Cardano Founder Unveils Midnight Rollout Plan As Mainnet Launch Begins

Cardano founder Charles Hoskinson says Midnight has entered its federated mainnet phase, marking the start of a guarded rollout that he described as the first step in turning on one of the most technically ambitious networks in crypto.

In a March 23 livestream, the Cardano founder framed the week as “Midnight Week” and said the network was being activated gradually with daily operational checkpoints. “What’s happening this week is the federated launch and this is basically the mainnet network and it’s turning on step by step,” Hoskinson said. “Every day we have a go no-go meeting and based upon what we’re getting back from the federated mainnet nodes, they tell us a whole bunch of stuff. … Basically the goal here is to get to a stable network.”

Cardano’s Midnight Launch Week Begins

That first phase is intentionally restrictive. Hoskinson said Midnight is live as a mainnet rather than a testnet, but operating in a guarded mode where transactions and decentralized application deployments are limited until the team is satisfied that consensus, block production, and core cryptographic components are working as intended. The immediate user-facing milestone, he said, is DUST generation, which should become visible through an update to Lace after the earlier Glacier Drop period ended.

The rollout is being handled by federated node operators, or FNOs, rather than an open validator set from day one. Hoskinson said those operators include firms such as Google Cloud, Telegram and MoneyGram, drawing a parallel to Cardano’s Byron era, when a small group of entities initially ran the network before control was broadened over time. Once the network proves stable, Midnight plans to lower its guardrails in stages and begin deploying applications in waves.

“So you go from just dust generation to Lace plus DApps and you can actually start using some of these experiences,” he said. “You’re basically looking for a stable consensus. You’re looking for stable block generation in the mainnet environment. And then as that gets stable, everybody’s happy, you go from guarded to less guarded to less guarded to less guarded.”

Hoskinson argued that Midnight’s launch path is more complicated than Cardano’s because the system spans both Cardano and Midnight, with separate roles for its assets and multiple address formats across public and private ledgers. He also pointed to its layered design, naming consensus components such as Aura, Grandpa and Beefy, while describing Compact as “basically Zcash with smart contracts.”

That framing is central to the pitch. Midnight, in Hoskinson’s telling, is not just another chain launch but a privacy-preserving smart contract system being opened in phases. The first version shipping with the federated mainnet includes zero-knowledge tooling such as Plonk and Halo 2, while later upgrades are expected to bring composable contracts, Nightstream-related infrastructure, capacity exchange, crosschain intents and the Midnight passport system.

The decentralization roadmap comes later. Hoskinson said Midnight is now entering phase two, with phase three set to introduce an incentivized testnet for stake pool operators, allowing them to begin making blocks in parallel with ongoing federated mainnet upgrades. Governance experiments are also expected to begin in that phase, although he cautioned that Midnight’s broad token distribution through its “glacier drop” means the ecosystem needs time to mature before full governance can be safely turned on.

“One of the problems with Midnight, and this is why you need at least 6 to 12 months to stabilize, is that Midnight was distributed with a glacier drop,” he said. “That’s a huge benefit because you get lots of people. The problem is that those people haven’t decided whether they want to be a good-faith member of the Midnight ecosystem community or if they just want to dump their NIGHT or be adversarial.”

Hoskinson also used the livestream to make a much broader claim about Midnight’s long-term role, describing it as infrastructure for privacy, compliance and AI-driven commerce. He said the system’s mix of zero-knowledge proofs, multi-party computation and trusted execution environments could make it a natural framework for autonomous software agents to transact and verify one another.

At press time, Cardano traded at $0.2611.