President of the Midnight Foundation Fahmi Syed on The Glacier Drop, Rational Privacy, and More

I had the fortunate opportunity to sit down with Fahmi Syed, President of the Midnight Foundation, in Las Vegas during RareEvo to discuss everything about the Midnight Network, its two-token system, and its Glacier Drop. Midnight Foundation So, if I have this right. Twenty-plus years in finance. CFO of FIFTHDELTA. CFO of Parity Technologies. So, you’re obviously a smart man. But I wanted to ask you a really important question. How are you handling this heat right now? The heat? Yes. So, I'm very fortunate that one, Charles, and the vision are around Midnight, that he has one, honored me with this role, and two, backed me. But what I recognize is I am not the smartest person in the room. And I want to be surrounded by people smarter than me, hungrier than me. So what I've been able to do with the foundation, the team, and there'll be announcements around the team, is to bring people in different verticals, whether that's operations, whether that's marketing, you met Steve, who enhance what we do. And my job here is to unblock people. So, I handle the heat by empowering them, enabling them to do all the wonderful things that you see and hear about, and to shield them from a lot of the noise. I meant, how are you handling this Las Vegas heat? The temperature. Oh, sorry. Sorry. I thought you meant the roles. Sorry. By not leaving the building. And staying in the AC. So, as I said earlier, you were the CFO of Parity Technologies. And as I understand it, you were a bit hesitant to join up with them. Is that right? Yeah. At that time, I was very much, you know, in a traditional sort of investment space. I was tracking what, you know, Bitcoin at that time and Ethereum were doing, but I hadn't really delved into down the rabbit hole. It's only when I was approached and initially, I was hesitant, and but I researched it, understood who Gavin was, what Polkadot Parity were, but also what the wider blockchain industry was doing, how it was evolving. And, my outlook in life professionally has always been, I just wanna learn. I wanna learn. I wanna grow. I wanna be able to build something, deliver something, whether that's at a unit level, business unit level, or at a business level that, you know, stands the test of time. And recognizing the opportunity that blockchain technology offered, it was, it was interesting. And I realized that I wasn't really learning anything. The steps I was taking into my professional learning career in the hedge fund world, each step was becoming smaller. Whereas, here, I can see I could learn and go back to where I started twenty, twenty-five years ago, might learn quickly, take bigger steps, be surrounded by bright minds, technologists, programmers, engineers, and that's what attracted me. So, if somebody is on the fence as you were, what resources would you recommend for them to learn more? Well, today, I would say just go to AI. Genuinely, I mean, AI didn't exist, or ChatGPT and other sort of LLM programs didn't exist. There's a lot that you can learn about not only what the basics of Blockchain, the evolution of the industry, about different blockchains themselves and how they operate, about their community, about their philosophy. And then once you get into that broad understanding, there are a lot of tutorials out there. There are a lot of firms, such as yourself and others, who create great content, great videos, YouTube videos. I was really fortunate that I got to work at Parity with Gavin Wood and some really bright engineering minds. And I think with all of these things, when you show an interest to learn, to understand who they are, what they are, what their business model is, what the blockchain is, before you start trying to add value or change things, they reciprocate. So, I learned I was going over to Berlin and to other sort of Parity offices and spending half a day. It was embedded in a room, closed in a room, just with whiteboards, just learning. And that, for me, was just a great opportunity. And I know many people don't have that, so I'd go back to Google AI and sort of YouTube videos. Earlier this year, I think you said you joined blockchain because you could see what it would do for businesses and for society. Can you go into detail about these changes? Yeah, absolutely. So, if you think about how businesses operate, a lot of it's costly to run large data centers, to hold large stores of information, to have to build an entire stack within yourselves. When you can outsource costs, elements, and things like that, it can bring in expertise that you don't have internally. It can also reduce costs. And when you think about the blockchain, essentially, that's what it's trying to do. It's trying to say through decentralization, this technology stack that we're so used to can be different. We don't have to own every piece of data. We don't have to be involved in everything that we do. And actually, it empowers the individual, or the corporate, whichever angle you're looking at it from, in terms of flow. People who have seen my, some who have connected to me through Telegram and other things, will see that my profile is Bruce Lee. And there's a reason for that because Bruce Lee said, “Be like water.” It's about flow. It's about reducing friction. It's about creating sustenance in processes and businesses, and that's where Blockchain changes things. And when it comes to society, it's saying, following the financial crisis and other sort of data leakage issues back in, you know, 2008, 2009, there's a different way to do things. And cryptography and advancement in