Cardano’s (ADA) recent stretch has mixed technical progress with public friction. Founder Charles Hoskinson has argued that the privacy-focused Midnight network could eventually surpass Zcash, pressed Gemini (NASDAQ: GEMI) to list ADA again, and pushed back against critics who say years of building haven’t translated into stronger token performance.
At the same time, the Cardano Foundation advanced a bid for a .ada internet domain, while Hoskinson criticized the same organization for leaving Midnight off a major conference display.
On September 28, Hoskinson replied to a bullish note from Weiss Crypto, saying Midnight would become larger than Zcash.
He pointed to selective disclosure, private agents, a DeFi kernel meant to work across major chains, and a stack that combines zero-knowledge proofs, trusted execution environments, and multiparty computation, alongside Cardano’s uptime and the planned Leios upgrade.
The gap remains wide. Around the time of the comment, NIGHT’s market capitalization sat near $443 million, while Zcash’s stood in the mid-$20 billion range.
Separate reporting around October 1 noted that ADA itself was still trading roughly 92 percent below its all-time high, even as Zcash held a far larger valuation and stronger recent momentum.
Hoskinson has framed Midnight as infrastructure for controlled privacy and cross-chain activity rather than a pure privacy coin, but he did not specify whether “bigger” referred to market value, users, or on-chain activity. Exchange access remains another sore point.
On October 6, after Gemini co-founder Tyler Winklevoss marked the exchange’s 11th anniversary, Hoskinson replied with two words: “List ADA.”
The request continues a multi-year campaign.
Gemini already supports several proof-of-stake assets, including Solana, Avalanche, Polkadot, Cosmos, and Tezos, yet it has not added Cardano’s token and has not publicly explained why.
Hoskinson previously estimated that the omission cost the exchange about $70 million in revenue over five years, comparing it to volumes on Binance and Coinbase.
He has raised the issue in interviews, at events, and once by posing with a handwritten “Wen ADA?” sign near a Gemini booth.
Governance and visibility have also collided.
At TOKEN2049 Singapore in early October, Hoskinson walked through the Cardano Foundation’s large booth and noted that Midnight—widely described as the ecosystem’s largest project, with its NIGHT token already trading on Binance as a Cardano native asset—did not appear among the featured teams. Projects such as Minswap, Iagon, SNEK, and GravityDEX did.
He jokingly called Midnight the “Where’s Waldo” of Cardano and suggested its privacy focus might explain the absence, then turned more serious, stating that the booth was a public asset funded by the community and urging holders to watch how treasury resources are used.
Midnight maintained a separate presence at the event.
The episode fits a longer pattern of disagreement between Hoskinson and the Foundation over representation.
Those tensions sit beside a defense of delivery.
In early October, after community members questioned whether spinning Midnight out as its own network hurt ADA holders and whether the year had produced enough activity, Hoskinson asked what else he was supposed to do.
He listed RealFi going live on mainnet on October 1 after public testing, Midnight’s network launch earlier in the year, NIGHT’s earlier debut as a Cardano native asset, the Pentad integration push involving USDCx, Pyth, staged LayerZero support, and Fireblocks plans for native tokens, plus work tied to Pogun, Midnight.city, Draper, and AlphaGrowth.
He noted that NIGHT itself was issued on Cardano and is managed through Cardano wallets.
However, the price has not followed the roadmap: holders continue to see ADA lag well below prior highs.
A separate thread from a July interview still frames how Hoskinson explains the pace.
He compared Cardano’s methodical path to Anthropic’s rise in artificial intelligence, arguing that Google and then OpenAI held early leads, yet Anthropic advanced by prioritizing a disciplined approach over raw speed.
In an environment of frequent exploits and AI-assisted attacks, he said, markets may increasingly favor security and governance over the fastest launch.
On the naming front, the Foundation announced on October 8 that its .ada application had moved into the next stage of ICANN’s new generic top-level domain program.
ICANN published advancing applications on Reveal Day, October 7.
The bid followed a Cardano governance action that passed with roughly 75 percent support.
Approval is not guaranteed; technical, financial, and operational reviews still lie ahead, with delegations from this round expected between 2028 and 2030.
If granted, .ada could sit alongside extensions such as .com and support shorter wallet addresses, links to decentralized identity tools such as Veridian, and domain tokenization.
Other crypto-focused strings, including .sol, .ethereum, .btc, and .bitcoin, are also in the round.
The updates show an ecosystem shipping privacy infrastructure, institutional integrations, and a formal internet-domain bid, while its founder remains publicly at odds with parts of the governance structure and with at least one major US exchange. It remains to be seen whether Midnight narrows the gap to Zcash. And whether ADA’s price eventually reflects the buildout remains an open market question.