From token listing to new product development, is going to have a big timeout, I think, as they kind of change management and get where they need to go. Excuse me, that's just where they're at now. The good news is that we, as innovators, still have a lot of power. That's why we created Midnight. You see, Midnight is this idea that you can have algorithmically generated law...

In the Ethereum space, there's even a project called Open Law, where they take real world contracts and actually try to add a legal DSL to them. So, you combine a smart contract with a legal DSL, but you need a privacy component for this to actually work, which is why Midnight exists. I do believe we can make it quite interoperable with these things. So the fourth-generation cryptocurrency is no longer about scale...

I think we predicted this with Cardano, and we predicted this as an ecosystem. We understood the need for how to innovate with integrity and to comply with integrity. We've invested very heavily as an ecosystem in core technology like Prism, which allows for self-sovereign identity - so, identity with integrity. Midnight, which gives all those components for data confidentiality, is required for...

I owe you guys a midnight video. I'm going to try to make it today. Um, I'm seeing some crazy stuff floating around and a lot of misunderstanding and misinterpretation. I guess we could have done a better job of layering information, but that's okay. It's a lot all at once: the whole partner chains concept, the Cardano service layer, and what these things are all about.

Hi everyone, this is Charles Hoskinson, broadcasting live from warm sunny Colorado. It's always warm, always sunny, sometimes Colorado. This is the third time today; got Logan on the mic and we're just gonna get through it. This is the Midnight Special, November 16th, 2023. Are you guys ready? Let's go. Okay, the first step is, we're gonna go ahead and share the screen. There we go, okay. So, a lot of community questions about midnight

A lot of people are interested in midnight. There is a lot of stuff floating online. I did a whiteboard publicly with my 30-minute keynote. We didn't really have a lot more time for that keynote, unfortunately, or else I would have gone into a lot of detail. So, we just kind of left it for this. I said, you know, I owe you guys a whiteboard. I've been terribly ill for the past two weeks, but we've pushed through.

That's okay because we got a scholar draw and obsidian. So what we're going to do is we're going to say, "Hey midnight notes, how about that?" Alright. So, in the beginning, there was just a Cardano asset and settlement layer. Okay, and what I'll do is, uh, I'm going to shut this notepad down so we have a bigger screen here. So in the beginning, we just had the asset and settlement layer of Cardano, and basically, this layer.

Every single one of those service layers has different logic behind it, meaning they have different tokenomics, different transactions, different network consensus logic. But what we can do is bundle this in just the right way wherein they actually have a common ancestor. They have a common set of rules, so that basically, they're in partnership with Cardano. We'll get into specifics with midnight, okay? Common rules, okay, so

...they're both connected together. The deflationary nature of the system is at odds with the variable monetary policy that you need to have with the field system. So, it's good to actually separate them in some way, and this is kind of the thing that we've been exploring on the midnight side. So, you have something that lives on the asset settlement layer, you have something that lives in the service layer, um, and then...

...ownership of the network here on Cardano. That's kind of the rough idea of how this all comes together. Then, when you're a Dev provider, what you do is you say, "Oh, okay, I want to use Midnight now for all of my KYC ML and my data protection privacy stuff." Then there's this question of "Well, what currency do I pay at, Ada or Dust?" and the reality is it actually doesn't matter. This is why Babel Fees were developed. The whole concept of...

...right now, the daps that live in this ecosystem, in the DAP that live here, can't talk to the things in Cardano. By having a surface layer that has a lot of hooks for interoperability, what that effectively allows you to do is to have a Dapp. Instead of just being a Cardano-native Dapp, it could be written in Solidity here on Ethereum, but then call a midnight service, or call our AI chain, or call our decentralized network, or...

Um, the dual, there's a lot of tokenomics to be figured out in the token model, and we have some great ideas for Midnight as a case study. We think what will happen is that people will copy these tokenomics when they build their own service layers. Then, some compatibility infrastructure has to be built for these DApps to be able to seamlessly talk to multiple services and move state between multiple services...

...for example, I can imagine a world where Alchemy or Infura is combined with the Cardano blockchain, combined with the Midnight blockchain, and all three of them basically work together to call one thing. Then, you'll have multiple payments. Babel fees can sort that out, or DEXes can sort that out, and it just becomes something that works under the hood, and people just pay in things that they care about.

...electronic medical records with each other, perhaps they provide different services and have to refer patients, so there's demographic information. You could imagine that an EHR plus midnight would be able to do the following: they can ask questions of each other, queries, and those queries are private. Essentially, the clinics will get answers but they won't receive any of the underlying, personally identifiable...

