Midnight has an admin key that can freeze, censor & pick nodes without delay! They are also lying about being open-source! They secretly switched to closed-source 3 days ago! ⚠️ Founders control majority supply, & it is permissioned NIGHT is a nightmare of centralization: 🧵 You heard that right: NIGHT has been caught red-handed lying. The validators swapped out the code without notifying anyone on the 25th of September Yesterday @IOHK_Charles claimed that NIGHT will be bigger than ZEC! A ridiculous statement considering these facts. This is not the first time Charles has pushed "vaporware" to unsuspecting consumers Make no mistake, NIGHT is "vaporware", as there is almost no NIGHT on the network; it is all on the ADA network, as there is no bridge. Their total on-chain TPS right now is 0.0017... Most users are holding tokens on the ADA network, controlled by a smart contract with an admin key that can steal all user funds & inflate the supply without delay. All from the holier-than-thou decentralization crowd; this is truly the worst of crypto: Centralized Design: Ten anonymously held keys have absolute control over the NIGHT chain. So if your funds get frozen, there is no party you can hold accountable because they are anonymous. So, it is the worst of centralization & decentralization combined There is no PoS, as it is pure PoA. Nothing is at stake Block production is controlled by a mere 13 keys, contrary to the 130 number that is thrown around. Not that any of that matters within a permissioned context Their smart contract approval proccess rules specifically block "political-donations", so much for credible neutrality! & pooled-funds apps, so much for almost all DeFi use cases! These are exactly the types of use-cases a privacy chain should be built for. Making NIGHT utterly useless today They promised this would be removed weeks after release; now, over 6 months later, it is still the case! We cannot trust the promises that come from this team. Putting all of their other promises of future decentralization further into doubt Closed-source deception: Night is supposed to be open-source, as is repeated throughout their documentation & by its advocates Along with the MiCA white paper, which says "The codebase implementing the Midnight network is open-source and is published" This all happened only three days ago, on September 25th. The code validators run was swapped out for a closed-source variant whose hash does not match any of the available public repositories! Something I am sure the European regulators would love to also be informed about when something so foundational changes overnight without anyone outside of the network's private operators being informed For any regulators reading along, this is why decentralization matters! That means the network is currently running closed-source code; there are no ifs or buts about it Extractive economics: The two founding companies that control the majority of supply are: Midnight Foundation, which is based in the Cayman Islands. It controls 8.4B NIGHT, 35% of the total supply! It has full discretion over its tokens. The white paper warns it may even act against other holders' interests! The second organization is Midnight TGE Ltd, based in the British Virgin Islands & it controls 3.66B NIGHT, 15.25% of the total supply! Tokens are for "commercial partnerships intended to provide liquidity" There is no lock on the supply of these two founding entities, like none at all. Not on the protocol, or through legal guarantees. They can literally sell it all or give it all away overnight if they wanted to. Which goes completely against the good practices established by this industry over the last few years Conclusion: This only scratches the surface of the horrible things we found when we dove deeper into NIGHT. We cannot in good conscience say this is a "good" project Quite the opposite is true; this is a horrible crypto project, as it sullies crypto's already tainted reputation The amount of nonsense, vaporware & massive risk this represents for innocent users & investors is unacceptable We might agree with the need for a DeFi-capable chain with strong privacy guarantees, but NIGHT cannot possibly be it Starting from such a corrupt, dishonest, extractive & totally centralized foundation is not the way we effect real positive change in the world In this proccess of deep research, we uncover the devils hiding in plain sight, sorting the wheat from the chaff. People who make billions by misleading & lying to innocent people must be held accountable They cannot hide when we dig into the code, as open-source code is the best antidote to their lies. That is how the truth sets us all free! 🔥