Cardano’s privacy-focused Midnight network is deepening its Japanese presence after Input Output announced that the NIGHT token will be listed on OKCoinJapan starting October 13, 2026. The exchange, part of OK Group and a registered crypto-asset platform in Japan, becomes the second Japanese venue to support NIGHT after S.BLOX, a Sony Group company, added it in August 2026.
The listing arrives during a busy stretch for Midnight. Permissionless smart contract deployment recently went live on the Midnight mainnet, giving builders more freedom to deploy contracts directly and enabling applications to deploy contracts on behalf of users. Input Output framed the OKCoinJapan move as “another step forward” for Midnight’s work to bring programmable privacy to a wider audience.
Cardano’s onchain metrics have also picked up. Santiment data showed daily active addresses reached 27,500 on October 7 and 27,200 on October 8, about 1.7 times the September weekday average. The jump coincided with the CIP-0113 token standard going live on mainnet on October 7. Cardano settled 542,551 transactions on October 8, averaging 6.28 TPS on its busiest day of the past week, and surpassed 125 million mainnet transactions. At the time of reporting, ADA was up 6.47% over 24 hours to $0.244, while NIGHT rose 9% to $0.049.
Founder Charles Hoskinson has also stirred debate by claiming Midnight will eventually surpass Zcash. On September 28, responding to a bullish note from Weiss Crypto, he pointed to selective disclosure, private agents, a cross-chain DeFi kernel, zero-knowledge proofs, trusted execution environments, multiparty computation, Cardano’s uptime, and the planned Leios upgrade. At the time, NIGHT’s market cap was near $443 million, compared with Zcash’s mid-$20 billion range. Hoskinson also renewed his long-running push for Gemini to list ADA, replying “List ADA” to Tyler Winklevoss and estimating the omission has cost the exchange about $70 million in revenue over five years.
Governance frictions remain visible. At TOKEN2049 Singapore, Hoskinson criticized the Cardano Foundation’s booth for not featuring Midnight, while the Foundation separately advanced its .ada internet domain application into the next stage of ICANN’s program. The combined developments show an ecosystem shipping privacy infrastructure, exchange access, and domain-level identity tools, even as public disagreements and slow ADA price recovery continue to shadow the buildout.
