Benzinga and Yahoo Finance LLC may earn commission or revenue on some items through the links below. Cardano founder Charles Hoskinson landed UK bank Monument with $250 million in tokenized deposits at launch for his new privacy blockchain Midnight alongside partnerships with Google Cloud, MoneyGram, and Vodafone. Hoskinson said the deal makes sense because compliance officers can write scripts defining what’s allowed and how assets interact with other chains while staying compliant with UK regulation. He credited Fahmy Syed, who formed over 100 partnerships in nine months at the Midnight Foundation, with closing the deal. The partnership creates a direct path to syndicate similar deals with U.S. and European financial institutions and the Bank of England.
• A single bad hire can set a startup back years. Here are the 5 hires founders most often misjudge — and why
• Still Learning the Market? These 50 Must-Know Terms Can Help You Catch Up Fast Monument wants to step into what Hoskinson calls the “Web 2.5 space”—one foot in traditional regulated business and one foot in crypto with rules and control. “There really isn’t a bespoke chain for that,” Hoskinson said. Users in the next five to 10 years will no longer browse websites manually—they’ll delegate tasks to agents that handle crypto transactions. The platform combines privacy, chain abstraction, and smart compliance, and uses proofs to verify that agents perform as intended. Charles Hoskinson said that everyone everywhere can see crypto transactions forever, with no opt-out. “Then why do you want it with your money?” he said. Midnight uses zero-knowledge proofs to let users prove facts without revealing underlying data. Trending: Avoid the #1 Investing Mistake: How Your ‘Safe' Holdings Could Be Costing You Big Time Midnight uses two tokens: Knight and Dust. Knight is public, tradable on exchanges, and controls governance. Dust is private, non-transferable, consumptive, and not listed on exchanges. Knight generates Dust and consumes it in transactions. The separation solves Ethereum’s problem where speculators want prices up while users want prices down. Knight holders earn rewards when Bitcoin, Ethereum, or Solana users pay transaction fees to use Midnight. “You can list a privacy coin on exchanges that ban privacy coins,” Hoskinson said. Meanwhile, Midnight will likely be the first privacy coin listed in Japan and South Korea.