Building with Rational Privacy: Key Takeaways from the Midnight Summit

Midnight’s first-ever summit, held in London, brought together an unusual mix: a former chancellor and a former spy chief, privacy engineers, healthcare founders, card networks, banks and DeFi builders – all wrestling with the same question: how do you make privacy a default feature of the way we move money and data online without shutting regulators, auditors and counterparties out?

The answer, it appears – repeated across keynotes, panels and hackathon demos – is ‘rational privacy’: a model where activity is shielded by default, but verifiable when it matters, whether for know your customer (KYC), tax, risk or market integrity.

Instead of a conference hotel in Zone 1, the Midnight Foundation and Input Output (IOHK) set up camp at the Old Royal Naval College in Greenwich – with the main stage in the Painted Hall, billed as the UK’s answer to the Sistine Chapel and currently home to Peter Walker’s Connection and Identity light installations, a set of illuminated DNA-like columns that had speakers quietly comparing eye strain between sessions. The Prime Meridian a short walk up the hill. Lots of history about navigation and trade: perhaps an ideal setting for two days of people debating the future of data and money.

As Fahmi Syed, president of the Midnight Foundation put it: “Before this building became known as the Old Royal Naval College, it was Greenwich Palace where Henry VIII was born underneath our very feet in this very building. So that’s a secret that this building keeps, and secrets are important. Privacy is important.”

Or as Charles Hoskinson, CEO and founder of IOHK, the company behind the Cardano blockchain, commented: “This used to be the centre of the world 200 years ago… it’s where GMT came from, so when we built a time-based product and we called it Midnight, it seemed kind of clever to rent this place.”

The Midnight roadmap

The two days also gave a clearer view of where Midnight actually is on its journey: the ‘wen Midnight?’ question.

Under the hood, the distribution and launch plan is already well under way. The Glacier Drop – Midnight’s ‘fair distribution’ programme – ran from August to October, with close to 200,000 participants across eight ecosystems claiming NIGHT. That’s now been followed by Scavenger Mine, a 21-day event with more than 15 million registered addresses and around eight to nine million actively mining. On stage, Hoskinson claimed that in the first 12 days alone, Scavenger Mine used more compute than Bitcoin did in its first 2.5 years.

He also sketched out a four-phase path, borrowing names from the Hawaiian moon cycle. Hilo covers where we are now: NIGHT minted on Cardano and distribution under way. Kūkolu is the ‘launching from a safe port’ moment with the genesis block live. Mōhalu is where more participants come in, and Hua is when hybrid dApps start to appear across other chains, with Midnight sitting underneath as the privacy layer.

The broader ambition is for Midnight to behave less like a standalone destination and more like a ‘privacy engine’ – quietly sitting behind other chains, wallets as well as Web 2 interfaces, handling the selective disclosure piece so users and institutions don’t have to think about the plumbing.

What happened in Greenwich

The summit was Midnight’s first major outing. Over two days, 466 attendees, 40 speakers and 121 hackathon participants moved between keynotes, panels and downstairs build sessions, where teams were hacking on privacy-enabled apps, tools and integrations.

It wasn’t a crypto echo chamber either: the agenda swung from deep technical sessions to political and policy perspectives, with George Osborne (former UK Chancellor of the Exchequer) and Lord Andrew Parker (former MI5 director-general) both taking to the stage.

Osborne’s contribution leaned towards the ‘what does this actually fix?’ side of the conversation – from tokenised real estate to more efficient public services – suggesting that better financial plumbing and trusted data rails will matter far more in the long run than spinning up new trading assets.

Lord Parker’s closed, no-recording session, billed that way because, as the organisers put it, he’s “a national asset”, the former MI5 director-general spoke about the crisis of trust, the geopolitical risks facing the West, and the role that financial and identity data now plays in that picture. China, Russia and other state-level threats all featured.

For the blockchain crowd, his comments felt part warning, part homework. He described crypto and Web 3 jargon as “the alphabet soup that many of you swim in”, and said the industry has a “PR challenge”: if builders want policymakers and the public to take privacy tech seriously, they’ll need to use real-world analogies that make the benefits obvious to people who don’t live in the space.

Rational privacy, regulated finance and real use cases

Panel after panel made the same point in different ways: privacy isn’t about hiding; it’s about controlling what you reveal, when, and to whom. Midnight’s framing – private-by-default, provable-when-needed – came up in discussions on institutional adoption, healthcare, real-world assets and even AI. As several speakers noted, the current financial system already works this way: your salary is private from colleagues, but not from HMRC, your bank or your accountant.

