Cardano founder Charles Hoskinson says Midnight’s push into traditional finance is only getting started as U.K.-regulated Monument Bank moves closer to bringing as much as £250 million in retail customer deposits onto the privacy-focused blockchain.
Responding to a post saying the Monument Bank integration could go live “in days,” Hoskinson declared:
“This is just the beginning. All the assets of the world want some NIGHT Mode.”
His remark points to a much broader ambition for Midnight: becoming privacy infrastructure for regulated real-world assets beyond crypto-native applications.
Monument and the Midnight Foundation initially announced the project in March, making the bank the first U.K.-regulated lender planning to tokenize retail deposits on a public blockchain. The first phase targets up to £250 million in customer deposits.
Monument Bank Plans to Bring Retail Deposits On-Chain
The initiative is substantially different from issuing an independent stablecoin.
Each tokenized deposit will represent one pound held at Monument Bank on a one-to-one basis. The deposits are intended to continue earning interest, remain redeemable in pounds sterling and retain applicable Financial Services Compensation Scheme protections.
Monument manages approximately £7 billion in deposits, making the planned £250 million rollout only an initial portion of its wider deposit base.
The first phase is intended to establish tokenized bank deposits on Midnight. Later phases envision giving customers access to tokenized real-world assets, including private equity, commodity funds and structured products through Monument’s existing banking interface.
This builds on earlier comments from Hoskinson that banks and insurance companies were already exploring real-world assets on Midnight.
November Launch Followed Earlier Delay
The Monument rollout was originally expected earlier in 2026 but encountered a custody bottleneck.
In September, Monument founder Mintoo Bhandari said the project had been delayed while the bank searched for a custodian capable of meeting regulatory requirements and supporting Midnight’s zero-knowledge infrastructure. At the time, Bhandari indicated that a retail rollout was expected around November 2026.
The latest “in days” timeline came from the Cardano/Midnight community following Monument and Midnight Foundation representatives appearing together at the Digital Asset Summit in London.
Hoskinson directly responded to that post with his “just the beginning” comment.
However, Monument Bank and the Midnight Foundation have not publicly confirmed the exact “in days” launch date in the official material reviewed. Accordingly, the £250 million should also be understood as the first-phase target, rather than confirmation that £250 million has already moved on-chain.
Why Hoskinson Says the World’s Assets Want “NIGHT Mode”
Hoskinson’s reference to “NIGHT Mode” ties the Monument project to Midnight’s central proposition: allowing institutions to use public blockchain infrastructure without exposing sensitive financial information.
Midnight combines programmable privacy with selective disclosure using zero-knowledge technology, allowing transactions to satisfy audit and compliance requirements while protecting private data.
Its economic system uses two components.
NIGHT is the network’s native governance and utility token. Holding NIGHT generates DUST, a non-transferable resource used to execute transactions and smart contracts on Midnight.
That architecture is intended to make costs more predictable for institutions because NIGHT itself does not have to be spent for each transaction.
Hoskinson has increasingly presented Midnight as a major route for bringing external users and assets into the broader Cardano ecosystem. He recently said every NIGHT holder is already a Cardano user and argued that Midnight represents the type of project Cardano was originally built to support.
NIGHT Jumps as Midnight Expansion Continues
NIGHT is trading around $0.048, up approximately 13.7% over the past 24 hours, according to CoinMarketCap. Its circulating market capitalization is close to $795 million, with approximately 16.6 billion NIGHT currently in circulation.
That puts Midnight well below Cardano’s valuation, although Hoskinson has said NIGHT could eventually surpass ADA by market capitalization. The Crypto Basic recently calculated that NIGHT would need to approach roughly $0.40 to match Cardano’s then-current market cap under the same circulating-supply assumption.
The Monument integration does not guarantee additional NIGHT price appreciation. However, it provides a real-world test of the thesis behind Midnight: whether regulated financial institutions can move conventional assets onto public blockchain infrastructure while retaining the privacy and compliance standards traditional banking requires.
If the first £250 million phase succeeds, Monument’s longer-term plan could extend beyond tokenized deposits into investment products and lending—giving more substance to Hoskinson’s assertion that this is only the beginning.