Midnight’s mainnet has surpassed one million cumulative transactions, with Input Output Group confirming the milestone on Oct. 27 after Midnight Explorer reported a total of 1,019,963 transactions.
Daily activity showed a sharp acceleration. The explorer recorded 47,714 transactions on Oct. 26, compared with 128 on Sep. 27, a difference of 47,586 transactions and an increase of roughly 372.8 times over the 29-day period.
The surge followed Midnight’s Sep. 28 network update, which enabled permissionless smart contract deployment on mainnet. Developers could begin deploying directly without a mandatory security review on Preprod, the project’s preproduction environment. This was described as a planned step after the initial March rollout, when work focused on operational stability, security, and developer preparation.
Wallet access advanced alongside contract deployment. Gero Wallet version 2.7.1, released Sep. 16, introduced shielded mainnet balances and a connector capable of proving, funding, and submitting transactions. It also supported sponsored DUST fees, allowing one wallet generating DUST to cover another wallet’s transaction costs.
Midnight separates its native asset from its transaction resource. NIGHT is the public, unshielded native and governance token, while DUST is a shielded, nontransferable resource used for fees and smart contract execution. Registered NIGHT holdings generate DUST, and transaction costs consume DUST without spending the underlying NIGHT. A DUST address takes seven days to reach full charge.
Institutional initiatives also form part of Midnight’s roadmap. The partnership with Monument Bank targets an initial phase of £250 million in tokenized retail deposits, with each token representing funds held on a one-to-one basis and remaining redeemable in pounds under existing banking protections. Later phases include tokenized investment products and lending secured against customer investments.
For analytics, Midnight integrated with Token Terminal on July 23 to track transaction counts, block times, and contract deployments, while Dune covers public-state metrics such as NIGHT flows, validator block production, and DUST generation. Neither milestone post disclosed active-address counts or a breakdown of applications behind the transactions.
On U.S. policy, the Midnight Foundation submitted comments on the Treasury’s joint FinCEN and OFAC proposal concerning the GENIUS Act, arguing that selective disclosure and zero-knowledge proofs can support sanctions screening before settlement while preserving user privacy.
