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Midnight Network Live on Mainnet | Partner Content [Replay]
Recorded: April 3, 2026 Duration: 1:32:23Space Recording
Full Transcription
Hey everyone, good morning. I'm Jen Sinassi. You are watching Coindesk and today we're
unpacking everything you need to know about Midnight. The fourth generation blockchain
is now live and pushing forward towards a future where privacy is the default setting.
CEO and founder of Input Output, Charles Hoskinson, and Midnight Foundation, Fami Sayan.
Join me now to get our program started. Hey, guys.
Hello, hello.
Well, I just want to say the three of us have spoken several times about the Midnight mainnet launch in different capacities.
And now we're finally here.
Midnight is live.
Just talk to me a little bit about what that feels like for you guys.
Charles, we'll kick it off with you.
Well, I mean, it's been a long journey.
It's been about eight years for me.
It's been, I think, two or three years for FAMI.
We've been chipping away at this.
You know, the first two years were deep R&D.
And then actually, I think the demo that we had for it
was at our conference in Miami in 2019. And that was a great time. We had CCR Play and Steve Miller.
And we had this very private internal demo about midnight. At the time, it was written in Scala,
and it was a hybrid proof of work, proof of stake system. And we just never were happy with it. So
we kept rebuilding it and redesigning it. But it's good to finally get it out.
And what's really remarkable about it is just how smooth and predictable things have been.
You never want to say that launching these things because always something blows up.
But liquidity started in December.
It's one of the most traded assets in the entire industry.
It's on Binance Spot and Kraken and many other places.
And then the guarded mainnet started this week.
And it's just been remarkable to see how every three months major progress is made,
major partnerships and collaborations come on board.
So it's going to be a very busy year.
But it's the fastest product launch we've ever done
and the fastest evolution of a product in market
that we've ever done.
And it's been cool to see so many people flock to privacy.
The Discord has great numbers.
There's a tremendous amount of people there
and they're super passionate and it's a new narrative.
It's a new day.
You get to do different things.
I liken it to like when color came to the television.
You have a whole new design
dimension that you can look into. And people are having a heck of a lot of fun writing private
smart contracts and asking what can privacy do for their applications. Fami, talk to me about
what it feels like for you two to three years in the making. You come from a different background
than Charles. You come from the TradFi world. What does it feel like
to finally be here? And then we'll get into what that means for all the folks watching at home.
Well, thank you. And thank you for having me here on the show today. Look, it's a huge
milestone. As Charles said, I've been here over two years now. When Charles told me the promise
of what midnight could be and why privacy was the unlock, I was sold.
So I've been on this journey with him for the last two years.
We formed the foundation.
We're here to steward the network for us.
It's a great achievement, not only at the foundation, but also input-output and Shielded Technologies.
We'll hear from Mike Ward later, the CEO of Shielded. They are our dev partner in all of this. We've been doing this hand in hand,
step by step. And for my team, I want them to celebrate. This is a milestone that they should
acknowledge and they celebrate. I've told them all to find a moment to go and explain to their
friends, their family, what they've achieved. So every day you launch a blockchain. But more
importantly, what I've said to them is this is not the end.
This is, if anything, the end of the beginning, to quote Churchill or paraphrase him.
Tomorrow is another chapter, and we're here to keep taking the network forward.
There's a guided launch.
So we launched with our federated node operators.
And slowly we will unleash the true potential of Midnight
and that will come in through slowly unlocking the network so more and more partners can deliver
more of their products and ultimately what we want to get to is through Q2 and Q3
that the community is speaking for us the partners are speaking for us we're showcasing their
their talents their abilities their products and Midnight becomes this wonderful privacy enabling infrastructure that supports all
of them.
All right.
On this program, I want to talk about the past, present and future, because I think,
you know, to understand where we're heading towards, we have to understand how we got
here.
Just for everyone who's watching at home, if you're just joining us now over the next hour and a half, we're going to be taking a look at the vision, launch priorities, roadmap,
and we're going to get a demo at the end of this from Charles. We're going to take a look at
Midnight City. So lots to come. Stay tuned. Stick with us. Charles, I'm going to kick it over to
you. Let's touch on that past very briefly and talk about what events happened, what's gone
on in this industry that makes this type of technology so important for where we're heading.
I'd say there's three converging factors.
So first and foremost, the blockchain can't keep a secret.
And that's a huge problem because every
business, every commercial activity, every governance structure, there's a public side,
but then there's a private side. So you have a Dow, for example. Well, if you work for a company,
do you feel comfortable that all of your salary information, your HR data, your entire employment
history, all these things are publicly available to everyone everywhere, including your social security number and all this other stuff.
He said, of course not.
I said, okay, well, how do we do the HR thing and the payroll thing if everything's on a blockchain?
You have public side, you have private side.
You need to verify things.
Business supply chains, you know, those are a lot of proprietary information.
Apple doesn't want Samsung to know how many memory modules they're buying and how many screens they're buying or any of these other things, you know, after the fact.
But during the time they're doing it, it's a competitive piece of information.
It's quite valuable.
So we kind of take for granted that in the legacy world that there's this harmonic balance between privacy and publicity.
And we're always fighting over where that balance lives.
But in the blockchain space, we've embraced utter transparency. And we love the parts of transparency. We love the
auditability. We love the immutability. We love the fact that there's a timestamp with everything.
So there's certain classes of assets where that makes a lot of sense, like real estate,
where you have a chain of ownership and the easements and these other things.
But there's other classes of assets where you need more nuance to it or activities where you need nuance. So it's always
been the case when a big company or somebody who has a real world application wants to do something
in the cryptocurrency space, they keep going until they reach a wall and the wall generally is
privacy. And then at that point, they have to go off chain and then they re-centralize.
And then you kind of ask, what's the point of using a blockchain? And a great example of that
is if you look at the Fortune 100, every single one of the Fortune 100 have some form of blockchain
project that they've done over the last 10 years. But then you look at it and say, well, why is
Microsoft not running on a blockchain? They're a big tech company. They should be able to do that. What about Google or Amazon or Meta? Certainly at least one of these
guys sees some value instead of doing that. And the reality is that they get to the privacy wall,
their compliance officers, other people, they get freaked out. They say, I'm sorry, we can't do this.
And they abandoned the project over the last 15 years. So we noticed there's a huge market demand for that.
The other two factors are it's too hard to use cryptocurrencies and you have to know how cryptocurrencies and cryptography work to use them. So the everyday consumer, I've been in this for
now 15 years. You ask them, you talk to them. We all have me as a creator for blockchains and the
end consumer that you know just started
the exact same problem you're always thinking god i'm going to get hacked i'm going to lose my keys
you know i'm going to screw something up and then something's going to happen and then suddenly you
know what i'll lose all my money um and so safety in in simplicity huge issue for people huge issue
uh and they're used to a web two workflow.
And what does that mean? That means I have a fingerprint and I have a pin code and it just
works on my phone and application installation is one click and there's some conception of curation.
So there's this big movement in the industry towards abstraction in two different directions.
in two different directions.
One direction is account abstraction,
One direction is account abstraction. The other direction is chain abstraction.
the other direction is chain abstraction.
So account abstraction means it just works on your phone.
You don't have to care about wallets.
You don't have to care about keywords
or any of these other things.
And it just, it's there.
And you click a button and you can spend,
and it works with your identity
and it works with your money and everything's great.
And chain abstraction means
you don't have to understand the chain. You don't have to know how Ethereum works or Cardano works or Midnight works
or any of these other things. You just tell people what you want. That's the intent. And then somehow
the network figures out how to solve all of that. And there's actually a corollary to this. When you
look at agentic flows, like agents coming in, the vast majority of users of the internet and the users of e-commerce and
the users of information retrieval and production by 2035, over 70% will be agents. And the
cryptocurrency space has no framework to sort out. How do you delegate authority and tell the agents
what you want to do? It's very declarative in nature. And the third factor is compliance.
You go and say all these governments, whether it be MECA framework or the ADDGM framework
in Abu Dhabi or be what we're trying to do in America with clarity, all those frameworks
require some notion of KYC and AML, some notion of regulation, and they're trying to sort
out how do we regulate all these people and get all these things happening.
Well, how does the blockchain do that?
You need some concept of a smart compliance system,
much like how the contracts got upgraded to smart contracts.
Compliance needs to be upgraded to smart compliance.
You need to have blockchain-based compliance, and you need to be able to build these structures and solutions.
So if you put these three things together,
you form a triangle and a privacy and abstraction and compliance.
And what we try to do with Midnight
is build a toolbox to give this to everyone everywhere. And if you look at how to do that,
you don't launch yet another token, yet another blockchain, yet another layer one and tell
everybody we'll migrate to us and then everything will be magical and incredible. You meet the users
where they're at, not where you want them to be.
So you have to make this solution work for Ethereum
and Solana and Bitcoin and Cardano and other ecosystems
and let them pay in the assets they want to pay in
and let them extend their applications.
That's the magic of where things like ChatGPT came from.
It's embeddable.
So if you want AI inside your application, you don't
build chat GPT. You call it through an API and you white label it. So you put it in and now you have
AI and you have all this amazing AI capability, but the user has no idea that there's an additional
service there and there's a consolidated fee structure and whatever the commercial model of
that application happens to be. So we built Midnight from the very beginning to be multi-chain from the distribution with
the Glacier drop where we have seven blockchains, eight ecosystems that we dropped to.
And I think there's probably going to be more than a million holders after all the redemptions
are done from the proof of work side, the scavenger hunt, the Glacier drop and the exchange
drops.
And those holders are very diversified.
