Cardano founder Charles Hoskinson says Midnight’s new partnership with Monument Bank could be one of the biggest commercial deals yet for the privacy-focused network, after the UK lender revealed plans to put retail customer deposits on a public blockchain. In a post on X, Cardano’s founder wrote:
“This is one of the largest deals we’ve ever done and could bring hundreds of millions to billions of TVL to the Midnight ecosystem. I’m very proud of Fahmi Syed and her team at the Midnight Foundation for the hard work they’ve done in negotiations with Monument. Midnight is the home of Web 2.5 ventures.”
Why Cardano Is So Passionate
Memorial, a UK digital bank that serves the affluent segment, said it plans to be the first UK bank to tokenize retail customer deposits on a public blockchain, while Midnight provides the underlying network and privacy-preserving infrastructure.
The first stage is concrete. The memorial said it refers to £250 million of deposit tokens, each token representing a one-to-one claim to the funds held in the bank. Those deposits are intended to be fixed interest, redeemable in high pounds and protected within the existing regulatory framework, including the Financial Services Compensation Scheme. Reminder says it currently serves more than 100,000 clients and has savings deposits of more than £7 billion, giving the project a real base on the sheet rather than a starting point for testing.
That setup is in the middle of Midnight’s pitch. Tokenized deposits are not created as a new synthetic asset or offshore wrapper, but as a blockchain mirror of a traditional bank deposit. According to the release, transaction data on Midnight will be protected and visible to Monument and its customers only, a structure intended to maintain the confidentiality required by banks while using public railways.
Midnight Foundation President Fahmi Syed used the agreement to make a broader point about the institution’s blockchain adoption. Financial firms, he said, are struggling with the tension between openness and banking secrecy. Midnight, in his words, is designed to “represent assets in social networks” while protecting “sensitive financial information,” and the release of Monument is intended to show that controlled products can move over the chain without going outside of compliance with existing laws and consumer protection frameworks.
The long-term road explains why Hoskinson is talking about billions rather than the initial £250 million. The second phase will expand beyond token deposits into tokenized investment products delivered through the Memorial app, including access to private equity, commodity funds and structured products. The third phase will introduce Lombard-style lending, which allows customers to borrow against investments without selling them. Monument also said that its technology company intends to expand tokenized deposit functionality to other institutions through its Banking-as-a-Service platform.
In that sense, Hoskinson’s TVL projection reads less like a claim about one-day inflows and more like a statement about the size of the pipeline if emissions expand as planned. The rough figure revealed so far is £250 million for the first phase. But if Memorial can move from a deposit token to investment products, lending and third-party empowerment, Midnight will compete with a balance-sheet-linked operation that is structurally different from DeFi currencies.
At midnight, the partnership is also a live test of its core thesis: that privacy-enhancing infrastructure can enable public blockchains to be used for regulated finance. If Reminder works beyond the pilot, the deal will give the network connected to Cardano something that many crypto projects lack, a use case in a bank tied to real deposits, real customers and a product roadmap built to stay within the boundaries of traditional currencies.
At press time, Cardano traded at $0.26.
The featured image was created with DALL.E, a chart from TradingView.com
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