I wrote a book

Hi, this is Charles Hoskinson broadcasting live from warm, sunny Colorado—always warm, always sunny, sometimes Colorado. Today is March 27th, 2026. I wanted to make a quick video to let that I've been working in the shadows on something that has just come out. I just released it, hot off the press. The things I do for Midnight, the things I do for love.

I put it up on a GitHub repo and released it under a Creative Commons license. I decided to write a book, and let me share this little repo with you. If you're a turbo nerd, you’ll find the tech here alongside all the build scripts and basically how to do it. I actually messed up on the first release; I forgot to put the Creative Commons license in the file itself. I have it in the repo, but I’m just so used to working with repos.

Let me go ahead and bring up the book and tell you a little bit about what I wrote. I noticed there's a shockingly low level of understanding about zero-knowledge proofs and zero-knowledge cryptography. So, I wrote a 337-page book over the last few months. I was going back and forth on how to approach this, focusing on what Midnight is in relation to a taxonomy that allows you to understand how zero-knowledge proofs in general work. The seven layers of the system start at the very top, which is the trusted setup or the ceremony—does it require a setup?

Then you work your way down the stack, looking at languages, witnesses, arithmetization, proof systems, cryptography, and the verification environment. This structure gives you the ability to understand all ZK systems from that lens. I wrote this as a non-technical manual, although it contains a lot of technical information. It starts with the seven layers, and each chapter covers a different layer of the system. You go through the first layer, the second layer, the third layer, and so on, including arithmetization and all these concepts.

Then you get into the actual proof systems. After covering all seven layers, it starts discussing one layer up, getting into ZEXE, which is what Aleo uses, and Kachina, which is what Midnight uses. This helps provide a broader understanding of private smart contracts in general. I also delve into some new developments in the ecosystem, like ZKVMs, covering all the different types. I discuss Stark to Snark pipelines and include a dedicated chapter on Midnight.

It's only about 10 pages, but it gives a pretty good understanding of what Midnight is. I close with the market landscape and some open questions within the ZK landscape. This is the first edition, and it includes a nice glossary. I’ve included lots of interesting content and tried to make the book as non-technical as possible. There’s also a very dense bibliography, so if you're curious about additional reading or similar papers in the ZK space, you can explore all the major research papers listed.

You’ll find over 50 interesting places to read, making it a good starting point. I’m proud of it; it took a long time to organize my thoughts into one place, and it’s only 337 pages. Go ahead and read it over the weekend; it will give everyone a good understanding of how ZK works. It’s released under a Creative Commons attribution license, so feel free to share it and give it to others. You can embed it in your commercial products, just remember to attribute it to me, as I’m the author.

The link to download it from the GitHub repo is right there. I’ll also share it throughout the Midnight Discord and other places, so you should be able to download the PDF straight from GitHub. Feel free to distribute it. This is the first edition, version 1.0.

1, so it’s very early days. I’ll keep adding and changing it, working on it throughout the weekends as more things come up. As more developments in Midnight are launched, I’ll add to this. Right now, it’s very ZK focused, but I plan to add sections on multi-party computation, trusted execution environments, and probably homomorphic encryption, which will require a discussion on how homomorphic encryption works. I’ve already covered Nightstream a little bit in this, so we could talk about cyclotomic polynomials and other mathematical preliminaries.

But this is a non-technical introduction to the topic as well. Those seven layers really help you orient yourself, and what's cool is that you can dissect any zero-knowledge system. So, anyway, this is a little something I wrote in my spare time over the weekends. It was a lot of work, but it’s a nice 300-page manual on zero-knowledge. If you’re curious about it, please enjoy it.

It’s a good way to introduce Midnight to people. Please do enjoy "Midnight: The Seven-Layer Magic Trick." It’s a product made with a lot of love. Share it around, have fun with it, and cheers, everyone!