Midnight Goes Permissionless: Solana Privacy, Japan and AI Agents

0:00 All right, guys, a massive midnight update to everything that's happening in the midnight ecosystem, some news before token 2049 and during the event as well. So let's get right into it for you all. So first off, the barriers have been dropped in regards to the permissions that were required to launch smart contracts on the midnight ecosystem. So for a while before you could actually launch anything, you'd have to get your smart contracts audited by the team.

0:29 have the security guys look at it as well. So just to make sure that we're not launching anything that was vulnerable. And the last thing you want when launching a brand new chain is launching with a couple of dApps that had vulnerabilities and were hacked within the first few days. So those barriers have been dropped now and anyone can deploy a smart contract on the midnight chain and to have privacy enabled within their ecosystem. So this is a really big move. This happened just before Token 2049 now. and is gaining a little bit of traction.

1:00 We're seeing a lot of transactions now on Mainnet. We've seen that ramp up dramatically, I think over a 900% increase. Let me just pull up those details here. Yeah, we can see a post here from Linda. It's actually a 9,100% growth in daily transactions over the last week. So there's a lot of activity happening. People are testing on Mainnet and seeing what the chain is actually capable of. What is actually creating these transactions? I don't know, and I need to look into that so I can see what dApps are playing around on mainnet at the moment. But it is exciting to see this chain start to come alive, and we'll see more levels of decentralization, more dApps launch, and everything else over the next coming months. Now, another

1:45 really exciting announcement that came out from the event itself, this came out on Tuesday last week, and this is the integration of Solana. So now Solana has the ability to do private transactions thanks to Midnight. So this is the enabling of the bridges, enabling of potential dApps being connected in as well. Now I did look into what levels of privacy Solana actually had already. And Solana did a major hackathon earlier this year to bring privacy to their chain. So I've looked into private escrow contracts, private transactions, private DEXs, private swaps, private sending of assets. And they do have some of these on DevNet at the moment.

2:28 So they are moving things to MainNet. So Midnight enabled a little bit more levels of privacy for Solana with enabling the Midnight Bridges and the Midnight Swaps as well. So if you want to actually see this in action, Sebastian here put together a little video in regards to how Solana and Midnight actually work together. So if you want to see it in action, Check out this video here.

2:52 It's a bit of an AI narration over it. I found it a little bit annoying listening to an AI voiceover, but hey, that's what everyone's doing these days. But you can check out and see how that all works and how potential smart contracts and privacy will be enabled thanks to Midnight on Solana. Now, this next update here is around the growing ecosystem in Japan and another exchange that OKJ or OKJapan. So I think this is part of OKX.

3:20 I'm not entirely sure. Let me just double check this. Yeah, it is. So the green branding kind of gave it away. So I don't know if you can see back there, but that's my OKX phone holder that I grabbed from Token2049. It's actually really high quality. It's lined on the inside and it's got really nice quality ropes that you can put around your neck. So it's nice and comfortable. But that was really useful when walking around trying to network with people, you need quick, easy access to your phone.

3:46 So that was really cool. But this announcement here around the OKJ exchange listing of Knight is a really important one because it just gives users more liquidity access within Japan. And we know that there are many ADA holders within the Japanese ecosystem. And we know a lot of them participated in the Glacier drop for Knight tokens. So they'll be interested in claiming their Knight tokens and paying for the tax on top of that, and then holding onto it or staking or whatever they want to do in the future. You can see on the OKJ website here, if we just go back to the first scrolling screen, we can see that the Knight token is listed there.

4:24 They've got little news announcements all around that too. So that's really good to see and verify on their side. Now, one of the really interesting presentations that came out of token was from the president of Midnight Foundation, Fahmy. And he went through and talked about the collateral warehouse and how this works for DeFi and a traditional finance when it comes to privacy transactions, being able to move into the collateral warehouse or your assets and do your private transactions within there. And then when you need that liquidity and assets back out, you can move it back out to whatever wallet you want. And within that collateral warehouse, you have your private transactions. Now I found this really interesting.

5:09 During our workshops before the event, Fahmy explained an experience and conversation that he had with particular brokers in the ecosystem, trading in the DeFi space. And this is what he said. He actually presented it on stage. So let me play you this clip here.

5:26 I want to go back to a conversation that I had Tuesday night before the event started. I was invited to a broker event. They're hosting clients and community members. And one of the senior traders of that firm said to me that this is a problem for him. Why? Because right now, brokerage firms, central exchanges, they can take advantage of all of you. But the service they offer, they can see all your movements, all your trades. In fact, just when you move, in this example, when this broker was speaking to me, he explained how a client moves 20 million USDT every morning into his accounts to trade.

