Midnight:- At the ongoing TOKEN2049 in Singapore, Cardano founder Charles Hoskinson and Google Cloud confirmed a strategic collaboration around Midnight, Cardano’s privacy-focused sidechain under development.
The partnership is to set to bring in the ZK and cloud together with Fahmi Syed, president of the Midnight Foundation, framing the effort as part of a push for “rational privacy”. Midnight is currently in token-distribution and testnet phases with the mainnet expected by November 2025 as the Glacier Drop concludes.
Google Cloud to Run Validators for Midnight
Calling Google “a wonderful company,” Charles said that “the partnership is going to add a ton of value to our ecosystem.”
Under the agreement, Google Cloud will operate critical parts of Midnight’s infrastructure. This will explicitly be including validator operations — and the cloud provider’s Mandiant division will supply advanced threat detection and incident response capabilities.
Midnight said it will also leverage Google Cloud’s Confidential Computing tech to reduce the operator from the trust boundary. This according to the project hardens protections against cloud-provider access to private data. The blog post framed these components as necessary to make zero-knowledge systems palatable for enterprise and regulated use. It is evident as Hyperscalers running validators and offering confidential computing and incident response materially lowers the operational and security bar for privacy-first chains that want enterprise customers.
At the panel discussion, Google’s James Thrones said, “With Midnight, we’re happy to collaborate by running protocol validators. Running validators teaches you the hard lessons about security, attack surfaces and what it takes to operate a secure network. He also said that “It’s really important to understand and participate in Web3 to better gauge what the technology means.”
Interestingly, for financial institutions, regulators and large enterprises that have been wary of public ledgers’ transparency, the combination of zero-knowledge proofs with hardware-assisted isolation and professional security monitoring creates a clearer path for pilots and production deployments.
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What’s Next for Midnight?
The Google Cloud collaboration arrives as Midnight’s Glacier Drop is already in motion. The claim portal is open to nearly 34 million eligible addresses across eight blockchains. According to Midnight’s network update, roughly 1.5 billion NIGHT tokens were claimed within the first two weeks – a sign of intense community momentum.
And now by committing to run validators and provide Confidential Computing and Mandiant security services, Google Cloud could materially speed enterprise pilots and third-party builds on Midnight.
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