Charles Hoskinson Celebrates Major Cardano Milestone with Midnight Testnet Launch

• The Midnight team of Cardano has officially unveiled its testnet for developers and organizations, which includes added functionalities to improve user experience. 

• The team is also expanding its capabilities to enable less-exposed developers to ramp up and build smart contracts. 

Cardano’s (ADA) Midnight team has officially announced the launch of the testnet of its midnight network. According to reports, this initiative underscores its commitment to redefine the Cardano ecosystem and subject the existing experience to a significant upgrade. Following this groundbreaking news, Cardano’s co-founder Charles Hoskinson expressed his excitement, lauding the effort of the developer team and the community. 

Reviewing the team’s blog post, CNF observed that the latest development would provide a stable sandbox environment for experimentation with “building on-chain applications” without compromising the protection of sensitive data. According to the post, developers and organizations would be the principal beneficiaries of the network. 

To build commercially successful on-chain applications, developers must be able to guarantee that sensitive data remains protected. The Midnight network is being built for developers and organizations who could benefit from the transparency of blockchain technology but need to balance data protection, ownership, and utilization needs.

As stated in the press release, the testnet is meant to ensure that developers building on Midnight have a reliable environment that “simulates the conditions of a live mainnet.” 

Midnight has expanded its capabilities and hardened the network’s codebase to reduce the need for regularly scheduled chain resets when upgrading. Countless hours have been invested from the Midnight engineering, product, and delivery teams, in collaboration with the Input Output partner chains team, to deliver testnet. They will continue to support the growth and stability of the Midnight blockchain.

What to Expect from Midnight Testnet

According to the report, the testnet is equipped with programmable data protection capabilities that provide the needed flexibility for developers to make decisions on the data to make public on-chain. On top of that, its programming language Compact, could be easily used by developers who are less exposed to blockchain. In this case, they can easily ramp up and start working on smart contracts. 

Secondly, Midnight is built with a stable sandbox environment which makes it possible for developers to initiate hard forks to force major upgrades to the network’s performance. Fascinatingly, this could be done without the need to redeploy applications. 

This will ensure that developers have a consistent and stable environment for testing applications before they are deployed to the mainnet. Testnet also introduces ZK Snark upgradability, a novel functionality to ensure that developers will benefit from the latest and future security and performance enhancements to zero-knowledge proving systems without having to rewrite or redeploy their smart contracts.

Currently, the Midnight team is launching a regular hackathon to enable developers to capitalize on and learn the network’s data protection. Also, several ways for the community to provide feedback have been introduced to contribute to the future development of the network. In addition, it introduced Nightpaper, the first in a series of papers meant to deepen users’ understanding of the network. 

At press time, ADA was still struggling to maintain its level as it declined by 2% in the last 24 hours and was trading at $0.34.