How to get one
Right now you can't buy one. You win one.
- 1Get a fighter on Cardano Any MarsBird or Martian Spawn in your Cardano wallet can fight, using the wallet you already have. No fighter yet? Mint a Martian Spawn or find a MarsBird on the marketplace.
- 2Win a Burn Battle Two NFTs fight on marsbirds.com. The loser is burned forever. The winner gets a brand-new MarsBird minted on Midnight.
- 3We hold it until you're ready Midnight is a separate chain, so your Cardano wallet won't show it. We hold your bird for you, and this page shows it with your name on it, until you move it to a Midnight wallet.
The first twenty
Twenty birds, minted the day mainnet opened.
Twenty Cardano NFTs were given up to found this collection, and each of these birds carries the name of one of them, written into its token for anyone to check.
- 19:40 UTCMidnight opens to new contractsOur watcher had been checking every 10 minutes for five weeks.
- 19:45 UTCThe MarsBirds contract goes liveThe first new contract on mainnet after the opening. Block 2,827,344.
- 19:46 to 19:54All twenty birds are mintedAbout one every 25 seconds, each picture written straight into the contract.
- Same nightEvery block on mainnet checked169 contracts have ever been deployed. This is the only art collection.
reading Midnight mainnet
Won in battle
After the first twenty, birds are won, never sold.
In a Burn Battle, two NFTs fight. The loser is burned forever, and the winner gets a brand-new MarsBird minted on Midnight, into the same collection as the first twenty. Pick one to see everything the chain holds about it. Replays play back on marsbirds.com, which asks you to connect a wallet at the door.
reading the prize ledger
Why it's different
Three things worth knowing.
The console
Nothing above is taken on faith, and nothing has been removed to make the page look tidier. This is the machinery: the two-source check in detail, any Midnight contract you care to paste, the owner lookup, and the server's own health. Our older test contracts on Midnight's Preprod testnet are still readable here; those tokens have no monetary value.
Open the console verification detail, explore any contract, owner lookup, service health
The two-source check, in detail
Explore any contract
Paste any Midnight contract address. If we hold its compiled artifacts you get a schema decode; if we do not, you get the honest byte-scan and a label saying so.
Owner view
The input is a Zswap coin public key:
32 raw bytes, 64 hex characters, exactly as stored in the contract's tokenOwner
map. It is not an mn_addr… wallet address and not an
mn_dust… address; pasting either will never match. The server cross-checks its
own scan against the contract's ownedTokensCount and answers
unknown rather than hand back a list it cannot vouch for.
Service health and registry
reading