They're across the industry, whether they be Ethereum
people or Bitcoin people or Solana people or Cardano people. And also we built it to be able
to have a multi-chain programming model. The primary language of Midnight is compact. It's
a derivation of TypeScript, the most common programming language in the world. I think
there's over 26 million developers. So very accessible, very easy for people to code with it. And then the idea is
integration. So you start from Ethereum and you build into Midnight or you start from Solana,
you build into Midnight. That's kind of the goal. And what's cool is when you add the abstraction
components and you add the privacy components and the compliance components to it, then what it
means is you have great user experience. And that means the simplest and safest way to use a cryptocurrency
will be through midnight so the safest and simplest wallet for bitcoin will be through
midnight the safest and simplest uh you know uh way of transacting in crypto will be through uh
midnight and what's cool is you now have this new design dimension of privacy and it does so many
incredible things and it also allows you to bridge off-chain infrastructure with on-chain infrastructure, which is why it's been so easy for us to accumulate
amazing collaborators, partners, and full node operators. For example, Google Cloud is a full
node operator. Telegram is a full node operator. Vodafone, MoneyGram. These are not exactly small
companies and they have these great off-chain offerings. And they're saying, look, how do we bring those offerings into the midnight space
and into the cryptocurrency space?
And we kind of built it to facilitate this.
So very exciting, incredibly hard.
But it's cool because all these pieces have been built.
They just need to be assembled correctly.
And the industry as a whole is waiting for this moment. So it truly is a new generation. Fami, I want to kick it over to you and talk to me a
little bit about how we got here through an institutional lens. And I ask you this, we saw
a debate on X last week between permissioned and permissionless chains, what's going to work for
institutions, what's not going to work for institutions. Just set us up a little bit here. What are institutions looking for? And how is Midnight's
offering solving some of their challenges and giving them the opportunity to reveal what they
want to reveal? We don't have to get stuck between, you know, permissionless and permission being these
two static elements. Yeah, sure. So look, for corporations,
whether it's financial institutions
or corporations in the Fortune 100 and beyond,
they have made their money
through protecting their clients' assets
or their clients' information,
but also monetizing that data.
So for them, whether that's trade information,
asset information,
other sorts of data that they hold,
that is very privileged information
that they hold. Compl is very privileged information that they hold,
compliance requirement around that. Also, that is their source. That's part of the
ingredient to their special source. So they do not want to present that publicly, that
that information can be deciphered. So that's where you go down the road of permission networks.
But when you have permission networks, often, well, they bring you protection around privacy.
It's really private.
They're private networks.
And they're private networks where you need to be permissioned into them.
Somebody controls the gateway, the access points to the network.
And they may get to see what is going on.
And they may utilize that.
The other problem with the private networks, permission networks, is they can become siloed.
And if they're siloed, how do you then transmit information from one private permission network to another?
There may be leakage, leakage of data, but more important, leakage of metadata.
So within Midnight, what we've said to those institutions is Midnight is a permissions network where we can offer you
that protection and you can do so in a way where you can still be connected to your peers
so we give protection of the data because and the metadata in the way that proofs are presented
proofs are presented and so the data never sits on chain and the proof it can be created on the
client side of the firewall so again all that sensitive information is in the control in the possession of those said institutions but once
they're in the midnight network they're operating in a permissions the way their information
their proofs are guarded they're protected and then they can gateway into transactions into
different opportunities and even gateway into other sort of counterparts.
So a good example of that is the conversation and the announcement we made
with Monument Bank last week at New York, at DAS, at the Digital Asset Summit.
And Monument, for those who don't know, are a UK regulated bank.
They're approved by the Bank of England, regulated by the PRA,
and they have ten billion dollars of client assets predominantly high
net worth individuals and those individuals are
new unities and what blockers and defy option offers is new new yield opportunities whether
that's through stable coins through access to fractionalized opportunities in private equity and hedge funds
and what monument have recognized is there's a way for them to privately present their clients
deposits on chain as tokenized deposits and from that position as we bring in white listed approved
rwas and stable coins their clients as part of phase two of that project is to switch those digital
to other RWAs, which are yield bearing. And these are opportunities that they don't have
through the traditional finance rails they have. So it gives their clients a new type of
accessibility and opportunity. And all of that they can do within essentially a walled garden
within the permissionist network.
So others cannot get to see that information.
That activity is only for the clients of a monument bank and also for this compliance team of monuments.
So monument can obviously present that as they need to for their own regulatory and reporting purposes.
So that shows that there's a way to create permissioning within a permissionless network. And the advantage of that is Monument, they get access to other assets coming on chain in midnight. And as those assets come on chain, Monument can approve those
for their clients. And equally, as other banks come on chain, it may be possible in the future
for Monument to speak to those other banks. So if a client has two accounts for two different banks,
they can seamlessly,
as Charles pointed out,
through the future of the Midnight Passport,
connect to those different sort of counterparts.
And therefore you remove silos,
you remove barriers.
And we've got to go back to the beginning.
You talked about,
Charles talked about the past that brought us here.
Blockchains are transparent.
And we talked about the freedom they gave us. And we've confused transparency with the truth.
Transparency does not always mean the truth. And you can have truth through privacy-enabled
solutions. The selected disclosure elements of midnight does make solutions like Monument Bank
feasible on our network. So for anyone watching who wants to learn more about that partnership,
Fami, you and I actually spoke about the launch last week. So for anyone watching who wants to learn more about that partnership, Fami, you
and I actually spoke about the launch last week. So you can find that video over on Coindesk. Charles,
before we bring in Mike from Shielded Technologies, just talk to me a little bit and lay a foundation
for us, right? We're talking about this privacy preserving technology. We're talking about what
it can unlock. There are competitors of yours out there who are also building their own privacy preserving
technologies in different ways.
How is Midnight different than some of those other privacy projects that we've heard about?
Yeah, it's a hard question.
So I wrote a book.
It's called Proving Nothing, and it's a seven-layered guide to how to think about zero
knowledge.
Because what I noticed is that it's a very complicated topic, and there's lots seven-layered guide to how to think about zero knowledge because what I noticed
is that it's a very complicated topic and there's lots of moving pieces to it and what I wanted to
do is systematically break it down so you could actually objectively answer the question you're
asking. The thing is that there's actually different ways you can look at it from how
they're set up to how the languages work to how the witness generation works, the arithmetization,
the proof layer, the proof engine, the system, the cryptography to how the witness generation works the arithmetization the proof layer the proof engine the system the cryptography and
how you do the verification so the devil's always in the details and when
you talk to people the first thing they try to do is they try to say well
privacy is like a light switch you know we're private and and and you flip the
switch and everything's great uh and if you flip the switch the other
direction everything's transparent that's the first lie the reality is
privacy is like waterproofing.
Okay, so when you waterproof a house, it'll work for a rainstorm maybe, but not a hurricane.
And so it's always contingent on the weather.
It's always continuing on the quantity of the water and what's going on.
And the other thing about privacy is a holism of many different components.
So you have zero-knowledge proofs.
You have multi-party computation. You have homomorphic encryption, you have network and automization,
and every one of these things is a different component for a different use case.
So the first thing that differentiates Midnight is we look at it from a holistic view. So we don't
look at just one privacy primitive, like zero knowledge, but we say you're never going to get
anywhere unless you put all the components together into one coherent framework. So like chat GPT, where you start kind of like with GPT
two, three, and it's text only, then what happens? Then it goes from text to image to video,
your complexity increases. So what will happen with midnight over time is we're going to accumulate
a library of different privacy enhancing technologies. And those technologies basically
increase the scope
of things that you can do so you can go from waterproofing in arizona and waterproofing in
miami where there's hurricanes okay so you could actually have heavier duty privacy especially at
the enterprise and the government level so that's one set the other thing is that we bet on a
post-quantum first approach so we're're launching with Plonk and Halo 2,
which is tried and true,
but we have a beautiful project that we've been building
based on technology from Microsoft
and people at Stanford that we work with
called Nightstream,
and it's nested at the Linux Foundation.
And we've been collaboratively working
on a post-quantum lattice-based folding system.
And what's really cool about that
is it's super high performance,
it's immune to quantum computers, but then the math of this system follows the very same math
that we use in the artificial intelligence world, which means these gigantic data centers that
Google is building and Microsoft is building and Amazon's building, you know, hundreds of
billions of dollars to do AI inference. We get to use that and we get to be accelerated by that same mathematics.
This is not the case with Ethereum when they look at Starks or any other stuff.
They have to build custom hardware for it.
We get to use the AI hardware, which every consumer's phone is having, every consumer's
laptop is having.
So there's kind of a built-in natural acceleration that you look like.
It's much the same like Tesla and batteries where the cell phone manufacturers,
laptop manufacturers, they want batteries to charge faster and be cheaper and have more energy
inside of them. Well, Tesla gets all that research for free. We get all the AI stuff for free with
that universal privacy primitive. The other really cool part about Lattice is they bring next
generation cryptography capabilities like homomorphic encryption. So that's the ability
to operate on encrypted data without ever decrypting them and get the results. So you can search on
Google and Google doesn't know what you're searching for. You can navigate with Google Maps
and you can see the thing, but nobody knows where you're going. Or you can analyze a medical database
and you're able to infer something about the population without seeing the underlying population.
So we have a lot of partners and projects like Nexafuse, for example, is a medical record
system, and they want to build like an agentic EMR.
And they're super excited about this prospect of being able to use this menu of privacy
enhancing technologies to do all of that.
Now, the specific differentiators, they're layer by layer.
We've tried really hard to kind of match them in a way where they provide maximal value.
