Cardano Midnight Enters Mainnet Phase, What Does It Mean for Privacy?

In a major development for the Cardano ecosystem, the Midnight network has officially gone live.

This launch follows years of research, development and collaboration to develop Midnight, referred to by Cardano as "the world’s first fourth generation of blockchain" aimed at delivering end-to-end privacy, which is flexible and enforceable at the protocol level.

Midnight was conceived as a vision years back; according to Cardano founder Charles Hoskinson, the Midnight vision began more than eight years ago, while its building has been on for the last six years.

"We started Midnight more than eight years ago. It left the R&D two years into it. So for about six years, we've been building," Hoskinson said in a video clip ahead of the mainnet launch.

The launch marks the starting point for the next phase of on-chain network activity as developers, partners and institutions will be able to deploy applications and migrate assets on Midnight.

Midnight: fourth generation of blockchain

The Cardano founder explained the basis of Midnight being a fourth generation of blockchain, starting from the first Bitcoin transaction. "Satoshi gave us good money; Ethereum gave us programmability; Cardano brought the third generation of interoperability, scale and good governance. Midnight gives us our identity and privacy back," Hoskinson wrote.

Speaking about the privacy network, Hoskinson says Midnight marks "the first time ever that you kind of get Zcash with smart contracts."

Midnight architecture boasts of a dual-component economic model aimed at resolving token volatility concerns. It separates the asset used to govern and secure the network from the resource used to pay for transactions to ensure operational costs remain predictable. This opens up a path toward a near future where users might no longer need to hold or manage volatile crypto assets in order to use the network.

Midnight has launched as a federated model network, with plans to transition to a fully decentralized network. Recently, Monument Bank announced partnership with the Midnight Foundation to deliver the world’s first tokenized retail deposits by a fully licensed bank.