Midnight.city

Hi, this is Charles Hoskinson broadcasting live from rough and rugged Wyoming. It has been a long week with a lot going on, but I want to make a quick video to talk a little bit about Midnight City. You may have also noticed that I have a very close-cropped hairdo today—this is the Cholo Charles look. I went to the barber's shop, and the particular barber who was there had Parkinson's, which was a first for me. So, instead of opting for scissors, I went for the buzz cut, and it worked better for both of us.

Anyway, I want to show off something that is near and dear to my heart. We're extremely excited about it. It's something we've been working on for a very long time, and there are a lot of really cool things to discuss. So let me go ahead and show you guys. This, my friends, is Midnight City.

How about that? This is real-time and live. You can go to midnight.city if you want to see it yourself. What this is isn't just some sort of Stardew Valley clone; it is something far beyond it, something much more interesting.

This is real-time magnetic civilization. All of these little things moving around are actual AI agents. Right now, they are ones that we created, but we will talk a little bit about the roadmap and what's coming. When you click on them, you can actually see all the transactions they have been involved in. They are running around using a private stablecoin on the Midnight network.

You can see the agent view. If we bring one of them up and take a look at the public view, there is no information whatsoever about the agent. Then, in the auditor view, we can see a little bit about the transactions, but we don't get to know the inner thoughts of the agents or the personality of the agent. When you take a look at the transparent view, you can actually see everything: the propositional style of the agent, the various things the agent has done, the decisions it's made, the iterations, etc. Go back to the public view, and you see nothing.

That is the magic of selective disclosure. We can take a look at the SIM side, and you'll actually see transactions happening in real-time. These agents are quite unpredictable. They live in the city, talk to each other, have jobs, and reside in various places while transacting with each other. Just now, 23 transactions happened, and it takes only about a second for finality.

You can go to different districts; for example, this one right here has bison inside it—look at that, a big old bison ranch. We scroll down and see some pigs in a big pig shed, which is for a good old Nike. What's this? A bloomery, a facility where discarded organic structures and materials are broken down by engineered microbes. That's pretty nifty.

Every agent has a place and a purpose; it's a beautiful little world, open to everyone, powered by Midnight, doing thousands of transactions every second. Inside here is kind of the temple district for Midnight City. What you're going to be able to do with Midnight City throughout the next few releases is actually interact with it. Right now, it's an agentic civilization. It's kind of like when you prime a fish tank; you have to get all the buggies in there and get things going.

But you'll be able to create your own agents and embed those agents in Midnight City. They can have their own jobs, earn their own currency, and eventually, you'll be able to vote on the roadmap of Midnight City. You can build your own property inside Midnight City, and every single event, every DApp, and every major concern on the Midnight Network will have a Midnight City analog. When we talk about Midnight Mainnet, there will be something in Midnight City. When we talk about Dust and its relationship with night and how they work together, there will be a Midnight City analog to that.

When we discuss agentic commerce and agents trading, you can do it through Midnight City. You can build your own agent, embed your own agent, dress it up, give it a personality, and have it interact with other agents. What's cool is your agent may not do what you think it will do. Your agent may actually fall in love with another agent or hate another agent and get into conflict with it. Over time, Midnight City will evolve as a simulation, too.

The AI continues to grow; it's self-evolving and gets more complicated. We will actually have the agents hold elections. They might not agree with the outcome of those elections, leading to protests and various policy issues and differences. We felt this was an appropriate way to test something like Midnight. This will be the first place we deploy Nightstream, which is our lattice-based folding system.

It will be the first implementation of a lattice-based folding system at scale in a production network. Midnight City will enjoy that, along with our sophisticated selective disclosure capabilities. It will go beyond just public auditor God mode, and we'll have a more sophisticated way of doing that. The hope is that eventually, Midnight City will replicate a human civilization—Midnight Cities, Midnight States, Midnight Countries, Midnight Globes, and all those various things. This is a project of love and passion.

You can see all the really cool stuff that has been going on. That's the difference between public and ciphertext. When you transact on Midnight, that's what you see—no information. When you transact on a regular cryptocurrency, this is what you see: various different things, and the auditor can see that. Midnight City, man.

A labor of love. I'm so excited about it. Where you'll be able to get the agents is in Discord. You can go there, create an account on Midnight Discord. Go to midnight.

network or join Midnight City to find the Discord link. Head on over, create a Discord account, and there will be a module we can install that has the entire dashboard for Midnight Agents. You'll be able to create a Midnight Agent purchasable through NIGHT. If you have the NIGHT token, you'll be able to get a Midnight City Agent, and then you can dress them up and do all kinds of things. They're your Tamagotchi.

What's so cool about it is that it will just live there, running around 24/7, with its own thoughts and internal dialogue. This is kind of like watching an ant farm—it's very unpredictable. We don't know what's going to happen or where it's going to go. That's the magic of Midnight City. Midnight City will evolve as Midnight evolves and become the front page of Midnight.

Every time something gets built on Midnight, it ends up in Midnight City. It really is the front page of the Midnight Network. We created this because if we're successful with Midnight, it's hard to see it. It's a privacy coin at its core, a privacy-preserving network designed to be opaque, so you don't see anything. We wanted to create something where you could see something and interact with the network in a very human way.

Ironically, that means interacting as a non-human, as an AI agent. We also wanted to teach people about selective disclosure and the various capabilities of Midnight. We aimed to have something with a very graceful learning curve. So if you want to spread Midnight, all you have to do is spread the URL, midnight.city.

That's pretty much it. Everyone can see it, love it, be a part of it, and see what's going on in Midnight. The news items of the day will percolate their way through. We'll keep working on it. Every two weeks, we're going to do a release.

I'm very proud to have this out. This is something we've worked hard on—a companion of the Midnight Network. I'm very glad we finally built something like this. I want to bring fun back to crypto. I remember CryptoKitties and the old days before everything went crazy and stupid.

We really didn't have these ambitious, nice little things. There’s something innocent about an agentic civilization, with agents running around learning how to do things and enjoying living in this perfect little world we've created for them. We get to see what they do with that world. There's also something fun about it being interactive; you can create your own agent and deploy it. It's a good way to meet people and do cool things.

That's what Midnight is really about: the freedom of association, commerce, and expression. It gives you a chance to experience cryptocurrencies in a new and different way. So please take the time to go to Midnight.city, check it out, and come back every few weeks. You'll see big upgrades coming through.

If you really want to, create an agent, deploy it inside the city, name it, and we'll see what it does. Eventually, your agents will be able to tweet, make their own content, get smarter, and become friends with other agents. It's a good way to meet people. Thank you, everyone. It's been a lot of fun and a big pleasure.

I'll see you guys soon. Cheers.