Like on the language
side layer two we have general purpose programming language so a lot of these guys that you like use
sircom or noir or other things and those languages are special purpose and they only build one
specific thing and really hard to use well compact is like javascript and it's really straightforward
and easy how to label what's private what's not private and the compiler figures out how to build the circuit and run it all the way down and then when you go further down
like that uh rhythmization other things we're experts in programming language theory you know
some of the people working at input output helped create the internet uh the guy who created plutus
the programming language for cardano uh it was also creator of the haskell programming language
his first project he worked on as an undergraduate at stan at Vint Cerf's lab was to test the Internet links between Stanford and San Jose.
And he wrote the very first online game.
It was like this little pong game that they had.
I think it was back in the 70s.
So, you know, there's this unbroken legacy of five decades of PL theory knowledge.
So another really cool thing is where he's been able to apply that into the design of how we of PL theory knowledge. So another really cool thing is we've been able to
apply that into the design of how we think about zero knowledge, because the problem is the space
of things that can go wrong in terms of security, especially with AI attacking you, is quite large.
And so you need to use formal methods and all these other things to think about under constrained
circuits and so forth. So that's something you get for free.
You know, it's the legacy, the 250 plus papers we've written, 168 scientists. We've thought really carefully about how this model can work, be secure, be upgradable and future proof and go
where the markets are going. I'm betting that we're going to have a trillion dollars in data
centers by 2035. I want to make sure those GPUs and the data centers, in addition to accelerating AI, can accelerate proof generation. And the final point is when you move to a streaming
platform instead of a block-based platform, so this is what our privacy engine does that we're
testing with Nightstream, this allows you to have everything happen like a pipe with water flowing
through it and asynchronously.
And blockchains don't operate that way.
They operate with blocks.
You know, they block one, block two, block three.
It's like the beating of a heart.
Well, real life works like that pipe.
You can't predict where the users are going to be doing things and how traffic's going
to be coming through.
And so when you look at real world applications, they have to do a lot of work to try to convert
real world flows with events and data flowing real time into this block structure.
And it compromises user experience.
And this is exacerbated when it's multi-chain because you have Ethereum and Bitcoin and Solana and Cardano.
They all have different consensus protocols, proof of work and proof of history and whatever Ethereum does these days.
You have all these different algorithms. They beat at different rates and you have to consolidate whatever Ethereum does these days. You have all these different algorithms,
they beat at different rates
and you have to consolidate and put all that together.
There's a horrible devX for going multi-chain.
But if you have a streaming system that sits on the top,
what we're doing is Nightstream,
you can build on top of that, it's super easy
and the system takes care of the coordination
and you get proofs of the state of each of these chains.
So you can fold the whole chain and it says, hey, you know, what you're seeing from Ethereum
is correct.
What you're seeing from Solana is correct.
So as a developer, you don't really have to care.
So that simplification of the DevEx to build multi-chain applications and link them to
off-chain infrastructure and prove what's going on, it's an emergent feature.
And it goes so far beyond just a roll up trying to scale things or
a zero knowledge proof to go ahead and prove that you actually have money or what have you.
It's the next generation capability. So it's a lot of fun. I have a lot of cryptographers that
work with me and some are young, some are old, but all of them are young right now because they're
working on state-of-the-art things. And I was just with our chief scientist last night having
dinner with them. And he said, you know, lattices are justthe-art things. And I was just with our chief scientist last night having dinner with him.
And he said, you know, lattices are just magic, absolutely magical.
And so we're really excited to bring that to bear.
We get to work with phenomenal partners. We get to work with phenomenal pedigrees like Dan Bonet's lab at Stanford or, you know,
Shireem's work over at Microsoft Research.
It's good to bring these things to bear and be able to turn them on.
And you get that universal privacy primitive, wonderful system. So if you're curious about this, I have a
free book I wrote called Proving Nothing. We'll throw up the link and you guys can get to more
detail about it, but I wanted to explain how it all works and I'll do some lecture series at some
point for it. All right. We do got to bring Mike in in just a second, but I have a quick follow-up
for you, Charles. This wouldn't be the first time you and I go down a rabbit hole
and get in trouble. So we got to keep it quick. I got to ask you about what you said about quantum.
It is obviously very topical after that Google report came out recently. If I were to just very
much oversimplify it, it says the quantum risk is coming faster than we think. It sounds like
what you're saying is one of your competitive advantages is the fact that Midnight is quantum proof.
Talk to me a little bit more about that and maybe tell me, is quantum proof something institutions
are demanding right now? Is that something that they really understand right now? Is it top of
mind for folks who want to implement blockchain and implement
some of the solutions we've been talking about? Yeah, every one of the Fortune 500 has to migrate
to quantum proof cryptography before 2030. And the reason being is they have government contracts.
The Department of Congress is going to mandate that migration. So the single biggest challenge,
as we said before, when we were chatting, not to go down the rabbit hole, is that the U.S. government has to standardize what they mean by post-quantum, and they've done so.
When you look at the FIPS standards from NIST, 203, 204, and 205, they basically said, okay, this is what we view as approved cryptography, both on the hash and lattice side.
And once you have that, that's important because the hardware manufacturers build special cores in their chips to accelerate those algorithms.
So you can choose many different algorithms, but your Intel chip and your ARM chip and your
Apple chip, they're not going to accelerate those. They're only going to accelerate what NIST says.
And then NIST will mandate that the US government must do this. And then people working with the
US government have to do that. So transitively, it kind of rolls it out. So absolutely, a lot of clients,
whether they be big or small, they're extremely concerned about this. And they say,
what is your post quantum strategy? It's almost like the Y2K bug of our generation.
So a lot of people have to migrate. Now, the thing is that what Midnight does,
because it's using a universal privacy
primitive, is one set of cryptography that we can focus in on hard and accelerate and make awesome,
and it's post-quantum end-to-end. So you can use it for quantum random number generation. You can
use it for encryption. You can use it for hashing. You can use it for signature schemes. So it makes
the migration to post-quantum much simpler,
where our strategy lies. And what's great is we're dealing with a lot of wonderful partners,
you know, who have been doing this for a long time. And we have the academic support and the formal methods support. So it not only is important, it's something we got to get done.
Now, the specific paper that you referenced, they kind of set a clock they showed an attack a theoretical attack uh on uh ecdsa uh sick uh 256k1
a sick p 256k1 which is the curve that bitcoin uses um and they estimate that you need about 500
000 uh physical qubits to achieve that if you look at the rate of progress of the different
quantum platforms whether it be kookaburra with ibm or it'd be quantaniums platform or what google is doing with willow
the rate of growth of the physical qubits and the rate of of improvements for uh the quantum
air reduction algorithms is such that somewhere between 2029 to about 2037 they should achieve
this if their roadmaps continue to scale.
And AI is actually helping them because AI is helping them discover new quantum error
correction algorithms.
The biggest problem as you scale a quantum computer is that the coherence of calculations
breaks down.
And so you need error correction as you do it to be able to get a high fidelity computation.
And humans were not so good with quantum information theory. It's really complicated. So you need error correction as you do it to be able to get a high fidelity computation.
And humans were not so good with quantum information theory.
It's really complicated.
It's an interdisciplinary thing, but AI is really good at it.
So AI enhancements is likely going to accelerate quantum computers coming to bear because the
hardware path looks pretty good.
Our benchmark that we use as a clock to figure out when we need to do things is DARPA's QBI,
the quantum benchmarking initiative, where they got all the big gigabrains together in the military
and government, and they're benchmarking 11 different companies' quantum approaches.
And they're going to deliver a report probably by about 2027 of whether they think there's a
high probability of a working quantum computer that could threaten national secrets by 2032. So there's too many people working on this. There's too much work.
There's too much stuff. There's a high probability that this is a horizontal threat.
It's not today, but by 2030, it's certainly going to be a problem. That's why we're building
Nightstream and we're making sure that we do it in the right responsible way.
But once it's in, we'll be end-to-end immune to quantum computers. And it's a lot of fun working on it. And what's cool is some of the smartest people in the world work on these problems. So
when you work on these problems, you get to work with some really good people that are truly
remarkable. All right, Charles, we'll have to have you back another time and do a quantum deep dive.
It is absolutely fascinating. But Mike Ward has been waiting in
the wings. He's the CEO of Shielded Technologies. Shielded Technologies is the developer behind
the Midnight Network. Mike, welcome. Thank you. Thank you, Jen. Good to see everybody.
Yes. Thank you for having us on. So I think my role here is to talk about the future direction,
but Jen, can I segue really quickly? Because you touched on something that I've been involved in a long time. So I worked at a company called R3 for five and a half years or so,
and lived the private versus public network debate, which you brought up earlier, which I
thought was quite interesting. It's interesting to see it resurface. I thought this debate had
gone to rest. So, and I'd have to say I did at R3, we did something like 140 projects with
financial institutions to see how could we bring blockchain to bear on this. And when I left,
the biggest thing I learned from five and a half years of that was open always wins. And these,
these closed networks are never going to triumph over the openness. And I felt in the end,
like I was selling Novell networks in the age of the openness. And I felt in the end, like I was selling Novell networks
in the age of the internet.
And if anybody here actually remembers Novell networks,
there were the private networks
you could use for file sharing and print serving,
those types of things.
So I think it's interesting to see that debate resurface.
We did work with the DAH team as partners back then.
Great technology, great people,
very, very different discipline and domain.
So in my mind, I think Open will win here.
Mike, I love that you brought that up.
I want to touch a little bit more on your past because we got to talk with Charles and Fahmy about, you know, what they've experienced in their past lives that brought us to today.
