Meet Mauricio Magaldi, Head of Product For Midnight at IOHK

About Shielded Technologies

Shielded Technologies is an emerging engineering company pioneering privacy-enhancing, decentralized technologies designed for real-world compatibility. A spinout from leading Web3 venture studio Input Output, Shielded brings deep cryptographic expertise as the core technology partner for the Midnight Network – a new blockchain that leverages advanced cryptographic proofs and a cooperative tokenomics design to protect data and metadata while ensuring auditability and compliance.

In collaboration with the Midnight Foundation, Shielded is shaping a global ecosystem that upholds the fundamental freedoms of association, commerce, and expression.

Tell us about Midnight Network, developed by Shielded Technologies’

Public blockchains, while extremely promising for a wide range of use cases, are overly transparent. Their utility design comes at a cost to user privacy – something businesses can’t afford to risk.

Midnight, a new data protection blockchain, was designed to address this tradeoff, ultimately empowering businesses to tap into the benefits of public blockchains without sacrificing privacy or their ability to comply with regulators.

Core to Midnight’s ability to do so is zero-knowledge (ZK) technology, a cryptographic technique that uses attestations of data on-chain rather than the data itself. In other words, thanks to ZK tech, private data is never actually sent on-chain. By combining ZK with a novel programming model, Kachina, Midnight provides advanced programmable data protection capabilities that enable businesses to choose who can access sensitive data in accordance with their own privacy and security paradigms.

What do you think makes this project unique?

What makes Midnight’s protocol stand out is that it not only prevents sensitive data from being published on-chain, but also protects the associated metadata, such as the time or frequency of interactions between two parties. Metadata can be used to identify patterns and draw correlations, posing a threat to privacy that is often overlooked in today’s ecosystem.
Midnight extends data protection to metadata through a novel dual-asset framework that utilizes both a public (or ‘unshielded’) token and a private (or ‘shielded’) resource. Typically, blockchains use a single unshielded token to secure the network and power its functionality, by serving as the ‘fuel’ required to process transactions. Because the token acting as the fuel is unshielded, transaction details and user identities can be inadvertently exposed.

At a very high level, Midnight solves this by leveraging an unshielded token (NIGHT) to secure and provide utility to the network, coupled with a shielded resource (DUST) for the network fuel. These assets both have specific characteristics that will be detailed in Midnight’s upcoming tokenomics paper. What stands out about this model is Midnight’s ability to enable metadata concealment without exposing projects to regulatory risk, as they retain the ability to share necessary information with trusted parties.

What is your advice to aspiring entrepreneurs?

My advice is to try and fall in love with the problem and not the solution. This will help you avoid becoming a hammer and seeing every problem as a nail. If you truly embrace the problem at hand and explore its different characteristics, you will start to see new ways to tackle it, which will make your product or business so much stronger.

What most excites you about Midnight?

As a former Chief Data Officer, I believe that privacy is a lost human right in the current state of the internet. Over the last 20-30 years, we’ve normalized openly sharing our data in exchange for what appears to be free services. But as the saying goes, “if the service is free, the product is you.” It’s time to reclaim ownership over our data so that it cannot be exploited without our consent, and that’s what Midnight is all about.

Midnight also addresses another core belief of mine. As a musician, I feel passionately that we need to secure the freedoms of expression, association, and commerce. The prospect of the few controlling the many is too big to ignore –individuals should have the right to fundamental freedoms. Midnight offers a mathematically sound way to protect these for developers and users alike.

How has the company evolved over the last couple of years?

After running for 4-5 years as an IOG-incubated research project (yielding papers such as Kachina, which lays the foundations for privacy-preserving smart contracts, and Minotaur, a multi-resource blockchain consensus protocol), Midnight became a de-facto product project in 2023. Since then, we’ve launched 3 major releases: private devnet, public devnet, and 2 major versions of testnet. These have allowed us to gather early and frequent feedback from the community, and we’re now refining those features in the leadup to our mainnet launch.

We’re also beginning to announce new partnerships with industry leading projects such as OpenZeppelin, Maestro and Zoniqx, signifying momentum and commitment to providing exceptional experiences for those building on Midnight. The team is also expanding its hackathon program to enable the community to begin experimenting with Midnight’s programmable privacy capabilities.

What can we hope to see from Midnight in the future?

The next iterations of the testnet will bring the network gradually closer to its launch by introducing more capabilities for block producers, builders, and users. Be on the lookout for more partnership announcements, hackathons, and Midnight’s tokenomics paper.

In the longer term, Midnight aims to establish itself as the leading platform for privacy-preserving applications. By empowering businesses to capitalize on blockchain opportunities without needing to sacrifice privacy or compliance, Midnight will act as the missing piece in Web3 adoption while fundamentally changing the way data is handled–for the better.