Crypto Wars author Erica Stanford noted that KYC burns “about 200 billion dollars a year” yet still “stops under one per cent” of global financial crime. Law firm CMS partner Charles Kerrigan remembered the old cartoon – ‘On the internet, nobody knows you’re a dog’ – to underline how shaky our identity model really is, and why cryptographic proofs could replace endless document checks. Midnight’s CLO Saj Khoshroo added the human fallout: sanction rules that trap refugees, ‘lazy’ de-risking by banks, and place-of-birth flags that shadow people for years; problems he believes privacy-preserving attestations could finally avoid.

An AI × Web3 session, moderated by Dr Ruth Wandhöfer, took a speed-tour through how fast these two worlds are colliding. DEGA’s Carlos René talked about AI as a “four to 10 times” productivity boost, while OODA’s Sohejl Shahshahani joked that AI today is mostly a “trust me bro paradigm” that blockchain can finally make verifiable. Webisoft’s Utkarsh Varma framed the whole thing as democratisation: tools that let “anybody… build on Web 3 with very little to no knowledge”. The vibe: tech still has rough edges, but the next few years will make powerful on-chain AI tools feel as ordinary as using your phone.

Privacy-first

Once “the most stressful five minutes” of AV chaos was out of the way for the very capable and insightful emcee Ian Horne was out of the way, Brave Software CEO and JavaScript creator Brendan Eich, NEAR Protocol co-founder Illia Polosukhin, Helius CEO Mert Mumtaz and Zcash cofounder Zooko Wilcox got stuck into what a privacy-first internet should actually feel like.

Eich warned that too many users are being nudged to “fingerprint [themselves] on a transparent chain” and said the fix has to be products that are “super easy” to use, not new OpSec rituals, while Polosukhin argued that “private AI is actually going to be a better product” because you can safely give it more context. Wilcox framed the end goal in one line: an internet where information about you only goes “to people that [you] intentionally wished to share it with, and no one else”, and Mumtaz’s advice was to the point: “Anything you do on the internet can and will be used against you. Do everything with that in mind. Use Zcash, use Brave.”

Several other sessions filled out the picture. In an ‘innovations to watch’ panel, Shielded Technologies’ Bob Blessing-Hartley, IO Research’s Markulf Kohlweiss and Midnight CTO Sebastien Guillemot compared notes on everything from post-quantum cryptography to safer wallet design: the gist being that most privacy failures today come from metadata leaks, not the maths..

Health-conscious

In a session on the ‘trust gap’, Gem Ozan (NexiFuse Health), Dr David Cox (health journalist) and Tony Abed (SOVO) all circled the same problem: medicine runs on data, but almost none of it moves safely. Ozan argued for proofs that confirm conditions or treatment histories without exposing records, Cox pointed to genomic research stuck behind access walls, and Abed summed it up: every interaction raises questions about ownership and consent that current systems can’t really answer: the kind of gap selective disclosure is supposed to close.

Privacy advocate Max Schrems delivered a sage reminder: that surveillance “creeps in through convenience”, and that rights only survive if they’re designed into the infrastructure, not left to policy. A stablecoin session with Irina Chuchkina, Eric Queathem and Marieke Flament dug into how “stable, safe and seen when needed” might work in practice, especially around wallet linkability and censorship risk.

While on the capital side, Dan Singleman (CIO, Hoskinson Family Office), James Newman (managing partner, Republic) and Tommy Doyle (head of relationship management, Xapo Bank) argued that privacy is fast becoming an investment thesis in its own right: less about ‘dark’ use cases and more about infrastructure that lets institutions meet rules, protect competitive data and still use public chains at scale

The hackathon

While the main stage wrestled with the big ideas, the hackathon downstairs was there to answer a more grounded question: if you gave people working tools for rational privacy, what would they actually build?

More than 120 developers took part, with teams flying in from South and Central America, the US, across Europe (including a strong Eastern European contingent), Sub-Saharan Africa, India, Indonesia and Vietnam. A rather global first outing.

Many of the projects clustered around AI. Teams were testing how you prove things about data without exposing it: for example, that an AI model is genuinely allowed to use a given dataset, or that your own query is not quietly being folded back into someone else’s training corpus.

“We’ve seen lot of proofs or verifications around the concept of AI,” Syed revealed to The Fintech Times. “Some interesting cases around healthcare, a lot of financial ones naturally, but I’m always more fascinated by the ones outside of my traditional knowledge. It amazes me how people conceptualise the use of Midnight in ways that my team haven’t even foreseen.”

The post Building with Rational Privacy: Key Takeaways from the Midnight Summit appeared first on The Fintech Times.

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