May has come with major milestones and announcements with the introduction of the Midnight Foundation and Shielded Technologies at Consensus Toronto, marking important steps in the ecosystem's expansion. The network also advanced with the live release of a major testnet-02 upgrade. Alongside these developments, learning resources like Dev Diaries and the Docs Academy are new and expanding, and the improved Rust-based Midnight indexer has been released while the Scala indexer has been deprecated..
Ecosystem Expansion
Two new significant players in the Midnight ecosystem were announced at Consensus Toronto.
The Midnight Foundation, a core constituent of the ecosystem, is an organization committed to the growth and adoption of Midnight. The Foundation's core mission is to foster a thriving developer community, expand access to Midnight's privacy-first technology, and steward the network's evolution toward full decentralization.
The Foundation will also play a leading role in Midnight's path to decentralized governance. As the network matures, it is expected that control over protocol upgrades, treasury allocation, and ecosystem development will transition to the community of NIGHT token holders through on-chain voting. The Foundation will ensure this transition is secure, transparent, and community-driven.
Shielded Technologies is the core engineering team driving the development of the technology behind the Midnight network. Shielded brings deep expertise in cryptography and is building the technical foundations for the next generation of privacy-enhancing technology (PET).
In collaboration with the Midnight Foundation, Shielded is shaping a global ecosystem that upholds and promotes the fundamental freedoms of association, commerce, and expression.
Check back in to the blog for more information about the role Shielded Technologies and the Midnight Foundation will be playing in the Midnight Network.
Learning and resources
The range of learning materials and developer resources are continuously expanding to help users and builders engage with the Midnight network, alongside a new section for direct insights from the core teams.
Introducing Dev Diaries
For those looking to gain a deeper understanding of the Midnight network's inner workings, the documentation site now features the Dev Diaries. This section offers direct insights from individuals actively building and supporting the ecosystem. Readers can find detailed technical explorations on a wide range of topics from Compact to the Lace Wallet.
Midnight Developer Academy
The Midnight documentation now also features the newly launched Developer Academy, a dedicated space to build an understanding of the network with a focus on privacy and zero-knowledge proofs through structured learning modules.
The first three modules are already live and explain key concepts from cryptography to zero-knowledge proofs (ZKPs), with five further modules in development. The Academy also provides self-assessment quizzes related to key concepts to solidify knowledge. As the academy content expands, distinctive ways to celebrate academy participants’ learning milestones will also be released.
Ecosystem partners
The Midnight ecosystem continues to grow with an expansive network of ecosystem partnerships. These collaborations are key to the growth of Midnight, and supporting the global community around it. This month, we're highlighting an ecosystem partnership focusing on institutional-grade identity solutions.
Explore all the partners across the Midnight ecosystem and learn how they’re shaping the Midnight network in the Midnight Ecosystem catalog.
Institutional-grade identity solutions
Keyring, an institutional-grade compliance solution for blockchains, is joining the Midnight ecosystem. Keyring specializes in identity and privacy solutions. Their approach uses custom languages and zero-knowledge proofs for programmable, rules-based permissioning of sensitive information, which aligns with Midnight's focus on creating a zero-knowledge, privacy-first network for future decentralized applications.
The integration of Keyring with Midnight will empower both users and businesses with access to institutional-grade identity solutions, featuring reusable Know Your Customer (KYC) processes for streamlined onboarding, all while prioritizing privacy and adhering to compliance requirements. This collaboration underscores the increasing significance of identity and privacy within the Web3 space, and highlights the capability of ZK cryptography-based technology to meet the needs of institutions within decentralized frameworks.
Releases and documentation
There have been many upgrades this month, with more on the way, so be sure to bookmark the network compatibility matrix in the Midnight documentation, which is kept up-to-date with every release.
Network upgrades
A major upgrade to testnet-02 went live on May 12, 2025. This upgrade included improvements such as the transition from the package Partner Chains v1.2.0 to v1.5.0, a shift from the Pluto-Eris proving system to BLS12-381, a new ledger storage implementation, along with other enhancements.Developers will need to take action. First, by backing up local work, then download the latest Midnight component releases compatible with the upgrade. Following this, developers will need to request tDust from the faucet and redeploy any contracts. Detailed instructions are included in a recent Dev Diaries post.
For additional information and updates, check the testnet-02 upgrade blog, which will be updated with any further information or required action.
Rust-based Midnight indexer released, Scala indexer deprecated
The Midnight Rust-based indexer is now the official indexer for the network, replacing the deprecated Scala-based implementation which is no longer supported.
This upgrade delivers significant improvements in performance, reliability, and maintainability. Key features include optimized blockchain data processing, wallet-aware indexing for personalized results, flexible deployment options (local binary or distributed microservices), and support for PostgreSQL and SQLite storage backends.
Developers must ensure their integrations are compatible with this new Rust-based version. For detailed information on the latest updates, migration steps, and full release notes, please refer to the Dev Diaries post and the official documentation.
Open Source Repos
The commitment to open sourcing within the Midnight ecosystem is rapidly advancing, with the first open source repo last month, and the Midnight Indexer now marking the tenth publicly available repository. This initiative is central to building fair, distributing fair, and enabling the community to break free from opaque systems.
By making code accessible, global collaboration is invited, transparency is enhanced, and developers are empowered to build the future of privacy. This is a significant milestone and there is much more to come in open source.
[Join the community on Discord now]