Original Title: “A Token with Nearly $10 Billion in Daily Trading Volume Actually Comes from Cardano?”
Original Author: Eric, Foresight News
Recently, a token named NIGHT, which was listed for spot or futures trading on Bitget, Binance, OKX, and Bybit at the beginning of the month, achieved a 24-hour global trading volume exceeding $9 billion, approaching $10 billion. Bybit even surpassed Binance in 24-hour spot trading volume thanks to NIGHT.
NIGHT was officially launched on December 9. According to CoinGecko data, the token price rose from around $0.025 initially to nearly $0.0114 in less than two weeks, a gain of over 3 times. Its FDV once exceeded $2.5 billion, placing it within the top 50 by market cap. As of writing, NIGHT’s price has retraced to around $0.08.
Such performance from a token simultaneously listed on top exchanges is not entirely unexpected, but interestingly, NIGHT is the token of Cardano’s privacy sidechain Midnight. A project labeled with both “Cardano” and “privacy” having such explosive momentum truly caught most by surprise.
What Makes Midnight “Expensive”?
Midnight is a sidechain developed by Input Output Global (IOG, Cardano’s parent company), with “programmable data protection” as its core selling point. It packages zero-knowledge proofs (ZKP) into a ready-to-use TypeScript API, enabling Web2 developers to achieve “selective disclosure” on-chain without learning cryptography. The entire network uses Cardano as its consensus foundation and Halo2 as the ZK backend, adopting a dual-token model (NIGHT+DUST). The goal is first to implement “data availability without visibility”—crucial for enterprises—and then gradually expand to scenarios like DeFi, RWA, and on-chain compliant identity.
Overall, nothing seems particularly special; privacy technology employs ZKP, but it doesn’t natively protect privacy. Instead, privacy features are made optional to address practical needs.
IOG first publicly announced plans to develop Midnight in November 2022, but the testnet wasn’t launched until nearly two years later, in October 2024. This is indeed IOG’s style—it took nearly 5 years from announcing Cardano would introduce smart contracts to actual implementation, with smart contract functionality only arriving in September 2021, long after the bull market had cooled.
In May this year, Midnight established a foundation, chaired by Fahmi Syed, former CFO of Parity (Polkadot’s development team), indicating the first step toward TGE. Just two days after announcing the foundation’s establishment, Cardano founder Charles Hoskinson revealed plans to airdrop tokens to 37 million addresses across 8 major blockchains, stating the airdrop would target retail users only, with no VC participation in the project.
Perhaps what truly ignited market sentiment was Midnight’s “massive airdrop.” Besides the airdrop, Midnight collaborated with Binance, OKX, and Bybit to distribute nearly 3 billion NIGHT tokens. This large-scale approach starkly contrasts with the recent popular ICO model, eliciting a positive market response.
From the block explorer, aside from the top three addresses likely belonging to IOG or the Midnight Foundation, holdings among the remaining addresses appear relatively dispersed. Based on data from the official website, the author estimates that airdrops by NIGHT itself and distribution activities with exchanges account for nearly 1/3 of the total supply (24 billion tokens), which indeed qualifies as a substantial effort.
Midnight’s tokens aren’t limited to NIGHT alone; it employs a dual-token model of “NIGHT+DUST.” This rare design isn’t due to some “whimsical idea” but rather to ensure regulatory compliance. NIGHT can be used for network governance, incentives, and generating another token, DUST. NIGHT itself is unrelated to privacy and supports on-chain auditing.
DUST, generated by holding NIGHT, is used to pay transaction fees, similar to the role of gas. Additionally, DUST is used to pay privacy fees—meaning if one wants to add optional privacy features to on-chain transactions, DUST must be paid as a fee. DUST is automatically distributed to NIGHT holders’ accounts with each block and “decays” over time to prevent malicious hoarding and network attacks.
Thus, Midnight’s “equity” token NIGHT doesn’t participate in on-chain transaction fee payments but exists solely as a governance token and to generate DUST, the actual on-chain fuel. DUST itself, as a “renewable resource,” is generated from NIGHT and diminishes over time, making it viewed as a resource rather than an asset under regulatory policies, thereby meeting various regulatory requirements.
Cardano to Heavily Invest in On-Chain Ecosystem Next Year
According to Cardano’s roadmap, next year will focus on comprehensively boosting on-chain activity.
First, as a foundation, Cardano will undergo a network upgrade to increase throughput to 1,000–10,000 TPS through parallel block processing and layered architecture for vertical scaling while maintaining security and decentralization. Then comes the mainnet launch of this article’s protagonist, Midnight. Cardano believes Midnight’s launch will bring more DeFi activity and TVL through its optional privacy features. Additionally, the Cardano Treasury will allocate funds to support native issuance of major stablecoins like USDT and USDC on Cardano.
The last point, which the author considers most important, is Cardano’s plan to focus on interoperability—not simple cross-chain bridging, but enabling users from other chains to interact directly with DApps on Cardano by spending gas tokens from the source chain.
Last week, Cardano achieved atomic swaps between BTC and ADA via Fluid, not through cross-chain bridges, wrapped tokens, or centralized custody, but directly via underlying script-to-script transactions, partly benefiting from Cardano’s own UTXO ledger model. Two days ago, interactions on X between Cardano stake pool operators and Solana co-founders also confirmed this development direction.
Complementing strategic and product plans is capital investment. The Cardano Foundation plans to increase marketing budgets by 12% and “make appearances” at events like TOKEN2049 and Consensus. Venture Hub will also invest 2 million ADA to support startups and ecosystem projects. Furthermore, the Cardano Foundation plans to inject tens of millions of ADA into on-chain DeFi to enhance liquidity and attract institutional participation.
Thus, driving NIGHT’s price surge might just be the appetizer Cardano serves for a series of plans. By 2026, it might indeed be worth keeping an eye on this project, which launched its mainnet in 2017 and has been largely forgotten by the mainstream Web3 market.
