Midnight is a privacy sidechain ecosystem led by Input Output Global (IOG), based on Zero-Knowledge Proofs (ZK-SNARKs), aiming to achieve 'rational privacy': protecting sensitive business data and personal privacy while retaining the verifiability and usability of data on-chain. All content is sourced from official announcements, on-chain data, and public information from mainstream exchanges, excluding personal predictions.
One, key time nodes that have occurred
On December 4, 2025, the NIGHT token completed the minting of 24 billion tokens on the Cardano mainnet, with a total supply permanently fixed and no inflation mechanism.
On December 8, 2025, the project officially entered Phase 1 (Hilo stage), network activation, and the token economic model and on-chain governance were launched simultaneously.
On December 9, 2025, at 10:00 UTC, more than a dozen leading exchanges such as Binance, Bybit, OKX, Gate.io, MEXC, KuCoin, and BingX will simultaneously open NIGHT spot trading and deposit/withdrawal functions.
On December 10, 2025, at 00:00 UTC, the airdrop redemption portal officially goes live, and Glacier Drop and Scavenger Mine participants begin to unlock tokens in batches.
Two, airdrop distribution and unlocking mechanism (current community focus)
A total of 4.5 billion NIGHT tokens (accounting for 18.75% of total supply) have been distributed to the community through the following two methods:
Glacier Drop distributes approximately 3.5 billion tokens to over 170,000 eligible Cardano wallets;
Scavenger Mine spans 8 chains including Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Solana, with over 34 million actual participation addresses and a total allocation of 1 billion tokens.
The official adopts a 'progressive thawing' mechanism to control selling pressure:
Each participant is randomly assigned a thawing start date, evenly distributed between December 10, 2025, and March 9, 2026;
The first withdrawable amount is 25%;
The remaining 75% will be unlocked in three phases, every 90 days, with the final node on November 29, 2026;
The final grace period ends on February 27, 2027, and any unclaimed portion will enter the community treasury.
On-chain data shows that the actual redemption rate on the first day, December 10, is approximately 9.3%.
Three, mainnet roadmap (official latest confirmed version)
Phase 1: Hilo (launched, December 2025)
Complete token economic activation, all core code open source, developer testing environment ready.
Phase 2: Kūkōlu (Q1 2026)
The complete toolchain for the Compact language has been released, and the SideNet testnet has been upgraded to a federated mainnet, with the first batch of privacy-protecting dApps officially launched.
Phase 3: Mōhalu (Q2 2026)
Cardano staking pool operators (SPO) nodes have joined, initiating permissionless validator recruitment, greatly increasing the decentralization of the network.
Phase 4: Hua (Q3 to Q4 2026)
The mainnet is fully operational, with cross-chain privacy bridges supporting mainstream public chains such as Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Solana, with hybrid privacy DeFi protocols fully ready.
Four, current on-chain and ecological data
Circulating supply of approximately 1.125 billion tokens (initial unlocking portion + liquidity pool + initial exchange distribution);
24-hour highest trading volume of $384 million;
Fully diluted valuation (FDV) is approximately $4.3 billion;
Publicly announced collaborative projects include Dust Identity (supply chain physical anchoring ZK), ZKHoney (privacy stablecoin experiment), NightSwap (testnet DEX, TVL has exceeded $8 million in equivalent assets);
All core protocol code has been fully open-sourced under the GitHub Input Output organization, utilizing both TypeScript and Rust implementations.
Five, the actual impact on #Cardano ecology
From a technical perspective, Midnight is the first officially launched Partner Chain of Cardano, validating the feasibility of the entire architecture of Plutus + Hydra + Partner Chain.
Financially, NIGHT's launch day drove the ADA spot price up by as much as 23%, and from December 9-10, the staking rate on the Cardano chain increased by approximately 1.8%.
At the developer level, the number of active contract deployment addresses in Devnet has increased by 44.6% since November, with about 60% being non-Cardano native developers.
Six, conclusion
As of December 10, 2025, Midnight has successfully completed three major milestones: token minting, exchange listing, and the opening of the airdrop redemption portal, officially entering the Phase 1 wrap-up stage of the four-phase roadmap. The project has strictly followed plans in terms of technology selection, distribution fairness, and unlocking rhythm, with no significant security or technical incidents reported so far. The most critical observation points moving forward will be the launch of the federated mainnet in Q1 2026 and the actual performance of the cross-chain privacy bridge.
Official real-time information channels:
Official website: https://midnight.network
Redemption portal: https://claim.midnight.network
Block Explorer: https://explorer.midnight.network
(All data in this article comes from the Midnight official blog, IOG announcements, Cardano on-chain records, and third-party data aggregators such as CoinGecko and CoinMarketCap, and has completed multi-party cross-validation on December 10, 2025.)
