Cardano founder Charles Hoskinson used his late-November 25 livestream to argue that, despite the recent hack, FBI drama and social-media firestorms, “overall, Cardano is really healthy.” He insisted that the protocol side of the recent incident is largely behind them, saying, “we recovered… we’re on the other side of it, we’re in cleanup mode,” and claimed Cardano will “finish pretty strong towards the end of the year.” The revival he sketched rests on Midnight, RealFi, a renewed DeFi push and a more aggressive scaling roadmap.
Hoskinson Predicts A 2026 Cardano Revival
At the core is Midnight’s Glacier Drop. Reading from a “State of the Network” memo prepared by the Midnight Foundation, Hoskinson said the airdrop “was the largest distribution event in the history of cryptocurrencies,” stressing, “this is not puffery, we have the numbers.” The Scavenger Mine phase closed on November 20 “with over 4.5 billion NIGHT claims registered across more than 8 million participating addresses.” He called the architecture “a new standard for token distribution” that combines “a broad community-driven allocation” with mechanisms “to increase fairness and systemic integrity.”
The airdrop now shifts into a 450-day redemption phase starting December 8, during which NIGHT unlocks in four equal installments. A “lost and found” mechanism lets users who later recover private keys still claim, which Hoskinson openly framed as an incentive for custodial platforms: “
As Midnight goes up in value, they realize that they can redeem on behalf of their users and do an exchange distribution and take their cut.” He said Kraken, OKX, Bitpanda and NBX will distribute NIGHT to eligible KYC’d users, so “tens of millions potentially could be viable.” December 8 is also the token’s trading debut, which he described as bringing “tier one listings for the first time ever for a Cardano native asset,” ahead of a federated Midnight mainnet in Q1.
Hoskinson argued that Midnight is more than a high-profile airdrop; it is the lever that will force Cardano’s stalled DeFi pipeline to move. Looking back at 2024, he said there were KPIs they “hit very strongly,” such as launching the on-chain Treasury, making the first Treasury payout and fully decentralising the Constitutional Committee, but admitted that “we lagged behind in integrations and the growth of the DeFi ecosystem. It just couldn’t get coordinated and done.”
With Midnight in production, he claimed that in 2026 “there’s no optionality. It must get done. An exceedingly aggressive organization is basically forcing that to get done whether people like it or not, kicking and screaming.” He underlined the different posture he expects from the new entity: “The Midnight Foundation will be an active participant in DeFi, unlike the Cardano Foundation… that alone is going to bring a lot of TVL.”
RealFi is billed as the second engine of that revival. Hoskinson spotlighted RealFi, a lending platform that, he said, has already issued “over 1 million loans in Kenya and Uganda with my money just to test our credit model and our MFI relationships and how we process these types of things.” These are fast 30- to 90-day micro-loans that are now being “translated… into the DeFi world to be launched on Cardano.” He predicted RealFi “is going to be the single biggest driver along with Midnight for TVL and transactions on Cardano in the Cardano ecosystem.” RealFi, he added, represents “the aggregation of 10 years of careful thinking about how to do” banking the unbanked at scale.
Scaling And Cross-Chain Efforts
On the scaling side, Hoskinson said the Leios team is “building up faster than any other team we’ve had,” declaring, “we got to get Leios out next year, there’s no if, ands, buts about it.” Hydra, he noted, is already in mainnet use “with Delta DeFi, the Glacier Drop, Hydra Doom as well as the vending machine project,” and IOHK has been meeting with core contributors “about how we can unify the Hydra community and ecosystem together… so we can have dapp-by-dapp acceleration.”
He said upcoming work on StarStream, Plutus V4 and Aiken, together with Leios “at the base ledger,” is intended to “speed things up tremendously.” Having “learned our lesson,” he said, future base-layer and L2 components will be co-developed “hand and glove” rather than with the long lag that separated Cardano and Hydra.
Midnight’s reach is also meant to be cross-chain. Hoskinson reiterated that “the raison d’être of Midnight is it’s a layer two to everybody,” but said bridges will open gradually, roughly every two months, each one enabling “a hybrid dapp” on a new ecosystem and creating “a nice constant news cycle.” Behind the recent meme exchanges with Solana, he claimed, “we’re already talking about Midnight on Solana for privacy for Solana contracts and all types of RWAs,” before adding, “the reality is we’re all friends now.”
Hoskinson closed by acknowledging that 2025 “has been an incredibly, incredibly tough year,” citing more than 200 days of travel, four deaths “close to me” and an ongoing struggle with weight and stress, but insisted he is “doing okay.” The point of enduring that, he argued, is precisely the long-term revival he now claims has begun. “We can do anything if we put our mind to it,” he said. “We know our KPIs. We know what to do. And we know how to get it done. And we have wonderful products like Midnight to represent that. Lace to represent that. RealFi to represent that. Cardano to represent that.”
At press time, ADA traded at $0.4238.
Featured image created with DALL.E, chart from TradingView.com
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