...for federated components, because each clinic is hosting its own EHR, there are connecting tissues. The connecting tissue is a midnight application, excuse me. Maybe eventually they want to use a cloud provider instead of hosting it themselves, but then use a decentralized infrastructure to host the medical information, as opposed to using a database, you know, in the sky like Amazon...

The point of Midnight, and more broadly, the partner chain framework, is trying to sort all these different things out. In simple terms, you have two tokens. You have something that represents your ownership, your governance, your control. You have something that represents your fuel. They follow different monetary policies. One is the native spending asset of that...

...there are clearly people who understand this who are in the know, and the advantage we have is that we've been thinking about it for about five years. We have all the pieces here and, with midnight, what we're doing is putting those pieces together as a case study to show how to do this. What will happen is there will be a nice distribution that will bring the broader cryptocurrency ecosystem in.

So, I hope this gives you guys, you know, a better sense of where things are. Applications, of course, will run solely on midnight or hybrid, run on Cardano, either or. So, you know, oftentimes people will call these applications. Then, it'll be like a larger, service-oriented application of applications model. I could imagine, for example, a bunch of regulation and...

...compliance applications are built that run on Midnight. These are called through APIs by Cardano applications, and they pay a dust fee to run. Dust lives here and then another asset, essentially, being the ownership token of Midnight, exists here. I can imagine a world like that. Furthermore, I can also imagine a world where Midnight applications call a lot of Cardano applications.

For example, if there are lots of assets that are floating here. They are female and need liquidity. Maybe there's a high liquidity Dex that lives on Cardano, but you know, there's going to be that cross-pollination that lives there. There's going to be a case where an Ethereum app calls midnight, which then in turn calls Cardano. Indirectly, Ethereum creates demand for Cardano. There are about 76 million users here, there are about 35...

The point of what we're pushing with this service layer model is this idea that we become one of the best places for those upgrades. Midnight is a case study for how to do that. The data confidentiality side adds all these amazing things to our ecosystem, some that are an overlap, some that are completely new system is incompatible with the way that Cardano does things on the native ledger.

So that's what we're trying to do, that's what we're trying to build. The development work on Cardano hasn't slowed down; it's sped up. The roadmap of Cardano continues to move forward. No one has been pulled or reassigned from Cardano to Midnight; they're using different technologies in...

...the Wallet ecosystem has great on-chain governance coming with MVG intersect. It is looking really sharp, and it's going to bring a lot of innovation in. There are tons of community projects, like TX pipe and Aiken. TVL keeps going up, and with the Cardano service layer, this idea of hybrid dApps is really going to be pushed. You have something living on Cardano, but then it does something with Midnight or...

...the system was one that I was very curious about. Concepts like economic identity, how do you bank the unbanked, how do you connect the unconnected, how do you take resources like data and computation and network and decentralize them? Because I saw a world where all of those things are being taken from us as people. So, what I'd like to do is focus on building those types of things, midnight for...

Midnight for example provides us with a completely new perspective on data confidentiality and privacy. I would like to spend considerable time working with Eran and his team, ensuring that it grows to become the place where all those things can be done, and can be done following principles that preserve and protect freedom of association, commerce, and expression. I can't tell you how many people come to me....

Doing that through the centralized banking system and having those loans go down at midnight with data protection or any of the other things that we have cooking, like a Atala prism for example, with the idea of self-sovereign identity. These are the projects that are meaningful because those are the things that bring millions and billions of people to the real-life use cases.

And you know, when you look at side chains and these things, I think people will be very, very happy about that. Plus, I guess I have a Twitter space tomorrow with Eran Barak about Midnight, and I think people will be very happy about Midnight as well. Um, you know, on the commercial side, on our side IO, we have ventures like RealFi. Uh, that's John O'Conor's company. He was the director of African operations.

...about people, is there real empathy there, and do they want to make the world a better place? Can they listen, can they learn, and can they assist you? That's what you look for in good leaders, not ideological perfection. Charles, are all midnight validators, SPOs? Maybe you're more comfortable answering that one. For SPOs, uh, in Midnight, the goal is to deploy Monotour, and that means it's ...

The multi-resource consensus, so the midnight side chain, will be able to bootstrap from the SPO set. However, it can introduce multiple consensus algorithms in the long term. I'd prefer to see a proof of work side, specifically proof of useful work. Snarks" recursive snarks, are very, very heavy instruments. If you have useful work, what you can do is actually...

