Author: Eric, Foresight News
Original Title: A Token with Nearly $10 Billion in Daily Trading Volume, Actually from Cardano?
Recently, a token named NIGHT, which was listed for spot or contract trading on Bitget, Binance, OKX, and Bybit earlier this month, saw its 24-hour global trading volume exceed $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's price rose from around $0.025 to nearly $0.114 in less than two weeks, a increase of over 3 times. Its FDV once exceeded $2.5 billion, which would place it within the top 50 by market capitalization. At the time of writing, NIGHT price has retraced to around $0.08.
Such performance from a token listed on several major exchanges simultaneously is not entirely unexpected. However, the interesting part is that NIGHT is the token of Midnight, a privacy-focused sidechain of Cardano. The explosive power of a project bearing both the "Cardano" and "privacy" labels truly surprised most people.
What Makes Midnight "Valuable"?
Midnight is a sidechain developed by Input Output Global (IOG, the parent company of Cardano) with "programmable data protection" as its core selling point. It packages zero-knowledge proofs (ZKP) into a ready-to-use TypeScript API, allowing Web2 developers to implement "selective disclosure" on-chain without needing to learn cryptography. The entire network uses Cardano as its consensus layer and Halo2 as its ZK backend, employing a dual-token model (NIGHT+DUST). The goal is first to land the "data availability without visibility" that enterprises care about most, and then gradually expand to scenarios like DeFi, RWA, and on-chain compliant identity.
Overall, it doesn't seem particularly unique. It adopts ZKP privacy technology but doesn't natively protect privacy; instead, it makes privacy features optional to address practical needs.
IOG first publicly announced the plan 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 almost 5 years from announcing smart contracts for Cardano to actual implementation, which wasn't achieved until September 2021, long after the bull market had passed.
In May of this year, Midnight established a foundation, with Fahmi Syed, former CFO of Polkadot development team Parity, as chairman, signaling the first step towards TGE (Token Generation Event). Just two days after announcing the foundation's establishment, Cardano founder Charles Hoskinson revealed plans to airdrop tokens to 37 million addresses on 8 major blockchains, stating that the airdrop would target only retail users, with no VC participation in the project.
Perhaps what truly ignited market sentiment was Midnight's "massive airdrop." In addition to the airdrop, Midnight also distributed nearly 3 billion NIGHT tokens in collaboration with Binance, OKX, and Bybit. This large-scale approach, which contrasts sharply with the recent popular ICO models, garnered a positive market response.
Looking at the block explorer, aside from the top three addresses which likely belong to IOG or the Midnight Foundation, the holdings of the remaining addresses are relatively decentralized. According to data provided on the official website, the author estimates that the airdrop itself, combined with exchange collaboration events, distributed nearly one-third of the total supply (24 billion tokens), which indeed qualifies as a massive effort.
Midnight's tokenomics feature not just NIGHT, but a "NIGHT+DUST" dual-token model. This rare design isn't based on some "whimsical idea" but rather aims to ensure regulatory compliance. NIGHT can be used for network governance, incentives, and generating the other token, DUST. NIGHT itself is not related to privacy and supports on-chain auditing.
DUST, generated by holding NIGHT, is used to pay for transaction fees, similar to Gas. Additionally, DUST will be used to pay for privacy fees—if one wants to add optional privacy features to on-chain transactions, they must pay DUST. DUST is automatically distributed to NIGHT holders' accounts with each block produced and "decays" over time to prevent malicious hoarding and network attacks.
Thus, Midnight's "equity" token, NIGHT, does not participate in paying on-chain transaction fees but exists solely as a governance token and a generator for the actual on-chain fuel, DUST. DUST itself, as a "renewable resource" generated by NIGHT and constantly decreasing over time, would be considered a resource rather than an asset from a regulatory perspective, potentially satisfying regulatory requirements in various jurisdictions.
Cardano to Heavily Invest in On-Chain Ecosystem Next Year
According to Cardano's roadmap, next year will be focused on comprehensively boosting on-chain activity.
First and foremost, Cardano will undergo a network upgrade to increase throughput to 1000-10,000 TPS through parallel block processing and a layered structure for vertical scaling, while maintaining security and decentralization. Following this will be the mainnet launch of the protagonist of this article, 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 the native issuance of major stablecoins like USDT and USDC on Cardano.
The last point, which the author finds most important, is Cardano's plan to focus on interoperability—not simple cross-chain functionality, but enabling users from other chains to interact directly with DApps on Cardano by paying gas fees on their source chain.
Last week, Cardano achieved atomic swaps between BTC and ADA through Fluid, not via cross-chain bridges, wrapped tokens, or centralized custody, but directly through underlying script-to-script transactions, which is somewhat facilitated by Cardano's own UTXO ledger model. Two days ago, interactions between Cardano stake pool operators and Solana's co-founder on X also confirmed this development direction.
Accompanying the strategic and product plans is capital investment. The Cardano Foundation plans to increase its marketing budget by 12% and "make an appearance" 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 improve liquidity and attract institutional participation.
From this perspective, driving up the price of NIGHT might just be the appetizer Cardano is serving for a series of plans. Perhaps 2026 is really the year to keep an eye on this project, which launched its mainnet back in 2017 and has been almost forgotten by the mainstream Web3 market.
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