Cardano Joins Linux Foundation's Confidential Computing Consortium

Cardano has joined the Linux Foundation’s Confidential Computing Consortium (CCC), shifting the focus to enterprise adoption and hardware-rooted trust.

What Happened: The announcement came during an hour-long “Midnight Booth” fireside chat at Consensus, where Charles Hoskinson, chief executive of Input Output (IO), and Eran Barak, chief executive of the Midnight development company, discussed how confidential computing will underpin Cardano’s privacy-first sidechain, Midnight.

“We just recently joined the Confidential Computing Consortium, you know, with Linux Foundation, and we’re right there with Microsoft and Amazon with Nitro. They’re talking about confidential computing and trusted hardware enclaves with GPUs for outsourcing AI data,” Hoskinson told the audience.

The CCC sets cross-industry specifications for enclave-based security; its membership signals that Cardano intends to align Midnight’s zero-knowledge roll-ups and decentralized-identifier (DID) stack with emerging hardware standards rather than rely solely on purely cryptographic shields.

“So, Midnight basically clicks into all of those different things and it gives you the ability to reason and think about how do I share, who do I share with, what do I own, what do they own, what’s the semantical value of the data that I’m sculpting, and then ultimately what’s the marketplace look like and how do I be an economic agent in that marketplace and I actually get paid for sharing these things as opposed to it all goes to the Magnificent Seven and they just tell me what I get,” Hoskinson added.

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The session unfolded in a relaxed, conversational style as Barak and Hoskinson responded to a few audience questions during the chat.

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Later in the chat, a questioner raised concerns about exchange suitability in the context of a two-token model, which combines a volatile governance token (Knight) with a stable capacity token (dust).

"We have the capacity to put disclosure at the smart-contract level and then let exchanges decide their suitability guidelines on a case-by-case basis," Hoskinson replied, adding that "selective disclosure is an absolute necessity."

Also, in an observation about the integration of legacy finance and crypto, he remarked, "You want broker-dealers, compliance, circuit-breakers, but you also want blockchain stuff... having infrastructure like Midnight is the only way to really do that."

Good to Go: As previously reported by Benzinga, Midnight is modular, programmable and enterprise-focused. It’s designed to process smart contracts written in a variant of the Cairo language used by the StarkNet protocol.

The sidechain is also rolling out a decentralized-identifier (DID) stack, which is being developed in collaboration with the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C).

According to Barak, the goal is to create a system where individuals and organizations can control their own digital identities and decide what information to disclose.

"Midnight hopes to be the fabric that enables AI to access personal private data in the right way that doesn’t violate our rights," he said, adding that "when you think about protecting your data, you really need to think about two pieces—protecting the data itself and protecting the metadata."

The session's final moments touched upon the Linux Foundation's Confidential Computing Consortium, which Barak mentioned in response to a question about hardware-level privacy.

"We're also members of the Linux Foundation's Confidential Computing Consortium, which is setting specifications for enclave attestation protocols and open-source reference code," Barak said.

The consortium, whose members include Microsoft Corp (NASDAQ:MSFT) and Amazon.com Inc (NASDAQ:AMZN), aims to develop standards for confidential computing, which uses trusted hardware enclaves to protect data and code from observation even by cloud providers.

The session concluded with Barak reporting more than 2,000 early builders on Midnight’s testnet, ranging from dark-pool prototypes and medical-record pilots to carbon-credit tracing for jet engines.

Because code and state are encrypted, IO’s own developer-relations team cannot inspect what is being deployed; teams volunteer information only in opt-in calls.

"I think if we finally bring blockchain technology that encompasses the privacy elements businesses need, the innovation is just unbelievable," Barak remarked.

At press time, ADA was trading at $0.68.