Talk to us a little bit about yours.
I mean, why is it so important for a project like Midnight to be here today?
Why is privacy-preserving technology so important in the future that we're building towards?
And I'd love you to comment on that through your lens and your experiences.
Yeah, to me, privacy is a feature, but it's a feature.
We talk a lot about privacy as in what it protects us from and guards against, et cetera.
I think it's what it unlocks.
It's much more a positive angle of this enables a whole set of scenarios that are not possible without it. So yes, there's
a bad side to the privacy story, but really it unlocks a whole huge set of things. Originally,
what brought me into the blockchain space, if you go many, many years back, I was at a company
called Ariba. It was a startup that I joined. I think there was 70 people or so when I joined.
We built a procurement product.
It's a super boring field, right?
So procurement is I'm literally in a company
and I want to buy a chair and I need to fill out a form
and I go get a purchase.
Our innovation was we originally had a product
that was inside corporate organizations
to automate it effectively.
But we built something
called Ariba Network. And Ariba Network was initially just out of necessity. Organizations
needed to send information between them. So they would take all their orders and they would send
them to different suppliers. Suppliers report back with invoices, you pay the invoices, you match what
you received, et cetera. Very simple problem. It gets complex really quickly. And there's something
in procurement called the three-way match, which is just this intractable problem, which
is so simple to fix in some ways. What brought me to blockchain was that network became very
successful. So I just looked up today, it does $6.5 trillion in business a year. So it is still
running. It's called SAP Network now. They renamed it about two years ago from Ariba Network. What brought me to that was that's a closed system. Nobody can innovate on top of that. Right. So you have six and a half trillion dollars of purchases happening through one network where I cannot go write an application on that to take advantage of it. I cannot bring any financial innovation to it. I can't bring any supply chain innovation to it. So the world needs something that's open in that realm is what originally attracted me to it. I can't bring any supply chain innovation to it. So the world needs something that's open
in that realm is what originally attracted me to it. So I came over looking at that,
but you couldn't do it on a public network. So you are not going to put, to Charles's point,
a purchase order out with how many units you want to something and at what price you're willing to
pay and certainly not the invoice itself. As I went to R3, really with this in mind, hoping to
understand more about the domain, you start discovering the finance side of it. And that's
when you get an invoice financing as an example. Fantastic use case for a private blockchain. I
can take an invoice. I can tokenize that invoice so others can purchase it, have as an investment,
provide capital to finance it but
i certainly cannot put out what i've paid for items because my competitors will know
you get a ton of insight who are my customers huge piece of information you need to keep private so
that type of capability is what midnight brings so that's that's what i'm most excited for i think
we can finally live this dream and do it in public networks
versus the private approach I tried previously.
All right, this live stream
is all about Midnight's mainnet launch.
Let's get into the nitty gritty
for folks who are watching at home.
They're wondering, you know, okay, we get it.
We get the concept, but what's live today?
Talk us through the features that are live today,
what people can access.
Yeah, absolutely.
So let me start before I get into the brilliant future.
Let me talk about what you can do today.
I think that's the most exciting part.
There's lots of great stuff coming, but you can do a lot today.
The simplest analogy here is you can take Zcash and add smart contracts.
And this is hugely powerful, right?
So Zcash has been around a long time, very valuable network, great capability,
but it's effectively a private version of Bitcoin. What we're adding to that is the ability to put
smart contracts on top of that. That is what you can go build today. So you can do incredible
things with that today. Smart contracts, as Charles talked about, is the compact framework.
So a very simple way for developers to do something that's very complex,
very powerful. So that's the capability that's out there today. Before I get into the roadmap,
people should know you can go build because you can build incredible things today.
So where do we go next? Let me talk a little bit about how we're launching first, and then I'll
talk about what we have in the near term coming three, six, nine months, and then kind of some of
the projects we have in the background. I will tell you, nine months, and then kind of some of the projects we have in the background.
I will tell you up front, though, Jen, we want to be able to talk to you again in the future.
So there's a lot of stuff we're not going to talk to you about today.
There's really exciting stuff they're doing in the background.
It's keeping me on the edge of my seat here.
So what are we doing today?
We are doing what was called a guarded launch, and this is a bit of a rolling start so this is not unknown in the
blockchain industry so you would have seen aleo did the same thing when they launched their network
you would have seen aztec it did the same thing building empty blocks for a number of periods of
time the guarded launch is is launching with federated node operators so it is running today
it's public we just control or that collective group controls the publishing
of contracts. And this is to allow a slow build of value coming on chain. So you can go do it today,
work with the foundation, and we'll get you live. In the not too distant future, in weeks to months
months at the most, this will be fully open. Anybody can publish contracts, anybody can
at the most, this will be fully open. Anybody can publish contracts. Anybody can transact.
transact. Then we move into decentralization. And if anybody's familiar with the Cardano route to
this, there's something called the D parameter, which is the decentralization parameter. You
slowly turn things over and eventually it's fully decentralized. So our federated node operators
will keep adding more and more nodes and eventually we'll hand the keys over entirely to validators,
open set of validators. So that's when the incentivized test net comes in. That is when
we will incentivize people to run a test network that reflects the end state of a fully decentralized
network. And eventually we'll turn that d parameter over when we're totally confident
and it'll be fully permissionless.
So anybody can run a node and be rewarded.
So that's the end state we're aiming for.
We're at the very beginning of this.
So we are on a rolling start.
We're being very careful as we go.
More and more capabilities come around.
So as this roadmap progresses, and we can even
go to the next slide as a transition here,
as we progress through this transition stage,
we're also introducing more and more capabilities as we go.
So we're launching intentionally with low TPS now.
Keep things safe.
We'll just keep increasing the TPS and other kind
of baseline characteristics as we go.
So unleashing more and more of the power as we go
as it's all under control.
So the phases we're going through,
we are complete with phase one.
So I'm not going to attempt to pronounce these names.
I'll let Charles and Fahmy do this afterwards.
My Hawaiian's not very good.
Charles is hopefully as good.
Hang loose, brother.
Going into Q1, we have completed phase two, right?
So phase two is the launch.
So the network is live.
You can go
build. Moving into the third stage of this network in the second half is about decentralization. So
that's what I just talked about. It's taking it from this federated operators, a very classic way
to launch a blockchain, hand over the keys, fully decentralized. And then that last stage is when we start introducing net new capabilities.
So I'll talk a bit about that. So I would like to differentiate, this is all layer one
capabilities, right? We are launching a network in an era when it's known that layer twos are
a fantastic way to bring different characteristics to the broader network. So a lot of things
happening on the layer two side of this. And to that. And I'll differentiate a little bit on some of that as kind of more
researchy, more experimental. It's a fantastic way for us to experiment. Charles will talk about
our first layer two in that category, which is Midnight City, which is a really fun one, actually.
So we're going to get... No, sorry, Mike, continue.
No, so I'll take you really quickly. So I don't want to belabor this through what's coming three, six, nine months.
So in the three months, we are going to be adding composable contracts.
So we'll be adding public events.
So it's around the public side of the ledger.
The nifty thing about Midnight is it is both public and private.
And a lot of blockchains, when they go private, get in a lot of trouble
because everything must be private
on the smart contract side.
With Midnight, you can choose public or private
and you can intermix the two.
And we have a UTXO ledger
and we have a smart contract-based ledger
or account-based ledger.
Those two things are interchangeable.
We open things up capability-wise first on the public side
and then bring that same capability to the private side. So it's a capability-wise first on the public side and then bring that
same capability to the private side. So it's a way of revealing it to the world. It's also
part of that progressive capability building. So you'll see composable contracts come in the very
near future. You'll see events come in the very near future. And obviously this unlocks a lot of
capabilities around DeFi and such. And then in six months, you'll see capabilities around recursion in particular.
So that allows for compressed roll-ups.
So we can bring a lot of data from these L2s
up into the layer one.
And really what we're aiming for here
is a layer one network
that is the place to do custody,
the place to issue your assets.
But those can go into various layer twos,
high performance layer twos or whatever characteristic you need, always retaining the privacy promise as can go into various layer twos, high performance layer twos
or whatever characteristic you need, always retaining the privacy promise as you go into
this layer twos. So. I want to unpack, Mike, some of what you said with bringing Fami and Charles
back into the conversation. Fami, I'm going to start with you. We talked about what's live today
and what's to come. What's the one feature, It can be live today or one that's on the roadmap
that you are really excited about
that is something that you think
is really going to change the trajectory
of where we're heading.
Great question.
There's so many to pick from,
but I'm going to pick one in particular, ZSwap.
We call it ZSwap.
It's the ability to,
I think going back to Charles's earlier point,
blockchain can't keep a secret. So whenever you have an intent in terms of trading intent,
that is very visible in terms of your intention. To Mike's point around procurement, you don't
want to put what you're willing to pay for a certain number of goods on any public chain,
because then your competitors know, but also the market knows where your where
your bidding offers are so with z swap you have the ability to create private intents the intention
to trade i don't know six apples for eight oranges and that can remain private until somebody comes
with a equally private in but opposite intent and then they will match uh and so that is a very i believe
a very unique function and capability within midnight that is possible today so as people as
we as mike says we unlock the network from this guarded launch that is something that people can
play with and then as we bring events and composable contracts and all the other wonderful features
that people expect within a blockchain through the next coming weeks and months,
there's a lot more you could do with that.
Charles is absolutely right.
We need account abstraction.
We need to make it easier to use Midnight.
But if you take that plus chain abstraction and ZSwap,
there's an ability to create a really interesting warehouses
of trading information, medical information,
procurement information within Midnight
in a very private way that allows people to bring those, the things that people are trying to build on
private permission networks are the things you can bring to Midnight because of that
Z-swap capability.