technology, and now zero-knowledge proofs applied to cryptography, can change the way you operate. You interact with other people, other businesses, through this new technical route. And when do you think these businesses will take advantage of blockchain tech? That’s a tough question. No. No. It's a good question. I'm glad you asked it. What requires businesses like Amazon, Coca-Cola, and others to come and adopt blockchain technology is to see not only does the technology - look, businesses are very simple. They just wanna make money. They can talk about philosophies and what they wanna do, but the bottom line or the first kind of requirement is they wanna make money. And you make money in two ways. You charge people more money for your items, or you reduce costs. But for business to do that - and web3 in technology around web3 and blockchains - enables that. And I can give you some examples later on, around some opportunities within Midnight and partners we were working with. But to put their business online, to put their clients’ information online through a blockchain, you need confidentiality. You need privacy. Because no business wants to show their clients transactions visibly to everybody. There's power in owning data. There's value in owning data. We've seen that monetization of data through very large companies. Google does it, you know, your access to Google's AI, Google's browser, Google's maps, they're all free. Nobody pays for it. But in return, they capture your data and they monetize that data, and they earn revenue through advertisers. And those advertisements come to you, and they get more and more optimized to send to you. So, - and that power, data is useful. And now, if Google is sharing all of that information, that flow with another web browser, then that other web browser is gonna take advantage of that and monetize that. So, for large businesses, for also individuals, confidentiality, privacy matters. And if we can bring that to a blockchain, which Midnight is trying to do through its smart, zk technology and its smart contract, ability to disclose information from a private state, that's what would move the paradigm in terms of shifting into real-world adoption, real use cases. Do you think people should be worried about their privacy? Especially nowadays, every week you hear data leakage, there's millions of passwords, millions of credit cards. What are your thoughts about privacy and where we're headed? I don't think people should be worried about privacy. They should embrace privacy. The data leakages you speak about - it’s the other way around. You're giving away your data. So, think about it today. Right now, maybe in your wallet, in your pocket, in your jeans, you carry your driving license. So, you are in control of that. If somebody at the bar asked to see that, you are in control about giving it to them. But once you've shown them once, and they confirmed you are the right age to buy a beverage, you put it back in your pocket. That's privacy. You've provided a disclosure to prove something. On the Internet today, when you put that driver's license or your details on a web page to buy an item, your credit card details, that information is now stored and captured by large companies, PII. And that data is under their control. They will monetize it, but they also have to put a com a data team around that, a compliance team around that to make sure that they follow rules and regulations. But there's one door, and if that door gets breached, then all your data, along with everybody else's data, is exposed through these hacks. We should consider a place where the data, just like your driving license in your pocket, is held by you. And you get to show it, but then take it back. Is that where rational privacy comes in? Absolutely. We do it in our physical world every day. I just gave you an example with your driving license in your pocket. We do it in our digital world every day. Like, sometimes you go to a bar, a stadium, and you want the free wifi. And sometimes, the free wifi will ask for your email. And at some point, some people enter that, but it means that in the future they might get random adverts or, you know, just spam emails. And other people will say, I choose not to and I can live without the WiFi for the next half an hour, an hour. That's rational privacy, a choice about what you want to share and don't wanna share. And we do that on websites, we do it in our physical world. And, in Midnight, we have, within our technology, designed the concept of introducing rational privacy into Web3, into a blockchain. And that's innovative. You start your journey fully shielded in a private state, and then you decide how much of that information you wish to share through the smart contract technology, which enables disclosures. And speaking of Midnight, can you tell us what the Midnight Network is and what the Midnight Foundation is? Yes. Absolutely. So, the Midnight Network is a new blockchain, which is being launched later this year, so Q4 of this year. The Midnight Network is bringing rational privacy into Web3, into blockchains, just like I explained. This concept of that you should start your journey in a private state, fully shielded, and then be able to expose selective information with counterparts. Today, everything you do in a Blockchain is anonymized. Anonymity is not privacy because everything is transparent. Your wallet is transparent; how much you have there - the transactions connected to that wallet. And through certain patterns and behavior, data analytical firms and others may be able to dox that wallet and identify who you are. So, that