A couple of days ago, I saw a rather counterintuitive design.
Many public chains are researching how to reduce gas fees, how to improve TPS, and how to make the network faster. But Midnight's approach is a bit different; it directly changed the logic of gas fees.
When I first saw it, I was actually a bit confused.
Because on most blockchains, gas fees are paid with the same token. ETH pays gas, BNB pays gas, SOL pays gas; this has almost become the industry default rule. No one has really thought about whether this design is reasonable.
It wasn't until I saw Midnight's token structure that I suddenly realized a problem:
Why are all public chains forcing users to use 'investment assets' to pay for 'daily consumption'?
Imagine this scenario.
If you buy a stock, you hope it appreciates. But what if you have to use this stock daily to buy coffee, pay parking fees, and cover utility bills? What would happen?
There are probably two situations:
Either the stock has risen, and you will feel distressed about spending it.
Either the stock has fallen, and you will feel that you lost more severely.
Many public chains are actually doing this.
Tokens are both assets and fuel.
The more popular the internet, the more expensive the Gas;
The more expensive the Gas, the higher the usage cost;
User experience will get worse and worse.
I gradually understood later that Midnight is actually solving this problem.
They have separated these two things.
NIGHT is an asset that you can hold, stake, and participate in governance. It is more like a value anchor of the network.
What is really used to execute privacy transactions and pay for computing costs is a resource called DUST.
The most interesting part of this design is that DUST is not a freely tradable token.
It cannot be bought and sold in the market, nor can it be hoarded.
If not used for a long time, it may even gradually decline.
When I first saw this mechanism, my first reaction was:
This thing is actually 'evaporating Gas'.
After thinking about it carefully, it actually seems quite reasonable.
Because Gas should inherently be a consumable.
It should be more like electricity costs rather than gold.
If Gas itself becomes a speculative asset, the entire network's costs will become very unstable. Cheap today, ridiculously expensive tomorrow. Developers find it hard to control even the budget when creating applications.
The design of DUST essentially separates 'network usage costs' from 'investment assets'.
If you want to participate in the ecosystem, you can hold NIGHT for the long term to generate DUST.
If you want to run privacy transactions, you also need continuous resource consumption.
In this way, those who truly participate in the network long-term and those who speculate short-term will naturally stratify.
It's a bit like a city.
Some people are just passing by, while others are running companies, doing business, and living here long-term.
A healthy system usually makes these two types of people bear different costs.
What I find interesting about Midnight's design is that it does not focus on 'how high the level of anonymity is'.
Many privacy projects have been focusing on this metric for the past decade:
Who is more anonymous, who is more untraceable, who is more black.
But the real world is not that simple.
Businesses, institutions, and even many ordinary users don’t need to completely disappear on the chain, but rather to prove some things when necessary without exposing all their data.
That's why selective privacy is becoming increasingly important.
When I saw some traditional companies starting to participate in nodes, I actually began to understand this route.
If blockchain really wants to enter financial, cross-border payment, and enterprise data scenarios, complete transparency and complete anonymity are actually not very realistic.
The system needs an intermediate state.
It can protect privacy while proving compliance when necessary.
What Midnight is trying to do seems to be this.
As for whether this design will eventually be accepted by the market, no one can conclude yet.
But one thing I am increasingly sure of is that the privacy track is slowly moving from 'geek labs' to 'real business environments'.
And those who can smoothly combine technology, economic models, and compliance logic have a better chance of survival.
Many people are now only focused on coin prices.
But I increasingly feel that what is truly worth observing is actually another thing:
On this chain, whether someone will really come to work in the future.