Cardano founder Charles Hoskinson said he will fly to Japan this week for a multi-city community tour focused on Midnight, the privacy-focused network being developed in Cardano’s orbit, while hinting that new “commercially critical integrations” and major launch partners are nearing the finish line.
In a Jan. 22 video recorded from Colorado, Hoskinson framed the trip as both a reconnection with what he called Cardano’s “most critical component” and a staging ground for the next execution phase he wants the ecosystem to pursue: making leading applications meaningfully more competitive by combining Cardano and Midnight capabilities.
Midnight, Privacy, And A Cardano DeFi Push
Hoskinson said the tour will span Sapporo, Osaka, Fukuoka, Naha, and Tokyo, covering “the entire Japanese archipelago” over roughly two weeks. He described the agenda as part Midnight introduction, part Cardano status update, and part technical pitch for what builders can do when the two stacks interoperate.
“As many of you know, Japan is why Cardano exists. There would be no Cardano if there was no Charles and there would be no Cardano if there was no Japan,” Hoskinson said. “I went to Japan in 2015 and with our partners from Emurgo amongst others we were able to go about all of Japan and convinced them that Cardano needs to exist. So they put up the money we built it and the Japanese community still is the largest and strongest Cardano community in the entire world with more than half the supply there.”
That legacy, in Hoskinson’s telling, makes Japan a natural first stop for positioning Midnight not as a side project but as a strategic lever for Cardano adoption.
Hoskinson said that “about [the] middle part of this year” he intends to “aggressively push for the top 15 Cardano dapps to go through a overhaul and get some additional resources.” His stated goal is not incremental polish, but step-function improvements in usage and distribution.
“In my view the best place to take it is to focus on the DeFi ecosystem and the Cardano dapp ecosystem and ask the question how do we make those Cardano dapps more competitive? How do we 10x their TVL and their transactions?” he said. “Get them listed on major exchanges and get them where they need to go.”
The connective tissue, he argued, is Midnight’s privacy mandate, paired with new infrastructure components he referenced, including “new bridges,” “new stablecoins,” and “new oracles.” The pitch is that dapps cannot win on throughput and fees alone; they need new product surfaces that attract users and transactions from other ecosystems.
“My view is Midnight is going to be an indispensable component in that because it’s not good enough just to make them better, faster, and cheaper,” Hoskinson said. “The dapps have to offer new things and being able to combine Cardano technology and Midnight technology together. What that means is that we can actually offer privacy to the masses to Solana, to Ethereum, to Bitcoin and other places.”
Hoskinson also linked the push to Cardano’s broader engineering roadmap, citing Hydra progress while using a roads-and-traffic analogy to argue that application demand, not base-layer capability, needs to be the next constraint to break.
Japan Tour https://t.co/MTq8Trp0UP
— Charles Hoskinson (@IOHK_Charles) January 22, 2026
After Tokyo, Hoskinson said he will head to Hong Kong for Consensus, where he plans to keynote and “have some cool announcements for Midnight along with some big big partners” tied to the network’s mainnet launch. He stressed he would not disclose counterparties until agreements are finalized, saying he expects people to be “very happy” with upcoming “commercially critical integrations.”
At press time, ADA traded at $0.3595.
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