The cryptocurrency circle in March indeed made headlines.
From Binance launching spot trading to the mainnet about to start, the excitement has been continuous. But amidst all this noise, one detail has been spinning in my mind — the words spoken by Charles Hoskinson at Consensus Hong Kong.
At that time, a journalist asked him: How does Midnight plan to attract users from Monero and Zcash?
His answer was very direct:
"We do not intend to pursue users from Monero and Zcash."
"Privacy fundamentalists" and the remaining billions of people
Hoskinson divides the people in the privacy race into two categories.
The first category consists of those who wake up every day and first care about privacy. They use Monero and Zcash, treating privacy as a belief. This group is important, but its scale is destined to be limited.
The second category is a much larger group.
Billions of people rarely actively think about privacy issues, but they should default to having privacy.
What Midnight wants is the latter.
This positioning is clever. Most ordinary users won't change their habits for privacy because it's too troublesome. But if a product has privacy protection by default and comes with no extra barriers, people will naturally stick around.
Hoskinson also mentioned a viewpoint: many privacy projects have been using a 'switch mindset.' It's as if privacy only has two states: either completely transparent or completely anonymous.
The real world is clearly not like that.
You are willing to let the bank see your account transactions, but you wouldn't want everyone to see them.
You are willing to show your educational background to employers, but there's no need to disclose every grade.
Midnight's 'selective disclosure' mechanism essentially simulates this logical reality:
Some information can be made public, some can only be shared with specific parties, and some can only be partially disclosed.
Why this positioning is important
If you accept Hoskinson's judgment, the overall strategy of Midnight becomes easy to understand.
It is not meant to replace Monero, but rather to make privacy the default setting for Web3.
Just like today's internet.
Most people do not think about whether to use an encrypted connection when opening a browser, as HTTPS has become the default.
What Midnight wants to do is something similar:
Make privacy no longer a high-level option that users must manually turn on, but a part of the underlying infrastructure.
This also explains why the team has invested a lot of energy in the developer ecosystem.
Through Midnight Academy and the Aliit Fellowship, they are nurturing a batch of developers who can use zero-knowledge proofs to build applications.
When truly useful applications emerge, users will gain privacy protection unknowingly, without needing to understand the technical details behind it.
Does the token model match this goal
If Midnight's goal is really billions of users, then the economic model must support such scale.
$NIGHT has a total supply of 2.4 billion coins, which has already been fully minted.
In design, the roles of NIGHT and DUST are very clear:
🔹NIGHT is responsible for value storage and governance
🔹DUST is used for network usage and privacy computing fees
Ordinary users only need to consume DUST when interacting at the application layer, while the underlying staking and generation of NIGHT operate automatically by the protocol.
This 'seamless usage' experience may be just the way mainstream users are willing to accept.
What does the market think
From a price perspective, NIGHT has recently experienced a significant correction.
On the technical side, it remains weak, but several key events on the fundamental side are approaching:
* The mainnet is about to launch
* The first batch of dApps is expected to be deployed
* More institutional collaborations may materialize
Short-term market sentiment remains volatile, but what truly determines long-term value is often whether the network can attract real applications.
The target audience that Midnight is truly aiming for
Hoskinson said that Midnight does not pursue Monero users, which is not a denial of the privacy coin community, but rather an acknowledgment of a larger market.
Those ordinary internet users who use mobile payments, watch short videos, and shop online every day are the people that Web3 must reach to become mainstream.
Providing them with privacy protection cannot rely on complex mixing tutorials or address obfuscation tools.
It must be a ready-to-use default capability.
Midnight has chosen a more difficult path:
Technology needs to be strong enough, while the experience must be simple enough.
If this path succeeds, the gameplay in the privacy track may be completely rewritten.
The mainnet is about to launch, and it's worth paying close attention to what comes next.#night