Despite the variety of attempts to produce dark matter at accelerators, none of the experiments so far produced any evidence.
The elusiveness of dark matter has triggered innovative and open-minded approaches with high-sensitivity detectors spanning a wide range of energies.
The Positron Annihilation into Dark Matter Experiment (PADME) ongoing at the Laboratori Nazionali di Frascati of INFN is one of the initiatives born within this scenario. PADME is searching for a Dark Photon signal by studying the missing-mass spectrum of single-photon final states resulting from the annihilation of a positron from the beam with an atomic electron in a fixed target.
In 2020, after detector commissioning and beam-line optimisation, the PADME collaboration collected about $5\times 10^{12}$ positrons accelerated at the energy of 430 MeV on target. These data are now under study in order to tune all analysis procedures.
This contribution gives an overview of the scientific program of the experiment, reporting on the detector performance achieved so far, and presents a preview of the ongoing studies of Standard Model processes ($\gamma\gamma$ events and Bremsstrahlung).