transparency, which was required at the time, we believe is not required. And therefore, that's the concept Midnight is trying to bring in, the concept of bringing privacy, rational privacy, into a blockchain. And the foundation's role is to be the steward of the network, of the community. We are here to protect and guide the journey and the growth of the network. So, that's looking after the community, looking after governance, looking after developers and builders, encourage more adoption from builders and developers to come and build solutions on Midnight that could be used going forward. And also partnerships with potentially large corporates, large enterprises to come and adopt Web3 in a way that they have so far been unable to adopt. So, how was it that you joined the Midnight Foundation? Good question. So, while I was at Parity, I worked briefly with Eran Barak. Eran Barak is CEO of Shield Technologies, the engineering company which is supporting the development of the Midnight Network. Eran had joined IOG on the Midnight project. It was - it's been funded and supported through Input Output and Charles Hoskinson, the builders behind and founders of Cardano. And Eran invited me to come and have a conversation with Charles. So, I spoke with Charles. I listened to his vision. I listened to what this technology could unlock. And like Gavin, he's a student of blockchain. He's been here since the very beginning. He was, you know, heavily involved in Bitcoin in the early days. And then he was one of the co-founders of Ethereum, along with Gavin Wood. And then Gavin went off to build Polkadot, and Charles went off to build Cardano. And what I saw in Charles was a vision to push Blockchain to a space where you had real-world adoption, real-world use cases, to a space where people are using Midnight Blockchain and don't even know it. It's just part of a technology stack, no different to using AWS or Google Cloud or something else, that when builders build applications on Web3 or Web2, you don't even know you're powered by Midnight. Can you explain Midnight Networks‘ two-token system? Yes. So, as part of the sort of growth development of the Midnight Network, one of the things we've looked at is how tokenomics works generally, across the industry. And essentially, since Ethereum introduced tokenomics and the proof of stake, sort of stake concepts that came through the third-generation blockchains like Cardano, Polkadot, Solana, and others, there's been no real evolution or change. If you think about tokenomics in those chains, it's quite adversarial and counterintuitive to what happens in the traditional world. In the traditional world, like, you are now recording this interview on your iPhone. It looks like an iPhone, but you don't pay for your iPhone in Apple shares. Apple shares, if you have some, that's an investment decision. You pay for your Apple phone in a fiat token. A fiat token, fiat cash, US dollars, euros, sterling, whatever it may be. That's a utility to go and acquire things. In the blockchain, we've seen Ethereum, Solana, and others. The very asset you want gives you ownership and governance of the network. The very asset you wanna see go up in value is a very asset you cannibalize to pay for transactions. So, as the token value goes up, the cost of transactions goes up. So, it's very unpredictable in terms of capacity and cost based on that tokenomics model. Equally, if you're a Solana builder or Ethereum builder and you wanna go and work with another chain, you have to go and acquire their volatile asset. And all you want is access to transactions. So, in Midnight, we've created and bifurcated that by having an ownership and governance token called Night - that gives you the utility to access, and the governance and ownership of the Midnight Network. But what we've done is to say Night, if you own it, will give you a perpetual emission of a resource called Dust. And Dust, think of it as the computational power that gives you shielded access to the Midnight Network. And as such, now, going forward, you have access to the network with much more predictability both around capacity and cost. And also, as part of our cooperative tokenomic model, it encourages builders, whether it's from other Web3 chains or Web2, to acquire transactions as a service through Dust. So, you can access Midnight either by owning Night and getting this emission of Dust, or by finding holders of Night who are willing to lease out their access and capacity. Can you explain to us the glacier drop? Yes. You're asking some great questions. So, again, we, as part of our sort of approach to looking at everything through a new lens, is we looked at how projects and blockchains have been sort of funded in the past and how they have distributed their tokens or access to their networks to the community. And more often than not, what happens is that the original builders and the VCs, maybe who have backed those investors who have backed those projects, get first access to the token distribution. A private sale or presale, whatever you wish to call it. And then there is a distribution mechanism that targets a narrow group of people, but often, they are secondary. And therefore, when the retail or the community comes in and gains access, by that time, they've lost out on a lot of the opportunities of the upside. Sometimes they may take a risk - a downward risk in that. So, what we want to do with Midnight is one: put community first. So Midnight will have 24,000,000,000 token supply. And through the Glacier Drop, 100% of that supply can be claimed by the community. And not just one community. I mentioned we are backed by