Input Output Global (IOG) founder Charles Hoskinson announced Thursday that Midnight, the company’s long-awaited privacy-focused blockchain, will officially launch in the last week of March.
The announcement came during Hoskinson’s keynote speech at Consensus Hong Kong, marking a major milestone in IOG’s efforts to bring data protection and regulatory compliance to decentralized systems.
“We have great collaborations to help us manage it,” he said. “Google is one. Telegram is another. We’re really excited, there will be more to come.”
Midnight uses zero-knowledge (ZK) proofs to enable selective disclosure. Think of it as a smart curtain for blockchain data, allowing users to share only what they choose while keeping the rest private. It functions as a partner chain for the Cardano smart contract platform and ensures privacy and regulatory compliance for decentralized applications.
Alongside the mainnet timeline, Hoskinson unveiled Midnight City Simulation, an interactive platform offering insight into how Midnight’s delivers scalable privacy through selective disclosure. So-called rational privacy ensures that transaction data remains private by default, while specific information can be shared with authorized parties when necessary.
This flexibility balances transparency and privacy on the blockchain through multiple disclosure views, categorized as public, auditory, and divine, each with a different level of access.
The simulation, hosted on midnight.city, became operational at 10 a.m. Hong Kong time on Thursday, although public access to the simulation remains restricted until February 26, according to a press release.
The simulation, which runs on the Midnight Network and recruits AI-driven agents that interact in unpredictable ways to create a constant stream of transactions, shows how well blockchain can handle real-world demand and scales accordingly.
IOG said this test demonstrates the network’s ability to continue generating and processing evidence at scale – an important step in proving it is ready for real-world use.
