Since this is our first in-depth analysis of Midnight, today we will learn how leaders hold meetings: no discussing airdrops, no tutorials, just directly presenting some value and talking about the 'grand vision'. We will avoid the noise on the streets and conduct a soul-searching inquiry:
Is the current blockchain, the current Web3, what you wished for? Do you really feel free now?
Think about those moments in real life that make you feel uneasy: you just casually talked about a certain product with a friend at the dinner table, and then you open an e-commerce app (like PDD), and the homepage recommendation is exactly what you just discussed. In this era of ubiquitous surveillance, even those 'anthropology companies' that publicly oppose the U.S. government's endless monitoring can be directly placed on the 'danger list' by the authorities.
We originally thought that escaping the surveillance of the real world and rushing into Web3 would grant us the so-called 'freedom' and 'decentralization'.
But reality has slapped us hard. The so-called Web3 is essentially a 'transparent panoramic prison' that anyone can peek into.
Your exchange data is all transparent; as long as you dare to withdraw a sum of money from the exchange, on-chain tracking tools (like Arkham) can instantly strip your address down to nothing; if you want to set up a mouse warehouse on DEX, MEV clipping bots are watching your slippage 24/7, ready to suck blood; if you are a legitimate institution wanting to do some real business on-chain, your fund flows and upstream and downstream customers are being monitored as if live streaming by competitors every day.
Is this what we proudly call Web3?
@MidnightNetwork 's official homepage starts with an extremely face-slapping statement: 'Web3 promised freedom... Midnight restores the original promise of crypto.'
This sentence translates to: The world has long suffered from 'naked running'; it is time to return true freedom to humanity.
In today's lengthy article, I will peel back Midnight's extremely arrogant slogans on their official website, to see how this group of self-proclaimed 'fourth-generation blockchain' IOG veterans prepares to use 'rational privacy' and 'dual-token detachment' to rescue Web3 from the transparent prison.
Tearing apart the transparent lie: Why are Wall Street and AI afraid of 'naked intentions'?
The first three generations of blockchain (from Bitcoin to Ethereum to various high-performance L1s) are all crazily competing over one thing: TPS (transactions per second). Everyone is racing to see who can keep the fastest ledger.
But they all avoid a fatal flaw: All transaction intents and commercial cards are exposed before execution.
Midnight's latest release (the second annual privacy survey) slapped a loud slap in the face: Up to $1.22 trillion in Web3 transactions are currently being unreservedly exposed on a transparent track.
The future of Web3 is definitely not just a casino for geeks to speculate on memes; it is meant to carry millions of AI agents for automatic trading, cross-border medical data verification, and the underlying network of Wall Street's dark pools.
But in a 'transparent' network:
AI's trading strategies will be reverse-engineered;
The bottom price of the supply chain for Fortune 500 companies will become public intelligence;
Medical institutions will receive exorbitant fines from HIPAA (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act) the next day as soon as they dare to put their data on-chain.
Midnight's official statement in 'Midnight City Simulation' directly points out: If intentions are visible before execution, they will be exploited, and the autonomy of humans and machines will be eroded.
The declaration of the 'three freedoms' of the fourth-generation public chain (from the hidden corners of the Midnight official website)
If you carefully understand the spirit of Midnight, you will find that they never regarded themselves as an ordinary 'privacy coin'; they are issuing a 'declaration of freedom' that reconstructs commercial civilization.
Under the framework of 'rational privacy', Midnight proposes three soul-piercing freedoms, each a dimensional strike against existing public chains:
1. Freedom of Association: Connect without surveillance. Note the word they use: surveillance. To Midnight, the current transparent mechanism of public chains is not 'public', but 'surveillance'. Midnight allows you to prove your identity, votes, and reputation through zero-knowledge proofs (ZK-SNARKs), but you can always 'leave your wallet behind'.
2. Freedom of Commerce: Block the trackers. In today's Web3, as long as you dare to move large sums, countless trackers and Twitter bots will sound the alarm. Midnight wrote a phrase here that excites Wall Street: 'Keep your valuation model secret.' This means quantitative institutions and AI can finally price bids safely on-chain, regulators can verify your funds' legality through 'auditor mode', but the vampires in the market will never see your bottom cards.
3. Freedom of Expression: Prove the provenance. You can encrypt and verify the authenticity of content without sharing underlying data. This is a killer in the age of rampant deepfakes.
Business models should not pay for the craziness of the crypto circle: economic sovereignty detached from dual tokens.
What is astonishing is the hard-core declaration written on the official website under 'Predictable costs':
Your business model should not depend on market volatility.
This statement is simply a dimensional whip-lashing of the Ethereum gas model!
The gas fees of traditional public chains are burning your principal. Today, a meme coin exploded on-chain, and gas fees surged by 100 times. If you are a company running a ride-hailing app or supply chain on-chain, your operating costs will instantly go bankrupt. How can companies dare to entrust their lives to a 'highway where oil prices can skyrocket by 100 times at any time'?
Midnight elegantly solves this deadlock with its 'dual-token model':
NIGHT is a 'capital asset': it is that wind turbine.
DUST is a 'resource': it is the electricity specifically used to pay fees, non-transferable, burns up when used, and will also automatically decay.
As long as you hold $NIGHT, you can continuously generate DUST. Building on Midnight means predictable operational costs. The airdrop in your hand is not a one-time wool but a printing machine that allows you to 'always use free electricity' in the future digital city!
A day in 2030: when giants are all settling down in this land.
Many people think this is just a pie in the sky. But don't forget, those reality giants with the keenest intuition have long been voting with their feet.
Take a look at the just-released Midnight mainnet node list: Google Cloud, Pairpoint by Vodafone, MoneyGram, eToro.
Why don't these multinational giants with extremely strict data compliance requirements choose other chains? Because only the fourth-generation architecture like Midnight can let them do business with peace of mind in this digital world named 'Midnight City'.
Imagine a day in 2030:
At 9 AM, Vodafone's IoT devices conduct high-frequency data verification among millions of cars in Europe. They consume DUST obtained through leasing, with costs precise to six decimal places, unaffected by any crypto market crash.
At noon, eToro's quantitative fund completed hundreds of millions of dollars in institutional DeFi clearing in the Midnight dark pool built by Webisoft. The SEC (U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission) completed anti-money laundering compliance review using the auditor mode key, while competing peers couldn't find a single clue on the public chain browser.
In the evening, you lie on the sofa, watching the $NIGHT that you didn't destroy generating DUST for you continuously. You not only played a game on-chain for free for a day but also rented the excess fees to others through the capacity marketplace, earning a steady fiat rental.
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The conference has reached this point, it should be summarized.
From being kidnapped by 'transparent shackles and skyrocketing gas fees' to 'shattering the panoramic prison and reclaiming commercial privacy sovereignty', what lies between is not a line of ZK code, but a complete rewriting of the industry's landscape.
Web3 promised us freedom, but Midnight is the one who truly restores the 'freedom from surveillance' to humanity and AI.
When you are still hesitating whether to dump and cash out the extra few hundred U on Binance, traditional giants have already started to stake their claims and build in this new frontier.
What about you? Are you ready to shatter the glass house and reclaim your digital sovereignty?