Charles Hoskinson and Input Output, but this is not just for Cardano; it's bigger than Cardano. We are distributing 24,000,000,000 tokens and making them eligible for claim to eight different ecosystems. Cardano, Bitcoin, Ethereum, Solana, Avalanche, XRP, BNB Chain, and BATs, the Brave Browser Network. Because we want to encourage adoption. We want these tokens to be claimed so that people have access to Dust and capacity in the network. So, we wanna encourage them to build. We're not taking money from VCs. In fact, we're giving it away. We've given the token away and say to VCs: Look at your portfolio companies. Which of them will be enabled by our privacy-enabling solutions? And ask them to come and build to investigate. So, the cost to them, there's no network cost because they now have access. It's a time cost. To builders, to developers in this space, come and see how we might be able to help them not only augment their existing solutions, but build something completely new, take it to a different level. And it's about empowering the community, but empowering builders and users. So, we have four months left in the year. But I wanted to know how has 2025 been for the Midnight Foundation? Have you guys achieved what you wanted to achieve so far? Setbacks? Can you tell us about that? Yeah. So look, this week's been a very monumental week for us. After years of development, we have initiated the launch of the Glacier Drop. So, the 24,000,000,000 tokens and the claim and entitlements across these eight ecosystems, they're out there for people to claim. And when you're doing something as innovative and as complex as that, there's always gonna be hiccups. So, I know a number of people who are ledger holders and users have voiced concerns that they are unable to claim. That there is a bug in the system. And again, we are aware of that, and we are addressing that. There are solutions that some of the wallets, like Euroid and Lace, have been able to do to support those alleged claims. But equally, we're working on a solution that will be released with Shielded Technologies the week of August 25th to unlock that. And what I would say to the community who find it difficult at first to come and claim, let us know. We're here to help. We're here to listen. People should recognize that this is not a first-come, first-serve. If you're the first person in on the first day of the claim this week, you don't have any better advantage than the last person who comes to claim on day 60 of this initial phase. Your entitlement is already locked in based on the mechanism of identifying eligible addresses. And if you're ineligible, have an eligible address, your claim is theirs. It's available to come and secure within the sixty-day window. So, for us in the foundation, have we achieved everything we wanna do? No. Not by any means. And I'm not one of those people that ever rests with, hey, we did something great. Let's just - I always say to my team, this has been a great week to get us to the stage. Yes, we will face hurdles. Yes, we will face difficulties. But take some moment to sit down with your loved ones, with your friends. Maybe explain what you've done and how you were part of that, because this is new and innovative. We may see others adopt this. But right now, you know, we've had tens of thousands of claims, very successfully processed. We've had 2% more and more of our distribution already claimed. So, when you compare it to other airdrops, it holds in a positive light. For me and the foundation, and for Shielded Technologies and our partners, success really comes from not only large claims, but partners and builders using the network. And in that sense, the foundation has done a great job with the team there to acquire, you know, work with strong partners. We have partners, you know, in the financial space. We have healthcare partners. We have identity partners. We have supply chain and logistics partners all building on the Midnight Testnet. And what we're looking for is for others to come, to come and play on the network, know they've got a claim that gives them capacity and access. Success, for me, by the end of this year, is a successful launch of the mainnet. It being stable and seeing applications and users, and transactions on the network. And what about for next year and the year after that? What do you see for Midnight Foundation's future? For the Midnight Foundation, it's important that we listen to the community. We listen to feedback. We listen to our developers. That we move to a decentralized governance, a decentralized network of builders and users. That we at the foundation are supporting community activation as far around the globe as is physically possible. But we have discipline. Very more often than not, it's very easy to get caught up in the excitement of a start-up, of a launch, to get excited by matters like what is the price of the token, how much assets it's sitting in treasury. And very quickly, wasting that. So, bringing discipline, both financially but also strategically, to ensure that we have longevity to support the community, to continue, people building, being real-world use cases into the network. That is success. And beyond that, getting to a place where people are using Midnight even in traditional applications. So, app store builders are using, through their subscriptions, part of the Midnight stack as part of their technology stack, and nobody even knows it. If we can make Midnight so private in terms of how it's used by others that it's almost invisible, that's success. Enabling privacy with compliance through disclosures, I think, is the future of where Blockchain