Charles Hoskinson wants to write Cardano’s next programming language himself. The Cardano founder said he’s personally building a new language for the blockchain, one he said will handle intents and proof-carrying data (PCD) using Groth16 proofs.
“I’m actually personally developing a programming language for Cardano. It’s the first of its kind enabling intents + PCD via Groth16 proofs,” Hoskinson wrote.
That’s the whole announcement. He didn’t give the language a name, publish specs or say when it might ship.
It started with a community question
Hoskinson posted the news in reply to a community member who asked what makes Cardano useful as a highly decentralized base layer for blockchain use cases. His answer was the language, along with the promise that it will add advanced cryptography features to the chain.
Earlier the same week he teased something bigger for Midnight, the privacy-focused partner blockchain to Cardano.
“I’m working on a concept that only Midnight can bring to the cryptocurrency space to solve most of the problems. It’s gonna be the magnum opus for my career,” he said.
Nobody knows yet whether the two projects are connected. Hoskinson hasn’t said.
Hoskinson has had doubts about Haskell
He’s argued about programming languages in public for years. He likes Haskell, which was the original basis for Cardano’s development architecture.
In June 2022 he joined a conversation between Elon Musk and Jack Dorsey about which languages are worth using. Musk said he preferred C over the newer C++. Hoskinson replied that they should try Haskell.
Later, though, he admitted he hadn’t been sure Haskell was the right call for Cardano. In May 2024 he said he nearly went with Clojure at one point. He said Haskell won out because of Cloud Haskell, and because it let him use other tools such as Liquid Haskell and Agda.
In an April 2025 interview he went further, saying he would probably choose a different language if he could rewrite Cardano from scratch.
Where the new language would fit
Cardano developers can already pick from a few smart contract languages. Plutus is based on Haskell. Aiken is the other main option. Over on Midnight, privacy-focused contracts are written in a language called Compact.
Hoskinson’s project would join that list, but until he publishes a name, a spec or a release window, developers have nothing to write code in yet.