Not only is it unethical, it's just a stupid policy. However, you can't have those conversations right now in the current political environment. You simply can't because there are no incentives to have those types of conversations and to consider solving the problem from different angles. How is Midnight planned to be used in the financial sector? Are there any major partners in play yet? I really am curious.

Excited about the integration of Midnight with security tokens and talking about regulated value transfer protocols, we're going to talk all about that at the Cardano summit. Actually, I think the perfect jurisdiction is Abu Dhabi and Dubai for this because they're progressive enough on the regulatory side to enable these things. You can kind of create a shadow financial market...

I guess they got some Dubai backers, uh, real cool dude. Do you have a Geno Tree on your Rancho? I do, it was a gift from F. Your opinions on private versus public chains? I think they should all be public, uh, but I do believe that you can merge consensus together and have part of the consensus be a Federated Quorum. That's the point of uh, Midnight, but public has won out. R3 has learned that Abric has.

Them that are incubating inside the venture studio are all being spun out and most of them are related to Cardano. We've had a lot of CEOs and a lot of board meetings. A boatload of team building has occurred, the most notable of which is actually the Midnight Project that we've been working on internally for years now. So, there's lots to say about that in the future, but that's what we're doing right now.

...happy with and there's already great technology that's now being built in the side chain layer it's not hypothetical, great teams are doing that like Midnight for example. The drum beats louder and louder it takes a village each and every one of us we have to defend what we've created. Cardano is a global ecosystem it's got millions of people when you see dishonest things step up and fight for it.

Okay, and that can come from the delegates, but you could also do things like proof of work, for example. So, one of the things we're exploring with Midnight for a long-term release is a proof of stake BFT mode with proof of work. The proof of work is intended to be useful proof of work and is specifically related to the zero-knowledge infrastructure in order to accelerate it. So, you actually get a...

...parameterizable by the users in the framework, and you could roll that back in a way that would allow you to, uh, go ahead and start paying some of that reward to other people. So, these are the kinds of things we're thinking about and building in the partner chain framework for Cardano, and Midnight is really the first case study. But this is an example of where World Mobile can go. You can.

You look at more sophisticated proof systems, a lot of work has to be done but now is the time to invest that and there's a multi-million dollar collection of teams, Galway on us that are working on that and then on the sidechain side it allows very high volume apps that need very specific logic like the World Mobiles or the Midnights or these other things to actually run which takes load off of the main chain but actually continues to use Ada as the underlying asset and continues to create network value for Cardano.

Hi Charles, any update on Midnight? So, the Midnight people will be attending, there are three major events for the this the rest of the year for Cardano, there is RareEvo. That's over in Colorado. There's going to be CNFTCon and that's over in Las Vegas and that's going to take place in September, October, where RareEvo is right at the end of August, September. And then there's the Cardano Summit that's taking place and I believe Dubai. And that's going to be in November, so.

One of those events, or all of those events, there's going to be midnight people there. And lots to say about midnight. And actually, be a lot of fun to make a whiteboard video about some of the things there, but I definitely will talk about the sidechains frame. There's an enormous amount of goodness that's occurred. We can't wait to tell you.

Eran Barak is the CEO of the midnight depco he's building that up and you know, he's kind of a silent figure right now. But eventually, he'll take a more public role, but a lot of good work, especially on the zero knowledge side and some of the really cool things that are being experimented with Pluto-Eris. Cucina has been finally fully realized and it's going to be a lot of fun to roll out the devnet because the programming language for midnight is very similar to TypeScript.

Anyway, it is almost midnight here. Great AMA as always and I'm sorry that I haven't had a chance to do all my whiteboard videos yet, but I will do them over the weekend.

Another part of my company can then also focus a lot on building on top of Cardano. Many of you are fans of and know of, for example, Midnight and you know of our real flight plans about getting real finance into the hands of people in Africa and other places in the world.

Because Midnight it's going to be its own company. RealFi is going to be its own company. Our wallet Lace it's its own company. CEOs are hungry to get equity. They're fired up. They're ready to go. They want to go do some stuff. They want to build some stuff and then I can focus at the core and innovation and incubation.

So I do believe in the coming years there's going to be an open source revolution for healthcare software and I do believe that concepts that have come out of the cryptocurrency space could be applied in the health industry in particular, I really believe that the technology we're building from Midnight that preserves data privacy and confidentiality can absolutely be applied to a EMR system. I also do believe that there's a great potential for concepts like the FEDIVERSE and the recent AT protocol that's replacing activity pub that the Twitter replacement that Jack Dorsey is working on could definitely be a useful play for medical records system.

