Mastering Crypto

There are about 17 million JavaScript programmers throughout the globe. That figure has been mentioned so frequently it has almost become background noise but it can have some real impact when one considers what it implies to a new technology that is struggling to find its footing. Any platform that can actually get close to such developers and use the patterns they already know, the mental models they have already developed, begins with an immense structural advantage. The question on blockchain has never ceased to exist whether blockchain can bridge that gap. The majority of networks are yet to be closed.
The average developer experience of a developer transitioning to Web3 is being introduced to Solidity or Rust, learning how blockchain state functionality, adjusting to toolchains that do not even look like what they were used to, and being okay with the fact that most of the abstraction layers they are used to are not present here. To many developers, such an expense is prohibitive. It may be interesting technology. The use case may be convincing. However, once the learning curve is high, people have something else to construct. Talent does not travel into hard-to-work situations but rather into shippable situations.
The programmers at @MidnightNetwork have created their own programming language named Compact, and the main concept of the language is as follows: developers do not need to leave the knowledge base to create privacy-protective smart contracts. Compact is written in a JavaScript-like syntax and familiar programming patterns, allowing the intellectual burden of transitioning to the ecosystem of a blockchain to Compact to be much smaller than what most blockchains require. You're not starting from zero. You are elongating out of some place you have been.
This is not merely a factor of convenience. With a familiar language developers may work on the problem being solved, as opposed to the tool being solved with. It is then that, interesting applications get built. The learning curve of entirely new paradigm does not only reduce the speed of the developers but also weeds out most of the developers who could have created something useful had the threshold been lower. Compact is an intentional effort to retain that kind of population to the room.
The question is what Compact is really up to underneath that makes this more than a developer experience story. The language is designed to reduce to the ZK circuit layer of Midnight, and this implies that the developer can write surface level code and have the network work out the zero-knowledge proof generation behind the scenes. The privacy is not something to add later the infrastructure does the work of creating it as a byproduct of writing in Compact. The combination of that, which is the syntax that is already familiar and a cryptographic infrastructure that is in place and is taken as an abstraction is precisely the sort of abstraction that is likely to open new classes of builders.
The token of $NIGHT , the Midnight, drives the network that these developers are constructing. The easier it is to construct a network on, the more valuable becomes the ecosystem around NIGHT. The connection between the accessibility of the developers and the long-term sustainability of any blockchain network is direct. Midnight appears to realize that well enough.
The programmers who will ultimately make privacy-first applications will reach mainstream users are not necessarily all cryptographers. The vast majority of them are currently working in JavaScript, creating applications that have no relationship to blockchain, unaware that there exists a network that was created with them in mind partially. The first point that Compact is Midnight makes to that audience is that, it is evidence that you do not need to decide between using the same tools that you are familiar with, or using a technology that will protect users in reality. That would be an argument that gets lodged, and who comes to construct the next generation of the internet would be different.
$NIGHT #night

It is a question best pondered upon: when you store information about a person, what are you storing? The majority of digital systems constructed nowadays revolve around data: names, dates, records of transaction, identification number. Data alone do not inform you on the truthfulness of something. It records what one wrote down. That is a minor, yet non-negligible distinction and one that @SignOfficial has made its whole infrastructure on.
The internet has never been a bad data storage medium. What it has never been especially good at is certifying it. An image of a diploma, a picture of a transaction, a government-issued document uploaded to a form - they are files. They are manipulable, replicable or even counterfeit using tools that any person can locate on the internet. The level of checking that you know this is real and is a certified source has never been taken seriously. It is typically a phone call, some third party service, or the hope that a database somewhere has not been manipulated. None of them can be trusted at scale.
This is the gap that $SIGN is endeavoring to bridge. Instead of creating a new system to store data, SIGN is constructing infrastructure to store evidence. In particular, it is an omni-chain attestation layer - a protocol that enables any individual, organization or government to issue verifiable records of any statement, cryptographically signed by them, on multiple blockchains at once. An attestation is not a document that it happened. It is a signed and structured document that could be verified freely by any person, any time without the necessity to refer to the initial issuer.
