Crypto has a rather unique experience: to use the application, you must first buy tokens, not for investment but just to pay the gas fee.
I only started paying attention when I saw a few people mentioning @MidnightNetwork in some discussions about user experience on the blockchain.. At first, I thought this was just another privacy chain, as this narrative has appeared quite a lot in recent years.
But when I read the project's documentation more carefully, I realized they talked quite a bit about something else: gasless UX.
In the current Web3, gas fees are still a significant barrier. New users often have to buy tokens just to pay fees before using the application. For many, that step is enough to give up. On many blockchains today, holding tokens just to pay gas is almost mandatory if you want to interact with DApps.
Midnight tries a different approach. Their system uses a DUST mechanism, a form of computational energy generated from holding $NIGHT and used to execute transactions on the network.
This opens up the possibility for DApps to hold $NIGHT to create DUST and pay transaction fees for users. If this model works as designed, users can open the application and use it right away, quite similar to the Web2 experience.
According to the roadmap, MidnightNetwork's mainnet is expected to launch at the end of March. With the market cap of $NIGHT hovering around nearly 1B USD, it is clear that the market is also closely monitoring the project's next steps.
I am not sure this model will work perfectly. But if blockchain wants to serve millions of regular users, simplifying the experience may be just as important as the technology itself.