Midnight Network Might Be Reducing the Biggest Barrier to ZK Adoption: Complexity

Zero knowledge proofs have been called as one of the key cryptographic breakthroughs in decades. Their mathematical reasoning is beautiful, in that you can demonstrate that something is actually so without telling you anything about the information behind it. Researchers love them. Privacy advocates love them. However, throughout the history of the ZK technology, most of the time it has remained just out of reach of those who would actually be constructing with it. Not because it is ineffective, it is simply that cryptographic expertise to work with it has always been at an expense that hardly anyone has. That is the secret issue of ZK adoption. The technology does exist and works, however, the journey between the desire to create a privacy-preserving app, and the reality of creating one has been violently harsh. The developers have been forced to learn a new mental model, exploit low-level tooling that was not meant to be used generally, and reason carefully about the circuit design, proof generation and verification that has nothing to do with creating good products. The obstacle was not the scepticism. It was friction. And friction, with perseverance, will put adoption to death like any rival. @MidnightNetwork is starting with this problem at the developer level moving to the outside. The design of the network is such that apps controlled by ZK can be accessible to a significantly broader audience of builders, not just cryptographers, but developers who are interested in writing smart contracts with guaranteed privacy without having to possess a PhD to do so. Midnight employs a programming model which allows a developer to operate with logic with which the developer is familiar, and the ZK layer deals with the complexity beneath. The generation of proofs, the verification, the computation which is shielded, that infrastructure is implicit in the protocol, that may not need to be coded by any particular developer each time. The design option represents a certain theory of the way technology is adopted in practice. The most potent tool does not necessarily win, it is the most practical one that would solve a real problem. Web development did not become a phenomenon since HTML was far better than anything that had ever existed. It was accessible and thus took off. The same logic applies here. Assuming that ZK technology would some time become a bedrock of the internet as opposed to a specialized cryptographic system, the developers working with it must be able to look at what they are constructing, and not the mechanism of the proof system. NIGHT, the indigenous representation of the Midnight Network, is in the middle of ecosystem that only makes sense in case developers do show up and construct. The utility of the token is directly related to network usage - and network usage is related to whether the infrastructure of Midnight is in reality more convenient to deal with than anything else. It is no coincidence that they are aligned. It implies that the incentives drive towards the same direction with the design philosophy. The sort of abstraction layer of privacy that Midnight is trying to quietly attempt is the kind of privacy abstraction layer. Just as cloud computing removed server infrastructure to an abstract level in which builders did not need to consider physical machines, Midnight is attempting to do the same thing to ZK complexity, where builders did not need to consider cryptographic circuits. In the event that that abstraction is true - in the event that it is actually powerful and expressive enough to drive real applications - then the range of available people to develop privacy-first software grows exponentially. It is the growth itself that counts. It is intriguing to have a single team of cryptographers develop a ZK application. Making privacy the default in thousands of developers building in finance and identity and healthcare and governance that is a very different change. Midnight will not only make ZK user-friendly. It is betting that access to ZK is the easier part of the next wave of blockchain adoption. That bet seems more plausible than it used to seem a few years ago considering the length of time that complexity has been the bottleneck. $NIGHT #night