Headline: Midnight airdrop reignites Cardano — NIGHT’s volume outpaces Solana and XRP as token rebounds
For much of the past few years Cardano watched from the sidelines as rivals like Solana and XRP dominated headlines — Solana powering a memecoin boom, and XRP making institutional inroads through partnerships and regulatory progress. Cardano’s decentralized finance activity lagged, until a highly anticipated airdrop this month put the blockchain back in the spotlight.
The new token, Midnight (NIGHT) — a privacy-focused sidechain native to Cardano — launched earlier this month with an airdrop that initially looked like a disaster. NIGHT plunged more than 90% from its $1.81 launch peak to below $0.025 as many claimers moved to dump tokens. That sell-off generated widespread coverage and concern that the project had fizzled.
But the story didn’t end there. Interest in NIGHT and the Cardano ecosystem has rebounded: over 122,000 on-chain transactions have involved NIGHT tokens since the launch, according to reports, and the token has staged a notable recovery. Market data showed NIGHT rising more than 30% in a 24‑hour span and about 44% on the week, pushing its market capitalization back above $1.5 billion.
What really turned heads was trading volume. Stakepool posted to X (formerly Twitter) that Midnight’s daily volume had surpassed that of Solana and XRP combined — a claim Cardano founder Charles Hoskinson reiterated, noting NIGHT is a native Cardano token. CoinMarketCap data cited by Hoskinson at the time showed NIGHT with daily trading volume north of $6 billion versus roughly $2.4 billion for XRP and $2.078 billion for Solana. By contrast, ADA’s daily volume hovered near $405 million during the same period.
Rankings still reflect an uneven recovery: XRP and Solana remain among the market’s largest tokens (5th and 7th by market cap), Cardano sits in 10th, and Midnight is listed around 46th. The spike in NIGHT activity has, however, reignited conversation about Cardano’s on-chain utility and the growing market appetite for privacy-focused products.
What to watch next: whether NIGHT’s volume and price action are sustainable beyond initial airdrop dynamics, how Midnight’s privacy-focused features are received by users and regulators, and whether this renewed attention translates into broader adoption and DeFi activity on Cardano. This development has certainly put the network back on traders’ radars — even if ADA itself still has ground to make up.
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