Charles Hoskinson said Midnight’s mainnet is entering “phase two” this week, marking the start of a federated, guarded launch for Cardano-linked privacy network Midnight. The move matters because it shifts the project out of prolonged testnet work and into a live production environment, with early functionality centered on network stability, DUST generation, and a tightly controlled rollout of apps.
Hoskinson Says Midnight Mainnet Hits Phase Two
In a March 23 livestream, Hoskinson described the week of March 23 as “midnight week” and said the network is being turned on “slowly methodically” with daily go/no-go checks. He framed the launch as a staged process rather than a single switch-flip, comparing it to “landing the space shuttle” because of the operational risk involved in taking a complex crypto system live without rollback. “We’re entering phase two with the federated mainet right on schedule,” he said, adding that the immediate goal is a stable mainnet where consensus holds and blocks continue to be produced reliably.
Midnight Launch Week https://t.co/mYyhm8TNl4
— Charles Hoskinson (@IOHK_Charles) March 23, 2026
The guarded phase follows roughly a year of testnet iterations, where the team, developers, and operators repeatedly upgraded the system and tested hard forks. Hoskinson said Midnight is more complex than Cardano’s original launch because it operates across both Cardano and its own network, with the value-carrying asset on one side and the operational asset on Midnight. He also pointed to Midnight’s “four address structures,” its private and public ledger design, and a layered consensus model involving “Araura, Grandpa, and Beefy,” with Beefy tied to the Cardano bridge.
For now, the focus is not broad user access but proving that the live system can hold up under real conditions. Hoskinson said the current phase is about determining whether Midnight can “achieve consensus, get the performance things we’re looking for, verify plon and Halo 2 are working the way we think they are.” He described the stack shipping with federated mainnet as “basically Zcash with smart contracts,” then added: “This is the first time ever that you kind of get Zcash with smart contracts. They’ve been talking about it for a long time. and you actually get it with that model.”
Guarded Launch Begins With Partners and DUST
The first wave of mainnet activity is being handled by federated node operators, or FNOs, rather than an open validator set. Hoskinson said those operators include Google Cloud, Telegram, and MoneyGram, alongside other collaborators. In this phase, those partners are responsible for making blocks, processing transactions, and coordinating network maintenance while access remains restricted. He said that is a practical necessity in 2026-era crypto launches, arguing that going directly from testnet to full decentralization would be “a super bad idea.”
That guarded launch means app deployment and transaction activity are intentionally limited at the outset. Hoskinson said users should first see DUST generation, which follows the end of the project’s Glacier drop period and should become visible through an update to Lace. “It is a mainet not a test net. So no backaxis ideally and it’s guarded,” he said. “The goal is to make sure that we have stable consensus… Once you have a stable network, the FNOs like Google and Telegram, all these others say, ‘Yeah, yeah, we’re happy with it.’”
If those checks pass, Midnight will begin reducing the restrictions in stages and allowing more apps onto the network. Hoskinson said he expects guardedness to drop next week, with some dapps deployed after DUST generation is confirmed. He described the rollout in incremental terms: “You go from just DUST generation to Lace plus dApps and you can actually start using some of these experiences.” Beyond that, the roadmap includes composable contracts, Nightstream-related test harnesses, capacity exchange for crosschain transactions, and eventually governance experiments and an incentivized testnet for stake pool operators in phase three.
Hoskinson said Midnight still needs six to 12 months of stabilization before broader governance and decentralization features can be safely introduced, especially after a wide token distribution that he said brought in more than a million users. For now, the signal to watch is straightforward: whether the federated mainnet can keep producing blocks, generate DUST cleanly, and support its first guarded apps without incident.
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