Hey Cardanians! Welcome aboard the Weekly Cardano Digest #119!

We've filtered through all the noise to distill crucial updates into a breezy, 5-minute read. No need for you to sift through endless info — we've got you covered. Ready to delve into this week's top Cardano news? Let’s dive in.

Here are the topics of the week:

• 🏦 Monument Bank to Tokenize £250M in UK Retail Deposits on Midnight

• ₿ First Bitcoin–Cardano Atomic Swap Executed on Mainnet

• 🌙 Midnight “Federated Mainnet” Goes Live in Kūkolu Phase

• Weekly Development Report

• & More!

🏦 Monument Bank to Tokenize £250M in UK Retail Deposits on Midnight

UK challenger bank Monument Bank announced a landmark partnership with the Midnight Foundation to tokenize up to £250 million ($335M) of retail customer deposits, becoming the first UK-regulated bank to tokenize customer deposits on a public blockchain. Deposits remain interest-bearing, fully backed, and protected under the UK’s Financial Services Compensation Scheme (FSCS), ensuring complete safety for account holders throughout the process.

The rollout is structured in three phases: Phase 1 tokenizes up to £250M in savings deposits; Phase 2 expands into tokenized investment products (commodity funds, private equity, structured assets); Phase 3 opens the infrastructure via Monument Technology’s Banking-as-a-Service platform for other institutions to adopt. Midnight’s privacy architecture ensures transaction data remains visible only to the bank and its customers, while maintaining full regulatory compliance.

This milestone represents one of the most significant real-world asset tokenization events within the Cardano ecosystem to date. Charles Hoskinson called it “one of the largest deals we’ve ever done.” For Cardano, Monument Bank’s move signals a new phase of institutional adoption: regulated financial products are now using Midnight’s privacy layer as a trust layer, validating the thesis that compliance-ready ZK chains have genuine demand from traditional finance.

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₿ First Bitcoin–Cardano Atomic Swap Executed on Mainnet By FluidTokens

FluidTokens executed the first-ever atomic swap between native BTC and native ADA directly on mainnet — with no bridges, wrapped assets, or centralized intermediaries involved. The historic transaction swapped 0.0001 BTC for 50 ADA, settling on-chain with a fee of just 2,000 sats ($1.43). The swap was executed via Fluidly, FluidTokens’ trustless peer-to-peer swap protocol that allows users to post and match cross-chain offers that settle atomically once conditions are met.

This milestone demonstrates that native Bitcoin can now be traded directly within Cardano’s ecosystem without relying on any third-party custody or wrapped token infrastructure. The trust model is fully on-chain: either both legs of the swap execute simultaneously, or neither does. This eliminates counterparty risk entirely and represents a qualitatively different level of cross-chain interoperability compared to bridge-based solutions.

The broader significance is strategic: Bitcoin DeFi integration has been identified as a core 2026 priority by IOG, the Cardano Foundation, and Intersect. FluidTokens’ mainnet success puts Cardano among the first Layer 1s to support trustless, native BTC–ADA settlement. As Fluidly scales and liquidity deepens, Cardano stands to capture a meaningful share of the growing Bitcoin-native DeFi market.

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🌙 Midnight Federated Mainnet Goes Live in Kūkolu Phase

The Midnight Network mainnet launched its Kūkolu (federated) phase this week, marking the world’s first regulatory-compliant zero-knowledge privacy chain going live in production.

Charles Hoskinson confirmed in a livestream that “Midnight Week” is underway, with the federated mainnet being activated step-by-step through daily go/no-go checkpoints with its 10 institutional node operators, including Google Cloud, MoneyGram, WorldPay, Bullish, eToro, Vodafone’s Pairpoint, Blockdaemon, and Shielded Technologies.

Full decentralization is planned for Q3 2026, when community-driven block production will replace the federated model. The Midnight launch marks the culmination of years of R&D by IOG and the Midnight Foundation, and represents the first live deployment of a ZK-based, regulatory-compliant partner chain to Cardano. For the broader Cardano ecosystem, Midnight adds a privacy layer that complements ADA’s public ledger, opening entirely new use cases in regulated industries.

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Essential Cardano’s weekly development report