The difference is more than it would appear. Consider what occurs when a government is interested in making payments related to welfare, or when a company requires assurance that a contractor has cleared a background check, or when a university is interested in issuing a diploma that can be accepted in another country. In both scenarios, the problem behind is not storing the information but ensuring that that information can be checked by the parties who was not involved with the creation of the information previously. The Sign Protocol provided by $SIGN deals with this by binding attestations to digitally signed schema, cryptographic proofs, and digital signatures. A verifier verifying an attestation does not need to call anybody. They check the chain.
The truly interesting fact about the architecture is that it does not push everything into the blockchain. Sign Protocol also features on-chain and off-chain storage, in which durable off-chain storage is done with Arweave but the verification layer remains on-chain. This is practically important since a full on-chain storage is both costly and sluggish in the case of big credential systems. Separating data whereabouts and proof whereabouts lets SIGN scale to the government scale without making a verifiability and cost-efficiency compromise. The evidence is ever available. The information is kept in the reasonable place.
This separation also addresses a privacy issue which most credential systems silently neglect. In the case that all of your personal information resides on a publicly accessible blockchain, privacy and transparency are mutually exclusive. SIGN solves this by zero-knowledge proof support, that is, the holder of a credential can prove that something is true (I am over 18, I passed this compliance check, I have this qualification) but without showing the underlying data that demonstrates it. The proof exists. The data stays private. That is a radically different model to the majority of the digital identity work being done today.
All this is executed by the $SIGN token - this is how the network executes attestation transactions, this is how governance decisions are executed, and this is how the participants in the ecosystem are rewarded to participate in its infrastructure. It's not decorative. The more SIGN spreads out to additional chains, additional uses, additional government implementations, the more it acts as a connective tissue of the economic layer underlying it all.
The direction that SIGN is assuming is towards something that is, technically, not an easy task to accomplish: a world where credentials are served with the proof attached, where you do not need to trust someone to make a claim before it is proved, but where cryptography does. This infrastructure is already being implemented by governments in the UAE, Thailand and Sierra Leone. This year Kyrgyzstan became a signatory of CBDC infrastructure. These are not evidence of concept they are some of the first signs that the data warehouse transition is already in progress, and the plumbing to realize it is being installed as we speak.
#SignDigitalSovereignInfra

Why it is not another protocol that will be innovated in the real world... it is the way truth is made.
The majority of individuals visit new crypto projects and pose the same question.
Is this a faster chain
A cheaper chain
A better layer
That question, though, silent as it is, lacks something larger.
It would be nothing to do with speed or fees in Web3.
What is the problem was a more fundamental one.
How are you supposed to demonstrate the truth... and not trust anybody?
Since, as yet, the majority of the internet is operating on soft trust.
Authentication, documents, ownership, credentials.
Each of them is based on somebody saying that this is valid.
And a whole world believes it, everyone else.
That is the loophole that $SIGN is seeking to exploit.
Not through the construction of another chain.
However, by reconsidering the very sense of a so-called fact on the Internet.
Something very simple which is powerful is at the heart of that idea.
The attestation
The attestation is not a transaction.
It's not a token
It's not even an identity
It's a claim that can be proven
A statement that it is true signed.
Supported by encryption, not government.
That sounds small at first
But it changes everything
Since, when a claim is provable, it is proven.
It stops being opinion
It becomes infrastructure
It is at this point that the Attestation Engine of SIGN begins to have significance.
Rather than creating application based on databases and permissions.
SIGN allows anybody to construct verifiable claims.
You can attest that:
You own something
You completed something
You are even worthy of something.
You signed something
And when that attestation hath been.
Anyone can verify it
At any time
And without permission asked.
That's the shift
Web3 has been working on value mobility over years.
Tokens, swaps, liquidity
But SIGN is concerned with something more.
moving truth
And that is possible because of the Attestation Engine.
It operates silently at the background.
Transforming real-life information, identities, contracts and credentials.
Into programmable form.
Not just stored
But structured
Queryable
Composable
The latter is not as insignificant as it appears.
Since attestations are not in isolation.
They can be combined
A single claim is useful
However, there are several assertions that, when combined, provide the context.
Proof of income
Proof of identity
Proof of history
Stack them together
And all of a sudden you do not just have data.
