Last month, there was a piece of news that Wuxue had to read three times before believing it.
The NASDAQ-listed company AlphaTON Capital signed an agreement to collaborate with the Midnight Foundation to promote privacy-protecting AI Agents on Telegram. A super app with a billion monthly active users will directly build its AI layer on Midnight's privacy architecture.
Wuxue was thinking at the time - this is not just another collaboration; this is the first time the privacy track has been treated as 'infrastructure' by mainstream tech giants.
Previously, everyone thought that privacy had to be either completely hidden like Monero or completely transparent like Ethereum. But Midnight introduced 'selective disclosure', breaking down this black-and-white choice.
Look at the case of that Turkish medical company: 3 million patient data, running clinical trials across institutions proving that the raw data has never left the hospital. Only a zero-knowledge proof generated certificate runs on the chain, allowing the other party to verify 'you meet the criteria', but they cannot see the medical history. What do we call this? It’s called 'rational privacy' — you can comply when you want to, and when you don’t want others to see it, no one can see it.
The AlphaTON deal is even more intense. They signed the Federated Node agreement, one of Midnight's ten founding nodes, directly sharing 20% of the revenue. And listen to the list of node operators — Google Cloud, MoneyGram, and Pairpoint under Vodafone, all came. The CTO of MoneyGram put it plainly: 'Privacy, compliance, and reliability must be built in from day one.'
Wu Xue believes this is key. The problem with traditional privacy coins is that the compliance department sees them and their blood pressure skyrockets. From the very beginning, Midnight designed the token model as a 'dual-track system': NIGHT is a publicly tradable asset, and staking it automatically generates DUST, which is the resource for paying gas fees, and DUST cannot be bought or sold, disappearing automatically after seven days. This mechanism completely separates 'investment value' from 'network usage cost', making it predictable for enterprises and providing a clear compliance path.
A few days ago, Midnight opened applications for Aliit Fellowship Cohort 2 again, specifically recruiting engineers for zero-knowledge proof development. Wu Xue reviewed their requirements — not looking at follower count, not looking at content output, only focusing on GitHub contributions and the depth of documentation. This attitude is quite right: when it comes to privacy, shouting slogans is useless; someone needs to write real code.
The mainnet will go live at the end of March. Don’t look at the privacy track with old eyes anymore; this time it’s really serious.