Backfill entry Dating honesty: Midnight's claim windows ran in late 2025, well before this fiche. We are adding it in August 2026 for tracker completeness, because two live deadlines still hang off this airdrop, the December 4, 2026 redemption cutoff and an undated Lost-and-Found phase, and both keep generating questions and scams right now.

Most airdrops end when the claim closes. Midnight's is the rare one where the most consequential dates come after. The privacy-focused Cardano partner chain distributed NIGHT through one of the widest eligibility nets ever attempted, self-custodying holders of ADA, BTC, ETH, SOL, XRP, BNB, AVAX and BAT at a June 11, 2025 snapshot, per the official launch guide, and both original claim windows are long shut. What remains is a slow-motion final act: everyone who claimed is still redeeming tokens that thaw in quarterly installments through December 4, 2026, and roughly 252 million NIGHT sit in a confirmed but undated Lost-and-Found pool for the people who missed their window. That second group is why this fiche exists, and why a top Cardano DRep was still issuing public reminders about the airdrop as recently as August 17, per The Crypto Basic.

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Three phases, two of them closed

The structure is worth laying out plainly, because the phase names confuse people into thinking they missed everything or nothing. The Glacier Drop was the main event: 3.547 billion NIGHT for snapshot-eligible holders, claimable from August 5 to October 20, 2025, with more than 170,000 wallets participating, per the official guide. The Scavenger Mine followed from October 30 to November 19, 2025, an open-to-all phase requiring only a CPU and an internet connection that drew over 8 million unique addresses and had its allocation raised to 1 billion NIGHT on the back of that demand. Both are closed, and nothing reopens them.

Figure 01The Midnight distribution arc, per the official launch guide. Two phases are closed, one is ticking toward a hard deadline, and the last has no date.

The Scavenger Mine increase came at a cost, and it is the number that matters most to latecomers: the Lost-and-Found pool was rebalanced down to approximately 252 million NIGHT, per the official guide. That pool serves eligible participants who missed the initial windows and exchanges claiming on behalf of users. It is a real, confirmed allocation, about 5 percent of the roughly 4.8 billion NIGHT spread across the three phases, but as of our August 30 check Midnight has not announced when it opens, and no amount of Discord rumor changes that.

Figure 02How the roughly 4.8 billion NIGHT across the three distribution phases split, per the official launch guide. Lost-and-Found is the only slice still undistributed.

Where the urgency actually is

The deadline asymmetry inverts the usual airdrop advice. If you claimed, you hold the urgent position: claimed NIGHT thaws in four 25 percent quarterly installments over 360 days, each destination address assigned a randomized first unlock between December 10, 2025 and early March 2026, and the whole redemption period ends December 4, 2026 with a 90-day grace period after, per the official guide. Exodus's support documentation walks holders through connecting a wallet to the redemption portal to redeem thawed tranches and check progress. Letting installments sit unredeemed past the grace period is the one way to turn a successful claim into nothing, which is precisely why Cardano community figures keep banging the reminder drum.

If you missed the claim, your only job is patience and skepticism, the combination our scam field guide exists to teach. An undated pool worth hundreds of millions of tokens, attached to a project whose eligibility net covered eight chains of wallets, is close to ideal raw material for fake claim portals. Until midnight.gd or midnight.network announce a Lost-and-Found date through their own channels, every page offering early access to it is a drainer. We hold this fiche at confirmed rather than live for exactly that reason: the token is real and trading, the remaining distribution is committed, but nothing about it is claimable today. The pattern rhymes with OpenSea's SEA, where a confirmed token spent months between announcement and mechanics, and the same discipline applies: we will update this entry the day an official date exists, and the status will not move before the facts do.

How to position yourself

  1. If you claimed NIGHT during the Glacier Drop or mined in the Scavenger Mine, connect to the official redemption portal at midnight.gd and redeem each 25 percent installment as it thaws; the redemption window runs through December 4, 2026, with a 90-day grace period after.
  2. If you were eligible at the June 11, 2025 snapshot but missed the claim, do nothing but watch: the Lost-and-Found phase is confirmed at about 252 million NIGHT for exactly this group, and it has no announced date, so any page offering it today is a scam.
  3. Only trust midnight.gd and midnight.network; the project's breadth made it a favorite target for fake claim portals, and the real one never asks for a seed phrase.
  4. Remember the deadline asymmetry: redemption has a hard end date, Lost-and-Found has none, so the urgent action belongs to people who already claimed, not to people waiting.

Reality check None of these steps guarantee an allocation. Teams change criteria late, add anti-sybil filters, and sometimes never ship a token at all. Only spend time and gas you are fine writing off.