@MidnightNetwork The team asked themselves a question at the beginning of the design: Why is privacy chain always so difficult to use?
The answer is straightforward—because most privacy projects treat "privacy" as a feature that requires users to actively enable, operate, and bear complexity. And humans are inherently lazy; complex things are destined to be niche.
So Midnight changed the approach: making privacy the default setting.
Developers do not need to choose between "transparency" and "privacy" because Midnight's underlying architecture automatically protects sensitive data by default. When you write a smart contract, the public logic automatically goes on-chain, and sensitive details are automatically encrypted without the need for additional configuration. Users do not need to study what zero-knowledge proofs are; they just need to know that their data will not be casually browsed by others.
$NIGHT plays the role in this design of ensuring that this set of default settings can operate continuously—transparent circulation, convenient to hold; staking generates DUST, providing fuel for privacy transactions. Users do not even need to be aware of its existence, just like using electricity without needing to understand power plants.
This is how privacy should be: not a feature that needs to be actively turned on, but a default setting that has existed from day one.