Last night I checked my wallet on a blockchain explorer and honestly felt uneasy 😤
Everything was exposed — my full transaction history, token balances, the protocols I’ve interacted with, even patterns in how I’ve been using the wallet over the past few months.
All of it is publicly accessible. Anyone with the wallet address can view it — no permission, no authentication, nothing.
To me, this highlights the exact problem Midnight is trying to address.
What stands out is that they’re not treating privacy as something to bolt on later. Instead, private state stays local by default, rather than being pushed on-chain. Developers have to explicitly decide what gets disclosed publicly.
Features like PersistentCommit let you anchor data to the public ledger without revealing the underlying information, while shielded tokens go further by protecting even transaction metadata.
It feels like a shift in mindset: moving blockchain from “public by default” to “private by default, public only when intentionally disclosed.”