Electric Capital report highlights ecosystem growth
The Electric Capital developer report is an independent benchmark for tracking software engineering activity across the blockchain industry. The report aggregates open-source repository data and tracks unique contributors to provide an objective evaluation of ecosystem health and activity. This standardized methodology removes bias, allowing observers to compare developer engagement across different networks.
Data from the latest Electric Capital developer report highlights a major technical success for the Midnight ecosystem, showing a substantial acceleration in engineering activity in the months leading up to, and following, the network launch. The metrics outline a surge in contributors, putting Midnight on the map in the active developer ecosystem.
Midnight now appears in the same independent dataset that benchmarks Cardano, Solana, and Ethereum. As of the latest report, Electric Capital publicly tracks 1,028 repositories in the Midnight ecosystem. What makes that number worth citing is the method behind it: EC measures activity from open-source commit data the same way for every network, so the comparison rests on neutral ground rather than self-reported metrics.
Sustained activity backs this repository count. The developer community maintained an average of 150 monthly active developers throughout 2026. This consistent engagement confirms that active builders support these repositories, reflecting the collective efforts of the builders across the Midnight universe.
Check out all the Midnight ecosystem insights from the Electric Capital report.
Developer support fuels ecosystem growth
A steady stream of new developer tools, learning initiatives, and community programs directly powers the developer activity. New resources and protocol updates this month provide builders with enhanced capabilities for building and streamlining production.
Midnight Expert provides AI that runs Compact code
Frontier AI models have little training data for Compact, Midnight’s smart contract language. As a result, most AI assistants struggle to write Compact code, often filling the gaps with plausible-looking nonsense.
Midnight Expert is an open-source suite of Claude Code plugins built for the Midnight stack. Its Skills activate automatically based on context: setting up a local devnet triggers toolchain checks, version mismatch detection, diagnostics, and dependency fixes. Writing a contract hands off to a dedicated Compact agent that uses verified language patterns and a compile-test-validate pipeline, including ZK proof generation, to ensure generated code is accurate and hallucination-free.
In this Fireside Dev Hang, Lauren Lee and Aaron Bassett demo Midnight Expert live and unscripted, including generating a Midnight DApp from a single short prompt. Watch the video to see what Midnight Expert can do, then head to midnightntwrk.expert to get set up and start building on Midnight.
Offer files enable private atomic settlement
zSwap does private atomic swaps on layer one, and you can build on it on mainnet today. You post an offer, someone matches the opposing side, and it settles on-chain the moment the balances net to zero. Only the deltas are public. Addresses stay private, and there's no escrow risk.
The builder's unlock is the Offer File. Prove an offer locally, serialize it, and post it anywhere, a Discord channel, a Telegram group, or a shared Celestia namespace for public liquidity. Anyone can pull it down and match it, which means liquidity is shared across every Midnight project instead of each app fighting for its own.
EffectStream hands you live state over a simple RPC, so you never touch Celestia or Midnight indexing directly. And because the swap is a core protocol primitive rather than a contract you write and audit yourself, you can ship order books, RFQ DEXs, NFT marketplaces, and token launchpads without taking on that audit risk.
One current constraint to build around: Offer Files run with a one-hour expiry on the network today. The next hard fork extends that to two weeks. There's an order book template on GitHub to fork if you want a working starting point.
See the full walkthrough in the Fireside Hang with CTO Sebastian Guillemot.
Partner sprints accelerate application development
Partner sprints offer structured development initiatives that help teams build applications on the network. The previous sprint with 1AM recently concluded, resulting in custom-skinned wallets for the winning contributors: Spy, Violet_A, TomJohn, and HollandB. More information about these upskilling sprints can be found on the recent partner sprints blog.
Participants in the latest partner sprint with EddaLabs can compete for a bespoke engineering support session with ecosystem veterans. The top three participants will receive a dedicated technical session with EddaLabs engineers to review application architecture, evaluate design decisions, and audit Compact smart contracts. This is a great opportunity to learn directly from teams with years of Midnight experience. Participate now on Zealy.
Stay in the loop
The expansion of developer tooling, mainnet primitives, and ecosystem sprints provides multiple avenues for engineering engagement. Developers can access the repository templates, install the AI plugins, or participate in active community events to begin building privacy-preserving applications.
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