The launch of the Midnight Network, a privacy-focused partner chain on Cardano, has been marked by a significant market event. Its native token, NIGHT, entered active trading and recorded over $1 billion in 24-hour trading volume, briefly pushing its market capitalization above the $1 billion threshold. This trading activity was so substantial that NIGHT's turnover on the Bybit exchange ranked ahead of XRP's.
Charles Hoskinson, the founder of Cardano, reacted to the milestone on social media, calling the $1 billion volume "absolutely remarkable" for a new token. Bybit, the world's second-largest cryptocurrency exchange, accounted for over $650 million of this volume, with significant contributions from Binance, OKX, KuCoin, and Gate.io, indicating widespread market interest.
Technically, Midnight Network is not a meme token but a programmable privacy network built on zero-knowledge proofs and a dual-ledger architecture. It aims to offer "practical privacy" with selective disclosure, targeting enterprise, identity, and compliant DeFi applications. The network operates as a partner chain to Cardano, with ADA remaining the settlement layer, thereby expanding the ecosystem's capabilities without compromising its core design.
The NIGHT token was distributed via a community-centric "Glacier Drop," allocating over 4.5 billion tokens to holders across multiple blockchains including Cardano, Bitcoin, Ethereum, Solana, and XRP. Following the launch, the NIGHT price surged from below $0.05 to trade around $0.069, exhibiting a volume-to-market-cap ratio of 96.5%, signaling intense speculative activity.
Analysts suggest that Midnight's successful debut redefines the Cardano ecosystem as a multi-network stack, now capable of handling privacy, compliance, and scalability. The network's developer-friendly smart contract language, Compact, is designed to lower the barrier to building privacy-preserving applications.
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