NIGHT — the Glacier Drop claim, decoded

Midnight's Glacier Drop unlocks in four 25% tranches over a 360-day thaw. Every tranche must be redeemed by you, manually, at the official portal. Nothing arrives on its own. This page is the honest version: the deadlines, the traps, and the fixes — with every uncertainty labeled.

*ClaimAid is an independent helper. We are not Midnight. We link their portals everywhere because that is where claims happen.

The two deadlines

The thaw-end date has a conflict — plan around the earlier one

Our research calendar puts the thaw end at Dec 4 2026. But Midnight's own blog guide says "The thawing period will end on November 29, 2026" (as quoted on r/Midnight). We show the conflict instead of picking a winner. Treat Nov 29 2026 as the operative date until re-verified at midnight.network.

After the thaw end there is a 90-day grace period, then the portal closes. With Dec 4 as the thaw end, that puts the close at ≈ Mar 4 2027. If Nov 29 is right, ≈ Feb 27 2027. The close date itself is unpublished — Midnight has not named it; aggregators infer it.

What happens to uncollected tranches after the grace period? Mostly answered — one piece is still open.

Verified (our mechanism research, Oct 18 2026): a claim that has been materialized — shows up in the portal — never expires. The redemption contract carries no upper time bound, and the official word is "there is no deadline of expiration for redemption, tokens can be redeemed even after the portal itself is retired." After the portal retires you would redeem by interacting with the smart contracts directly, with your own tools. Uncollected tranches are not burned at the deadline.

The open piece: claims that were signed but never materialized need a Merkle proof from the portal's backend to appear at all — and whether that proof service survives portal retirement is unpublished. If you claimed but never saw your NIGHT in the portal, don't wait: materialize before the portal closes (≈ Mar 4 2027 est).

There is also a "lost-and-found" phase for missed claimers — ~252M NIGHT ≈ $10.1M (@ $0.0402, CoinGecko, Oct 18 2026; the 252M figure is UNVERIFIED — peoplelikecrypto.com) — with no date; sources conflict on its length (official pages say 5 years, community documentation says 4), and it would use your own tools. We'll publish the full picture when every piece is verified.

How the 4×25% tranches work

Per Midnight's official guide:

Your full allocation unlocks in four equal 25% installments over a 360-day thaw.
Randomized start: every destination address got a random first day between Dec 10 2025 and early March 2026 (the first 90-day window).
Then every 90 days: a Day-1 schedule unlocks on days 1, 91, 181, 271. A Day-90 schedule unlocks on days 90, 180, 270, 360.
Your four unlock days = your start day + 0, 90, 180, 270. The portal shows a countdown to your next unlock, so your start day is written there. The latest starters' final 4th unlock lands at the end of the thaw — ≈ Dec 4 2026, or Nov 29 2026 if that reading is right.
You do not have to claim each tranche on its unlock day. You can redeem each 25% as it thaws, or wait until more (or all) have thawed and redeem them together — fewer transactions, same tokens.
Every redemption is manual and needs a small ADA fee. The fee wallet does not have to be your destination wallet ("On Behalf Of": any wallet can pay the fee — the NIGHT always goes to the destination address).

"Portal shows 0 NIGHT" — the two usual reasons

1. Tranche timing — nothing is wrong

If your first 25% has not thawed yet, the dashboard shows zero redeemable and a countdown to your next unlock. That is the schedule working, not your tokens missing. Check the "Redeemable now" number and the countdown, not just the big balance.

2. The connect-wallet bug — check addresses manually

Reported repeatedly on r/Midnight: with multiple addresses holding allocations, "connect wallet" can surface only the most recent address with an allocation — often the tiny Scavenger Mining one — hiding the big Glacier Drop claim. The fix that works: do not rely on connect-wallet. Paste each address manually into the portal's search field, one by one. Also note (official guide): if the portal says "Confirmed" but your wallet UI lags, your tokens are safe — wallet interfaces sometimes fall behind the blockchain.