6:08 But that broker can also see that single client is also moving 20 million USDT into four other brokers. So it forces that broker to actually price better with tighter spreads. But he also has another client who gives him 100% of his trading will, $ 10, $ 15 million. And because you can see that client hasn't moved assets to any other broker, he can price a little wider, which isn't fair. That transparency in every blockchain allows others to take advantage of you, whether in terms of how you trade, how you price, how you move collateral, even getting in front of your trades.

6:47 So the collateral warehouse uses that ability to shield all those assets. And that is an exciting opportunity, not just within midnight, but for you if you're a Bitcoin holder, an Ethereum holder and beyond.

7:00 So that's the whole idea of the collateral warehouse and being able to shield and hide your transactions, but still be compliant. And I think that's a really big thing compared to a lot of these other privacy solutions that you see. So the Helios on Solana, that's their privacy ecosystem, their solution. It doesn't have the ability to choose and program how you want your privacy. So being able to show that this particular transaction was compliant and wasn't interacting with sanctioned wallets is really important. So a brokerage firm would be able to manage and move their funds privately.

7:41 But if auditors came, they can prove that they were not doing any illegal activities. And that's a smart compliance side of things that Midnight allows that majority of the other solutions out there don't provide. the ability to switch things on and off and prove it via ZK proofs. That's the really big point of difference with midnight compared to anything else out there. So it was really interesting to hear that and listen into some of the examples of exactly how it all works and how we would see it in action in the future too. Well, not in the future. A lot of this stuff is actually being done right now and I know There's a lot of deals happening with Momentum Bank at the moment. Back earlier this year, there was a lot of talk about

8:26 Momentum Bank and how big it was. They take time. But from what I heard during the event, it's actually happening. And we will see a lot more of that coming up later this year and early next year. Now, for a lot of the week, I got to spend with the other Midnight Ambassadors. This is one of the really important things for us as Midnight Ambassadors to be able to connect with the developers, the people working within the Midnight Foundation and within our little network of community members as well. So being able to meet all the other Midnight Ambassadors, meet the Midnight team, Midnight Foundation team and know who to talk to. So if you guys come to me and say, hey Pete, I need to talk to one of the development teams at Midnight. I'm having

9:14 an issue here and I just need some help. I know now who to direct you to. Or if you're playing around with Midnight City and you've got an issue there and you've activated your trading bot, which you will be able to soon, and you're doing a strategy there, but something isn't connecting right, I know who to direct you to now. Or if you're coming to me and you have a question about a community member or you're trying to start something up somewhere around the world through the ambassador program, I can direct you to the right people as well. It's been a really good learning experience knowing who's doing what, who's building what, and how they're all interacting. So that's been Absolutely amazing. So these are

9:53 all the people, the awesome, awesome people that I got to spend time with. I managed to get some merch as well. So, um, Midnight City merch. MJ gave me a whole packet of stickers for midnight. And I got some amazing merch from the events team with the LED light up backpack. You may have seen videos of that.

10:15 That was absolutely cool. So I have to say, if anyone out there wants to be a Midnight Ambassador, the merch seriously is next level. You have to work your way up to a leader level, but it definitely is possible. And Shil, the Indian guy in the background, just back here. And Shil, he told me a funny story. He was messaging me through X and Telegram, asking me what Midnight was.

10:39 I think it was late last year, around this time last year. He was asking, Pete, how do I become a Midnight Ambassador? How do I eventually become a leader? And I told him, turn up to events, turn up to all the Discord events, listen in on all the calls, be active in all the communities, start up a community in India and be the face, the person, the go-to person in your local area. And he actually took that all on board. And when I met him at the event here, he explained, it was me. I was talking to you on X and Discord and Telegram and asking for tips and helps and how can I eventually become a leader and be a part of this ecosystem? And there he is there. So that's an amazing story. I'm so glad I had some sort of impact on his

11:30 life and he got to come to Singapore and be a part of this event. So if you're interested in becoming a Midnight Ambassador, reach out. It opens up a whole bunch of opportunities to be able to travel. be able to connect with people, do some work on Midnight and do some really cool things. So I thought I'd just share that. It was a pretty cool story to hear.

11:51 But like I said, working with all these people has been amazing over the last week. Now, Charles did a really cool presentation about Midnight City and where that is going. And for a lot of people, Midnight City, the idea concept of agents and having it all run on screen and all that stuff, It's kind of like a gimmicky thing.

12:13 And to get people's attention, it works really well. You look at this and go, what is this? We're trying to explore this. And it's all been a really big experiment for the Midnight Foundation and Charles as well, spending a lot of money to build up this ecosystem, running all the agents and everything else around it. And you can bring your own AI agent. So if you're running something at home, you can use your own agent to run all this as well. And then you can customize it.

