Introducing the Midnight testnet

Calling all developers – the Midnight testnet is now live

The Midnight network is now in testnet – all developers are invited to join this important milestone in the network’s evolution. Testnet will provide a stable sandbox environment to experiment with building on-chain applications that protect sensitive data.

Everything you need to know

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.

The goal of testnet is to provide developers building on Midnight with a reliable environment that simulates the conditions of a live mainnet. To enable this, 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.

Here’s what you can do

🛠️ Build in a stable sandbox environment

Hard forks can now be initiated on Midnight testnet, which will allow for major upgrades to the network’s performance and features during testnet and beyond, without disrupting existing projects or requiring developers to redeploy their applications. This will ensure that developers have a consistent and stable environment for testing applications before they are deployed to 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.

🛡️ Discover data protection capabilities

Midnight’s programmable data protection capabilities give development teams flexibility when selecting which data to make public on-chain and what needs to remain confidential. This flexibility will enable developers to build applications that can balance data protection needs with the transparency offered by blockchain technology.

Midnight’s native programming language Compact, which is based on Typescript, enables developers with little exposure to blockchain or zero-knowledge technology to easily ramp up and begin writing smart contracts. When collecting or sharing sensitive data, developers can experiment with using Midnight’s smart contracts to send cryptographically secure proofs of data to the network, rather than sharing the data itself.

🚀 Influence the network

Since launching devnet, Midnight has introduced a number of ways for the community to provide feedback and contribute to the network’s future development. The Midnight Discord now features a ticketing system to speed up support requests and community calls are hosted regularly.

In addition to our regular community calls, Midnight is also launching regular hackathons designed to enable developers to learn how to leverage Midnight’s data-protection capabilities.

Recently, Midnight released the Nightpaper, the first in a series of papers designed to deepen your understanding of the network. Discord members were invited to provide early feedback on the paper and were given exclusive insights into the future phases of the network’s development. Be sure to join the Discord and Telegram channels to stay up to date.

Start building on the testnet

Testnet serves as a crucial intermediary step on the Midnight roadmap, allowing time for rigorous testing and refinement to ensure the stability, security, and performance of the network. By building experimental apps and testing code on the testnet, developers can significantly impact its development, helping to refine and shape the future of data protection and blockchain more broadly.

👉For developers familiar with zero-knowledge technology or blockchain

Visit our quick start guide which will walk you through the necessary steps to begin building on Midnight.

👉 For developers new to blockchain

If it’s your first time building on a blockchain, visit the Midnight documentation for a comprehensive guide to get started, complete with developer tutorials and FAQs.

Please be aware that to build on Midnight, a suitable development environment is required, such as Linux, macOS, and/ or Windows WSL. You’ll also need sufficient resources to run a full non-block-producing node, a local proof server, and publish-subscriber indexer besides the client software.

On Windows operating systems, the testnet environment has been tested using the Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL), specifically Ubuntu 22.04.2 LTS (GNU/Linux 5.15.90.1-microsoft-standard-WSL2 x86_64)