@MidnightNetwork brings real Blockchain Utility and true Rational Privacy to developers and users. No longer must users have to choose between being private and a blockchain being useful. With Midnight Network users have full control of their data, and are able to choose what to reveal and what to keep private, while still benefiting from the on-chain proof required for a blockchain to be useful. Finally, real privacy for crypto.
So that’s Midnight. A concept based on the separation of public and private state for every transaction. In Midnight, contracts are written in a TinyTS (a tiny version of TypeScript) dialect that we call Compact. The contracts are run on the user’s local machine, and a zk-Proof of correctness is provided without releasing the private inputs. Transaction data and metadata is private by default in Midnight, but can be disclosed as required for business, regulatory or audit purposes. Recursive zk-SNARKs enable this functionality and as a developer you get to work on blockchain based applications as you would normally, but with the extra feature of privacy by default.
This is not theory, there are countless use cases that will solve a multitude of problems people and organizations encounter. Some examples include: Vote systems where the voter gets a proof of having voted in a way that does not reveal which vote. Decentralized identity apps that verify that a person is older than 18, that they completed a full Know Your Customer (KYC) process etc, while not having to disclose in full their passport or credit report. Dark-pool exchanges that keep all bids and prices confidential until after a trade is settled. Health care systems that verify a patient has given consent and is eligible for certain services without having to disclose the full health record. Supply chains where the origin and components of products can be verified in supplier contracts without having to disclose the full contents. Our partners, Midnames, Triple Play and Webisoft are already building Decentralized Identity apps, private credit scoring, and confidential exchanges using verifiable credentials and ZK predicates.
Who is behind this? Well the people behind Shielded Technologies are quite well known within the cryptocurrency space. Midnight is a long term project, one that has been in the works for many years. It’s based on a number of pieces of research that have been carried out internally by a team of researchers from Input Output Global. The same team of researchers that are behind the Cardano project. The chief scientist at Input Output Global, Professor Aggelos Kiayias, and other academics including Professor Elias Koutsoupias have been writing a number of papers on the subject of sidechains, private smart contracts and also Minotaur a consensus protocol. Shielded Technologies are carrying out the engineering work on Midnight and the Midnight Foundation will assist in the project’s journey to full decentralisation. Midnight is also one of the first official partner chains of Cardano, and as such, all the security of the Cardano network will be inherited as Midnight will be using merged staking.
We are fueled by NIGHT tokens, which were launched in December 2025 after a multiphase Glacier Drop in what is arguably one of the most fair token distributions in the history of crypto. Unshielded governance and capital reserve, NIGHT is not a fee bearing currency. By simply holding NIGHT in your wallet, you will also earn DUST our shielded transacting and smart contract executing currency, which acts as the rechargeable battery of the network. DUST burns down and cannot be transferred. Night supply is capped at 24B and all block producers are paid in NIGHT. Future on chain governance will allow Night holders to vote for treasury direction and protocol upgrades.
As things are, as far as the market price is concerned, NIGHT has somewhat recovered from the wild swings it saw during its initial launch. As of mid-March 2026, NIGHT is sitting at about $0.050, with a market cap of about $831 million, with 16.6 billion tokens in the market (out of 24 billion total) and with the daily trading volume being more than $140 million. Currently, it is ranked at about 80th place by market cap. It managed to reach an all-time high of $0.11 during its early days. Now it is time to look beyond the market price and to see if there is some real-world adoption.
The pace of progress on the roadmap remains strong and we have just finished the Hilo phase of the roadmap. This involved having NIGHT live on the Cardano blockchain to provide liquidity and to further test out the tokenomics. We are now moving into the Kūkolu phase of the roadmap, which will see the deployment of a federated mainnet with a set of trusted validators (including a couple of partners from Google Cloud) who will create the genesis block and deploy the first production privacy applications. The subsequent phases will see the addition of further validators, full decentralization and further cross-chain hybridization. We continue to deploy applications to testnet, and the Midnight Academy and new AI tools are having a significant impact on the productivity of our development team.
I’m quite bullish on Midnight’s prospects. A future where there is heavy regulation on cryptocurrencies and users want to remain anonymous is likely to have a need for a privacy-preserving, compliant, decentralized platform for tokenized assets, AI or enterprise dApps. Midnight does more than just add privacy to a system, it makes the privacy that is used in that system actual, auditable and in the control of the user what I call sovereign. With a solid research base, a fair token model and a community of passionate developers building real products, Midnight is poised to become the backend of choice for the next wave of blockchain innovations while finally delivering on the promise of cryptocurrency: freedom and privacy.