Ethereum’s ‘World Computer’ Has A Privacy Problem, Charles Hoskinson Says As Midnight Eyes AI Agents

Hoskinson said Midnight City could launch fully in the coming months, enabling AI agents to operate with their own wallets and identities.

• Charles Hoskinson criticized Ethereum’s “world computer” concept.
• He argued that personal computing should prioritize privacy and user control.
• He promoted Midnight’s privacy tools, including zero-knowledge proofs and trusted execution environments, as an alternative.

Ethereum (ETH) was wrong with its “world computer” idea, Cardano (ADA) founder Charles Hoskinson said. He suggested using Midnight (NIGHT),, the privacy network developed alongside Cardano, as the solution.

He described Midnight’s approach as “What they got wrong with this idea of one giant shared world computer. Computers are personal,” he said. Public blockchains reveal too much of their users, Hoskinson said. He asked whether people want everyone to see “what you buy, who you talk to,” forever.

That problem grew as AI agents continued to proliferate. Personal data was needed for it to be useful, he said. He said he was not comfortable sharing that data with Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, or Dario Amodei, the CEO of Anthropic. 

He called his answer a “night frame,” his personal computing box built on Midnight. It employs three tools. Zero-knowledge proofs verified the validity of an outcome without revealing the details. Multi-party computation allowed multiple parties to compute on data without revealing their inputs. Trusted execution environments ran code in a sealed portion of a chip. Hoskinson summed up the design simply. “What goes in, no one else can see,” he said.

Midnight City Opens Soon

Midnight City will be fully operational “in the next few months,” said Hoskinson. It will be a simulated world where AI agents live, trade, and test each other. It already has about 14,000 beta testers, he said. Users will be able to host an agent with its own wallet and identity,” he said. That agent could rent a trading strategy developed by somebody else. The marketplace will reach Solana (SOL), Ethereum (ETH), Hyperliquid (HYPE), and Binance (BNB), Hoskinson said.

Warning On Wall Street

He said crypto might still chase small improvements in speed and fees, or it could "hand control of this industry back to Wall Street, have them run all the nodes.” He called on builders to show the world “what a crypto-native civilization would look like.” He also downplayed rivalries among chains and said users shouldn’t have to worry about which network settles their transactions.

Tokens Slides This Week

However, all three tokens were struggling. Midnight’s price was trading around $0.0401, down 19.3% over the past week. Cardano’s price dropped 13.1% during that period to about $0.2158. Ethereum’s price, meanwhile, dropped 6.7% this week to around $2,372.

On Stocktwits, the retail sentiment around NIGHT and ADA remained in the ‘bearish’ zone, while the retail sentiment around ETH stayed in the ‘extremely bearish’ zone over the past day.

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