Cardano (ADA) founder Charles Hoskinson says the project’s development pace has accelerated sharply as the blockchain ecosystem increasingly embraces artificial intelligence, privacy, and agentic finance.
Speaking at the 2026 Wyoming Blockchain Symposium last week, Hoskinson discussed how AI agents could change how people interact with financial networks, while highlighting Cardano’s efforts to build infrastructure for a more decentralized and secure digital economy.
Hoskinson pointed to the development of Midnight City, an experimental environment designed to explore interactions between AI agents. He said AI has also changed how quickly his team can build and improve the technology.
“We rewrote the game engine three times in the last six months. Every two weeks, we ship vast new features.” Hoskinson said “We’ve done integrations faster than I think we’ve ever done in 10 years at building Cardano or other things. It’s incredible the level of velocity and scale.”
Notably, the Cardano founder sees agentic systems as a potential gateway for the next wave of cryptocurrency adoption. In his view, AI agents could eventually handle tasks such as trading, commerce, and financial transactions on behalf of users, while blockchain technology provides the underlying control and verification layer.
 
He further argued that privacy and zero-knowledge technology will become increasingly important as agents gain access to sensitive information and greater authority over financial activity.
Cardano’s development strategy is also moving toward greater decentralization. Hoskinson said the network has progressed to a point where its community can establish priorities, fund development and approve upgrades through on-chain governance.
He also highlighted the project’s ongoing efforts to diversify its development infrastructure, including work on Rust, Go and JavaScript implementations alongside Cardano’s existing Haskell node.
Moreover, in a separate interview last month, Hoskinson argued that the emergence of AI-powered attacks makes development speed alone a poor measure of technological progress. He said Cardano’s emphasis on formal development and governance could become increasingly relevant as software faces more sophisticated security threats.
“People want stability, and stability only comes when you have a clear governance system, a clear software development system, and really good ideas about how to evolve your roadmap in a sustainable way over time that leaves no one behind,” he told Coindesk.
Hoskinson added that he remains optimistic about Cardano’s prospects over the next 12 to 24 months, although he acknowledged that the ecosystem’s growth will take time.
That said, Cardano’s continued expansion across AI, privacy, tokenization, and decentralized finance could also benefit ADA’s long-term value proposition. Greater network activity and adoption could increase demand for ADA through staking, governance, liquidity, and other ecosystem functions. If Cardano attracts more users, applications, and capital over the next 12 to 24 months as Hoskinson expects, this growth could provide a stronger fundamental backdrop for ADA and potentially support its value over time.
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