Is Midnight (NIGHT) Catching Up With Zcash (ZEC)? Network Data Offers a Clue

Midnight, the privacy-focused chain developed by the team behind Cardano, hit a new record on November 10 after it processed over 96,000 transactions.

That is more than four times the slightly more than 24,000 that went through Zcash on the same day.

Midnight’s Activity Outpaces Zcash

Data shared by market commentary account MSB Intel shows that Midnight handled 96,851 transactions on Tuesday, compared to 24,160 on Zcash. The gap was also wider across the last 30 days, with Midnight completing 1,487,836 transactions while just 308,050 were processed on Zcash.

Charles Hoskinson, the founder of Cardano and a leading figure behind Midnight, was suitably impressed, taking to X with a short message:

“Midnight is growing. Private Smart contracts are the future.”

The outperformance didn’t end on transaction counts alone, with the native tokens of the two privacy-preserving platforms, NIGHT and ZEC, moving in very different directions. At the time of writing, data from CoinGecko showed NIGHT near $0.047, an uptick of more than 9% in 24 hours.

Other timeframes were also green, including an 11% improvement in the last 7 days and a jump of over 21% across two weeks, although the 30-day chart was pretty much unchanged, with the token only gaining a much more modest 0.1%. Still, that was enough to trounce ZEC, which, according to CG, is 19% lower than where it was one month ago.

As CryptoPotato reported yesterday, the asset lost 14% of its value to dump below the $1,000 psychological mark, with its market cap falling to about $16.6 billion, taking it out of the top 10 biggest cryptocurrencies. It is currently trading close to $980, 25% lower than its value from a week ago and more than 42% below its multi-year high of around $1,700 reached about two months ago.

And while NIGHT is 60% away from its December 2025 all-time high, ZEC is almost 69% below its own ATH from 10 years ago.

Hoskinson’s Longer-Running Bet on Midnight

Midnight’s latest activity count has added context to something Hoskinson said in September. At the time, he claimed that NIGHT could eventually become bigger than Zcash, then laid out what the network had got going for it.

Those included “Selective disclosure, Private Agents, abstraction with a DeFi Kernel for all major chains,” as well as privacy techniques the team was working on, such as zero-knowledge proofs and trusted execution environments.

At that point, NIGHT had been trading near $0.027, meaning it had gained about 72% since then. Meanwhile, ZEC was sitting near $1,600, which means its current price represents a drop of around 38% from that level.