It's almost 3:00 AM on March 20th, and it's still raining outside. I was just bored and flipped through the comparison of @MidnightNetwork and Findora's underlying data, and after watching, I really feel that the reality of this circle is too stark.
If you only look at the technical white paper, the Bulletproofs used by Findora is indeed impressive, generating zero-knowledge proofs in less than a second, even skipping the initial trusted setup. But I was curious and checked its mainnet browser, and good grief, in the past two days not a single transaction could be found, and the 24-hour trading volume of FRA is literally zero, it has completely turned into a ghost town. Now looking at the nearby Cardano's Midnight, which just launched on Binance this month, the trading volume on the 18th directly hit 2.4 billion USD. I previously tested its Compact language on the testnet, and writing that kind of selectively disclosed privacy contracts is indeed quite handy, determining what data to show to whom can be done in just a few lines of code, without worrying about accidentally exposing everything on the network.
Thinking about this matter carefully is quite heart-wrenching. Many tech geeks stubbornly focus on the fundamentals, boasting about theoretical performance, but in the end, no one plays what they create. Retail investors and developers are very realistic; no one cares about the fancy tricks used in cryptography. Everyone only looks at where there is liquidity and where real business can make money. Findora, with its good technology, has turned itself into a no-man's land, while Midnight has gained popularity with developer-friendly tools and real financial backing. Nowadays, creating a privacy chain is just like opening a shopping mall; location and foot traffic are always more important than what materials your entrance is made of.