And that's very exciting to see.
And we look forward to that.
Charles, as we look at the roadmap here, there's this element of progressive decentralization,
right?
And that's something we talk about a lot in this space. Things can't be fully decentralized from the get-go, but there
are steps towards getting there. Talk to us a little bit about what that's going to look like
and what folks who are watching at home can look to as milestones to know that that is actually
happening and that success is happening towards a fully decentralized network sometime in the future.
It's kind of funny. You're talking one of the few people who's actually fully decentralized
the network. You know, everybody says it, but to do it's really hard. It took us 10 years with
Cardano and we learned a lot along the way. And the advantage of how we've launched Midnight with
the glacier drop, there's already asset decentralization. I mean, seven different
ecosystems, million
holders. It's one of the most distributed cryptocurrencies of all time, which is, by
the way, you see all the trading and you see how we launched. That's because of that asset
decentralization. So that's one dimension of it. But then also you have to look at the development
decentralization. And you notice that Midnight is being developed by more than a dozen companies,
whether it be Shielded or Sunday Labs or what have you.
There's a lot of people actively working on the code.
And because of Cardano, we learned how to do members-based organizations, and we're already working with members-based organizations.
Like the Linux Foundation, for example, we're a member of the Confidential Compute Consortium with NVIDIA and all these other giant companies. And we obviously have the LFDT projects
with Nightstream and Minakawa, which is the LFDT name for Compact, our programming language for
Midnight. So we're already beginning that process of development decentralization, and we're well
ahead of schedule there. And then there's network decentralization. So when you look at that,
that's where you gradually hand the network over from a
federated sense to stake pool operators. Well, we have thousands of stake pool operators in the
Cardano ecosystem waiting, ready to go to come on in and actually take over the midnight network.
And so the incentivized testnet, which is the next era, that's where we do that gradual transition.
And we have a model from the Shelley era of Cardano
of how to do that.
But because we've done it before
and we've learned all these lessons from it,
we know how to do it very quickly.
And we already have a large community to do that.
Governance decentralization is another example.
So governance is a lot of work.
There's a lot of moving pieces to it.
We're going through it in Cardano right now
with the Volterra era.
We wrote a constitution and we have on-chain voting and sometimes it works well and sometimes it doesn't work so well.
We've learned a lot from that as well. And what's cool about Midnight is it allows you to bring
next generation voting capabilities. So you have anonymous voting and you can do anonymous soul
bound tokens and ZK quadratic voting and all kinds of stuff that you've never been able to do before
in a public transparent system.
So you can have the value of being able to count the votes correctly and know that there's no fraudulent votes, but preserve more anonymity inside the set.
So we have a kind of a slightly different strategy for how we're going to do on-chain governance with Midnight and do it as kind of a progressive series of iterations for stuff on the layer two side and work our way into the layer one side.
Cardano, we kind of did everything on the layer one.
So we wrote a lovely paper about this and that turned into an index at the University
of Edinburgh.
It's called the EDI, the Edinburgh Decentralization Index.
It's a way to measure and abstraction the level of decentralization of a cryptocurrency
and has eight different lenses.
You can look at it
through and I walked through a few of them, but there's more. And so we look at EDI as kind of
the North Star. And we say, okay, for these technology decisions that we're making,
do they intrinsically centralize or decentralize the network? And over time, if you look three
years, five years, 10 years, does the network get more decentralized or less decentralized?
The other thing that makes it really interesting is the complexity of multi-chain first as
a paradigm.
You know, Ethereum, when we did it, it was multi-client first and everybody thought we
were crazy.
We had a Rust and a C++ client, excuse me, a Go and a C++ client.
I was like, oh God, that's so hard.
Well, multi-chain is exponentially harder because you're dealing with multiple infrastructures,
multiple network stacks, consensus algorithms,
and all these other things.
A lot of moving pieces to that.
But midnight is multi-chain first by design.
It's on Cardano and midnight.
It's two networks having to work together.
And what's cool about that is that every design decision then
is that multi-chain first.
And by solving it there, it makes it very easy to think that multi-chain first. And by solving it there,
makes it very easy to think of multi-chain of midnight to Ethereum or midnight to Solana or
midnight to XRPL or any of these other ecosystems and say, okay, how do we get those things to work?
Well, that's part of our decentralization story as well. So when we look at three to five to 10
years, we invented a protocol called Minotaur that
allows for multi-resource consensus.
So this is kind of the capstone of the agenda, but basically it allows you to put multiple
consensus algorithms together.
You can do your peanut butter and jelly.
You can do proof of work with proof of stake with BFT protocols and all this other stuff.
You put it into one system.
So instead of saying, well, I'm proof of work or I'm proof of state, you can be both inside of this. So what that means is as we go more multi-chain, it's not just being able to
transact with those chains, we can use the validators of those chains to make blocks in
midnight. So that not only increases your decentralization, that increases the diversity
of decentralization because you can pick and choose these validators from different
security assumptions and get the strongest of all of them. So you can get proof of work security
properties with proof of stake security properties and these other things. So that means even if one
of those networks goes down or there's some problem or flaw, it doesn't destroy your network,
which is what happens in these monocultures, especially with sidechains. So it's a very complicated product under the hood,
but the magic is these complex decisions that we made over the last eight years,
they create something that organically will kind of grow as a meta chain above all the other blockchains
and naturally plug in and feel like a layer two to everyone.
And it just has a very seamless user experience.
And the more people who use it, the more decentralized the system gets,
and the easier it is to use the system.
So we're really, really happy about that.
And what's cool is we have these North Stars
and these great partners like the EDI
to help us reason about it,
and partners like these members-based organizations
like the Linux Foundation or others
that kind of help aggregate where people are.
Or like the Midnight Foundation, it's a great partner and they're
already thinking about how to build a great community.
I think there's 60,000 plus people in the Discord.
There's a night force.
So we'll probably have over a thousand ambassadors for Midnight by June.
So it's one of the fastest growing in terms of active engaged communities, which is another
really good indication of a healthy ecosystem.
All right, Charles, thank you for that. engage communities, which is another really good indication of a healthy ecosystem.
All right, Charles, thank you for that. For everyone who is listening into this, if you joined us mid-chat, we are talking about the Midnight Mainnet launch. Fami, I'm going to
kick it over to you before we take a break. Talk to me a little bit about your launch partners.
What can we expect to see? I know we talked about Monument Bank. And in that
interview, I believe I asked you, like, can you tell us about any other partnerships? And you
said maybe later. And here we are later. What can you tell us? Yeah, so as you've heard, we're
launching with a federated set of node operators. So what does that mean? We're starting with 10
operators that will expand slowly, we'll then bring more in there are some big names within that list um so i'm just going to reel them off we've got google
cloud we have alphaton capital on behalf of telegram we have block demon uh moneygram e-torro
vodafone well pay bullish but they're not just coming to operate nodes this is not just white
labeling some nodes and and and us saying shouting about
these names they're actually going to build poc products they're going to come and build other
products as part of our infrastructure whether that's uh proof servers in the sense in what
google cloud is looking at or if we look at what alphaton are doing with telegram they've actually
bought out a product or about to deliver a product called the Vero Report. And if you think about whistleblowing around the world, often people are afraid to come forward and raise issues of fraud or other elements of abuse within the system because of fear of being identified.
identified. So AlphaTon Capital are working on the Vera report sitting on top of Telegram,
which allows users to use midnight zero knowledge proof to let anybody submit evidence anonymously.
It's verified, it's tamper proof, tamper proof, and it's without surrendering any of their identity
or their location. This reaches a billion users across 190 countries, and it demonstrates how
midnight can bring privacy to real world
infrastructure and to the users of the telegram application and the report they don't even know
midnight is is sitting there in the background powering this and protecting them so this is
this is a real world use case that we'll see uh again with those those partners they'll bring
again other pocs uh into midnight over the coming months and we will make more further
announcements as they do go live. We have partners also in healthcare, in healthcare,
sharing healthcare information whether that's within clinics around sensitive information or
about interclinical trials in in Northern California and we have supply chain solutions, whether that's in corporations,
institutions, or in governments. So the one that really stands out for me is supply chain and data
protection around forensic supply chain. And there's a young team in India who've developed
a very tamper-proof, privacy-enabling way of tracking forensic evidence in the largest state in India. And that's
a really wonderful use case funded by the local government in India, which shows that blockchain
in India is alive and kicking and doing well. And I just want to come back to something Charles
mentioned upon why we are different to other chains. Well, first of all, Compact. Compact
makes it easy for people to come and use Midnight. It's not a complex Web3 language.
It is made to look and feel like TypeScript.
We've done great work in the developer community.
So I want to shout out to Lauren Lee and the DevRel team within the foundation
who have launched not only the ELIP program,
who are the best of the best amongst the developer group we have,
but have hundreds of other developers, thousands of other developers working globally.
So we have people in South America, in Turkey, in Africa, in Asia, and
Australia, all coming through that program. And then Charles mentioned the Night Force, which is
the ambassador program, and Jack O'Connor and his team is doing an amazing job there. And we're
up to 60,000 people in the Discord. We have thousands of people within that ambassador program
doing great work locally across
all of the world uh other countries that they're they're in philippines indonesia japan korea
argentina brazil peru so we have global coverage and for a brand new blockchain
uh that is an amazing place to be and we're very excited by what those developers and those
ambassadors can bring because we're not just about institutions.
We're not just about large corporates coming to use our blockchain.
