A token with nearly $10 billion in daily trading volume actually comes from Cardano?

If I told you to keep an eye on the Cardano ecosystem next year, would you think I'm crazy?

Written by: Eric, Foresight News

Recently, a token called NIGHT, which was listed for spot or futures trading on Bitget, Binance, OKX, and Bybit at the beginning of the 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 price surged from around $0.025 to nearly $0.0114 in less than two weeks, an increase of over 3 times. Its FDV also once exceeded $2.5 billion, ranking it among the top 50 by market cap. At the time of writing, the price of NIGHT has fallen back to around $0.08.

It’s not surprising for a token listed on several major exchanges to perform this well, but what’s interesting is that NIGHT is the token of Midnight, Cardano’s privacy sidechain. A project labeled with both “Cardano” and “privacy” showing such explosive growth was truly unexpected for 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 has turned zero-knowledge proofs (ZKP) into a ready-to-use TypeScript API, allowing Web2 developers to implement “selective disclosure” on-chain without learning cryptography. The entire network uses Cardano as its consensus base and Halo2 as its ZK backend, adopts a dual-token model (NIGHT+DUST), and aims to first realize the “data available but not visible” requirement most important to enterprises, then gradually expand to DeFi, RWA, on-chain compliant identity, and other scenarios.

Overall, there’s nothing particularly special; the privacy technology uses ZKP, but it doesn’t natively protect privacy—instead, privacy is made optional to meet practical needs.

IOG first publicly announced the development of Midnight in November 2022, but it wasn’t until nearly two years later, in October 2024, that the testnet was launched. This is typical of IOG: it took nearly five years from announcing that Cardano would introduce smart contracts to actually implementing them, with smart contract functionality only arriving in September 2021—long after the bull market had cooled off.

In May this year, Midnight established a foundation, with Fahmi Syed, former CFO of the Polkadot development team Parity, as chairman, signaling the first step towards TGE. Just two days after the official announcement of the foundation, Cardano founder Charles Hoskinson revealed a plan to airdrop tokens to 37 million addresses across eight major blockchains, stating that the airdrop would be retail-only, with no VC participation in the project.

Perhaps what truly ignited market sentiment was Midnight’s “massive token giveaway.” In addition to the airdrop, Midnight also partnered with Binance, OKX, and Bybit to distribute nearly 3 billion NIGHT tokens. This generous approach is very different from the recently popular ICO model and has sparked a strong market response.

According to the block explorer, apart from the top three addresses—which may belong to IOG or the Midnight Foundation—the remaining top holders of NIGHT are relatively dispersed. According to data provided on the official website, the author estimates that the tokens distributed through NIGHT’s own airdrop and exchange partnerships account for nearly one-third of the total supply (24 billion tokens), which is indeed a significant amount.

Midnight’s tokens are not limited to NIGHT; it uses a dual-token model of “NIGHT+DUST.” This rare design is not due to some “novel idea,” but rather to ensure regulatory compliance. NIGHT can be used for network governance, incentives, and to generate the other 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. In addition, DUST is also used to pay for privacy fees—if you want to add optional privacy features to on-chain transactions, you need to pay DUST as a fee. DUST is automatically distributed to NIGHT holders as blocks are produced and “decays” over time to prevent malicious hoarding and network attacks.

In this way, Midnight’s “equity” token NIGHT does not participate in the payment of on-chain transaction fees, but exists solely as a governance token and to generate the real on-chain fuel, DUST. Since DUST is a “renewable resource”—generated by NIGHT and continuously decreasing over time—it is considered a resource rather than an asset from a regulatory perspective, meeting regulatory requirements in various jurisdictions.

Cardano Will Invest Heavily in On-Chain Ecosystem Next Year

According to Cardano’s roadmap, next year will be a year of fully boosting on-chain activity.

First, as a foundation, Cardano will upgrade its network to increase throughput to 1,000 to 10,000 TPS through parallel block processing and layered architecture for vertical scaling, while maintaining security and decentralization. Next is the mainnet launch of Midnight, the protagonist of this article. Cardano believes that the launch of Midnight, with its optional privacy features, will bring more DeFi activity and TVL. In addition, the Cardano treasury will allocate funds to support the native issuance of major stablecoins such as USDT and USDC on Cardano.

Finally, and what the author considers most important, Cardano plans to focus on interoperability—not just simple cross-chain, but allowing users from other chains to interact directly with Cardano DApps by consuming Gas tokens from 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 script-to-script transactions at the protocol level. This is partly thanks to Cardano’s own UTXO ledger model. Two days ago, Cardano’s stake pool operators interacted with Solana’s co-founder on X, further confirming this development direction.

Supporting these strategies and product plans is financial investment. The Cardano Foundation plans to increase its marketing budget by 12% and make appearances at events such as TOKEN2049 and Consensus. The Venture Hub will also invest 2 million ADA to support startups and ecosystem projects. Additionally, the Cardano Foundation plans to inject tens of millions of ADA into on-chain DeFi to boost liquidity and attract institutional participation.

In this light, the recent price surge of NIGHT may just be an appetizer for a series of Cardano initiatives. By 2026, it might really be worth paying attention to this project, which launched its mainnet back in 2017 and has been almost forgotten by the mainstream Web3 market.