Input Output Global (IOG) founder Charles Hoskinson announced Thursday that Midnight, the company’s long-awaited privacy-focused blockchain, will go live in the final week of March. The reveal came during Hoskinson’s keynote at Consensus Hong Kong and marks a major milestone in IOG’s push to combine data protection with regulatory compliance in decentralized systems. Midnight is designed as a partner chain to Cardano and centers on selective-disclosure privacy powered by zero-knowledge (ZK) proofs. In plain terms, ZK proofs let users prove the validity of transactions or data without exposing the underlying information — a “smart curtain” for blockchain records that keeps data private by default while allowing selective sharing when required. Hoskinson said IOG has “some great collaborations to help us run it,” naming Google and Telegram among partners and hinting at more to come. To demonstrate how Midnight handles privacy at scale, IOG launched the Midnight City Simulation — an interactive platform that showcases the chain’s “rational privacy” model. The simulation presents multiple disclosure levels (public, auditor and “god”) to illustrate how different parties can be granted varying degrees of access, balancing transparency and confidentiality for decentralized applications that must meet regulatory or audit needs. The simulation went live at midnight.city at 10:00 a.m. Hong Kong time Thursday, though public access remains restricted until Feb. 26, according to IOG’s press release. Running on the Midnight network, the demo uses AI-driven agents to generate unpredictable, continuous transaction traffic, testing the chain’s capacity to generate and process ZK proofs under realistic load. IOG says this sustained proof-generation is a crucial proof point that the network can scale and operate in real-world conditions. Taken together, the launch timeline, industry partnerships, and the City Simulation position Midnight as a notable attempt to marry on-chain privacy with compliance — a capability many developers and regulators have been watching closely. Read more AI-generated news on: undefined/news

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