We also want to nurture the Web3 community who struggled with growth and adoption to come and use Midnight, whether they use that natively or in a hybrid capacity, whether they're building a solution of Solana, Arbitrum, Ethereum, Bitcoin.
a solution of Solana, Arbitrum, Ethereum, Bitcoin, they can come and use Midnight's
opportunities of privacy enabling technology through the tokenomics that we've enabled.
It is not tribalist. We want all of blockchain to win. Otherwise, what will happen, and we're
seeing this with the Clarity Act, it will favor the large institutions. And for all the people
who've made many sacrifices over the last decade and more to make sure open technology, open source, Web3 technology wins.
We all got to come together to kind of face off that sort of challenge.
And then we can embed ourselves into the general public.
We've got to use blockchain.
We're going to use Midnight as a layer to empower others.
So the less we talk about the blockchain,
the less we talk about crypto and trading,
the more we talk about infrastructure,
the more we talk about truth and protecting people's privacy, the more we will all succeed.
All right. Well, I mean, what I'm taking away from our conversation so far is even though Midnight just launched, there's lots for come. And it is really prevalent to me that the three of you are thinking long-term,
thinking into the future and building something that will test the tales of time and last far
into the future. Let's take a quick break. We're going to be gone for about a minute. When we come
back, Charles is going to introduce us to Midnight City. Stick around.
Cryptocurrency kidnapping scheme. Target and rob a family of cryptocurrency.
Asking for 15 bitcoins as ransom.
Everything you do is being recorded.
Every click, every scroll, every media you consume, every video you watch,
every interaction, every opinion you hold, every comment, every share, every like, every search,
every message, every pause, every glance, every keystroke, every preference, every secret,
every purchase, every order. Everything you do online is being tracked. It's in your hand
to let them track you or to control how much you share.
Welcome back to Coindesk. We are live with the Midnight folks on the back of the Midnight
Mainnet launch. Charles, you're going
to introduce us to Midnight City. Now, this is a living, breathing digital city that shows you
what privacy on a blockchain actually looks like and actually enables. Charles, I'm going to hand
the mic over to you for the next little while to walk us through it. All right, let's take a look here. So can you guys see my screen?
All right.
So this is Midnight City.
We're celebrating right now the launch of the network.
So there's a little bit of stuff going on.
And this is actually one of the coolest demos.
And it's turning into an actual product.
It's like the demo that won't die.
We love it so much, it's become its own thing.
So the first thing that we wanted to showcase is a space to do selective disclosure in a private stablecoin.
And we wanted to use agents to run it so that we could simulate large amounts of transactions.
And so this is running kind of the first generation of our roll-up system.
And it's capable of several thousand TPS.
And the next iteration of this will actually run a version of Nightstream.
So we can run it in production and we can verify that lattice-based folding is doing
what it thinks it could do.
And so what we did is we said, let's embed actual agents.
And so when you look around, that's an agent right there.
And these agents actually are running large language models.
They have their own thoughts. They have large language models. They have their own
thoughts. They have their own personality. They have their own soul. They have their own capabilities
and basically have different views of these agents. And so when you click on the agent,
you can actually see the transactions of the agent. And these transactions that you're looking at,
these right now are shielded. But if you go to, excuse me,
let me show you the public view. Here we go. These are actually encrypted. So this is what
it would be on the blockchain. You can't really see anything. And then you say, well, actually,
maybe I'm going to take the auditor persona. Okay, now you actually see a little bit more.
And if you take the God mode mode and you actually get full disclosure,
then what you can do is you can actually look at the entire history of the agent. You can look at,
so like right here, you see nothing. And over here is God mode. And this is what selective disclosure looks like, you know, basically in a nutshell. So the auditor has a particular view,
the public sees absolutely nothing. And then you, the owner of the agent, this is what your view would be and all the different
transactions and other things that they've done.
Now, what's really cool under the hood about this demo is that as we continue to build
it up, we're eventually going to allow people to buy their own agents and embed them inside
the city.
And then your agents, you can start changing their appearance and they'll have professions
and they can earn money. And then there's agent to agent, agent to
environment interactions. And what this effectively will become is the front page of the Midnight
Network. So as things happen in Midnight, we'll start embedding them into Midnight City.
We have different districts inside Midnight City. So if you kind of click up here, you
can go to this district or then I think
there's a temple district or a ranch district somewhere around here. Let me go and find it.
And each district can then correspond to different activities inside Midnight City,
including what partners are doing. So like when they launch a capacity exchange or a bank like
Monument comes on, we can put something inside the game world. So it acts as like a front page that as you navigate, you're able to see and learn more about it.
And then as you embed your agents, what we can do is start working on agent-to-agent communications
and agent-to-agent standards. So we say, okay, there's X402 for agentic payments.
We can actually test that here with an asset that is basically a synthetic stablecoin.
And we can show how you can do that.
And you can then delegate authority and have these agents basically trade on your behalf
or do other cool things on your behalf.
We're also going to use Midnight City as a test harness for governance.
So we have this really cool thing called Frontier Maps that we're working on.
Instead of having a roadmap for a network be boring, and it's just like, this is release A, release B,
release C, and it's get notes or whatever.
It's more like a video game
where you have an interactive map of nodes.
And each node has features
and the people inside the game world
can vote on those features of which ones they want
through conviction voting and other techniques.
And then basically we can build a roadmap
based on where the conviction is.
So we call this dark matter governance. We're learning with that governance system,
how to build up to eventually a governance system that can run midnight. And what's cool is we can
test many different things. Instead of just token weighted voting, we can also test one person,
one vote because each agent can represent a person as a soulbound token. So there's a lot of experiments
that we're basically running here. Some experiments on the scalability side, some experiments in the
agenda communication, experiments on how we can embed partners inside of it. And what's really
cool is hopefully by the end of the month, we should be able to turn on the feature to allow
you to be able to subscribe and put your own agent inside Midnight City. And then you can just
kind of like a Tamagotchi, watch it do things. And they're agents. So they're unpredictable.
Eventually with the sophistication of the agentic interactions, your agent may fall in love with
another agent. You wake up and now your agent's married and has kids. And then they get divorced
because he cheated. And then you have like alimony payments and things like that. It's
like totally unpredictable. We have no idea. And the agents will even form their own government,
their own language, their own religions,
and hold elections and all these things.
And we as the creators of the game
don't program those events.
These will just be emergent properties of the events.
And it's just a cool way to spread Midnight.
So just go to midnight.city.
You can see it's kind of like the front page of things.
And as agenda capabilities get more sophisticated
and the game world gets more sophisticated,
it'll be month by month, a lot of fun to watch.
The other cool thing is that we're co-designing this game with our Discord.
So the interface that you're going to have to be able to program your agent and change
its appearance, its professions, and its interactions is going to be in the Discord.
And so it's a nice aggregator strategy
to bring lots of people into the Midnight Discord
and create kind of a single place
for people to be to talk about Midnight.
So our goal is to get at least half a million
to a million people in the Midnight Discord
by the end of the year.
We think Midnight City is an example
of a really good attractor aggregator strategy to do that.
And then once you have that large population of people,
then you can use it to test the wallet technologies. You can use it to test the
governance technologies. You can use it to test a lot of these emerging next generation capabilities.
And as a final point, it's really cool because it's a co-design thing. When you look at very
successful games like Minecraft or other things, really what made them great wasn't Mojang sitting
on a mountaintop saying,
hey, this is what we should do.
It was that interplay between the people playing the game
and the people building the game.
And they both felt ownership in it.
So you having your own agent, having your own property,
having control over the roadmap
means that it's a co-development with us
and the Midnight City ecosystem.
And basically we all have that connection to it.
So we think it's going to be a high participation, rapidly evolving product.
And we get to showcase every month new Midnight capabilities.
So like when composable contracts come, we get to showcase that or some new Layer 2 capability,
we get to showcase that.
And it gives us something for our partners to do too.
That's a little different, a little more interesting. And it shows that Midnight's being built not just as a human
first system, but also an AI first system. So as the internet steps into the agentic era,
we think Midnight's going to be one of the best control layers for agents and preserving the
privacy and making sure that the agents speak proofs to each other. And it's multi-chain effect
means that it can work natively with all these different things that are going on.
All right. Thanks, Charles, for introducing us to Midnight City.
It looks crazy in there. I can't wait to get in and start playing around with it.
I want to vocalize something that I didn't say before this, but I see a lot of people in the comments talking about, and it is the midnight ad we played just before Charles,
you gave your demonstration. And what I was thinking while I was watching that ad was,
wow, if you weren't concerned about privacy before watching this, I don't know, 50 second
ad, I bet you are now. It did such a good job at kind of outlining why everyone should care about privacy.
This is not just a Web3 thing. This is not just something if you work within the blockchain space,
you need to be concerned about. It is a concern for everyone. So, I mean, good job. Good job on
that, on making people care, Charles. Yeah. And actually, I'll show you guys one more thing that's
really cool. And it kind of shows people how we think
and how we approach things.
So first we were talking about the post-quantum stuff
and everybody's like,
oh God, quantum computers are gonna be scary.
And like, what is your quantum strategy?
Will you guys be able to solve it?
Well, here's a paper that we wrote in 2019,
the Bitcoin backbone protocol against quantum adversaries. So we actually
wrote one of the first papers to model how a quantum adversary would attack a blockchain
back in 2019. So our research group, they think about things in terms of decades, you
know, and they're always ahead of the curve, but papers are not reality. So what we've
developed over the last few years is kind of an
engineering operating system where we're able to translate from the paper to a specification.
