Midnight Improvement Proposals

This repository is the canonical home for Midnight's open development documents. It is where the community proposes, discusses, and records changes to the Midnight protocol, standards, and ecosystem.

Contributions from anyone are welcome — developers, node operators, application builders, token holders, and users alike. If you have an idea for improving Midnight, this is the place to bring it.

What lives here

• mips/ — Midnight Improvement Proposals. Concrete, technically-precise proposals to change the Midnight ecosystem. See mips/mip-template.md and MIP-0001 for the full process.
• mps/ — Midnight Problem Statements. Solution-agnostic descriptions of friction, gaps, or opportunities in the ecosystem. MPS documents define what needs solving; MIPs propose how. See mps/mps-template.md.
• deployments/ — Archive of the contract deploy requests MNF reviewed while mainnet contract deployment was permissioned. Contract deployment on mainnet is now permissionless, so deploy requests are no longer needed. The records are kept as a historical record and are no longer updated or added to. The contract deployment rubric remains available as optional self-assessment guidance. These reviews were not audits.
• NUMBERS_INDEX.md — Canonical index of assigned MIP and MPS numbers. Maintainers of this repository should reference this index for the next available number

How to contribute

1. Open a discussion first if you'd like early feedback — via the Discussions tab of this repository or our Discord.
2. Fork this repository and copy the appropriate template (mip-template.md or mps-template.md).
3. Submit a Pull Request with your draft. Use xxxx in place of a number — an editor will assign one prior to merging. If you are aware of the proper relevant reviewer for a particular topic, assing them for review -- otherwise, leave the asignees blank and it will auto-populate with the MIP editor group.
4. Engage with reviewers. Discussion happens in the Discussions tab of this repository. MIP Editors will help shepherd your proposal through the process stages: Proposed → Review → Accepted → Implemented.

Pull requests should describe the change, not implement it — link to code repositories rather than including implementation code.

Authorship and AI assistance

Contributors are welcome to use AI tools (such as Claude) to help draft, edit, or refine their proposals. However, commits must be authored by the responsible human contributor — do not configure Claude or any other AI assistant as the commit author or co-author. The named author of a MIP or MPS is accountable for its content, regardless of which tools were used to produce it.

Signed commits

This repository requires verified commit signatures. Commits without a verified signature will be labeled BLOCKED | Unverified and cannot be merged until every commit on the PR has a verified signature. See GitHub's guide to signing commits to set this up.

See CONTRIBUTING.md and CODE_OF_CONDUCT.md before submitting.

License

All contributions are licensed under the Apache License 2.0.