Midnight Explorer Adds Tracking for Network Improvement Proposals

Midnight Explorer has introduced a dedicated section for Midnight Improvement Proposals, bringing documents on proposed network changes and technical standards into its blockchain explorer.

Announced on October 30, the feature lets users search by title, author or MIP number. Individual pages display proposal details and link to the official repository and discussions.

Midnight Explorer Lists 31 Proposals

Midnight Improvement Proposals, known as MIPs, are formal documents that describe ideas and potential changes for the Midnight ecosystem. They can cover protocol development, technical standards, governance processes and other areas where a documented design can support discussion.

The new section sits alongside the Explorer’s existing tools for viewing blocks, transactions, contracts and pools. Users can filter proposals by category or status and see information including the author and creation date.

As of November 1, the Explorer listed 31 MIPs: five marked Draft, 23 Proposed and three Accepted. The accepted documents included MIP-0001, which describes the proposal process, alongside proposals covering public contract log emission and ECDSA signature support.

For readers who do not regularly follow software repositories, the listing provides a starting point for finding a proposal and checking its progress. Someone interested in staking, for example, can search for the relevant MIP, identify its author and status, and read what it proposes.

Individual pages include sections such as the abstract, motivation and specification. They also link to the corresponding GitHub document and discussions.

Proposals Address NIGHT Staking and Node Storage

One example is MIP-0016, a draft by Karmel E that outlines a possible NIGHT staking mechanism. The proposal describes allowing holders of Midnight-native NIGHT, or mNIGHT, to delegate to a pool operated by a block producer and receive a share of that pool’s block production rewards.

Under the proposed design, tokens would remain in the holder’s wallet without being locked. The draft also states that delegated stake would carry no consensus weight in its initial version and that DUST generation would remain unchanged. MIP-0016 is marked Draft and does not describe an active staking service.

A separate document, MIP-0026, addresses how Midnight nodes handle temporary ledger states created while transactions are processed within a block. Author Dominik Zajkowski proposes releasing interim states instead of retaining them indefinitely in a storage area separate from the chain database.

The proposal focuses on reducing future storage growth as nodes process transactions. In a controlled performance-network experiment described in the document, the ledger store grew by 2.9 GB on nodes running the tested change, compared with 4.9 GB on nodes without it, over 20 hours and 11,750 blocks.

The document reports a reduction of about 42% in storage growth during that experiment; it does not claim an equivalent reduction in existing stored data. MIP-0026 is listed as Proposed.

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How Midnight Proposals Move Through Review

The MIP process is described in MIP-0001, which explains how proposals are prepared, discussed and reviewed. Authors can develop a draft in the public repository, where contributors can provide feedback and suggest changes.

When authors consider a draft ready, they can formally ask the MIP editors to consider it. The document then enters the Proposed stage. The process calls for community review and a commentary period that usually lasts at least two weeks before the editors discuss the proposal and vote on whether to accept it.

Acceptance does not automatically put a change into operation. Depending on the proposal, contributors may still need to implement it, and network changes may require deployment in an upgrade. Later statuses distinguish implementation and activation from acceptance.

The Explorer listing gives readers a way to follow those stages alongside the documents themselves, from the NIGHT staking draft to the proposed changes to node storage.