It's time to submit your homework. The day before yesterday, it was announced that @0xMiden has joined. Today, let's briefly talk about what Miden is actually doing.

In the past few years, on-chain privacy solutions have been stuck in an awkward binary choice:
To have privacy, you need "full anonymity," making transactions, balances, and paths all invisible;
To be compliant, you can only have "full transparency," with all information exposed on the chain.

As a result, no one is satisfied:
Regulators naturally reject black boxes, and institutional funds are hesitant to enter;
Ordinary users, once on the chain, are essentially making their assets and actions public to the world.

Miden aims to solve this structural problem.

It no longer asks you "Do you want privacy?" but instead makes privacy a configurable parameter for each transaction.

In Miden, privacy is not a Yes / No choice but a spectrum:

☀ Public: Behavior, amounts, and participants are fully verifiable, suitable for auditing and compliance scenarios
☀ Selective: Key fields are verifiable, while other information is encrypted and disclosed only to specific parties
☀ Private: Only validity proofs are submitted, with assets and operation paths completely hidden

This is not a UX trick but a protocol-level capability. So why can Miden achieve "adjustable privacy per transaction"?

The core lies in its three-layer design.

First, privacy starts from the client side.
On Miden, transactions are first executed locally by the user and generate a STARK proof, then submitted to the chain. The chain only verifies "this transaction is correct," not "what exactly you did." Privacy is not an after-the-fact concealment but a native property.

Second, a hybrid model of Account + Notes.
Accounts can be public, and contract entry points are visible; the actual asset states and operational details are stored in optional private Notes. Privacy granularity is broken down to the "state level," rather than bundling the entire transaction.

Third, "semi-public" is not a compromise but born for compliance.
Regulators can verify legality, double-spending, and violations without needing to see balances, counterparties, or operational details. To outsiders, this information remains encrypted at all times. In other words, regulators see verifiable facts, not all raw data.

Because of this, Miden also unties two deadlocks.
For institutions, there's no need to jump directly into a "fully anonymous" world;
They can participate using public accounts and private operations, making privacy a tunable parameter rather than a risk.
For ordinary users, this is the first time on the same chain to decide privacy based on the scenario:
Transfers can be private, DeFi can be semi-public, and interactions with institutions can be fully transparent—without changing chains or wallets.

Returning to the core need, Miden turns privacy from a black-and-white issue into a tunable spectrum, allowing regulators and privacy to coexist within the protocol.

I believe this approach is necessary because only in this way can blockchain truly gain mainstream acceptance and grow this cake bigger.