It's the weekend and I have nothing to do, so I put the latest lightweight client SDK released by @MidnightNetwork into the Android testing machine, wanting to see if the native ZK proofs they boast about for mobile really work. Now the whole internet is shouting that NIGHT's ultimate killer move is to allow hundreds of millions of mobile users to generate privacy transactions locally without relying on the servers of big companies.
The logic sounds particularly grand, but after I ran a few transfers with complex logic, my phone was so hot it could practically fry an egg.
I pulled up the performance monitoring data from the backend and was left speechless. Generating a basic selective disclosure proof directly throttled the fully functional Snapdragon chip, and the battery percentage visibly dropped within minutes. This was still the simplest transfer; if I were to run complex DeFi pool interactions, the phone would probably just crash.
This leads to a very ridiculous paradox: since mobile computing power can't withstand this level of cryptographic consumption, wallet applications will ultimately have to outsource the proof generation process to cloud RPC nodes.
After going in circles, the privacy data of retail investors still has to be sent to centralized servers for computation. What kind of decentralized privacy is this? I currently view NIGHT's trend very calmly; I don't care at all what grand plans the official Twitter account has laid out for mobile adoption.
I only want to see if they can come up with a hardware acceleration or extremely low-power ZK algorithm in the next few months. If they can't figure out the energy consumption of this calculation, the so-called hundreds of millions of Web3 breakout users are all just wishful thinking. I'm saying this to myself, the grand narrative that defies physical common sense will eventually be paid for with retail investors' principal, and until there is a real breakthrough in mobile technology, I will just watch the show without participating.