Midnight: Cardano's privacy chain
Charles Hoskinson launched Midnight, a privacy‑focused chain backed by roughly $200M and now valued near $1B, with an airdrop to about 37 million wallets aimed at enterprise compliance use cases (youtube.com). Midnight is marketed to organizations needing on‑chain data privacy—positioning itself as a bridge between public blockchains and regulated enterprise data needs (youtube.com).
Midnight will use two native assets: NIGHT as the governance token and DUST as a shielded utility token for private transactions and smart contracts. (midnight.network) IOG recorded the eligibility snapshot at 00:00 UTC on June 11, 2025 and limited Phase 1 eligibility to eight ecosystems — Cardano, Bitcoin, Ethereum, Solana, XRP Ledger, BNB Chain, Avalanche and Brave (BAT). ( ) Claim rules required each address to hold at least the USD-equivalent of $100 at snapshot time and explicitly excluded addresses on the U.S. Treasury OFAC Specially Designated Nationals list. (midnight.gd) Midnight published detailed conversion math and allocations — examples include 1 BTC = 696.9785 NIGHT and 1 ADA = 0.3466 NIGHT — and allocated 50% of the NIGHT Glacier allocation to Cardano participants and 20% to Bitcoin participants. (midnight.gd) The protocol pairs zero-knowledge proofs with a hybrid ledger capable of carrying both public and private payloads inside a single transaction, a design and rationale described on IOG’s Midnight pages. (iog.io) IOG and exchange reports say Midnight generated its genesis block and moved into operational/mainnet phases at the end of March 2026 after a multi-stage testnet program. ( ) The Glacier Drop distribution was run as a 60-day claim window followed by a public "Scavenger Mine" phase, with Midnight reporting early claim volumes of about 1.5 billion NIGHT in the first two weeks and later updates citing roughly 4.5 billion NIGHT claims across millions of participating addresses. ( )
