately than purely crypto-native privateness experiments.
The stablecoin effort itself has been taking form in public for months. In January, W3i Software introduced shieldUSD, a privacy-preserving USD stablecoin for the Midnight Network, saying it might be co-issued by Moneta Digital and Norwegian Block Exchange. According to that announcement, shieldUSD is being constructed for monetary workflows the place confidentiality issues, together with payroll, B2B settlement and institutional DeFi, whereas nonetheless supporting “compliance, auditability, and selective disclosure.” Midnight repeated that positioning in its January community replace, presenting shieldUSD as one of many ecosystem tasks supposed to deliver privacy-preserving finance into sensible use.
That additionally helps clarify why Hoskinson’s newest remark echoes his earlier rhetoric round Moneta’s USDM. Back in July 2025, he wrote that “Moneta’s USDM is turning into probably the most superior stablecoin ever constructed.” Moneta describes USDM as a Cardano-native, fiat-backed stablecoin backed 1:1 by US greenback reserves, with Moneta Digital appearing as issuer and redeemer. The newest Midnight work seems to increase that broader push from a regulated Cardano greenback right into a privacy-preserving setting designed for extra delicate transaction flows.
Still, Westberg’s publish made clear that the undertaking just isn’t presenting a completed product. The contract is just in Midnight’s Preview setting, which the community paperwork place as a growth stage for builders migrating purposes and testing new tooling moderately than a stay manufacturing venue. Midnight’s January roadmap replace stated the community is shifting by its Hilo part towards Kūkolu, the stage meant to introduce the primary wave of manufacturing purposes on a federated mainnet. In that context, the ShieldUSD deployment seems to be much less like a launch and extra like an early proof that Midnight’s compliance-friendly privateness mannequin could be made concrete.
At press time, Cardano traded at $0.287.
