Hoskinson and Lucas Rosa Develop New Cardano Programming Language

Charles Hoskinson announced on October 18 that he is personally developing a new programming language for Cardano. He named Lucas Rosa, an Aiken co-founder and Midnight’s tooling architect, as his collaborator on the project.

Aiken Co-Founder Works Alongside Hoskinson

Rosa, known online as @rvcas, co-founded Aiken and led its development for more than two and a half years. According to his project history, that work included designing the language’s features before transferring ownership and its license to Pragma for long-term stewardship.

Aiken is a programming language and development toolkit for Cardano smart contracts. Developers use it to define the rules governing whether transactions can spend assets or perform other contract-controlled operations.

Rosa currently lists his position as Tooling Architect at Midnight. His background spans compilers, distributed systems, and application infrastructure.

Hoskinson’s announcement identifies Rosa as a collaborator without assigning an organizational role to Midnight.

How Intents and Groth16 Proofs Connect

Intents describe an outcome a user wants to achieve and the conditions under which it is acceptable. A user could request an exchange of ADA for another token, specifying a minimum amount to receive and a maximum fee. Specialized participants called solvers can then find an execution path and construct transactions satisfying those conditions.

Proof-carrying data, or PCD, concerns information accompanied by cryptographic evidence that it complies with defined rules. The evidence can also cover its processing history, establishing that previous computational steps respected those rules. A recipient can check the proof without repeating the entire preceding computation.

Groth16 provides compact zero-knowledge proofs with relatively low verification complexity. It allows a party to demonstrate that a specified computation was performed correctly without revealing the private inputs used to produce the proof. Which application data remains public depends on the surrounding system’s design.

Combined, these concepts could allow an application to express acceptable outcomes and verify evidence that the relevant computational conditions were satisfied. The specific mechanism connecting them in the proposed language has not been described.

Connecting the Language to Cardano Validators

Cardano already provides cryptographic building blocks for proof-based applications. Plutus V3 includes BLS12-381 operations supporting efficient verification of compatible zero-knowledge proofs. Developers can use those primitives to build contracts that check evidence of computations performed outside the blockchain.

Verification consumes execution resources and contributes to transaction fees paid in ADA. The practicality of any implementation therefore depends on the proof system, verifier, and workload fitting within Cardano’s transaction limits.

Hoskinson’s post did not provide a language name, repository, specification, or release date. Its relationship with Aiken and Plutus also remains unspecified. The unresolved integration point is how a program written in the new language would generate a proof and make it available to a Cardano validator, connecting the user’s stated conditions with the contract authorizing settlement.