The company behind Cardona Blockchain, Input and Output Global (IOG) released a new privacy-focused blockchain named ‘Midnight’. It has also launched a token named ‘Dust’ along the new network.

The new data protection-based blockchain ‘Midnight’ is one of the side chains running off Cardano, supported by zero-knowledge-proof technology, which will work as side chains around Cardano. It will deliver zero-knowledge-proof smart contracts and will go beyond previous coin projects, allowing the involved users to complete transactions without disclosing any identifying data to each other, informed the CEO of IOG, Charles Hoskinson during an event at Edinburgh University in Scotland, last week.

He said, when permission is granted, the new system creates a balance between user privacy and regulators or auditors, giving a kind of backdoor into the system. 

“Midnight has evolved privacy-coin technology where everything was anonymous by default, which is what Zcash and Monero did with Snarks and ring signatures. This is a completely new way of writing and running private smart contracts and private computation. So you can have a private DEX (decentralized exchange) or go mine an anonymous data set or these types of things”, Hoskinson said while referring to two other privacy coins, also their encryption methods.

Crypto libertarians have always lionized privacy coins. However, they have always remained suspicious in the eyes of regulators as they believe it is vulnerable to financial crimes. However, every business requirement these days is to have privacy concerns and it is becoming one of the legal priority days after day. Hoskinson opined that adding privacy to the blockchain was difficult to figure out and this has prevented its adoption.

Hoskinson said, “You need programmability; you can’t just take Zcash and fork it, and somehow it’ll work. What was needed was the ability to write this stuff in a normal programming language, not some weird Snark thing, but JavaScript or something like that, something developers can understand and get a guarantee you have privacy.”

Midnight is still under development and IOG said that it will continue to provide updates as they work on it into 2023.

A published paper by Cardano in August 2022 named Kachina explained how privacy-enhanced smart contracts are now becoming a real thing. “It provides a unified security model for private smart contracts which is based on the Universal Composition (UC) model and proposes a novel core protocol, Kachina, for deploying privacy-preserving smart contracts, which encompasses previous systems.”

Hoskinson said this paper had encouraged the users of blockchain space, now Midnight will be working with Hyperledger. For instance, which is an association of large firms exploring private and permissioned ledgers for activities such as supply-chain management. “This is what the enterprise absolutely wants, and we have seen Walmart and some of the largest companies in the world working on privacy with Hyperledger. At the same time, we can service traditional cryptocurrency needs, especially when you look at DEXs that want to prevent front-running and these types of things.”

One of the founding entities behind Cardano Emurgo Pte. Ltd. also announced on Friday the first fiat-backed stablecoin on the network, USDA, which will launch in the first quarter of 2023.