Key Takeaways
- Shielded Technologies is a core privacy tech partner for Midnight
- Midnight allows for transactions to be made private on public blockchains. An industry first.
- Quantum computing may not pose a threat to cryptography for another decade.
The digital era demands a new standard of privacy, especially if public blockchain networks are to serve as the infrastructure backing major industries and sectors worldwide.
Shielded Technologies is the core dev team behind Midnight Network, a privacy-centric blockchain project spearheaded by Cardano’s founder, Charles Hoskinson.
CCN caught up with Shielded’s Chief Technology Officer (CTO) Bob Blessing-Hartley at TOKEN2049 in Singapore.
Midnight Now
Midnight is considered one of the more exciting projects out there, as it ultimately aims to reimagine privacy standards.
Blessing-Hartley explains that the lab spun out of Cardano’s parent company, Input Output, where they’ve been building the Midnight chain for the past several years.
The team is building some of the most advanced privacy tools in the crypto industry, including enterprise-grade solutions, rational privacy frameworks, and zero-knowledge (ZK) proofs.
So it’s a “team that wrote the core technologies, the core cryptography, all of those aspects.”
“We were now continuing to support the Midnight Foundation in both the development of the chain as well as the operation.”
Shielded’s technical direction is an “evolving proposition,” and one of the main challenges is “finding the right” privacy-enhancing tech that meets the market’s demands.
With that in mind, Blessing-Hartley admits that the team is “maniacally focused” on getting the Midnight mainnet launched.
Collaboration With Eight Ecosystems
At the beginning of August, the Midnight’s Glacier airdrop claim portal went live, kicking off the first phase of the NIGHT token’s distribution.
So far, the airdrop has seen over 125,000 wallets claim over 2.7 billion NIGHT tokens. Recently, the claim deadline date was extended to Oct. 20, 2025.
From a technical perspective, the multi-chain airdrop is a technical feat as owners of Bitcoin, Ethereum, Cardano, Ripple, and other tokens across multiple networks can participate.
Blessing-Hartley explains that this presented a myriad of challenges to the team.
“We had to work with all sorts of different signature algorithms and wallet combinations to get things working. But it really aligns with our intent for Midnight to be a multi-chain ecosystem.”
He believes it’s about bringing “everyone together,” which is why Midnight collaborated with eight ecosystems to distribute its tokens.
Midnight recently announced the project Minokawa with the Linux Foundation (LF) Decentralized Trust partner. This brings Midnight’s programming language, Compact, to the LF’s open-source hub for decentralized technology and digital identity.
“The goal,” Blessing-Hartley points out, is to make Minokawa a “cross-chain privacy-centric smart contract.”
Another recent collaboration is with Google Cloud.
“The collaboration with Google really enables us to take advantage of cutting-edge capabilities. They have a wonderful faucet of technology that we’ll be connecting into.”
Blessing-Hartley adds that they’re engaging with Google’s security services, which could “ensure” Midnight and its operations are secured.
“They’ve also signed on to be one of the node operators for our initial launch.”
Competitive Advantage
Shielded views privacy as a real competitive advantage, but because of the public nature of most blockchains, enterprise adoption has been muted.
It’s “long had” this problem, says Hartley, “businesses, banks,” and even us as individuals, “don’t operate that way.”
“When I make a deposit at my bank, you don’t see that. That’s between me and my bank and maybe the US government, since I’m an American citizen.”
So Midnight’s “rational privacy,” or programmable privacy, allows for on-chain transactions “that the world doesn’t need to know about” to be made private.
And, he adds, it’ll all fall within anti-money laundering and know-your-customer regulations. All those checks are carried out, “it’s a unique platform in that sense.”
Accessiblility
ZK-proofs are notoriously resource-intensive, which may present a barrier for enterprise and mass adoption.
Blessing-Hartley highlights that Shielded benefits from the broader Input Output ecosystem, “which has a really fantastic research division.”
They work closely together to remain at the “cutting edge of cryptographic evolution performance” and tirelessly refine on-chain and core cryptography performance.
“We have recently developed additional modalities for the proof server, which is an important part of the solution that will allow it to be usable by a person with a web browser without having to install any software.”
In WASM, for example, Blessing-Hartley remarks that Shielded is working with some “industry players,” who he can’t mention, and they’re collaborating to create “proving networks.”
This makes it easier for dApp providers to offer proving services from a major cloud within a Trusted Execution Environment (TEE) “with very little effort.”
Industry Adoption
As Blessing-Hartley has revealed, they’re working with a wide range of industries, but he believes that, out of all of them, financial markets will be the first to adopt Shielded tech and privacy-enhancing tech at scale.
“We see a lot of interest in the financial markets, just because, for the first time, they’re able to have those private transactions on public chains.”
Use in the regulatory sector could also drive adoption.
“I think if CBDCs are ever going to be successful, they have to have a core privacy component.”
Pointing to Brazil’s central bank, Blessing-Hartley says that they’ve opted not to use blockchains for their CBDC effort because they lack the “core privacy components that we all need.”
When Midnight launches, he chuckles, “They will.”
Scaling and Security
Moving ahead, Midnight is working on a new project with the LF called Nightstream.
Its purpose is to usher in the next generation of Lattice-based proving systems “for post-quantum cryptography.”
Blessing-Hartley doesn’t view quantum computing as a threat for now, “except for if you’re not putting protections in place.”
There’s the harvest now, decrypt later (HNDL), he says. This is where hackers/adversaries gather encrypted data in the hope of a future technological breakthrough that will give them access.
“One of the nice things is the midnight chain addresses that particular issue, so when we launch, we will be protected from that attack vector.”
He says that a “sufficiently large” quantum computer is still at least five to seven years away, “if not more.”
That said, he offers a cautious reminder that “innovation happens in strange places” and so it’s best to be prepared and not get taken by surprise.
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