Bitcoin, ADA, and a Midnight Circle: The Pogun DeFi Saga

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Cardano founder Charles Hoskinson, that tireless beacon of optimism you meet at crypto conferences as if he were delivering a sermon to a very enthusiastic choir, recently explained why Midnight-the privacy network people either pretend to have heard of or miss entirely-might be the essential spice in Bitcoin DeFi. “Bitcoin users want privacy,” he proclaimed, “and Cardano could do a lot of the heavy lifting on the programming side.” It sounded almost heroic, like a kitchen appliance promising to whisk your worries away with a single beep.

He laid out a scenario in which Midnight acts as the private coordination layer, a discreet backstage pass that lets Bitcoin holders generate yield on their own terms-no need to enlist the services of a mortgage broker with a couch full of jargon. Then trudging in comes Pogun, a system meant to ferry Bitcoin-based decentralized finance into Cardano. Hoskinson described Pogun as a circle, a sort of swaggering three-way power move among BTC, ADA, and NIGHT, as if the crypto world could be solved by forming the world’s most profitable triangular sandwich.

On X, a reader pressed the matter: what would this do for the ADA ecosystem? “What would be the point in holding ADA over BTC? Are we building against our own core token on which depends the whole incentive system?” the inquisitor asked, sounding like someone who just misplaced both their sense of humor and their wallet.

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“Every single transaction required ADA to happen. The Bitcoin user paid a fee in ADA, but didn’t see it,”

– Charles Hoskinson (@IOHK_Charles) May 3, 2026

Hoskinson, never one to let a good tweet go to waste, clarified that yes, every transaction would hinge on ADA somehow, with the prospect that the fee paid in ADA would be visible to no one except the ledger gods. In other words, ADA’s utility could get a nice little nudge, like a plant that suddenly discovers it has a new sunny window to photosynthesize in.

Pogun, the alleged star of the show, is promised to deliver a full BTC liquidity and credit engine: a non-margin credit market in the second quarter, a yield-generating DApp in the third, and a BitVM-powered, trust-minimized Bitcoin bridge in the fourth. It’s all very ambitious, as if someone crammed a whole PhD into a whiteboard and then asked it to dance.

In the end, the aim is to turn idle BTC into productive capital on Cardano, with mainnet launches stretched out across 2026 like a very long cheese-wheel of plans. The project page calls Pogun a practical bridge between two stubbornly well-armed ecosystems, promising that you won’t have to surrender custody to a centralized intermediary just to earn a few sats while you sip your coffee and pretend you understand the difference between a yield and a hammock.

Cardano Pogun project

Pogun’s goal is to bring Bitcoin-based decentralized finance to Cardano, practically letting Bitcoin holders borrow and earn yield on their holdings through Cardano-without handing custody to some centralized intermediary who keeps a tidy desk and a suspicious amount of free time. The lending component is targeted for public release in the second quarter, should the stars align and the servers stop throwing occasional tantrums.

Pogun is part of nine proposals submitted by Cardano builder Input Output Group to supercharge the network, with a focus on scaling Cardano to improve transaction throughput and to push into Bitcoin DeFi-the crypto version of expanding a village by adding a few more traffic lights and a bigger map.

The centerpiece of the proposals is a major consensus upgrade, Leios, which Input Output claims will boost Cardano’s transaction processing capacity by anywhere from 10 to 65 times, aiming to exceed 1,000 transactions per second. Leios is slated for a test release in June and full deployment by the end of 2026, which, if you are keeping score, sounds like a plan that mutters to itself, then finally gets around to muttering loudly enough for the rest of us to hear.

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2026-05-03 12:48