Last weekend, a usually active guy in our circle suddenly left several large groups. After asking him privately, I found out that his relatives' debt collection at home had almost driven him to a mental breakdown. Some time ago, Bitcoin surged, and he couldn't help but post a profit screenshot in his friend circle, which only revealed a small part of his address. As a result, his cousin who works at a big internet company followed the clues and found his main wallet. His relatives immediately knew he had hundreds of thousands of U on the chain, and next came the constant "borrowing money for protection" and "helping cousin." He even dared not return home and could only split and transfer most of his assets.
After listening to his experience, I was a bit dazed. This is precisely the awkwardness we often encounter while playing Web3: on-chain information is completely public, and privacy is almost nonexistent. Every transaction, every gain and loss, and every operation on niche DEXs on Ethereum or Sol can be seen by anyone in the browser. For retail investors, this is almost social death; for institutions holding hundreds of millions, it is like laying their cards directly in front of their opponents, equivalent to handing over defeat.
This fully naked on-chain state made me revisit the information of @MidnightNetwork . Especially after Binance just announced an airdrop for $NIGHT holders, the logic of this project seems particularly glaring. Past privacy chains often pursued full network anonymity right from the start, which resulted in becoming a hotbed for hackers to launder money. Once regulation intervened, projects like Monero and Tornado Cash were swept into the blacklist, and even major exchanges dared not list them.
Midnight has taken a different path this time, which they call 'rational privacy.' Simply put, it hands over the switch of whether to be public or private to the users. If you want the outside world to see nothing, make it a black box, even ZK-SNARK cannot extract internal details; if regulatory or KYC compliance is needed, only authorize specific transactions’ legal proof to the auditors, while keeping other information dark.
More interesting is its token model. $NIGHT This part can be traded on Binance and participate in governance, maintaining transparency; while the actual payment for Gas and execution of privacy transactions comes from the DUST generated after you stake $NIGHT. DUST cannot even be transferred, this physical isolation cuts off the contradiction between compliance needs and on-chain privacy.
On the underlying technology, Midnight directly uses the TypeScript that everyone is most familiar with. Compared to those chains that require developers to relearn specialized ZK languages, this undoubtedly lowers the barrier. DeFi projects troubled by on-chain probing and MEV extraction can almost directly apply a privacy layer if they want to add one.
The current project is still in the early stage of chip game theory, but if you can foresee the pain point of Wall Street wanting to enter on a large scale in the next two years yet not daring to run naked on transparent public chains, you will understand how much potential value this compliant black box holds. Don’t just focus on those so-called hundred-fold return shitcoins; before the real super whales come in, building the 'drawer' that can help them hide money is the most profitable business. #night