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 address at Consensus Hong Kong, marking a major step forward in the IOG’s efforts to bring data protection and compliance to decentralized systems.
“We have some great partnerships to help us run it,” he said. “Google is one of them. Telegram is another. We’re really excited, there’s more to come.”
Midnight uses zero-knowledge (ZK) proofs to enable selective disclosure. Think of it as a smart curtain for blockchain data that lets users share only what they choose, while keeping the rest private. It acts as a partner chain for the smart contract platform Cardano, providing privacy and regulatory compliance for decentralized applications.
Alongside the mainnet timeline, Hoskinson unveiled the Midnight City Simulation, an interactive platform that provides a glimpse 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 confidentiality on the blockchain through multiple disclosure views, categorized as public, auditor and god, each with a different level of access.
The simulation, hosted by midnight.city, became operational at 10 a.m. Hong Kong time on Thursday, although public access to the simulation will remain restricted until February 26, according to a press release.
The simulation, which runs on the Midnight network and recruits AI-powered agents that interact unpredictably to create a constant flow of transactions, shows how well blockchain can handle real-world demand and scales accordingly.
The IOG said this test demonstrates the network’s ability to continue generating and processing evidence at scale — an important step in proving it’s ready for real-world use.
