Cardano Founder Says AI Agents Essential for Midnight City

Cardano founder Charles Hoskinson is positioning artificial intelligence agents as essential infrastructure for the blockchain's future, defending recent experiments and detailing the role of AI within the network's privacy-focused Midnight sidechain. The push follows community criticism of an AI-generated influencer post shared on the official Input Output X account, which Hoskinson addressed in a statement on June 20.

Hoskinson clarified that the synthetic influencer content was part of ongoing development work on Midnight City, a digital simulation on the Midnight Network, and was shared to demonstrate emerging capabilities, not to mislead. He framed the use of AI as a necessary evolution for scaling, arguing that human teams alone cannot efficiently manage a community projected to grow into the millions. He pointed to the rapid growth of OpenClaw, an open-source AI agent platform, as a blueprint for handling community engagement and content distribution.

Central to this vision is Midnight City, described as a digital hub populated by autonomous AI agents that work, trade, and interact within an economy powered by the Midnight blockchain. The simulation, which launched with...