You possess logic of decision-making.
It is then that it begins to become less of a protocol.
And more like an overlay of the internet.
Sig is in a sense constructing a system in which
The applications do not even have to trust the input anymore.
They can verify them
And with trust assumptions out of the way.
You open completely new forms of systems.
Airdrops which are not farmed.
Anonymous identity systems.
Contracts that are performed under verified conditions.
Even states and companies are beginning to make sense here.
The system does not make them have faith in crypto.
It lets them verify outcomes
And that is quite a different point of entry.
The interesting part is
Majority of people will continue to refer to SIGN as an attestation protocol.
However, that title is too small.
Since the actual innovation is not the protocol layer.
It's the idea that
The truth itself may serve as a building block.
Not stored in silos
Not controlled by platforms
But issued, checked and reused over systems.
If that works at scale
It is not just the internet that becomes decentralized.
It becomes provable
And in that world
Who you trust is not going to be the greatest thing.
It'll be what you can prove
That's the bet $SIGN is making
And bet is where it comes to pass by the Attestation Engine.
#SignDigitalSovereignInfra @SignOfficial

Zero knowledge proofs have been called as one of the key cryptographic breakthroughs in decades. Their mathematical reasoning is beautiful, in that you can demonstrate that something is actually so without telling you anything about the information behind it. Researchers love them. Privacy advocates love them. However, throughout the history of the ZK technology, most of the time it has remained just out of reach of those who would actually be constructing with it. Not because it is ineffective, it is simply that cryptographic expertise to work with it has always been at an expense that hardly anyone has.
That is the secret issue of ZK adoption. The technology does exist and works, however, the journey between the desire to create a privacy-preserving app, and the reality of creating one has been violently harsh. The developers have been forced to learn a new mental model, exploit low-level tooling that was not meant to be used generally, and reason carefully about the circuit design, proof generation and verification that has nothing to do with creating good products. The obstacle was not the scepticism. It was friction. And friction, with perseverance, will put adoption to death like any rival.
@MidnightNetwork is starting with this problem at the developer level moving to the outside. The design of the network is such that apps controlled by ZK can be accessible to a significantly broader audience of builders, not just cryptographers, but developers who are interested in writing smart contracts with guaranteed privacy without having to possess a PhD to do so. Midnight employs a programming model which allows a developer to operate with logic with which the developer is familiar, and the ZK layer deals with the complexity beneath. The generation of proofs, the verification, the computation which is shielded, that infrastructure is implicit in the protocol, that may not need to be coded by any particular developer each time.
The design option represents a certain theory of the way technology is adopted in practice. The most potent tool does not necessarily win, it is the most practical one that would solve a real problem. Web development did not become a phenomenon since HTML was far better than anything that had ever existed. It was accessible and thus took off. The same logic applies here. Assuming that ZK technology would some time become a bedrock of the internet as opposed to a specialized cryptographic system, the developers working with it must be able to look at what they are constructing, and not the mechanism of the proof system.
NIGHT, the indigenous representation of the Midnight Network, is in the middle of ecosystem that only makes sense in case developers do show up and construct. The utility of the token is directly related to network usage - and network usage is related to whether the infrastructure of Midnight is in reality more convenient to deal with than anything else. It is no coincidence that they are aligned. It implies that the incentives drive towards the same direction with the design philosophy.
The sort of abstraction layer of privacy that Midnight is trying to quietly attempt is the kind of privacy abstraction layer. Just as cloud computing removed server infrastructure to an abstract level in which builders did not need to consider physical machines, Midnight is attempting to do the same thing to ZK complexity, where builders did not need to consider cryptographic circuits. In the event that that abstraction is true - in the event that it is actually powerful and expressive enough to drive real applications - then the range of available people to develop privacy-first software grows exponentially.
It is the growth itself that counts. It is intriguing to have a single team of cryptographers develop a ZK application. Making privacy the default in thousands of developers building in finance and identity and healthcare and governance that is a very different change. Midnight will not only make ZK user-friendly. It is betting that access to ZK is the easier part of the next wave of blockchain adoption. That bet seems more plausible than it used to seem a few years ago considering the length of time that complexity has been the bottleneck.
$NIGHT #night