Returning home, I ran into an old friend who runs a supermarket. He told me something that, looking back, is really interesting!

He said that now when ordering goods, there's no need to argue with wholesalers anymore; you can just go on-chain for reconciliation. I was about to explain to him what a 'distributed ledger' is, but he stunned me: isn't your Gas fee just like the rental fee going up during the busy season in malls?

I almost dropped my chopsticks at that moment.

He said, look, the property fee I pay for my supermarket is fixed, but on that street outside, once it's the New Year's goods festival, people start setting up stalls, and the rent skyrockets from two hundred to two thousand. Your blockchain is even harsher—when the market is hot, wealthy 'scientists' directly book the whole place, and ordinary users have to wait forever to make a transaction. What's the difference from me competing for space as a stall owner?

But he changed the subject and said he figured out the gameplay of Midnight.

This thing isn't about auctioning stalls; it's about paying a 'membership fee.' The higher the property fee you pay in the mall, and the longer you rent the shop, the better positions outside naturally belong to you. In Midnight's terms, the more NIGHT you stake, the more DUST you can use—not about who has more money, but about who is 'tied' to the chain.

What's even crazier is that DUST will expire and cannot be transferred. This basically tells you: don't think about stockpiling to drive up prices; this stuff is consumable, you use as much as you have.

He said you guys trading coins are always staring at K-lines; instead, think about this—Google Cloud is coming in as a node, and Western Union is stepping in as a federal node. Are these people here to trade NIGHT? They are here to 'pay property fees.'

I asked him if he thought this thing was worth it.

He calculated for me: a hospital using Midnight to run patient data, a bank using it for cross-border settlements, all these applications consuming DUST will have to rely on staking NIGHT to exist. This is a necessity for production materials, not just speculation on the secondary market.

I asked him if he was buying. He said he wasn't, but in the supply chain I work with, someone has already started using this thing for compliant proof.

This calculation makes sense. @MidnightNetwork $NIGHT #night