Just over $25 billion RWA on-chain is too small compared to expectations of hundreds of billions of USD, and that's why I started paying attention to @MidnightNetwork .
I noticed this project when reading discussions about RWA. Initially, I simply thought this was just another privacy chain, but the more I looked into the data, the more I realized it addresses the exact issue the market is facing.
Some recent reports I've read estimate that the value of real assets being tokenized has only surpassed the $25 billion mark, which is still very small compared to the scale of the traditional financial market.
If placed alongside blockchains like Ethereum, where every transaction is public, the risks for organizations are quite clear. A wallet address can have its entire history traced, and from that, behaviors can be inferred.
Let's take a simple example: a fund holding about 20 million USD in corporate bonds. If tokenized on a public chain, competitors can completely track the cash flow and gradually infer strategies. For traders, this is interesting, but for organizations, it is almost unacceptable.
This is where Midnight takes a different approach. They separate the verification from the original data, meaning that the blockchain only needs to confirm that the information is correct, while the details do not need to be public. This method is based on zero-knowledge, allowing for proofs without exposing the underlying data.
Another technical point is DUST. Instead of directly using $NIGHT as gas, the network creates a separate resource layer to use, helping to separate operational costs from token price volatility.
From a regulatory perspective, this model is quite similar to financial sandboxes in Singapore or Hong Kong for RWA, where sensitive data is still kept confidential but verification capabilities are ensured.
Currently, $NIGHT is in the testnet phase before moving to mainnet in 3/2026. If the verification model that does not reveal actually works, $NIGHT will not only stop at a privacy chain but will become one of the rare infrastructures qualified for RWA to scale on-chain at a larger scale.
And if the RWA capital flow truly begins to shift from several tens of billions to hundreds of billions, designs that solve the data problem like Midnight are likely to be revalued by the market.
