Midnight Network has upgraded its mainnet to Ledger 9, introducing private asset transfers and contract-to-contract execution. The hard fork, which occurred on November 6, 2026, was deployed directly to the mainnet, bypassing the standard pre-production testing phase due to security considerations.
The update adds native support for ECDSA signatures, Keccak-256 hashing, and secp256k1, enhancing interoperability with Bitcoin and Ethereum. Additionally, the network now supports unshielded event emissions, allowing contracts to broadcast specific events publicly.
The migration of existing balances and smart contracts was handled automatically. Node operators facilitated the transition by upgrading to binary version v2.1.101. Holders of cNIGHT saw their DUST generation registrations restored automatically following a state reset.
Developers are required to update applications to Midnight.js 5.0.0 and Wallet SDK 2.0.0 to maintain compatibility. Transactions created for the previous Ledger 8 are no longer supported on the mainnet following the upgrade.