12:40 and do some really cool things too. But Charles talked about being able to bring in AI trading strategies, rentable AI trading strategies onto Midnight City. So me as a professional trader, I'm not a professional trader, I'm a terrible trader, but I could potentially rent someone else's trading strategies and get my AI agent to use those particular skills to then trade within the ecosystem and trade on Midnight privately.

13:10 So we can do things like that. And that's the next role that we'll start to see in Midnight City. Now, this whole idea to be able to do it with agents with a midnight passport, so identification for your agent, renting the strategies and skills that AI agent needs, and then being able to trade and make money within the ecosystem.

13:29 So they're all the proof of concepts and ideas and concepts that Charles wants to show and highlight what is possible on midnight, but then We can use those particular skills, get rid of the visualizations and actually have midnight passport, midnight tradable skills and AI agents doing things for us in the real world. So proof of concept, midnight city, visualization, move off to real world impact and real world situations after that. So this is the gravity product to pull people in so they can see what is possible, highlight and show the gimmicky side of things, but then actually have real use cases from it. So that was one of the really cool things that came out of Charles's presentation.

14:14 But one of the things that the agents within the world at the moment were tasked to do is to attend token 2049, but they couldn't because they're agents that don't have any physical bodies. So he said that 20 of them hired humans to walk the floor of token 2049. And you may have seen this video going around. of these agents in these agent costumes. You can see like the little avatar icon on top of their heads. And then they were walking around with LCD backpacks. So these backpacks had full working computers and screens on them that you could see what Midnight City looked like. So it kind of made people quite interested to find out more about what was happening. So I thought that was a really cool activation event. Now, this was the backpacks that

15:01 we ambassadors were walking around with. So this was an LCD screen backpack. And Jack here is putting on all sorts of NFTs and logos, graphics and whatnot on his, along with the Midnight stuff. I just had Midnight or Cardano in my back, depending on where I am and what I'm doing. But, you know, it attracted attention. People were like, where can I get that backpack? What is this backpack? It's Midnight, Midnight Foundation got it for me.

15:28 It's all about privacy blockchain. So it was a really good talking point for me. I could approach people cause they were approaching me asking about the backpack. So that was a really cool thing overall. Most of the roles that I had to do during the event itself was just essentially talking to people, introducing them to what Midnight is, talking about the various activation and side events that we had.

15:49 So we had two side events at the overall conference. We had a Wednesday night event, which was the main, the big event. It was at Sushi Samba, I think it was called. 57 floors up, beautiful view of Singapore at night. Even with the haze and the pollution, it was still quite nice up there. We were supposed to have a drone show, but the weather, the pollution cancelled all that, unfortunately. But that would have been amazing to see the midnight logo in drones. That would have been really cool. But I walked around, I spoke to so many people talking about midnight and what was possible there and pointed them to the various events for them to come to. And I did see a lot of the people that I invited to come to the event too.

16:32 So that was really good. And I think the approach that midnight had here to not have a presence of a booth may have paid off because then they could have bigger presence in those particular side events and invite particular people to come to them. And I thought that was really good. So the people that came to the site events were specifically interested in privacy and what Midnight had to offer. Now, I just want to give a big shout out to Jack here. So Jack was the fellow Australian or even Queenslander that traveled with me to Singapore.

17:05 So we had the exact same flights. We didn't have the same seats, but I'm sure we could have arranged it next time if that ever happens. But it was really cool to hang out with Jack. You may know him as Omega Candle or Learn Midnight on X. And it was really cool just to hang out with him, get to know him a little bit more, get his understanding of the community and what he's doing in regards to his merch store for Midnight and other projects that are building on Midnight and everything else around the Web3 space that he's doing. So really good to hang out with Jack and all the other ambassadors in general. So this is a shot from the Sushi Samba event on the Wednesday night. So I managed to hang out with

17:45 these awesome people from the Kodano community. Yes, they're all from the Kadana community and Sydney's the content creator and marketing manager on the Midnight Foundation side of things. But overall, absolutely awesome events and really good outreach and energy in the room for sure. Now, the next day, the Thursday, we had another private event and we also had this really amazing pitch event for some startups that were building within the Midnight ecosystem. I think there were about five pitches.

18:17 I can't remember off the top of my head now. But we had some really cool projects going through and building some amazing things within the Midnight ecosystem. So I'll put a link to the live stream of this. I haven't gone through this live stream yet. I was in and out of the room talking with various people over the course of this particular event. So I didn't hear everyone's pictures clearly. I did record them on my camera as well. But some teams did phenomenally well. So this team here, WEA, They're doing payments within the Japanese ecosystem and it caught Charles's attention as well. So do look out for these guys here. It's good to see people building on midnight that we don't know. Does that make sense?

