Just today, the news of Teacher Zhang Xuefeng's sudden passing has swept through social media. This mentor, who once single-handedly ripped apart the professional facade and taught ordinary children how to change their fate through "pragmatism," tragically passed away at the age of 41 due to sudden cardiac arrest on the afternoon of March 24, 2026. This sudden sense of disillusionment is reminiscent of my feelings when repeatedly debugging the Midnight Network state transition contract on the testnet: the end of realism often comes with an almost cruel sense of disillusionment.
When teaching students to choose their majors, Zhang Xuefeng loved to say, "Don't talk about ideals; first talk about employment," and Midnight's design at $NIGHT is almost a blockchain version of this pragmatism.
1. Give up "purity" for "access"
Aleo is like those unpopular majors that shout "suffocating for dreams," trying to build a perfect geek utopia with extreme hardware computing power and complete privacy; whereas Midnight resembles the stable paths of "government exams, professional exams, and entering big companies" that Zhang Xuefeng advocated. It brutally cuts through the dual tracks of public and private, even at the cost of disrupting developers' logical intuitions, essentially for compliance—it knows that without institutional entry, no matter how cool the technology, it ultimately can only be a self-indulgence of geeks.
2. $NIGHT: A restrained "survival logic"
The kind of "disconnection between assets and anonymity" you feel in practical tests is actually Midnight's way of submitting a name to regulators. Unlike Monero, which stubbornly sticks to its principles, it allows specific nodes to reveal their cards. This may seem like a betrayal of freedom, but in today's globally tightening regulatory climate, this "half-covered" posture is, ironically, the price it pays to go further.
3. The cost of performance: from arbitrage to identity
The dream of high-frequency arbitrage has shattered, but the doors to compliant lending and identity verification have opened. This technical "compromise" and "counter-intuition" are essentially trading performance for a legitimate seat in the real world.
Summary:
Zhang Xuefeng is gone, taking with him an era that dared to speak the truth; meanwhile, Midnight is using a somewhat "unpleasant" technical truth to deconstruct that old privacy dream that belonged solely to geeks. It no longer speaks of absolute freedom; it only discusses the living space under the rules.