Thread by @technologypoet

The team behind Cardano just announced a new privacy blockchain, Midnight.

🤨 What is Midnight?
🛠️ The problems it solves
👤 How it compares with Monero
🚪 Does it have a backdoor?
🧐 Concerns
🔮 Promises

Lets dive in! 🧵

#Cardano $ADA #Midnight $DUST

Midnight is a data protection-based blockchain that safeguards sensitive commercial and personal data, protecting the fundamental freedoms of association, commerce, and expression for developers, companies and individuals.

🤝 Freedom of Association

Community rules (e.g. age limits or location limits) can be enforced without disclosing personal information. This allows rules based collaboration while preservice privacy

🪙 Freedom of Commerce

Many real world industries such as banking and supply chains are highly regulated. For better or worse these regulations will need to be respected to interact with them. Midnight enables this.

🗣️ Freedom of Expression

Share ideas privately, immutably on the blockchain without fear of censorship. Empowers whistleblowers and journalists in countries with hostile governments.

What is Midnight?

⛓️ Cardano Sidechain
💶 New token $DUST
🔐 Leverages economic security and decentralization of Cardano - share same validators
0️⃣ Zero Knowledge Proofs with confidential computation and confidential composability

🔏 Configurable privacy - users can grant dapps access to view keys
Dapps can specify the level of privacy disclosure needed by users in order to interact.

Support spectrum from fully private to fully visible to dapp

Monero is the pinnacle of privacy coins focused on transactions. Allows user to share view keys to show receipt of transaction. Private by default.

Midnight enables more use cases through confidential smart contracts and supports regulated industries.

🚪 Is there a backdoor to Midnight?
Technically, no.
In practice, maybe.
Users may not realize they're giving up privacy to interact with a dapp just like they click through the ToS today.

🤔 My Top Concerns
🌉 Security of the bridge, execution environment
👤 Data leakage via 'shadow profiles'
😢 Relatively isolated ecosystem could hinder adoption
👨‍⚖️ Government misuse
😳 Most dapps require view keys, essentially making it public

🔮 Yet Midnight holds much promise

✔️ Bring regulated transactions onto the blockchain
🏠 Connect the blockchain to the real world
🤝 Bridge web2 and web3 through flexible confidentiality architecture

There's more to Cardano's Midnight than can fit in a Twitter thread.

I cover all the above and more in my recent video:

kavarii.com/play/CONCEPTS-…

#Cardano #Midnight $DUST $ADA

I appreciate you reading this far!
If you've learned something new, please share this thread with friends.
If you have any information I missed about Midnight, or found something I misstated please comment below.

❤️

https://twitter.com/125101068/status/1594001336475226114

@IOHK_Charles I hope I captured a fair representation of Midnight, and I hope this helps better explain Midnight to folks who may be less well versed in the research.