And I'll show you what the spec looks like. So we're talking about wallet abstraction with
midnight and we say, well, that's a lot of words, but what does that actually mean? So we would
write this markdown document. I this so uh over the weekend it's
about 100 pages long and you know you start with source materials like there's a lot of different
concepts that go into wallet abstraction so you have the cake framework you have the open wallet
foundation stuff what we did with hedera hashgraph and algorand with derec there's the near protocol
zkme the ethereum naming service There's stuff about trusted execution environments.
You have to localize it to midnight. And then when you scroll down, then you eventually get
a nice architectural diagram. And you have this beautiful little ASCII and it talks about how
these technologies work together. Well, that's what an engineer would read. But then what you
can do is you can move a layer up. And then you want to actually visualize this thing.
So the next step is we'll actually create very quickly a website.
And so here's kind of a site that we created to talk around the concept of a midnight passport.
And it's derived from that ASCII diagram.
So you have these beautiful seven layers.
And it's not good enough just to have layers of
the system. Then you also have personas that you have to think about. And the personas have to be
from everything from I'm a completely new user of the cryptocurrency space and here's where I come
from and here's some of the things I want to achieve to I'm a power user and I actually really
do crypto stuff every single day.
And then you say, well, what's the definition of success?
I want you to be able to scan a QR code and have a fully functional wallet, name service,
multi-chain, ready to go, tokens in, 60 seconds.
You see, so that's fast user onboarding.
And you say, well, I have to look at this through principles.
So the keys never leave the hardware safe, one key per device, no seed phrases.
You encrypt before you leave the device.
And then you think, well, this has got to work with everyday software.
So when you look at the off-chain stuff, you say, okay, well, that's got to work with OneDrive.
And that's got to work with Google Drive.
And that's got to work with all these other things because that's where the users are at.
They all have that.
It just works that way. That's why you have to make it work.
So this is how we think about product. And this is how we develop. And all of this was built in
a very agile way. In less than a week, we went from a specification document to a website. And
the next step is a product manager and some engineers are going to go into a very specialized
group. I have a company called ARC,
the Applied Research Creative Engineering Group.
They're going to have this as a feedstock,
write an actual midnight improvement proposal and specification for it.
And then we can start implementing and bringing it in.
You see, so when we talk about midnight passport,
we don't just say,
hey, we're going to have some great user experience.
We're going to think about
how the whole stack sits together.
How do you do chain abstraction?
And you get many chains to talk to each other.
How do you have a DApp operating system?
And you make it really easy to one-click install a DApp.
But remember, all of this has to be connected to one baseline root of trust, and that has
to also be connected to a great recovery system.
So if you lose your phone, you lose your wallet, you get it back.
This is how you onboard
a billion people into the cryptocurrency space. It's how you bring them all in. They can't have
an experience where they have to know how cryptography works and know how the blockchain
works. Nowhere in the stack do they have to know any of that stuff. And this is being built as a
multi-chain first. So it means the easiest, safest, and fastest way to create a Bitcoin wallet
or a Ethereum wallet or Solana wallet is going to be through this type of flow. And then when you
talk about dApps, the easiest way to install an Ethereum dApp will be through a flow like this.
And you know it's great because you have a research group that has foresight. We wrote the
papers back in 2019, 2018, 2017. And then you have a specification driven development.
So you have a chain of evidence that comes through,
and then you have proper cryptography
and proper implementation.
And you can take your partners along the journey
every step of the way.
And then if we've done our job right,
they don't even know they're using crypto.
They don't even know they're in the industry.
They're just talking about their favorite app.
And they say, hey, I use this app
and it works really great.
And that passport allows you to go from app to app, ecosystem to ecosystem, and it's all
there.
And so this is, this is the fun part.
You know, normally you don't get to do this as a product guy.
You work on one little thing and one little vertical.
And the fact that we're able to think about a holistic experience for the entire cryptocurrency
space and say, okay, let's start from first principles.
Let's apple-fy this. Let's make it incredibly easy and let's meet the customers where they're at.
That's something very unique to what we do at midnight.
I think that's really important that you outline that for us, Charles, because this isn't
really about building these alternative systems that are hard to use. It's about building
technology that can be embedded into where we already are. We don't need to worry about changing our everyday activities. We're not
even going to know what exists, but in the end, we're going to be safer and we'll be able to access
better solutions and better products. We are running out of time, so let's get into our Q&A
section. We compiled a bunch of questions
from the community on social media ahead of this live stream. But I do want to get to one question
that I saw in the live chat because we spoke a lot, we spoke a bit about Midnight Passport,
but we didn't really introduce it to our audience. So Mike, I'm going to bring you back in really
quickly. Just give us the basics, the Midnight Passport 101, what it is and how it works.
Yeah.
In fact, this is a foundation-led effort.
So Midnight Passport, it's really about making the user experience across chains, not just
within Midnight, but how you travel across these blockchains, how you transact, but make it so that it feels like a Web2 experience, right?
And we've talked about this for the 10 years
I've been in this industry.
It's very difficult.
The complexity has to move somewhere.
And we're trying to take the complexity away from the user
and bring it back into what would be the wallet
or an embedded wallet
or whatever is relevant for that time.
So you can think of, start with an embedded wallet, right?
The concept that's been around for quite a while.
I come to an application.
Most people experience dApps through a website, right?
So it's very much just appears to a website to them
until you get into your key management,
until you have to generate a key,
you have to use passphrases,
which even I'm quite nervous to lose all the time.
So going through that onboarding process
and then your transacting process. So going through that onboarding process and then your
transacting process. So could you create a progressive experience similar to progressive
web? So I can start off with that. I can have an embedded wallet and then I can take control of
that wallet as I get more and more serious about my experience. So it's really trying to abstract
all of that away. And Charles talked about two parts to that. One is account abstraction.
And the second is chain abstraction.
So account abstraction, I don't want to think about my accounts.
I don't want to worry about my keys.
Chain abstraction, I don't want to think or worry about which blockchain I'm interacting with.
I just have an intent.
I would like the outcome I'm looking for.
So at a very high level, that's what it is.
There's a lot of pieces under the cover.
Midnight is very complicated
under the covers because we use ZK proofs. We are trying to A, keep that away from the users so
they're not aware of it. And that has a lot of pieces involved, like provers. So you have to
create your proofs remotely. That's how you keep things private. So a lot of innovations you'll see
on that, both in the coming months and coming years.
So taking that innovation, making it as easy as possible on the users.
All right, Charles, I'm going to kick it back to you because I know you have a hard stop in five minutes. So this is your last question, and then we will let you get to the rest of your day.
The question is phrased like this, can governments realistically use
this tech? And I'm just going to add a little bit to that. How do you anticipate governments
using this technology? Well, you know, when you look at smart compliance in particular,
what you're really saying is sovereignty. You know, the problem is in a global economy,
you know, we, every country likes to
believe that everybody's going to follow its laws, but reality is that big countries get
carte blanche to do whatever the hell they want to do in the global commons and mid-sized countries
to smaller countries. They basically have to accept that what they legislate and how they
want their people to behave and act they don't get to deal with. And so when you look at the power of midnight, what this allows you to do is set rules
and relationships at the individual company and governmental scale. So you can build a stock
market and you can say, well, if you're going to buy UK assets, you have to comply with UK law.
Well, you're not going to get somebody in Uganda or
Argentina or anywhere else to go physically fly to England or to go through some weird English KYC
or something like that. But at the same time, you still want rules in that relationship.
So with smart contracts and with selective disclosure and dids and these types of things,
like a non-creds, you can build a synthetic environment where you can replicate the intent and function of that environment. And then you can welcome global
customers to come in and have that digital passport to come in. But then you can still
have rules that you get to set as a nation state. And in a world where sovereignty is not really
respected as much as it should be, that's a super important aspect. People want to have some
say in the matter. So actually a lot of mid-sized governments are extremely excited about these
prospects and they like the fact that they now have something to express themselves and they
don't have to get constantly overwritten by China or the United States or these other hegemonies
that are pushing in. The other side of it is like, how do you do global business? And I'll give you a very succinct example.
When we did the Cardinal Constitution and ratified that constitution on chain, over
100 countries were involved in terms of the actual ratification.
So what is the regulator of concern there?
I have one transaction and that transaction touches more than 100 countries.
So do I follow the laws of 100 countries at the same time
so you need algorithmic regulation it's the only way to sensibly be able to move through this this
world and that's how we bring 10 trillion dollars of real world assets into the cryptocurrency space
so midnight's really the only coherent way to do that because you you can basically use smart
contracts on a jurisdiction by jurisdiction basis or adaptisdiction basis or a DAP-by-DAP basis.
You have this idea of digital passporting.
You have selective disclosure.
At the end of the day, the user is self-sovereign, so they control their credentials, not some government somewhere, and they're in charge of how they want to interact.
And then every interaction point is typically a zero-knowledge proof.
So you prove what's needed.
You don't over-prove or over-share.
You're like, how do I prove my age?
Well, I can
prove a Boolean. Am I above or at a specific age? As opposed to here's my driver's license and now
you know where I live and you might know my name and all these other things. Well, the composition
of that is any type of business environment, whether it be KYB or KYC or AML compliance,
and you can build your way up and prove things to
each other.
And then you can do that according to the standards that a government wants to set for
the marketplaces it wants to trade with.
So they feel respected, but they can welcome global business.
But you also know that you're not forfeiting lots of stuff up to some foreign government
that you don't fully trust or respect.
So it's a new way of thinking about business where everybody
gets to be equal, everybody gets to set rules. And it's a new way to respect the sovereignty
of nations. And so a lot of nations super excited about it. And also just opens up marketplaces.