gets adoption. And now, in an earlier interview this year, you talked about the importance of teamwork and building a great team. What is it about the Midnight Foundation's team that makes them work so well? Transparency, openness. I'm very much of the view that I am a guardian, a trustee, I'm appointed. I don't believe in centralization. People bring questions to me, issues to me. I'm here to answer some of those, to unblock those. Really, what I wanna do is empower the team. But I believe in not individuals. I always think about when you build teams, how does somebody coming into my marketing team add value and enhance and support his growth and the growth of his team and the foundation. But how’s the individual marketing team work well with the CFO or with the head of ecosystem? How do I make one plus one equal three? So, I'm always looking on building teams around how each component of these teams, whether this, the sum of the whole, is greater than the individual parts. And if I can bring teams, people together that are better than me, that are pushing me and challenging me and each other, but in a collaborative way, then that will achieve success. And if I can bring people in who are energized by the vision, who wanna grow and develop, then we build the next generation of leaders and the next generation of innovators. So, for me, that's something I learned through, you know, I wasn't always a great leader or a great manager, and you learn through those mistakes. And what I wanna do is just empower my team, my people, the foundation, which then empowers people and builders. And finally, when people think of the Midnight Foundation, what do you want them to think about? What do you want them to know about, like your mission statement? It's actually very funny. So, the mission statement, right now, the foundation's leadership team has been coming together. So actually, we are just about finalizing our mission statement, and it's been a very collaborative effort. Very much underpinned by the mission of, you know, a freedom of ace, association, commerce, and expression, but also making sure the values as that vision's mission is filtered into the team, and then, we will communicate to the the wider community that the values come from the people, from the team, and also the community. So yeah. For me, what do I want people to think about, for the community to think about the foundation? I want the community to look at the foundation as their advocates. And if they feel that we are doing the right thing and we are listening to them, and we are enhancing their ability to access the network, and grow the network and benefit from the success of that through application and use cases, then we're doing our job. If we're listening and we're helping answer some of those questions, that's the right place. What I don't want is people to think we're a foundation that is not listening, not delivering, not helping growth. And so, I take a look at other foundations that have done extremely well. I think Solana has done a great job, for example, in embracing community and really getting that message of theirs out. I look at Cardano and how they're kind of research-focused and think about stability and technology and things like that. How do we take the best of all of these ecosystems? How do we learn from their foundations? And if we could take a little bit of each of those and weave them together, and the community says, yeah, I feel my foundation, because it's their foundation ultimately, is listening and delivering, then that's success. Is there anything else you want the listeners or readers to know about; something they should be aware about? Yeah. Look, I would keep saying, look, keep looking at the official post, whether it's the social media platforms or the website, midnight.network, midnight.foundation. Also, come and see if you should be eligible. Well, there's eight ecosystems. If you want to token hold, there's eight ecosystems. Come to midnight.gd. Be careful around, you know, others trying to imitate us. midnight.gd You have a sixty-day window to come and claim. That is the only official process apart from recognized partners. We announced with blockchain.com. There are a few other large partners that we'll announce who are supporting the Glacier drop. We don't ask for any token locks. blockchain.com We don't ask for any payments. We don't ask for disclosure or private information. It's a very secure, simple way to come and claim. Please look at that. You have a sixty-day window, fifty-eight days now. And beyond that, if you aren't part of the eight eligible ecosystems, there's gonna be a thirty-day scavenger hunt, which will enable people to come and claim what has not already been claimed. So again, we want to go beyond the eight. We started with eight, but if we go beyond the eight, we wanna encourage all of the blockchain industry to work together. There's too much tribalism, too much separation. We need the best of them to come together, of each of us to come together. And through Midnight's cooperative tokenomics for this claim process, we hope that's the beginning of a new era. Great. Well, thank you for your time. Thank you, buddy. Cheers. This interview was edited for clarity. This interview was edited for clarity. I attended RareEvo as a guest of Input Output Global. While they were kind enough to cover my travel and accommodation, they did not influence the questions asked during this interview. I attended RareEvo as a guest of Input Output Global. While they were kind enough to cover my travel and accommodation, they did not influence the questions asked during this interview.