Yesterday afternoon, a senior sister engaged in cross-border e-commerce asked for help on WeChat.
She has been doing this for three years, and started gaining momentum last year. This year, she wants to expand her product categories and needs a bank loan. After submitting the materials, the bank responded: they require penetrating supervision — not only looking at the company account but also checking her store sales across various platforms and even the payment records from suppliers.@MidnightNetwork
The senior sister said: “I understand that the bank needs to manage risks, but isn't this exposing the entire business model? Who the suppliers are, how much the purchase price is, and which are the hot-selling products, these are all trade secrets.”
I said your question is similar to exchanges being asked to 'prove they have money.'
After the FTX collapse, the industry has been pondering the issue of proof of reserves. Some exchanges have disclosed wallet addresses for everyone to see, resulting in large holders' positions being exposed. Some exchanges are conducting third-party audits, but anyone can fabricate a PDF document. What is the real solution?
On Midnight's zero-knowledge layer, someone is building a proof of reserves POC—exchanges can prove that 'total assets are greater than total liabilities' in a cryptographic way without disclosing how much money is in each address or what each transaction is. All sensitive underlying data remains 100% private while being fully verifiable. In their words, this is 'real institutional-level expertise and infrastructural capabilities brought directly into the launch network.'@MidnightNetwork
In the scenario of the senior sister, she can prove to the bank, 'My monthly cash flow is consistently over X ten thousand, and the supplier payments are normal,' but she doesn't need to reveal the names, purchase prices, or popular SKUs of every supplier. The bank can verify the conclusion but cannot see the business secrets.
The senior sister fell silent for a moment and said, 'So when can this thing be used?'
I said that the Midnight mainnet will launch at the end of March, and now ten institutions are running federal nodes, including Worldpay, Bullish, MoneyGram, Google Cloud, and Blockdaemon. These people are not here to speculate; they truly want to use this chain to get work done.@MidnightNetwork
She asked, 'So do the banks accept this?'
I said that it definitely won't be accepted now, but the technology will run first, and policies will follow. Just like electronic invoices back in the day, no one recognized them at first.
She replied with, 'Then I'll keep an eye on it first.'
I stared at the screen thinking, maybe in a few years, business secrets and compliance audits can really coexist.