Cardano’s March 2025 “State of the Network” report highlights continued advancements to Midnight, Cardano’s privacy-centric sidechain. This narrative highlights recent developments, community feedback and emerging partnerships; although full launch remains to take place of Midnight protocol is evident through hackathons, new partnership declarations and enhanced documentation.
The Current Status of Midnight on Cardano
Midnight has recognized the significance of community involvement in shaping its network. A survey conducted between December 2024 and January 2025 revealed a diverse community. Twelve percent were blockchain developers while three-ninths considered themselves experts in blockchain technology; 46 percent had some experience while 15 percent were newcomers.
Midnight’s journey was marked by numerous memorable events, with one such instance being the Zero-Knowledge Identity Challenge which showcased practical applications of zero-knowledge technology. Brick Towers demonstrated how Midnight’s smart contracts could safeguard consumer privacy when buying digital wine sales using zero-knowledge proofs; customers could verify their legal drinking age via proof without providing personal data, thus keeping transactions private while meeting regulations without handling sensitive data.
OpenZeppelin has joined Midnight to apply its security expertise, developing a Compact smart contract library and frameworks designed specifically for this platform. This partnership aims to speed up development of privacy-focused DApps on Midnight while Zoniqx offers an enterprise-grade framework for real world asset tokenization with special focus on compliance, identity management, and privacy.
Midnight’s documentation portal has recently been enhanced to improve developer experiences, providing comprehensive overviews, change logs and compatibility matrices to ease integration processes. While these advancements are notable, Midnight is yet to officially launch since its testnet debut in 2024; nonetheless the protocol envisions creating a secure environment for exchanging sensitive data, with NIGHT tokens acting as governance and DUST tokens being used for shielded transactions.
Cardano continues to expand and is working toward merging the wider crypto ecosystem with enterprise needs by providing easy access to DUST tokens via its Glacier drop mining process and dispersing NIGHT tokens across networks. Cardano’s current trading value stands at $0.6786.
