Fahmi Syed - Midnight - TOKEN2049 Singapore 2025

I'm farm side. I am president of the Midnight Foundation. If you haven't heard about Midnight already, Midnight is a next generation blockchain. We think the the next blockchain that will bring rational privacy, privacy enabling solutions to the masses. So before I talk about midnight, what I want to talk about is the promise that blockchains brought.

So let's go back to 2008. So I was in the financial industry for over two decades. And two 2008 saw the start of the great financial crisis. And what you realized during the financial crisis was the hard hardearned money that you made through work or through investments was actually not your own. It was gated by centralized actors by the banks and when you needed it most you could not access it.

So blockchain came with a promise and the Satoshi white paper that came out around Bitcoin spoke about a decentralized network which was about truth not about trust about enabling peer-to-peer transactions a transfer of value across borders without censorship without anybody able to gate that. But that promise came with a compromise. Transparency. For everything we do on a blockchain today, that truth comes with transparency. And transparency compromises on our fundamental right to privacy.

And privacy often in web 3 has had a very negative connotation. But actually privacy is the central tenant that will unlock blockchain technology for mass adoptions from corporations, individuals and beyond. And with Midnight, we're here to deliver on that missing piece. And we consider that missing piece to be not just privacy, but rational privacy. So what does rational privacy mean?

It sounds like a complicated sort of term, but it's very simple. I'm assuming looking around that everybody here has a lanyard. And they often will walk around with a lanyard with their details turned around. You want that information. And I see that young lady in the corner is looking at a lanyard.

And you hide who you are cuz your lanyard contains your name and where you work. And when you walk around the conference floor, often you want to discover information, but you don't want people to know who you are until you come across an interesting project, somebody that you want to speak to. And at that point, you turn around your lanyard and you present yourself, your name and where you work. You might talk about your project. That is rational privacy in your physical state.

And rational privacy is what you do in your digital state. except in a blockchain, you've accepted that you're going to give it all away for peer-to-peer transactions, for borderless transactions, for that right to decentralized technology. And we don't think that's fair and that's correct. So, with Midnight, we're bringing forward rational privacy. And with that, we also think about how you interact with a blockchain.

So, rational privacy alone is not enough. This ability to have a public state and a private state and share information is not enough. We also have to think about how blockchains are accessed today. Technology is about consumption. We don't buy technology anymore.

We don't own technology. We consume technology. Think about cloud servers. Nobody owns a cloud server. You rent that space.

You consume that. Even AI, you no longer own knowledge. You process knowledge or you process information. So it's not about ownership. And yet in a blockchain today, everything you do is about ownership.

You have to own the blockchain technology to transact. If you think about the real world, you do not pay for your Apple iPhone using Apple shares. You don't consume or buy Amazon groceries with animal Amazon shares. You don't cannibalize your very investment from your consumption. And we at midnight we are separating the utility, the ownership with the usage, the consumption.

We will introduce a token called Knight. Knight will be a Cardano native asset and Knight will give you governance and ownership of the midnight network. But from Knight and owning it, it will emit a perpetual renewable resource called dust. And dust is the computational power, the gas fee for one of once of another word on the midnight blockchain. And when you transact with dust, when you commit a a computational resource or power, that is done with zero knowledge proofs.

So your transaction is private and then through the smart contract technology you open up with disclosures and through that cooperative tokconomics we're encouraging a movement away from tribalism and a movement to cooperation. That's why we think about cooperative economics because you can now consume technology as a service or blockchain as a service and because we are not tribalist because we want to encourage others to come and use this zero knowledge technology with the ability to disclose information the what you have the whom and whom you want to share it with. We've approached the distribution mechanism in a noble way. We think about fair distribution and fair distribution comes in the form of our glacier drop and right now we're in the middle of the glacier drop where we are distributing 100% of our token supply to eight ecosystems Cardano, Bitcoin, Ethereum amongst those eight and others. We want to encourage those chains, those developers on those networks to come and utilize the privacy enabling solutions that Midnight provides.

