I've been keeping an eye on @MidnightNetwork for the past couple of days, feeling a sense of 'the hype is real, but don't rush into it': on March 11, Binance put $NIGHT up for trading (with a seed tag), and liquidity surged immediately. Then on March 13, Binance Research explained it very plainly—$N$NIGHT is a traditional privacy coin path, which is publicly governed/value anchored, but continuously produces DUST, a resource that 'can only be used for payments and will also decay', effectively tying the cost of network usage to holding behavior. It sounds odd, but the logic is quite engineering-like.
What I'm more concerned about is whether 'progress has materialized': recently, the market has been buzzing about the news of 'mainnet/federated mainnet phase by the end of March', and Hoskinson has been teasing it wildly around March 23; at the same time, you can see the official/community updates repeatedly emphasizing preprod migration, development kits, sample projects, and launch preparations—these kinds of tedious tasks may not be appealing, but they are often more valuable than shouting slogans.
In terms of data, the number of on-chain holding addresses has already surged to over 57,000 (as of around March 13), and with Binance also putting it into Super Earn, a 'continuous deployment' channel on March 16, it shows that at least the exchange is willing to provide exposure and retention scenarios for it.
However, I also have to pour some cold water: the privacy track is easily misunderstood as 'the more private, the better', while Midnight advocates for 'selective disclosure/compliance-friendly', which is a tougher and slower path; short-term price fluctuations may be unrelated to progress, more so due to expectations pulling; so my approach is to only focus on three hard indicators: whether developer migration is smooth, whether the DUST mechanism is genuinely utilized by dApps, and whether the mainnet stage's nodes/eco-partners are continuously expanding—once these three things become real, #night can be considered a transition from narrative to business.$NIGHT
