Hi, this is Charles Hoskinson broadcasting live from warm, sunny Colorado. Always warm, always sunny, sometimes Colorado. Today is March 30th, 2026, and I am pleased to report to all of you that we have hit our deadline. Midnight is live and has been live for a while.
So, here is the Midnight network. The average block time is holding beautifully at 6 seconds, with already 163,000 blocks processed. The finality gap is about two blocks. You can see all the different validators: Vodafone, eToro, WorldPay, Bullish, MoneyGram, and Google is in the list. The filter gateway is looking good, and the Lambu nodes are also performing well. If you run all the diagnostics, everything looks solid. Midnight is running, it's happy, pre-prod is running, preview is running—everything is good. We're all healthy. How about that? That's pretty exciting, isn't it?
A few more things: Lace will be updated today or tomorrow. We're just getting out the latest release for the mainnet launch. Right now, Lace is at version 136.0, and version 136.2 has been submitted; we're waiting for approval in the web store. When the Apple auto-update happens, all the Midnight-specific features will be right there automatically in Lace. There are already a few others that have launched their own wallets and infrastructure in Midnight, but Lace is good to go. There are also a few launched test apps for this guarded launch, so you can play around and have fun with it.
Really, this launch is about keeping everyone happy, having a stable network, allowing developers to build on it, deploy things, and getting the user experience where it needs to be. It's good to see that there are already a bunch of things ready to go on day one.
And a few more things: I wrote a book. The book is called "Proving Nothing: A Layered Guide to Zero-Knowledge Proof Systems." I wanted to make sure this was out for the launch of the mainnet, and the book is available in my GitHub repository. I released the book for free under a Creative Commons license. Just tell people where you got it, but you can use it for anything you want.
The book covers all the different parts of a zero-knowledge system and talks about Midnight extensively. It discusses seven different layers. The first layer is the trust layer of the system, which involves the setup. Then, you have the languages used to write the proofs, the witness generation, the arithmetization of the system, the proof system, the cryptography, and finally, the verification infrastructure—how you actually verify that things are correct on your side. It also delves into privacy-enhancing technologies and the market as a whole.
The book will be updated often, and my hope is that it's a one-stop shop for anyone wanting to understand how zero-knowledge systems work at scale. The other cool part is that it's written for non-technical people. It's not aimed at scientists or programmers looking to build ZK systems; I wanted the audience to be everyday people who are curious about it. This is probably the best non-technical guide currently on the market, and it's comprehensive. It talks about the KZG summoning for the BLS curve that was on Ethereum, and it includes things like the Adopt framework that I lifted from a paper. It discusses ZKVMs, and in fact, I think this is the only book about ZKVMs. Most of the other resources are just open-source projects and papers.
So, what is a ZKVM, why do you need it, and when do you need it? It covers the Stark to Snark pipelines and all kinds of other topics. It's actually pretty comprehensive, and it's nice to have a single reference point. So, do download that and have some fun with it. As I said, it's in my repo.
I also put in all of the tech files last night. I think I may have ignored that, unfortunately, but I have it on my PC at home, and I will push it today. Midnight is running, it's live, and it's happy. A lot is going to come, and every few weeks, new features will drop. Partners are releasing things, and we're updating the network. The first major update will happen in a few months, adding a ton of new functionality and features. We're in the guarded era, a very strong, nice federated network. We already have over 130 bugs on our backlog to fix in the next two to three weeks that we've discovered during extensive QA. Nothing is a showstopper, but you know, you ship early, ship often, and get these things done.
Lace version 2.0 is coming very soon. The very last version of Lace will probably be 136.2 or something in that setup. Lace V2 will be coming in April, and mobile is also coming in April. So, that's something to look forward to and be excited about.
Everything is open-source, too. I just saw a question: will Lace V2 be open-source? Everything we do is open-source. So, enjoy Midnight, enjoy the network, and learn all about it. Join our Discord and visit midnight.network. There will be tons of things rolling out gradually over the next few weeks. Every two to three months, we want a major upgrade to work its way through, with more things to come. We're working at a frenetic pace. The token launched in December, and the network launched in March. How about that? It wasn't a long wait, was it? We said we were going to do it, and we did it. I even gave you a 300-page book to read about it. I'm pretty proud of everyone.
On behalf of Input Output, we'd like to thank everyone at Shielded and the Midnight Foundation. On behalf of all our partners, collaborators, volunteers, and others, thank you so much. We are now in the age of Midnight. Congratulations. Cheers.
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