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 you know that I've been working in the shadows on something that has just come out. I've 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 LaTeX here alongside all the build scripts and instructions on how to do it. I actually messed up on the first release; I forgot to include the Creative Commons license in the file itself. I have it in the repo, but I'm just so used to working with repos.
Anyway, 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 explain what Midnight is in relation to a taxonomy that allows you to understand how zero-knowledge proofs work in general.
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 framework 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 begin with the first layer, then the second, third, and so forth, covering arithmetization and all these elements before delving into the actual proof systems. After going through all seven layers, it discusses one layer up, including ZEXE, which is what Aleo uses, and Kichina, which is what Midnight uses. This provides a broader understanding of private smart contracts in general.
I also explore some new developments in the ecosystem, like ZKVMs. I cover all the different types of ZKVMs, our Stark to Snark pipelines, and I even have a dedicated chapter on Midnight. It's only about 10 pages, but it gives a solid understanding of what Midnight is. I conclude with the market landscape and some open questions within the ZK landscape.
This is the first edition, and it includes a nice glossary. I included lots of interesting content and tried hard to make this book as accessible as possible. There's also a very dense bibliography, so if you're curious about additional reading or seminal papers in the ZK space, you can find all the major research papers listed. You’ll have over 50 interesting resources to explore.
I'm pretty proud of it. It took a long time to consolidate my thoughts, and it's only 337 pages, so you can read it over the weekend to gain 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 attribute it to me since I'm the author. The link to download it from the GitHub repo is right there, and I’ll also share it throughout the Midnight Discord and other places. You should be able to download the PDF straight from GitHub.
This is the first edition, version 1.0.1, so it's very early days. I’ll keep adding and changing it as more developments arise. As more features in Midnight get launched, I’ll update 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 it works. I’ve already covered Night Stream a 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, allowing you to dissect any zero-knowledge system. So, this is just 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.
So, please 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!
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