Charles Hoskinson Slams Cardano (ADA) Booth Over Midnight's TOKEN2049 Omission

Midnight Missing From the TOKEN2049 Booth

Charles Hoskinson, founder of Cardano (ADA), publicly took issue with his own ecosystem's TOKEN2049 booth on Wednesday, October 7, after the display was found to omit the Midnight Network, the largest project across the entire Cardano ecosystem. In a walkthrough posted on X, Hoskinson showed viewers the projects represented at the booth, from infrastructure teams down to SNEK, the network's meme coin, which had earned a spot on the wall. Midnight, the privacy-focused blockchain built alongside Cardano and often positioned as a Layer 3 network, appeared nowhere in the branding. The omission stood out because NIGHT, Midnight's token, already trades on Binance as a native Cardano asset, which makes it the ecosystem's most recognizable project outside ADA itself. TOKEN2049 ranks among the industry's largest conference stages, so leaving out the flagship project is difficult to read as an accident. Hoskinson attributed the exclusion to governance politics and indicated that the Cardano (ADA) Foundation had a role in deciding what made it onto the display, joking that the project might be too private to show itself on a public wall. He then set the humor aside and wrote in his own post that “the booth is a public asset for Cardano. It was funded by the Cardano community.” That framing carries weight because Cardano's treasury, which underwrites community spending of this kind, is funded and governed through ADA holders and their delegates, the practical core of its governance token model, and the holders who delegate ADA to stake pools ultimately pay for what the ecosystem shows the world. The Cardano price added a soft market backdrop to the dispute, slipping 5.7% over the past 24 hours.

@IOHK_Charles · X post

Wrote in his own post.

View on X

Midnight Turns Toward Solana

Hours before Hoskinson's walkthrough, Midnight announced that it plans to support Solana wallets, a move that reframes the booth dispute as more than a branding quarrel. At its Solana Summit appearance, the team told attendees that Solana users will be able to run private swaps natively, with no extra software install required, and Hoskinson publicly welcomed the expansion in a quote post of his own. Private swaps would let users convert assets without a centralized intermediary, the core promise that made Midnight Cardano's flagship privacy bet. The gesture placed him in the odd position of endorsing Midnight's outreach to a rival chain on the same day the project's logo went missing from Cardano's biggest conference display. Neither side has published technical documentation for the wallet integration, so how private transfers will be routed between the two networks stays unconfirmed for now. The friction also feeds a longer political story. Relations between Hoskinson and the Cardano (ADA) Foundation over governance and the ecosystem's direction have been strained for months; in June, a crypto fund founder called for his removal, and the demand set off a fierce community debate that never fully settled. The tension has practical stakes, because the treasury that funds ecosystem marketing and development sits under the same governance process both sides invoke. The Foundation's on-chain footprint has grown in the meantime: its CIP-0113 token standard went live, giving Cardano issuers freeze and seize powers over issued tokens. Hoskinson has also pressed exchanges directly, renewing his “List ADA” call to Gemini over what he describes as lost revenue for the network. For Midnight, the Solana opening is commercially significant, since wallet reach determines who can actually use the privacy chain. The irony is difficult to miss: a project built inside the Cardano ecosystem is being welcomed on Solana while its own branding goes missing from the largest Cardano booth in the industry's biggest conference hall.

@IOHK_Charles · X post

Told attendees.

View on X

A Treasury Question for ADA Holders

Our reading: the load-bearing record here is Hoskinson's own posts. They frame the booth as a community asset, which turns a branding decision into a governance test for ADA holders and their delegates. The Cardano Foundation has not published a response explaining the curation call, and Midnight's absence remains unaccounted for in any official channel. Two markers are worth watching: whether the Foundation or the booth organizers explain the decision, and whether Midnight's Solana expansion becomes a template for other Cardano-native teams weighing their reach. NIGHT's Binance listing gives the dispute a market audience, so a prolonged standoff would play out in public, and holders may yet raise the curation question through the same governance channels that fund such spending.