Yesterday I opened the Monument App and saw a notification that stunned me for a few seconds.
“Monument Bank and Midnight Network have partnered, the first £250 million deposit will be tokenized on-chain.”
I flipped through my account and confirmed—hmm, my money is also among that £250 million.
As someone who has been in the crypto space for a few years, I have always been skeptical about 'banks going on-chain'. I've heard too many slogans and seen too many PPTs, and in the end, they all came to nothing. But this time is different because Monument is the bank I use every day, and @MidnightNetwork is the chain I have been waiting for three years.
Deposits are still deposits, just with an extra layer of protection
There is a sentence in the press release that makes me particularly reassured: these tokenized deposits are still protected by the UK Financial Services Compensation Scheme (FSCS) and can be exchanged back to pounds at any time.
What does this mean? It means my money has not become a risky asset because of 'going on-chain.' It is still that regulated and protected deposit, just with an extra layer of blockchain 'shell.' This shell is not for speculation; it is for protecting privacy.
Midnight's zero-knowledge proof technology allows my deposit information to be verified without exposing details. The bank knows how much money I have, but outsiders cannot see it; regulators can audit, but hackers cannot steal it. It’s like my money is still lying in the bank vault, but the vault has an extra lock that only I can open.
The leap from 'saving money' to 'using money'
Monument has announced a three-phase plan. The first phase is deposit tokenization, which has already been launched. The second phase excites me even more—bringing assets like private equity and commodity funds that were previously only accessible to ultra-high-net-worth individuals into the App.
In the past, I wanted to invest in private equity, where the threshold was often hundreds of thousands of pounds, and I had to find intermediaries and sign a pile of documents. Now, if I can buy directly in the Monument App, the threshold has been lowered, and the process simplified, allowing ordinary people to participate. The third phase is mortgage loans; in the future, I can borrow against my investment portfolio without selling it. This trick was previously the patent of private banks, but now ordinary users can use it too.
Why Midnight?
As a Monument user, I actually don't care much about which underlying chain is used. But this time it's Midnight, which gives me an extra sense of familiarity.
Midnight's positioning has always been 'programmable privacy'—able to protect data while also meeting regulatory needs. The biggest fear for banks is data leakage, and the biggest fear for regulators is the invisible and intangible. Midnight happens to sit in the middle, using zero-knowledge proofs to resolve this contradiction.
Monument chose Midnight not because it is 'cool,' but because it is 'usable.' With a deposit management scale of £7 billion and an initial on-chain quota of £250 million, this is not a test; it is real business in operation.
Regarding Midnight, what I want to say is
Midnight is not a project that 'disrupts banks'; it is more like a bridge—connecting the security and compliance of traditional finance with the transparency and efficiency of blockchain. It does not compete with banks' businesses but enables banks to do things they couldn't do before: turning deposits into programmable assets without exposing customer privacy.
From federal nodes to token models, from $NIGHT to DUST, from the Cardano ecosystem to the implementation of Monument Bank, Midnight is gradually proving one thing: privacy is not meant to be hidden; it is meant to be used. When banks start using Midnight, and my deposits start running on Midnight, the story of 'programmable privacy' truly gains a real-world temperature.
Next, I want to see what the actual experience is like. After deposit tokenization, will my App interface change? Will the transfer speed be affected? These details can only be known after actual use.
But at least, today’s push makes me feel that the distance between blockchain and traditional finance is not that far anymore.