Midnight Network Is Exploring the Idea of Selective Transparency in Web3

At the core of blockchain, there exists a tension that the majority of individuals in the area have learned to coexist with. On the one hand, there is the promise of decentralization systems that do not have institutions to operate. On the other, there is complete transparency, in which all transactions and all payments with wallets and every transaction on the chain are now available forever to all curious parties. A long time that transparency had been considered the point. It is what turned blockchain into trustless. The reason is that but trustless and private are not interchangeable, and the distinction is incredibly important when you begin to consider what exactly it would require to onboard real-world activity on-chain. A majority of the industries do not have the ability to work in a transparent environment. A law firm cannot place details of the case of the clients on a ledger that is public. The medical professional is unable to run the records of the patients using a system that allows anyone to track the information. Even personal users can have a valid reason to maintain secrecy of financial activity not to hide something, but because it is a natural expectation in the functioning society to have privacy. Web3 has largely ignored this. It has been assumed that in case you want to use blockchain, you are prepared to make tradeoffs. The question that Midnight Network is posing is whether that tradeoff was necessary at all.

The principle that @MidnightNetwork is operating under is selective transparency the notion that users and organizations ought to have the ability to decide what is displayed, to whom, and on what terms. Not complete obscurity, not even coercive transparency, but a measured compromise in this respect, a deliberate disclosure. This is enabled by the usage of the zero-knowledge proof technology that enables the architecture of Midnight to check the claims and confirm transactions but the infrastructure remains unaware of the underlying data. The network is able to establish that something was done, it was authoritative, but does not reveal all the details to everyone. Such unlocking in practice is really interesting. A company might want to demonstrate the compliance with regulations, but through Midnight, the company would not have to disclose its entire history of transactions to a rival. One user may prove his creditworthiness to a lending protocol without submitting his entire financial profile. Organizations who have been viewing blockchain with a distance telescope, interested but apprehensive, now have a new discussion to make. Ideology was not actually a barrier. It was exposure. Selective disclosure eliminates that as an inhibitor. The native token of $NIGHT , which is the Midnight, works on this infrastructure as the fuel layer of the network activity. However the token is part of something bigger a protocol that is in fact attempting to redefine what it means to be involved in a blockchain network. At this point, being on-chain implies being readable. Midnight is working towards a form of Web3 in which on-chain is a verifiable state, which is a quite different criterion. The larger point is that selective transparency may turn out as one of the determining characteristics of the next stage of blockchain implementation. All data which needs to be trusted is not necessarily publicly available. Not all interactions have to be observed in order to be valid. What the ecosystem has been lacking is a system that can simultaneously contain both of those things, the opening up where it is required, the privacy where it is warranted. When this balance is reached, Midnight is making a serious technical bet that it will come to pass and in the process alter who is able to use blockchain and how. That is no fringe benefit. It is another vision of what Web3 was to be. #night