How Cherry Servers Helped Power Midnight’s Scavenger Mine

When Midnight announced Scavenger Mine as part of its Glacier Drop token distribution, most people saw an opportunity to earn NIGHT. I saw a playground for something a little more specific:

Could we scale CPU-based mining on rented bare metal in a way that felt almost plug and play?

My name is Mick Blackwell, EIT. During Scavenger Mine I spent a lot of time:

• Running miners across multiple machines
• Working closely with the team behind Nocturne
• Experimenting with different Cherry Servers configurations to see what worked best

Image: The Nocturne dashboard showing my many-server mining setup, producing an outstanding 5.34 MH/s in raw CPU throughput.

This is a reflection on how those pieces fit together. I will walk through:

1. What Midnight is trying to solve
2. How Scavenger Mine actually worked in practice
3. Why Nocturne became such an important community tool
4. How Cherry Servers ended up powering many of those miners behind the scenes
5. How it all ties into Cherry’s broader commitment to Web3

#1. What is Midnight?

Midnight is a privacy focused network built as a partnerchain of Cardano. It is designed for use cases where you want blockchain transparency, but you cannot just dump every detail onto a public ledger forever.

A few key ideas:

• Midnight brings “rational privacy” to blockchain. Not everything should be visible, and Midnight gives developers tools to control what is revealed and what is not.
• It is a data protection chain, built for confidential smart contracts and zero knowledge proof-based validation.
• It runs as a partnerchain or sidechain to Cardano, with its own token, NIGHT, and a design that aims to be both privacy preserving and regulation friendly.
• It can be a Layer 2 to any protocol serving as a privacy layer

In short, Midnight is built for situations where you care about:

• Selective data disclosure
• Compliance and governance
• Real world uses that cannot afford to leak sensitive information

To get NIGHT into the hands of real users and builders, Midnight created a multi-phase distribution known as the Glacier Drop. Phase 1 was a more traditional claim model across multiple ecosystems. Phase 2 is where things got interesting for miners: Scavenger Mine.

#2. How Scavenger Mine and Mining Worked

Scavenger Mine turned token distribution into a time limited, challenge-based mining event. Instead of just clicking a button to claim tokens, you contributed CPU power to solve cryptographic challenges and earned NIGHT based on your share of valid solutions.

The structure was simple enough:

• The event ran across a series of fixed daily cycles, each with a set pool of NIGHT.
• Within each cycle, new challenges appeared on a schedule, and miners raced to solve them.
• At the end of the cycle, Midnight looked at how many valid solutions you submitted and gave you a proportional share of that day’s NIGHT.

The original on ramp was browser-based mining. You would:

1. Connect a supported wallet in your browser.
2. Open the official Scavenger Mine page.
3. Allocate some CPU threads and let the browser handle the rest.

Behind the scenes, your browser pulled challenges, used your CPU to work on them, and submitted solutions as it found them. Anyone with a halfway decent computer could participate, which is exactly what made the event so interesting.

Once people understood that rewards scaled with their contribution, the question shifted from “How do I join” to “How do I scale this up in a smarter way”.

#3. Why Nocturne Became a Go To Miner

The browser miner made Scavenger Mine accessible. For many participants, that was enough. But power users quickly wanted more control and more efficiency, especially if they planned to:

• Use multi core CPUs to their full potential
• Run multiple wallets from a single machine
• Move miners onto dedicated servers instead of personal laptops

This is the gap Nocturne set out to fill. I worked closely with the Nocturne team, especially:

• Shishir Pai, who led the core miner development
• Luiz Paulo de Castro Oliveira, who focused on the UI and overall usability

Their goal was to turn the Scavenger Mine API into a practical tool for miners who were comfortable with servers and command lines. A few things made Nocturne stand out:

• Simple deployment on Linux. A clean server and a short installer were enough to get started.
• Multi-core aware design, so higher core counts and better CPUs actually translated into more work done.
• Multi wallet support, which meant you did not need twenty browser windows to manage twenty addresses.

Image: Example of what the full Nocturne dashboard looked like for mining users. Note the ability to consolidate miners into one view.

#4. Cherry Servers Powering Nocturne Miners

As Nocturne matured, it became natural to pair it with bare metal cloud rather than just local machines. That is where Cherry Servers entered the picture.

Cherry Servers provides:

• Dedicated bare metal machines with modern AMD and Intel CPUs
• High core count configurations that are ideal for CPU heavy workloads
• Straightforward hourly billing and the ability to pay with crypto

For Scavenger Mine, that combination worked extremely well. The basic pattern looked like this:

1. Provision a CPU focused server on Cherry Servers using a standard Linux image.
2. Install Nocturne with a simple command.
3. Attach one or more wallets and configure how many threads to use.
4. Let the server quietly chew through challenges day and night.

Because the machines are bare metal, you get predictable performance without noisy neighbors. Because they are rented, you can spin them up for the event, tune your setup, then shut them down when the mining window closes. It feels like owning serious hardware without the long-term commitment or capital expense. In practice, Cherry Servers became the quiet backbone behind a lot of Nocturne based miners.

#5. How It All Ties Together

Cherry Servers and a Web3 Native Future

Scavenger Mine will end, but the pattern it demonstrated is likely to repeat. Midnight showed that you can distribute tokens in a way that is:

• Interactive and merit based
• Friendly to everyday users with a browser
• Still attractive to advanced users who want to bring their own tools and infrastructure

Nocturne showed how community builders can take an official API and turn it into something that scales, so that serious participants can run miners on real servers and use all the cores they are paying for.

Cherry Servers provided the muscle. With bare metal cloud, miners could:

• Rent CPU dense machines that match the needs of a challenge-based event
• Deploy Nocturne quickly and manage fleets of miners as infrastructure, not just hobby machines
• Pay with the same digital assets that underpin the ecosystems they support

The same pattern applies beyond Scavenger Mine. Privacy focused chains like Midnight still need:

• Reliable infrastructure for nodes and validators
• Indexing and off chain services that can handle heavy cryptography
• Partners who understand that Web3 workloads are not an afterthought

From my perspective, that is where Cherry Servers fits. They are positioning themselves as a Web3 aware base layer for teams that care about control, performance, and flexibility.

If you are exploring Midnight, Cardano, or any privacy first chain, and you want to experiment with CPU based mining or node infrastructure, pairing tools like Nocturne with Cherry Servers is a very natural starting point.

It worked for Scavenger Mine, and it is a model that will only get more relevant as Web3 continues to mature.