I thought Midnight was supposed to launch already. When in the hell did we ever give you a fucking date? Come on, man. No, the line must be drawn here.

So there's a lot of internal conversation about that right now, and there's actually a a large working project at that's a joint project between the Midnight project and the Cardano project, specifically about the types of curves to use.

The last thing I'll mention, the sidechain side of things, the sidechains of the house, we're making very great progress. Midnight is forcing this because it's a sidechain. We have a great relationship partnership with World Mobile and they're doing a lot of really cool and interesting things.

It'll be tethered to a lot of discussion about midnight, but the team is doing an excellent job and there's a lot of new tech that can be brought to market that would make Cardano, I think, the best platform in the industry for sidechains because it's that perfect connection of a lot of great ideas that that we've had.

...actually, we are doing that and there's a huge, wonderful, beautiful plan for it. It's heavily related to midnight and we will talk about it at a later date. I'm such a tease. According to certain Cardano moderators, this is my terrible management style. "Charles, when will the paper wallet be issued?" It'll come in lace and it'll be done this year. Whoa, I'm here. Wow, I think you're very loud now.

Quantum Resistant Ledger, isn't that an F token? Quantum resistance is its own thing, man. It's a great topic, though. You can't even get the Daedalus wallet working correctly. Oh no, you guys are so mean. Will Midnight use the UTXO or account accounting model? Actually, it's both.

"Charles, have you ever been to Northeast England?" Yes, I have. Charlito. "Any news about Midnight?" "Well, you gotta ask Iran Barack." "Uh, there's a big team. They're working really hard." "Charles, have you ever seen Otto GPT or if JJ's back up? How's your microphone?" "Hello, can you hear me?" "I can hear you. Great! That's a good mic. Very good. Yeah, switch it out. Otto GPT is the next thing."

...start pulling a lot of Voltaire-specific features, we have had many architectural conversations about what would be required to enhance the level of anonymity, where and when that makes sense. Now that Midnight is in the conversation, there are ways to do that. It's something we think about. It's not a crazy, conspiratorial thing; we live...

...the sidechain model of Cardano is maturing and evolving, thanks to Midnight Project, World Mobile Project, and others. I think next year will be the best in its class for that. In many different directions, whether we talk about recursive snarks and zero-knowledge proofs, there are great ideas and solutions. Similarly, when we talk about side chains, the bridging mechanics for that are also impressive.

...health record system that we're using, uh, we're aiming to find a way to mine and monetize that data because we're collecting enormous amounts of information. You know, we have genomic data, we have large population chronic care groups that are coming together, and it's going to be a lot of fun to ask, "Can we anonymize it using things like midnight technology?" and then basically...

Midnight, uh, but then a lot of other ongoing concerns can actually be addressed through the normal C-suite. So, you have this beautiful delegation inside the system and it's actually starting to work really well. There are still a lot of bugs in it and kinks in it, and we're learning. Oh, it's amazing. So, I'm trying to build one of the most amazing companies in the world that is agile.

CBDCs are going to be big. Insecurities are going to be big. They weren't so good on crypto, but they were so good on blockchain because that's what you have to say when you're in those circles. I think we can eat all that business on the midnight side, need it with principles. So, uh, yeah, absolutely. I'm really excited about our prospects and futures. It's great. That sounds like something city would write.

Only the best boss I'll ever have, will always be my boss. That's really cool, Uncle Ron. Uncle Ron, he is the OG, he really is. Yeah, alright. What do we have going on here? My ponytail does seem lopsided. Midnight is so exciting. Yeah, and it gets better. We've got a CEO now, he's amazing. He's incredible. Iran is, he's a beast. So, the whole team is coming, actually tonight. That's who I was mentioning, so...

...our midnight team's coming. Iran Vinishri, she's our head of cryptography. Um, who else is coming? Our CTO is coming. Is Alberto coming? Alberto is coming. Ah, muy bien. I think he's Italian. He's very Italian. Uh yeah, they're all coming and they're coming for a couple of days workshop because there's a lot of considerations. It's actually a very complicated product. At its heart, there are several different...

Okay, is that better for everybody? I wasn't able to switch my microphone to my Yeti mic, or to my Logitech real camera, and I hope everybody can hear this a lot better. There's no echo, and the camera's better for you guys. Let me know in the chat. All right, well anyway, it's midnight here in Colorado right now, but occasionally, I do AMAs late at night because apparently there's...