Recently, many people have been discussing the Midnight Network. Many people's first reaction is "another privacy chain," but if you look closely at the design, you'll find that it aims to solve a more realistic problem: blockchain is too transparent. All transactions, data, and contracts are public; this is fine in the DeFi world, but if it is to support real business applications, much information simply cannot be fully disclosed, such as corporate data, user identities, business strategies, etc.
So what Midnight wants to do is not simply anonymity, but to implement a kind of "verifiable privacy" using zero-knowledge proofs: things can be proven to be true, but the specific data does not need to be disclosed.
The core asset of the entire network is NIGHT. Its design has a rather unique feature: NIGHT is not used directly as Gas, but instead continuously generates a resource called DUST, which is consumed by transactions and smart contract executions in the network.
In other words, holding c-43 is more like holding the production capacity of network resources, rather than making a one-time payment for transaction fees.
The benefit of this structure is that if developers or application parties hold a certain amount of NIGHT, they can continuously generate DUST, and even bear the transaction costs for users, allowing users to hardly feel the existence of Gas when using applications, which is actually closer to the product experience of Web2.
Another noteworthy design is the boundary of privacy. Midnight does not hide everything, but rather concentrates 'privacy' on the application layer data, while the assets themselves remain transparent on the chain.
This structure is, to some extent, finding a balance between privacy and compliance: regulators can still see asset flows, while important data of users or enterprises can remain confidential.
From this perspective, the Midnight Network is not simply creating a privacy chain, but is attempting to redefine how blockchain is used in the real world, and c-22 is the most core asset in this system.