The two-address trap — your Drop address ≠ your Scavenger Mine address

Many people used one address for the Glacier Drop and a different one for Scavenger Mining (an empty address was needed for mining — r/Midnight-reported). Different addresses can sit in the same wallet. So: portal shows only your small mining balance → your big drop is very likely on the other address. Check both addresses manually. Users who did found "the correct amount for each, with different thaw schedules" (r/Midnight). Your tokens are not gone. If you have the seed phrase for the wallet, they are safe.

Tip from the same threads (user-reported, not official): the Vespr wallet app can display the redemption schedule in-app. Eternl's "single address mode" can help you reach a specific address inside a restored wallet.

Check an address right now — read-only

Paste any Cardano mainnet address. v0 shows ADA balance and transaction count via the public Koios API. The NIGHT tranche/deadline decode is next. We never see your keys, and addresses aren't stored — not logged, not written to disk. Check both addresses if you did the Drop and the Mine.

Full checker with details: /checker.

Exchange users (Kraken, OKX, …)

We don't know yet which exchanges credited NIGHT to their users, or on what terms — as of Oct 18 2026 we haven't found publishable, verified details. What we can say:

If you did the Glacier Drop with your own wallet, your NIGHT sits on your destination address regardless of what any exchange did. The tranches above apply to you.
If you expected an exchange to credit you, watch that exchange's official announcements. We can't see their internal distributions — and we won't guess.
Be careful in DMs and "support" channels around any claim confusion. Anyone asking for your seed phrase to "fix" your claim is scamming you. We will never ask. Neither will the official portal.

Your tokens can only ever reach YOUR destination address

The destination is pinned on-chain

Your destination address is fixed at claim time, on-chain, in the UTxO datum (verified in the smart-contract source — HydraThread/Terms.hs, RedemptionSupply/Terms.hs and the redemption validator Redemption/Terms.hs — by our mechanism research, Oct 18 2026). A redemption always pays the claimant's own pinned destination — no matter who builds the transaction or pays the fee. Redirecting your NIGHT to someone else's address is impossible by design.

And it doesn't expire with the portal: per the official FAQ and news posts, "there is no deadline of expiration for redemption, tokens can be redeemed even after the portal itself is retired" — if you miss the redemption window you can still redeem after the portal and backend are turned off, but you would need your own tools to interact with the smart contracts. The portal's total life is ~450 days (~15 months) from launch.

Portal errors? It has happened before

The redemption portal was suspended from Jun 28 to Jul 9 2026 with "status code 400" errors (forum.midnight.network/t/request-failed-with-status-code-400/1253; announced on Midnight's X). If it errors today: wait, retry, and don't panic. And don't let an outage push you toward third-party "helpers" asking for your keys.

The numbers, with their basis

2B NIGHT redeemed by Sep 14 2026 (x.com/midnightfdn/status/2099531123546108427) ≈ $80M at $0.0402 (CoinGecko, Oct 18 2026).
1,233,441,288 NIGHT ≈ $49.4M still uncollected — MEASURED by our own on-chain census (Koios, Oct 18 2026): 1,174,771,002 NIGHT ≈ $47.1M claimed-but-never-materialized (exact — all 568 supply-shard datums decoded) + 58,670,286 NIGHT ≈ $2.35M materialized-but-unredeemed (found set — 874 of 1,991 surfaced addresses; 1,117 still being counted, est. ~34M NIGHT more).
~252M NIGHT lost-and-found ≈ $10.1M — UNVERIFIED (peoplelikecrypto.com), at $0.0402 (CoinGecko, Oct 18 2026).
NIGHT price: $0.0402 (CoinGecko, Oct 18 2026). We show prices for scale, not as promises.

Sources

Official

Community evidence (r/Midnight) — treated as reports, not official statements

Research basis: read-only recon, Oct 18 2026. Conflicts (Dec 4 vs Nov 29 thaw end) are stated, not smoothed over.