Keeping the Data on the Device: Jay Albert on Building with Midnight

At 13 years old, Jonathan Albert was editing the HTML on his own MySpace music page, a profile he says had thousands of listeners. His father's side of the family had bought a computer because it was the new thing to own, and he was the only one in the house who tinkered with it. He now works as a Solutions Engineer at the Midnight Foundation.

From Oppenheimer Funds to Privacy Tech

Jay came to crypto through finance. He studied computer science and computer information systems in college, and because he didn't yet feel qualified to write code, he went to business school. His first job was at Oppenheimer Funds, a mutual fund in New York City. There he looked into emerging technology and started trading Bitcoin, though the people he talked to about it showed little interest. When Invesco acquired Oppenheimer in 2019, he used the change to teach himself to code, and he eventually shipped video games along with VR and AR applications.

By 2020 he was in DeFi summer, and then NFT summer, collecting from World of Women, Lazy Lions, and Bored Ape Yacht Club. After that he consulted on tokenomics and NFT economies at Smith and Crown, taught Unity game development on the Godwoken Network, and worked on decentralized computing at Lilypad. He then spent about a year on Midnight's DevRel team, working on docs, AI tooling, and hackathons. He recently moved to solutions engineering, where he helps institutional and ecosystem partners with bugs and with the harder parts of the network.

Jay described his move into privacy as a return to the reason he got interested in crypto in the first place, back at Oppenheimer.

It's about the freedom to move your money wherever you want without it getting seized and without people telling you what to do with it.

He sees blockchains as a way of "enshrining our rights in code."

Banks, Balances, and Strategy

Narb raised a shift he has watched since 2020. At first the transparent ledger was the appeal. Then ENS names made it easy to see who was doing what on-chain. Jay connected the recent attention on privacy to institutions. He pointed to JPMorgan's finance protocols and to an exchange owned by Sony as signs that large players are already building, and he said these firms cannot expose client balances, positioning, or investment strategy on a public chain.

Input Output Global, the company behind Cardano, announced Midnight in November 2022. Shielded Technologies, an Input Output spinout, is the core developer. The network's genesis block was created on March 17, 2026, under a federated model, with node operators that include Google Cloud, MoneyGram, eToro, Worldpay, and Bullish. Jay called Midnight a partner chain of Cardano: "We share SPOs, so the node operators that provide security to Cardano, they also provide security to Midnight." IOG's current materials describe Midnight as a layer-one blockchain.

Proving Someone Is Over 18

As Jay explains it, Midnight starts from the premise that user data stays on the user's phone or desktop and never goes to a centralized server. He argued this helps businesses too, because holding data makes them responsible for it, and he listed the ways that goes wrong: hacks, employees misusing records, and staff being socially engineered into giving information away.

If you don't have my data, there's nothing for you to lose, for you to hack, for you to give up.

Applications then generate proofs about that local data instead of sharing it. His example was buying alcohol online. Instead of submitting an exact birthday, the program answers a single question: is this person over 18. In Midnight's terms, a function called a witness reads the private data and passes it into a circuit, and the circuit produces the proof that goes to the network. According to Midnight's documentation, contracts are written in Compact, a TypeScript-based language that compiles to zero-knowledge circuits.

The pattern Jay sees most often for hiding data is hashing. Several inputs go through an algorithm and come out as a 32-byte string, which can only be reproduced from exactly the same inputs. A user who knows the underlying details can regenerate the hash, match it against the value stored on-chain, and continue with the transaction without revealing those details.

Jay was direct about the gotchas for EVM developers. The base protocol uses ZSwaps and a UTXO model that is closer to Bitcoin than to Ethereum. The entry point he suggested was Effectstream, Midnight's cross-chain framework, which he said can get a project running with about three commands. It includes templates that watch events on other networks, such as Cardano nodes, and update dApp state on Midnight in response. One template mints NFTs on Ethereum and keeps their in-game stats on Midnight. He also mentioned M402, a tool that lets agents transact on Arbitrum based on private state held on Midnight. Another example came from a team in Build Club, Midnight's program for taking ideas to production, which built a Midnight version of DocuSign that agents can use to enter contracts on behalf of their users.

Why NIGHT Generates DUST

Midnight's economics are split in two. NIGHT is the network's main token and trades on exchanges. DUST pays for transaction fees. It cannot be transferred, and it builds up in a wallet while that wallet holds NIGHT. Jay explained the split as a fix for fee volatility on chains that charge gas in their main token.

So the cost to transact today may be a dollar, tomorrow $10. How do I plan a business around network activity that I have no control over?

Holders can lease DUST to their dApps, which lets an app sponsor its users' transactions without affecting the price of NIGHT. Midnight's September 2026 network update announced permissionless smart contract deployment on mainnet, and it also mentioned sponsored DUST fees and Gero Wallet support.