19:02 So a lot of the time within the Kadano ecosystem, we kind of know people that are building on Kadano. It's the same faces. It's the same people over and over again. But when you start expanding to different blockchains and building another one that is focused on privacy, we start attracting different people, different talent, different investors. And this is one team that I thought was quite interesting to see building on midnight as well. So I'll go through all these presentations and I'll cut them up. I'll slice and dice them in another update so that we have a better idea of what's going on, who's building and what's coming out on midnight really, really soon. So keep an eye out for these guys. They're awesome. They're really

19:43 cool to hang out with as well. Now, after the whole token event, the rest of the Midnight Foundation team went off to Japan to continue the tour. So they were in Korean Blockchain Week, Singapore, and then back to Japan. Crazy, crazy, crazy tour. But if you got the momentum, if you got people's interest, you got to keep going. If you're announcing things like the OKJ expansion here, and then you're going back to Japan and working with people there, you've got to keep the momentum going. So Charles continued the event, talked about Midnight City in Tokyo and had their major activation event. And, you know, this kind of stuff really gels well with the Japanese community. And the feedback that I heard, packed, absolutely packed room. Lots of the OG

20:30 Japanese holders from the Kadana ecosystem were there as well. And we had, from what I heard, the translators working with Charles. and the investors all there too. So this was a really engaging and good event for midnight overall too. Really wish I could have been there as well, but my energy was absolutely spent after Singapore. Now, where to next?

20:57 I am continuing to build out my escrow platform. So from talking to a few people at the conference, they got the idea, they understood it. So I was talking with other founders, other investors, and they're like, Cool. Yeah, go for it. See how it goes. It sounds like a really good idea. We'll see how we can use it in our own solutions. So I am now expanding this, not just on Kadano. I do have to go multi-chain at some point. So I'm going to go multi-chain early.

21:24 I will be adding in privacy layer with Binite as well. It just made sense. Charles actually mentioned private escrows during one of his workshop presentations. and it is something that i believe i can tap into and add on to this infrastructure layer quite easily so this is still being built out um hopefully i get something up and running by the end of the year and you guys will be able to play with it with your um ai agents and build something on top of it as well so i'll be doing a couple of demo products you'll be able to see what is possible on this and then you can start going out and building your own projects on top of it so That's where I'm at at the moment. And I will be, like I said,

22:03 going cross chain and adding privacy to all of this too. Now at the event itself, I had my own product that I was trying to push out. And this is my networking CRM. Chat soon. Now the idea of this is that it was like supposed to be a really quick and easy way to collect a user's information by scanning their QR codes, their badge, one of their badges, like one of these things. Those tags, I don't know if you can see it.

22:36 One of these tags.

22:40 So if you had one of these around your neck, you could scan that, capture the image, it will capture their details, like their name, where they're from, what they're doing. And from there, you'll be able to add it into the CRM and then follow people up. So I've been following up people from the last week, sending them messages.

22:55 And the really important thing here is that it gives you context. Where you met them, when you met them, how you met them, how you got their details. You can have a photo with them added in there as well. So lots of little things just to make that follow-up process a lot easier. So I think this app went really well. I managed to connect with an additional 46 people at the event. So hopefully we'll see people download this app really soon. Now still in test flight. So Apple test flight is still in testing mode. And I'm still waiting for a couple more days before it gets released on the Google Play Store as well. So if you guys are interested in this app here, the web version is up and running and working. And the mobile

23:35 apps are coming really soon. But you just have to go through the test flight process or the Android testing process right now. But if you want to support the channel and what I'm doing as a founder, check out this app. And of course it is web three enabled too. So it's got lots of really cool things that I've got all in place. Now, overall, I have to say Singapore was absolutely amazing event. Absolutely loved it. And for midnight, I think it worked really, really well, especially with some of the big announcements that were there. But guys, if you enjoyed the video, enjoyed this update, make sure you hit that thumbs up like subscribe notification bell YouTube memberships down below. I've got buy me a coffee links there too.

24:15 If you want to support my work and the channel that way, I'll have another video update around Cardano and what is happening in the Cardano ecosystem from the Token 2049 event and what's been happening recently as well. So do tune in for that. And if you're in Australia, a lot more crypto and regulation and tax updates around what's happening in Australia too. So try and stay positive, guys.

24:40 It's been a rough week. I'm seeing prices drop at the moment as well. So Who knows where the market's going to go at the moment, but stay positive, guys, and I'll see you in the next video.