Hello, I am Ning Fan.
Recently, everyone in the circle has been buzzing about one thing: BlackRock has increased its position again, and the total market value of RWA (Real World Assets) has exceeded 12 billion. It’s clear to the discerning that this giant of traditional finance is desperately trying to squeeze onto the chain.
But there is a question that no one dares to answer directly—banks putting tens of billions of mortgage asset packages on the chain, and making the accounts visible to everyone? Customers' salary flows, credit records, and trading counterparts all exposed on the chain? This is not going on the chain, this is going to punishment.
Until a couple of days ago, I dug into the data panel of @MidnightNetwork and suddenly discovered a chilling fact: those traditionally aloof giants have secretly extended their reach, and it's quite deep. This is not just a simple 'cooperation intention', but real money making its way in.
This lineup is more top-notch than industry summits.
Let's get straight to the point and see who is running nodes for Midnight:
MoneyGram, the second-largest payment giant in the world, covers more than 200 countries. They announced it very plainly: we want to use Midnight to move traditional payments on-chain, compliance at the point of settlement – meaning that at the moment the transaction is completed, evidence that regulators want to see is automatically generated, but the user's privacy data is encrypted throughout.
Vodafone, a top global telecommunications operator, is coming in through their Web3 subsidiary Pairpoint. They want to create an 'economy of everything' – in the future, your car and charging pile will automatically settle electricity bills without the car needing to tell the charging pile 'I have this much money', only needing to prove 'I can afford it'. This is the destructive power of zero-knowledge proofs.
eToro, a Nasdaq-listed company, serves 35 million users. Their chief blockchain officer said it plainly: all asset classes will eventually go on-chain, but the premise is that the infrastructure can support both 'global-level markets' and 'compliant-level privacy' at the same time.
Also, familiar names like Google Cloud and Blockdaemon – Blockdaemon itself manages 11 billion dollars in assets, and their clients are mainly banks and funds.
You taste it, you savor it: this is not just a few crypto projects making a fuss, this is the top combination of global payments + telecommunications + technology + compliant custody.
I was stunned the first time I saw the design of DUST.
After talking about the lineup, let's discuss something hardcore.
I mentioned the token model of Midnight before, but recently I delved deeper into the mechanism of DUST and found the thoughts behind it to be terrifyingly deep.
The total amount of NIGHT is 24 billion, which everyone knows. The price is currently hovering around 0.047 dollars, Binance just listed it, and the 24-hour trading volume reached 126 million dollars. But what really made me slap my thigh is DUST as 'fuel'.
DUST can only be 'mined' by holding NIGHT, it is non-transferable, non-tradable, used to pay gas fees, and if you don't use it, it will evaporate.
What does this mean? It means that if an institution wants to run a business, it must hold NIGHT for the long term, but their gas costs won’t crash the market – because DUST can't be sold. Ownership (NIGHT) and value capture (DUST) are completely decoupled, which is quite rare in the history of crypto.
What's even more impressive is that this design naturally prevents witch attacks. Do you want to brush transactions? First, hold NIGHT to slowly generate DUST; the generation speed can't keep up with your brushing speed. The DDOS cost is directly maximized.
Rational privacy: the last fig leaf of Wall Street.
Many people ask: Fan Fan, if institutions want privacy, can't they just play with consortium chains? Why come to public chains?
The answer is: consortium chains cannot solve 'auditable credibility'.
You set up a bank consortium chain, you say your transaction volume is 10 billion, why should I believe you? You say it yourself. But on a public chain, you can use zero-knowledge proofs to prove to the whole world 'I really did 10 billion transactions' without disclosing any transaction details.
Midnight calls this 'rational privacy'. It's not the kind of 'no one should look' like Monero, but rather 'show what should be seen, and to hell with what shouldn't'.
Let's give a real scenario: in the future, when you apply for a mortgage, the bank only needs to verify the Boolean value 'your income > twice the monthly payment', without needing to see every record of you spending on skewers in your salary account. If regulators want to check for money laundering, they can unlock the data of specific transactions through designated permissions – permission layering, not a black box.
This architecture is the confidence that traditional finance has to bring core assets on board.
At the end of March, witness history?
The mainnet will launch in the last week of this month. Glacier Drop has already covered eight major ecosystems, with the number of holding addresses reaching 57,000, and the market cap touching 870 million dollars.
Charles said something that impressed me: 'This gives a clear response to all Cardano critics – we can create billion-dollar projects that attract the world's largest companies to participate.'
He also predicts that once this 'privacy + compliance' architecture is successfully implemented, the RWA market size may soar to 10 trillion dollars.
Of course, the coin price has recently corrected along with the market. But to be honest, with institutions of this level entering, I’m not looking at daily lines; I’m looking at the landscape three years from now.
