Cardano () co-founder Charles Hoskinson is outlining the features of a new privacy-focused protocol coming to the smart contract platform’s ecosystem.
In a new interview on Corey Casta’s Crypto Coins YouTube channel, Hoskinson says that ADA’s upcoming privacy protocol Midnight, which was announced last month, aims to create a confidentiality network of smart contracts, much like what Ethereum () did for Bitcoin (
Hoskinson says that Midnight aims to solve the paradoxical problem of having privacy and disclosure laws simultaneously.
“From a regulatory perspective, you’re not actually allowed to use blockchain systems [for privacy]. Why? There’s [the] Bank Secrecy Act, GDPR [General Data Protection Regulation], you have all these privacy departments.
Anytime you could engage in a regulated business, there’s a privacy requirement because regulated business requires you to give away some personally-definable information and there’s a privacy law on the other side of it that says you have to keep it a secret.
The problem is that if you try to do it in a blockchain setting, your private information becomes public to everybody… so it made sense to me to find a way to… create a confidentiality network, so like what Ethereum did to Bitcoin, where Ethereum said ‘we have programmability,’ Midnight does to [Cardano], where instead of having a privacy coin, what you do is you have a confidentiality network, you have smart contracts that are private.”
According to Hoskinson, this is the most difficult task Cardano developers have taken up until now, going as far as saying that it is making the development of ADA itself seem like child’s play.
“It’s a really hard product. It’s the hardest product we’ve ever worked on and it makes Cardano look like kid’s play.”
Cardano is changing hands for $0.31 at time of writing, a fractional gain on the day.
