What caught my attention wasn’t the usual narrative around privacy or compliance. It was the architecture itself. The level of talk on most projects is high but soon once you begin to dig in and see how the system is really organized, things tend to grow blurry very fast. Midnight did not seem like that. The further I examined it, the more of the impression that there was design behind the design decisions rather than merely theory.🧐
In the heart of it, Midnight divides matters such that one passes over a slight skimmer. You have the public layer that is pegged by the NIGHT token, that does governance and network security. Then there is this secondary resource, DUST that is in the passively generated and executed privately. There is more than cosmetic division there. It is working the ground in terms of separating privacy of the base asset layer.🤩
This part surprised me.
The privacy oriented systems either take the full plunge of having obfuscation or attempt to add privacy to the transparent system after it is developed. Midnight does neither. It rather establishes a dual resource world in which public state and private computation are used simultaneously. The NIGHT token can be traced, whereas DUST is the execution booster of shielded smart contracts. It is a purer division than we have had in the previous designs.🥳
This begins to have importance as a builder begins to think about state management. Public contracts just have a secret name of private ones. They demand various assumptions regarding data access, validation and flow of execution. The fact that the approach of midnight allows verifying the existence of private transitions of states without releasing any underlying information implies that these transitions are enforced by the use of zero knowledge proofs.🙃
That brings to the next area that was outstanding, which is block construction. Block production is not only rewarded by midnight. It brings in a utilization conscious reward division. The reward is divided into a certain amount, which guarantees the incentive on the bases, but the rest of it will be variable, which will depend on the quantity of the meaningful data contained in the block. That forms a direct motivation towards optimization to actual use and not empty throughput.
This section was once again a shocker at the time I related it to the privacy layer. Zero knowledge proofs are heavier with respect to computation and space. The network indirectly promotes the packing of these proofs more efficiently by providing incentives to use these blocks efficiently. The producers are not spammed with low value transactions but encouraged to ensure as much useful execution as possible in a block. It is a faint coincidence between business motives and technology.😥
One more piece of information that seems not to be valued is the developer environment. The TypeScript language is favored by Midnight and minimizes the entry barrier. However, more than that it is accessible, it is an indication of something greater. The team does not attempt to develop a closed system. They are attempting to fit in current developer processes. That will be significant when the objective will be to observe real applications and not merely experimental contracts.⚡
Architecturally, you have a system that is architecturally a system that considers privacy as a first class implementation layer, not an implementation layer. Verification of the public has not been eliminated but is no longer associated with complete data exposure. Instead, the process of verification is proved as opposed to data based. That is the paradigm change in the way blockchain systems can be constructed.💥
This is premature and all this is irrelevant as long as the network fails to perform under actual conditions. Structurally, Midnight does seem like it is solving problems on the correct level. Not only making the system faster or more efficient, but fundamentally reconsidering the interaction of data, computation and incentives in a system where privacy is an issue.🎁
@MidnightNetwork #night $NIGHT
