- Midnight Network has announced the first cohort of the Aliit fellowship, which targets developers building a privacy-first ecosystem.
- They include Taina Bugs, a seasoned Cardano developer previously at Edda Labs, and Ahmed Amine Gargoura, the founder of CarthageX Labs.
As the Midnight Network continues its rapid growth, the demand for talented developers who embody what digital privacy means in a decentralized ecosystem is rising by the day. To court these developers, the network founded the Aliit Fellowship, and on Tuesday, it announced the first cohort, which includes veteran Cardano developers and founders.
The cohort will “create network effects that ripple across regions, languages, and technical communities, laying the groundwork for a global, privacy-first developer movement,” Midnight stated in its announcement.
Introducing our first Midnight Aliit fellows!
Their work will create network effects that ripple across regions, languages, and technical communities, laying the groundwork for a global, privacy-first developer movement. #MidnightNetworkhttps://t.co/x5nWwjQDj7
— Midnight (@MidnightNtwrk) December 23, 2025
As we have reported throughout the year, Midnight Network was launched to address the Cardano community’s privacy needs. While most blockchains are fully transparent (and some are fully focused on privacy), Midnight strikes the balance, allowing its users to dictate the level of privacy they require and tweak it at will. It ends the year in the first of a four-phase rollout; starting in January, it goes into the Kūkolu phase with the launch of the Genesis block.
The network is now courting developers with the first cohort of the Aliit fellowship. According to Lauren Lee, the network’s head of developer relations, the group represents “the breadth of what it means to build privately, publicly, and with purpose.”
Midnight Network Targets Top-Tier Developers
Among the developers in the inaugural cohort is Ahmed Amine Gargoura, a systems engineer with over a decade of experience. In crypto circles, he is most renowned as the founder of CarthageX Labs, the developer of zkTanitID, which supports secure cross-border interactions between African and European counterparties. zkTanitID was deployed on Midnight, making Ahmed one of the leading minds in ZK-based identity.
Kaleab Gizaw brings extensive experience with the Midnight ecosystem to the cohort. In the past year alone, he has built an npm package dubbed create-midnight-app, which enables easy onboarding for developers. He’s also the mind behind Midnight Playground and zkVote; the former is an online developer environment for Midnight’s native language Compact, while the latter offers a privacy-first voting system.
Others include multiple Midnight hackathon winners Sergey Kisel, Midnight Pay and MidnightForge founder Norman Lopez, and Sam Jeffrey, the architect of the Nucast RegTech platform, tapped by India’s government forensics department.
Despite launching this month, NIGHT has become a large-cap crypto, commanding $1.25 billion in market cap and surpassing veteran projects such as Algorand, Filecoin, and VeChain. In the past day, it dipped 3% to trade at $0.07563, with its $1.7 billion trading volume ranking in the top ten globally.
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