In the past few days, I have been running a tool on the chain. The gas fees have increased sixfold in two days, and the budget has collapsed, forcing a shutdown. It was only today that I realized my operating costs are not in my hands, but determined by market heat.
This issue @MidnightNetwork has provided what I think is currently the most straightforward solution using the design of $NIGHT and DUST: turning gas fees from a market variable into a holding variable.
The logic is simple. Holding $NIGHT passively generates DUST, which is the only consumable resource for all operations on the network. The key is a term called non-pegged in the white paper, where the supply of DUST is linked to the holding amount of NIGHT and decoupled from market prices. The amount of NIGHT you hold determines how much DUST you produce, with the rate protocol fixed and not fluctuating with bull or bear markets.
In other words, if my tool runs on Midnight, the amount of DUST needed and how much NIGHT to hold is a math problem that can be calculated before going live, not something to decide daily by checking market conditions. The occurrence of gas fees increasing sixfold in a bull market simply does not happen in this mechanism because your costs are anchored to your holdings, not the congestion level on the chain that day.
Midnight also has a design called Babel Station that allows new users without NIGHT to exchange other assets for network resources. This is a workaround for cold starts; you cannot expect enterprise clients to understand NIGHT before using your product; if the threshold is too high, the ecosystem cannot flourish.
A 50% block utilization rate is the dynamic anchor point of the entire mechanism. If it exceeds the threshold, the per transaction consumption automatically increases; if lower, it remains stable. The protocol layer adjusts automatically, and developers do not need to worry about this layer, allowing them to focus on product development.
When everyone discusses Midnight, they talk about privacy, ZK, compliance.... Although these are all valid, I believe the design of Babel Station is the key capability that allows it to truly create an enterprise-level ecosystem. Because no matter how strong the privacy features are, if operating costs are uncontrollable, enterprises will not come.