- Brave Wallet now supports Cardano, letting 86 million users swap tokens and manage assets directly.
- Cardano’s shift to smaller dev teams like Aiken aims to speed updates and allow broader input.
Cardano has moved forward with the recent incorporation of Brave Wallet, making its blockchain capabilities available to 86 million users. The announcement was made on May 12 in a common press release from Brave Software and Input Output Global (IOG), the organization that has developed Cardano. The development integrates users to directly interact with the Cardano blockchain for token exchange, governance, and asset management.
Cardano founder Charles Hoskinson discussed the merge in a May 13 post. He characterized it as the first installment of a larger series he calls “fixing broken windows” — a series of projects first proposed in the planning stages of Midnight, a privacy-oriented sidechain. That particular partnership, which was revealed in 2024, had been in the works since 2022 but was held up due to delays from an unknown cause.
Hoskinson has confirmed that multiple other integrations of this sort are currently in active development. These are anticipated to move at pace over the coming few months and feature projects aimed at widening the presence of Cardano-native assets and enhancing their usability across platforms.
Cardano to Open Doors for Third-Party Developers
Hoskinson also outlined a shift in Cardano’s internal operation, seeking to recruit more third-party developers to the network’s future. This shift breaks away from the strict structure that once led its ecosystem. He conceded that although the initial development philosophy had been secure and complete, it also kept contributions at a distance from the outside and produced slow feature rollouts.
We are at a very exciting inflection point with respect to Cardano's engineering and the diversity of ideas and teams. In the beginning there was one philosophy that was rigorous, safe, and effective, but it also deeply alienated many who wanted to contribute, prevented new ideas…
— Charles Hoskinson (@IOHK_Charles) May 9, 2025
By 2025, the network itself intends to depend increasingly upon smaller development groups like Aiken and Midgard, but continue to have oversight through IOR and traditional verification techniques like Agda. Hoskinson stated that this change is intended to accommodate faster release schedules and adaptive project implementation without compromising the protocol’s technical requirements.
Some are always unhappy with change and will look for easy scapegoats and want a return to days that never actually existed. But many will welcome a real opportunity to contribute, the faster pace of development, and the competition of ideas,
Privacy Sidechain Midnight Adds Another Layer to Cardano Plans
The Brave Wallet transaction isn’t just about simple access; it also relates to the longer-term strategy around Midnight, which is to address the privacy constraints of public ledgers. Midnight Chief Executive Eran Barak described this previously this year, how despite transparency being touted as an advantage, the latter also brings risks. Exposure of metadata can go on to track identity, which deters adoption in industries such as business and healthcare.
BREAKING NEWS:
MIDNIGHT WILL PROVIDE FREE TRANSACTIONS FOR USERS THROUGH NFTS 😱😱🔥🔥@IOHK_Charles says Midnight could offer free TXs for users using NFTs as access passes , each granting a set number of TXs per day. "All of a sudden you have the whole Web2 business model,… pic.twitter.com/4bhqCd0pMR
— Mintern (@MinswapIntern) May 11, 2025
The news from IOG and Brave mentions that the new integration shall lay the foundation for greater interaction with Cardano governance processes along with possible Midnight privacy tools. That is more than a wallet feature – now it is a part of an entire network strategy.