You know, if you're Toyota, you want to do business in China, and you want to collaborate
with Chinese car companies, because the market is 10 times larger than the market in Japan. The problem is, what do you do about your
intellectual property and how do you guarantee that they're not going to steal it and compete
with you with your own products? So you need to set rules in a relationship and you need those
to be algorithmically enforced because you can't trust people and you can't trust the Chinese
government, but you still want to have access to that market.
That's where midnight fits are those cross-border things where you don't trust people, you trust algorithms, and it gives you a new dimension of rule setting where you start with dids and
self-sovereign identity and cryptographic wallets. And then using zero-knowledge proofs, you're able
to prove enough properties and then ultimately can make that decision of, is it safe to do business with this counterparty? And then you have settlement is compliance. If the funds settle,
you're in full compliance. And what you have as the merchant is zero knowledge proofs,
not the underlying data. So when the auditor comes or somebody else, you just give them proofs.
That's all I know. That's all I can see. And then if there's an audit scheme or whatever
inside that relationship, they can unwind it. Otherwise, it is what it is, you see. And that's the only way we're going to
be able to do business globally in a world where, you know, America's at war with Iran and Russia's
at war with Ukraine. And God knows what China's going to do with Taiwan before the end of the
decade. We're not really able to have a rules-based international order where we have treaties and
World Bank and world courts and these things figure it out, it's going to have to be technology that unifies the entire world.
So when governments think this way, they say, okay, crypto is no longer the adversary.
It's the enabler. By adopting this type of technology, we can create one global market.
We can get liquidity, we can get customers, and we can be relevant in the 21st century.
So it's not just China and America's game and all the markets aggregate there.
Everybody gets to be a member and a participant and their local laws get to be respected.
So we've actually had very positive feedback from a lot of governing bodies and anything.
They say it's like a glass of water in hell.
Finally, we understand where our place and role is in this.
We also understand how we can use our place and role is in this. We also understand
how we can use this technology to get a competitive advantage. And by the way, it's not small.
The cost of compliance in globally speaking, it's about half a trillion dollars a year of
unproductive stuff and labor and all these other things. You can buy Tokyo once every three years
for the cost of compliance. And it's only
getting more expensive and complicated because compliance has to be replicated in every single
jurisdiction you're in and you're never in full compliance and you always get fined. JPMorgan
Chase had $19 billion in compliance fines over the last 20 years. And I mean, their largest bank
their largest bank in the world, they have a giant compliance organization, if they have $20 billion
in the world, they have a giant compliance organization. If they have $20 billion in fines,
in fines, what chance does a normal person have to be able to do this correctly? So it's clear we
need a fundamentally different paradigm, and we need a rebalance thing where everybody gets to
be equal. And what's cool about Midnight is it makes everyone equal. The individual and the
nation state follow the same rules as opposed to different rules. It's never been that case in human history
where we've had a capability like that. And by doing that, it actually makes everybody trust
each other again and creates more freedom for everybody. Charles, thank you for taking that
question. We are going to let you go. Thanks so much for being with us for the last hour and 25
minutes. It was a pleasure unpacking Midnight with you, and I'm sure we'll see you
again soon. Cheers. All right. That was Input Output CEO Charles Hoskinson. Mike, Fami, it is
just the three of us, but it is going to be a strong end to the program. Fami, I'm going to
kick our next community question to you. The question is, can you share what industries are
expected to adopt Midnight First? Yeah, sure. I mean, we touched upon this before. So we're seeing
benefits within just both three and DeFi within the traditional financial world. We touched upon
Money Bank. We have a healthcare company who's bringing healthcare solutions in Turkey,
company who's bringing healthcare solutions in Turkey, in Barbados, in California to our technology.
So with finance, DeFi, healthcare, supply chain, supply chain, we spoke about the forensics
build a solution in India. There are other supply chain solutions coming. We're seeing interest in
gambling. So how do you provide proof of personhood, proof of credit,
but proof that the game is not being fixed against you?
So there are solutions like that coming to midnight.
There's dating solutions that are coming to midnight.
So again, proofs around the provenance of the person you're dating
or speaking to on the other side.
I think the question is not what is coming.
It's up to people's imagination.
There is a lot of opportunities, as Charles spoke to earlier.
What we're giving people are the tools and the infrastructure to come and build
and replicate what already exists in Web 2.
And that combination of Web 2 and Web 3.0, we get to Web 2.5,
the ability to provide a truth layer, truth engine
to existing services that we see.
And that advances not only Midnight's cause,
but the cause of all of Web 3.
But also through our developer community and groups,
we're seeing use cases that we hadn't even thought about.
And again, we ask people to keep coming,
keep bringing new ideas
because our success is not based on the token.
Every in crypto is focused on the token prices.
Our success is based on adoption, that people are using it.
People are building solutions on it.
They're coming up with new ideas, news cases.
That's how the internet evolved.
That's how blockchain should evolve.
And if we do this job right and we do it well, myself and Mike
and the teams at the foundation at Shielded and beyond
with our other partners, then we become a hidden infrastructure layer and the best tech is hidden
is invisible when you open your uber app or you open your amazon app you don't think about the
different services and infrastructure is calling you just know you're getting your car that arrives
on time you're getting your goods that arrive from wherever in the world and get delivered to
your doorstep and so good infrastructure is world and get delivered to your doorstep.
So good infrastructure is invisible
and we want midnight to be that invisible layer
powering the future of Web 2.5.
All right, next question is coming to you, Mike.
The question is,
will fourth gen chains rely more on off-chain computation?
Interesting.
You know, in principle, ZK is off-chain. So the
way you effectively retain privacy is the parties to a transaction will input their data privately,
compute proof that the inputs were, the inputs remain private, although they can select which
they would like to reveal both on inputs and outputs. And then you submit the proof. So the data stays off chain in a lot of ways.
Will things move off chain? Absolutely. There's a lot of things that are misunderstood, I think,
in how much you can purely go on chain, right? So take compliance, which Charles was just talking
about. A lot of compliance relies on things such as, am I on a sanction list? You know, have you proved that you're doing ongoing due diligence, etc.?
And it's a lot process-oriented.
So you want to create as much proof that you've done this as possible to keep it on-chain,
that you don't have to go back and submit records or reveal anything.
But you're always integrating with the real world.
There's really almost a fundamental shift that will be happening as a result of that, though, is most assets that are traded today on chain.
So DeFi is the biggest workload by far in crypto or in blockchain, I should say broadly.
It's mostly native. And this is the big opportunity we have to unlock here is this unlocks a whole set of assets that haven't come on chain to date for a lot of reasons.
One of the biggest is
privacy. The other is compliance. And those are two characteristics that we can solve for to bring
these assets on chain, expand the opportunity for all those that work on chain. But TLDR, yeah,
absolutely. We'll be doing a lot more with off-chain assets. One more question for you,
Mike, here. Will users even need to think about gas fees anymore?
With midnight, no. So it's a bit of a complicated mechanism, which makes it very simple for users.
But as a user, if I hold night, I am able to use the network because it generates something that
we call dust. And dust is really kind of the fuel the gas for the network a night holder can therefore
transact using their dust without having to spend their night so the whole notion of calculating
your gas as such a really kind of goes away and this is one of the simplifications we're trying
to make to push the complexity into the platform and take it away from the user uh you don't have
to hold night though we actually have a partner has launched a solution called Capacity Exchange.
Capacity Exchange allows me to pay for capacity in the network.
So if I don't hold night and I want to pay in ETH, as an example,
I can have somebody sponsor my transaction.
In the near term, large night holders
can sponsor transactions.
DAPs can sponsor transactions themselves.
So a DAP can hold Knight and generate enough dust to cover the cost of its transactions,
just removing that entirely for users.
So that is a convocation, I think, from one of the origins of blockchain when they tried
to overcome how do you work with congestion, et cetera, as well.
We'll use gas.
How do you pay people gas?
So we're hoping to greatly simplify this.
All right.
And Fahmy, we have come to the end, unfortunately,
of unpacking everything to do with midnight.
I know it is a sad reality that we are in,
but just take us home for everyone watching
who wants to learn more about midnight,
who wants to interact with midnight, who maybe wants to get into Midnight City.
How can they do that?
Yeah, great.
So the first place to go and the simplest place to go is Midnight.network. Once you get to Midnight.network, from that place, it tells you everything you need to know about Midnight.
Also, all the docs you need to start developing.
need to start developing.
It will lead you to links to Midnight City and to Midnight Fun,
where we're going to produce some games,
which will, again, bring the benefits and privacy-enabling solutions
on Midnight to some games that we'll release in the coming weeks.
There'll be a handful of games releasing every multiple weeks.
So that's the simplest place to go.
If you don't want to go to Midnight.network,
you can go directly to Midnight.city or to Midnight.fun.
But Midnight.network is a place to go where you learn everything you need to know about midnight also announcements
about partners you'll see what wallets are supporting us what id solutions are there
and the various things and partners that will be releasing over the coming weeks and months
all right well i want to thank you both for the robust discussion we've had over the last hour
and a half for introducing us to midnight and discussing where we are when it comes to privacy and what the future might look like it
was such a pleasure having you both on fami mike thanks thank you pleasure thank you very much one
other thing before i go because i'll get told by my social team also follow us on x follow us on
uh linkedin and other social media channels that's another place you can go find and hear about
midnight so keep tracking us and following us there. So take care. Thank you very much.
There you go. Some homework for our audience to everyone who watched on our various platforms.
Thanks so much for sticking with us. For FAMI, Mike and Charles, I'm Jen Sinassi. We'll see you next time.
