Midnight City: Hoskinson’s Plan for an AI Agent That Trades While You Sleep

In an interview during TOKEN2049, Charles Hoskinson gave an example of a merchant who receives cryptocurrency payments and wants the proceeds converted into a stablecoin every 15 minutes. An AI agent could carry out that recurring instruction if it had access to the funds, a trading strategy, and permission to use a connected trading venue.

Hoskinson placed that example within his plans for Midnight City. The virtual environment already lets people observe autonomous agents, while the financial workflow he described would require additional wallet, identity, and DeFi integrations.

An Agent With a Wallet, Instructions, and Protected Skills

Midnight City provides a setting in which agents act and interact. Hoskinson described extending their work beyond the virtual environment so they could perform assigned tasks involving assets on different blockchain networks.

He connected that goal to Nightframe, a proposed private computing environment combining a trusted execution environment, multiparty computation, and zero-knowledge technology. In his account, these components would protect information the agent needs to process while allowing it to carry out authorized actions.

For the merchant’s stablecoin conversion, the agent would need to know which assets it could use, where it could trade, and what strategy to follow. It would also need a wallet capable of interacting with the relevant applications. The merchant’s instruction would define the task; access to funds and trading services would determine whether the agent could execute it.

Hoskinson described a marketplace where agents could obtain specialized skills from other developers. A trading script, for example, could be rented for use inside a protected environment without disclosing its source code to the customer. The developer would provide a capability to the agent while retaining control of the underlying program.

Midnight Passport and Delegated Authority

Midnight Passport would connect users’ identities with their wallets and the information they choose to disclose to applications. Hoskinson described account access using phone security features such as a fingerprint, PIN, or passkey.

The identity system would also support verified claims. A user could prove that a condition required by a service had been met without providing every detail behind that claim. Hoskinson connected this selective disclosure to zero-knowledge proofs.

In his proposed agent workflow, the agent would have an identity and wallet of its own. Its authority to act with a user’s assets would come from that user. A merchant could therefore authorize a recurring conversion task while defining which funds and services the agent may use.

Hoskinson also discussed keeping a record of activity when assets move among networks. He described a transaction trail available to the user for accounting and tax purposes and mentioned CoinTracker as a possible connected service. The proposed arrangement would let authorized parties obtain the records they need without making the user’s full trading history public.

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From Midnight to DeFi on Other Networks

Hoskinson compared Midnight’s intended role to a “VPN for DeFi.” He described using Midnight to coordinate activity involving other blockchain networks while protecting selected information about the person behind the transactions.

Bitcoin provided one example. Hoskinson outlined a possible route in which Bitcoin-related assets could be connected to financial applications on Cardano, used in relation to a private stablecoin on Midnight, and then moved toward another network. A user could select applications manually or give an agent authority to coordinate permitted steps.

That workflow requires connections among asset infrastructure, DeFi applications, Midnight’s privacy functions, Passport, and compatible wallets. Hoskinson described the route as a proposed use case, without presenting a completed service that executes the entire sequence.

For wallet access, he reported that open wallet support had first come to Cardano. He identified an implementation involving WingRiders as a planned step toward bringing that support to Midnight.