Midnight Network upgrades mainnet to Ledger 9 with private transfers and contract calls

The privacy-focused network skipped its usual testing soak and pushed the hard fork straight to mainnet, citing security considerations Midnight Network has moved its mainnet to Ledger 9. The upgrade adds private asset transfers, contract-to-contract execution and a fresh set of cryptographic standards. The hard fork landed on November 6, 2026. Midnight also skipped its usual staging environment, deploying directly to mainnet because of what it described as pressing security considerations. What Ledger 9 actually changes The headline feature for developers is contract-to-contract calls. One smart contract can now trigger another directly, without a user stitching the steps together manually. Ledger 9 also introduces unshielded event emissions. Contracts can broadcast certain events publicly, which matters on a network built around keeping things private by default. Then there are the cryptographic additions. Midnight now natively supports ECDSA signatures, Keccak-256 hashing and secp256k1. According to the research findings, together they significantly improve interoperability with established chains like Bitcoin and Ethereum. Private asset transfers round out the release. How the ...