When the code begins to be silent, yesterday I organized an old hard drive and found the first line of smart contract I wrote ten years ago.
At that time, I firmly believed in one thing: transparency is justice. Every transaction should be recorded, every logic should be audited, and every participant should be seen. We call this 'trustless', we call this 'code is law'.
Ten years later, I read that code to a lawyer friend. He was silent for a few seconds and said to me, 'Are you writing law? No, you are writing a confessional.'
'You have tied everyone's secrets together and hung them in the center of the square.'
This sentence lingered in my mind all night.
We always praise transparency, yet forget that transparency has never been the norm for humanity. Would you post your diary on the office door? Would you send bank statements to the family group? Would you require every friend to publicly share their chat records with you?
No. Because privacy is not a weakness; privacy is the factory setting of a person.
That night, I opened the white paper for @MidnightNetwork . The homepage read: 'Public for accountability, private for choice.' Public for accountability, private for choice.
Suddenly, I understood a bit. Midnight is not about 'privacy', but about 'selective disclosure'. You can demonstrate solvency without exposing your bank account; you can prove your adult identity without showing your ID; you can verify the authenticity of your degree without putting your transcript on the chain.
It uses a method called 'partner chain', which neither belongs to Cardano nor is it unrelated to it. It has designed a resource called DUST that will decay over time—holding $NIGHT will generate it, while privacy operations will consume it.
This is not about creating a chain; this is about creating a sense of 'proportion' under an economic model.
Last night, I looked at the data, and the circulating supply of $NIGHT is 1.66 billion pieces, with a trading volume increase of 17% over the past week. Worldpay and Bullish have already entered the market to build stablecoins and reserve proofs on it. The mainnet is set to launch at the end of March.
I am not sure where it will go. But I know one thing:
Humanity does not need more transparent glass houses. What humanity needs is—the right to open that window when necessary.
And Midnight is helping us build that window.