Charles Hoskinson, the founder of Cardano, has revealed that he is currently working on creating a new programming language for the blockchain, promising to add advanced cryptography features to it.
The new language will be able to handle intents and proof-carrying data (PCD) with the help of 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.
He made this announcement after a community member inquired about the unique benefits of Cardano as a highly decentralized base for blockchain use cases.
The creator of Cardano did not share any details of the language's name, specs, or release timeframe.
Earlier this week, he also hinted at an ambitious use case for Midnight, a partner blockchain for Cardano focused on privacy.
“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.
It's unclear if the two announcements are related.
Merits of programming languages
Hoskinson has shared his views on programming languages many times. He is a fan of Haskell, which was originally used as the basis of the development architecture of Cardano.
In June 2022, he jumped into a discussion between Elon Musk and Jack Dorsey on programming languages' merits.
After Musk shared his fondness for the C programming language instead of the modern C++, Hoskinson responded by suggesting they should try Haskell.
However, later on, Hoskinson admitted that the choice to develop Cardano with Haskell was not something he was sure about.
In May 2024, the founder revealed that he nearly picked Clojure at one point. He said Haskell was chosen eventually due to the presence of Cloud Haskell. Plus, he could use other technologies like Liquid Haskell, Agda, etc.
In an interview in April 2025, he said he would probably pick another language for programming if he could rewrite Cardano from scratch.
Currently, Cardano supports a few smart contract programming languages like Plutus (based on Haskell) and Aiken. Another privacy-focused language on Midnight is called Compact.