And that fair distribution mechanism is in its currently in its initial claim phase. And because of the success and demands from the community and other partners that we have bought, we have extended it for a few more weeks to the 16th of October. So there's still time. You may have heard a recent partnership and collaboration with OKX. It open ups their wallets, their users to claim for this network and beyond.

And once we get through the claim phase, we will enter the scavenger mine where if you are not part of the eight different ecosystems, you will be able to come and mine for the remainder of the of the tokens. And by doing that we want to achieve that fair distribution. It's not about insiders. It's not about VCs getting first go. This is about a free fair access to users, developers and beyond.

So Midnight we believe unlocks blockchain's true potential. Data should not sit on a blockchain. That information that is powerful to the user to a corporate should remain offchain and we should exist in the world of zero knowledge proofs. But proofs alone are not enough. You need that ability to be able to disclose sensitive proofs to what you have and to when you have it and to whom you want to share it with.

So we think about midnight opening up that future. A future of freedom of association without permission, a freedom of commerce without restriction, and a freedom of expression without censorship. So I'm going to leave that up there and explain what that really means. When we think about commerce on a blockchain today, it's often you hear about DeFi and the DeFi liquidity and how it's improving access. The real liquidity that we all care about, the assets that we all care about sit in the walls outside of this building.

And many institutions are not going to bring that liquidity and that commerce to a blockchain because nobody wants to show all their assets, all their payments on chain. Stable coins are the theme and RWA are the theme of today. Now the very first thing that will happen when you are paid in stable coin form is you will look at the wallet that paid you. You will look at that wallet and say do I have confidence that that wallet will continue to be able to pay me next month and the month after? But we're humans.

We're not machines. So we're curious. So you might also look at who else got paid in stable coin form that month, that week. And you might realize that in a small company, you're not the highest paid person. You're not even the mid tier.

You may be below the medium. How does that help you as an individual, help your company? It creates disharmony. So, we will not see a future of these freedoms unless we bring privacy enabling solutions. I've just got off stage with Google.

We got collaboration with them around how that privacy enabling solution becomes the truth engine that connective tissue across not only commerce but people and blockchains that we see today. We encourage developers from other blockchains, Salana, Ethereum to come and use our privacy enabling solutions and the cooperative tokconomics model that we have designed does encourage that. It does bring us all together as an industry. We can't be separated. We can't be segregated the way we are.

So we need to bring us together and we believe Midnight is that connective tissue of privacy enabling solutions. Privacy by default, disclosure by choice and that empowers the individual, the corporate, the machine and that is not of an an enemy of compliance or regulation. That can be an ally that unlocks doors to greater adoption, greater use cases. So the freedoms of ACE are critical to building that fairer digital future to bring in more mass adoption, great use cases. At Midnight, anywhere there's data, anywhere where privacy has it gives you a competitive edge, Midnight can help enable use cases around that.

We're focused on solutions around finance, AI, healthcare, GVtech, and beyond. We already have a partner who's presented proof of 3 million patient data onto our chain that exposes it in terms of research and medical trials. We're working with a large children's hospital in California about how you can have cross clinical trials using midnight's technology and privacy enabling solutions. So those freedoms of race are critical to encouraging that fairer digital future, not only for us as humans, but corporations and machines. And with that, I'm going to finish on one quick video just explaining what what we believe in terms of freedoms.

[Music] Heat. Heat. [Music] So, thank you very much for your time today. Thank you for listening. If you're interested in what we're doing, please visit our website midnight.

network. If you're interested in understanding how you can come and claim, visit the glacier drop website. You still have time. Midnight is about the next generation. Is it bring about people not only in this room but outside of this room to black blockchain technology.

It's about the unifying layer of truth across all blockchains, across all technologies. Thank you very much for your time. Have a safe journey home.