Welcome to the Midnight Developer Documentation
Learn About Midnight
Here you’ll learn all about Midnight, a new data-protection blockchain. Midnight enables apps that protect user, commercial, and transaction metadata. Its zero-knowledge ("ZK") proofs offer utility without compromising data protection or ownership. Explore Midnight’s technology stack, features, use cases, and differentiators in the blockchain and smart contract landscape.
Jump Right In
Midnight on Testnet
Midnight is at a 'testnet' stage, providing a stable sandbox environment to develop commercially successful on-chain applications that benefit from the transparency of a blockchain while addressing granular data protection needs.
- The goal of testnet is to provide developers building on Midnight with a reliable environment that simulates the conditions of a live mainnet. Midnight chain capabilities have been expanded and the codebase hardened to reduce the need for regularly scheduled chain resets when upgrading.
- Hard forks can now be initiated on Midnight testnet, which allows major upgrades to the network’s performance and features during testnet and beyond, without disrupting existing projects or requiring developers to redeploy their applications.
- Midnight’s programmable data protection capabilities give developers flexibility when selecting which data to make public on-chain and which to keep private.
- The zero-knowledge ZK Snark proving system ensures fast, efficient truth validation between prover and verifier without requiring any additional interaction with the verifier. The proving system is upgradeable, not burdening developers with smart contract rewrites or redeployment.
- Midnight’s native programming language Compact – based on TypeScript - enables developers with little exposure to blockchain or zero-knowledge technology to quickly ramp up and begin writing smart contracts.
Participate & Influence
Since launching devnet, Midnight has introduced a number of ways for the community to provide feedback and contribute to the network's future development:
- Midnight Discord features regularly-scheduled community calls and support systems.
- Midnight Telegram channel provides another onramp into our growing community.
- Midnight hackathons enable developers to learn and leverage Midnight’s data-protection capabilities.
- Midnight on YouTube videos provide context and techniques on using the Midnight blockchain.
- Midnight blog highlights milestones and noteworthy news.
- Nightpaper: A litepaper introducing Midnight explains how Midnight removes barriers preventing organizations from leveraging blockchain technology.
Tailor & Target Your Experience
For Developers New to Blockchain
If it’s your first time building on a blockchain, we have a comprehensive guide on getting started, complete with developer tutorials and FAQs.
Requirements
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 the 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).
For Developers Familiar with Zero-Knowledge Technology or Blockchain
Visit our quick-start guide to begin building on Midnight.