11,000 Wallets Grab NIGHT Tokens in Cardano Airdrop Amid Disappointing $71M Upgrade

Cardano’s Midnight Network has launched its highly anticipated NIGHT token airdrop, and the crypto community responded in full force. Within hours of the August 5 launch of the “Glacier Drop” phase, over 11,000 wallets across eight major blockchains claimed more than 250 million NIGHT tokens.

The Midnight claim portal, now live, supports wallets from Cardano, Bitcoin, Ethereum, XRP, Solana, BNB, Avalanche, and Brave’s BAT. In total, 33.6 million wallets are eligible to participate in this multi-phase distribution.

Phased Airdrop Mechanics and Cross-Chain Eligibility

While Cardano users will receive the largest share, 50% of the total 24 billion NIGHT tokens, holders from other networks are also included in the drop. The claim process is designed to be fair and non-custodial, requiring users to verify eligibility and sign a transaction.

This first phase will remain open for 60 days, followed by a second phase (Scavenger Mine) where users can earn unclaimed tokens through on-chain computational tasks. A third “Lost-and-Found” stage will begin post-mainnet and allow late claims for a limited fraction of the original allocation.

Despite the excitement, not everything has gone smoothly. Many ADA holders using Ledger hardware wallets reported issues when trying to claim NIGHT tokens.

According to Cardano founder Charles Hoskinson, the problem lies with Ledger’s firmware, which currently supports message signing of only 31 bytes, far short of the 251 bytes needed for the Glacier Drop.

Cardano developers are actively working on a workaround, urging affected users to try again later in the month. “If you are one of the impacted people, then come back towards the end of the month and try again,” Hoskinson advised on X.

Surprisingly, the airdrop’s momentum comes at a time when Cardano’s $71 million network upgrade has underwhelmed the market. Designed to enhance smart contract performance and scalability, the update has barely moved ADA’s price, which hovers around $0.72, a 2.92% drop in the last 24 hours.

Cover image from ChatGPT, ADAUSD chart from Tradingview