Midnight (NIGHT) Exchange

About Midnight

NIGHT is the native token of Midnight, a privacy-focused partner chain to Cardano developed by Input Output (IOHK) under Charles Hoskinson, the co-founder of Ethereum and founder of Cardano. Unlike legacy privacy coins that conceal all transaction data, Midnight uses a dual-state architecture built on ZK-SNARKs and the Kachina Protocol — keeping two parallel records (public and private) and allowing selective disclosure to auditors, institutions, or counterparties without revealing underlying data. NIGHT generates DUST, a separate resource token that functions as gas for executing Midnight transactions and decays rather than accumulating. NIGHT launched on Cardano as a native asset on December 4, 2025, and the Midnight mainnet went live on March 30, 2026, with a group of federated node partners including Worldpay, Bullish, MoneyGram, Pairpoint by Vodafone, eToro, AlphaTON Capital, Google Cloud, Blockdaemon, and Shielded Technologies. The network is in a federated bootstrapping phase: a fixed group of Federated Node Operators handles block production, and on-chain delegation staking for individual holders is not yet live.

NIGHT tokenomics

Midnight minted the full supply of 24 billion NIGHT at genesis, with no inflation mechanism. Community distribution was conducted through two phases: the Glacier Drop (snapshot June 11, 2025; claim window August–October 2025) and the Scavenger Mine, reaching over 34 million eligible wallets across Bitcoin, Cardano, XRP, Solana, Ethereum, and BNB holders, according to CryptoBasic. CoinGecko lists a maximum supply of 24 billion NIGHT and about 16.6 billion NIGHT in circulation as of October 2026.
Total supply — 24,000,000,000 NIGHT; fixed at genesis with no additional minting
Community and developer allocation — 40% of total supply; distributed through Glacier Drop and Scavenger Mine phases
Team and investor allocation — 25% subject to a 1-year cliff followed by 4-year linear vesting
Genesis allocation — 10% distributed at TGE
Glacier Drop unlock schedule — over 4.5 billion airdropped NIGHT distributed in four equal 25% quarterly instalments over 360 days; start dates randomised between December 10, 2025 and early March 2026, meaning unlocks continue through December 2026
NIGHT → DUST relationship — holding unshielded NIGHT generates DUST over time, the renewable resource token used to pay for transaction execution on Midnight; DUST is shielded (private) and decays, preventing stockpiling
Binance Launchpool — NIGHT was distributed through Binance Launchpool, providing broad retail exposure at launch
Staking status — on-chain delegation staking for individual holders is not yet live; the network runs in a federated bootstrapping phase under Federated Node Operators; some custodians and exchanges (such as Kraken and P2P.org) offer their own reward features for NIGHT, separate from native on-chain delegation; the roadmap lets Cardano stake pool operators run Midnight validator nodes to earn NIGHT rewards

What determines NIGHT's value

NIGHT's primary value driver is adoption of the Midnight network after its March 30, 2026 mainnet launch: the mainnet is live with federated node partners, and the utility flow for NIGHT is DUST generation, which pays for private transactions and smart contract execution. The key question for the token is how much application and institutional activity builds on the live network. Individual on-chain delegation staking is not yet live, so for holders the near-term utility is DUST generation.

The secondary demand thesis is privacy infrastructure adoption: Midnight's selective disclosure model targets the compliance use case that full-anonymity chains cannot serve — regulated industries, DeFi protocols requiring audit trails, and institutional applications that need to prove transaction validity without exposing sensitive counterparty data. This positions Midnight as infrastructure for a different user segment than Monero or Zcash.

The supply-side constraint to watch is the ongoing quarterly unlock of Glacier Drop tokens through December 2026 — over 4.5 billion NIGHT distributed to airdrop participants is still thawing, and each quarterly tranche introduces predictable sell pressure until the unlock cycle closes.