NIGHT Gains About 100% in a Week as Midnight Builds Its Privacy Network

Midnight’s NIGHT token rose about 100% in a week to $0.05, lifting its market capitalization to about $800 million as the network opens development and advances plans for private smart contracts and tokenized bank deposits.

NIGHT climbed from about $0.024 over the period. At the reported $0.05 price, it remained about 50% below its record high of $0.1179.

Midnight is built around programmable privacy. NIGHT is a public, transferable token, while holding it generates DUST, a nontransferable resource used to pay transaction and smart-contract costs. The design aims to keep business data private while leaving NIGHT transfers visible.

Developers gained permissionless access to mainnet smart-contract deployment on Sept. 28, after a previous requirement for security review on the Preprod network was removed. On Oct. 1, Chief Technology Officer Sebastien Guillemot outlined a roadmap in which version 8 is intended to enable private smart contracts and version 9 is planned to focus on composability, allowing those contracts to interact. Neither upgrade is complete.

Monument Bank plans to tokenize as much as £250 million in retail deposits on Midnight. The rollout of those deposits has been delayed until November. The bank project remains in development, and the deposits are not yet live.

The token’s rebound follows a July vulnerability in the Wanchain cross-chain bridge involving about 515 million NIGHT. NIGHT fell 87% during the episode, while Midnight’s core network was not affected.

About 17 billion NIGHT are circulating out of a total supply of 24 billion. The Glacier Drop distribution is continuing across a 450-day release period, with allocations made quarterly.

Midnight’s on-chain activity remains at a very early stage. Private smart contracts and composability are still planned, and Monument’s deposits have not launched. The case for sustained demand for NIGHT depends in part on applications and users creating demand for DUST, the resource used to operate on the network.

Cardano founder Charles Hoskinson has said Midnight could become larger than Zcash. A comparison of historical market capitalization figures placed Zcash at $26.91 billion on Sept. 28 and Midnight at $415.71 million on Sept. 26; because the figures are from different dates, they are not a same-time comparison.