Why DAOs on Midnight Are Better

You may be wondering: what is a DAO?

A DAO, or decentralized autonomous organization, is basically a company, community, or group that is run by code instead of traditional leadership structures. So instead of a board of directors or a CEO making all the calls, you have a group of people who can vote on proposals and help guide decisions.

That part is not new.

What is exciting is what happens when you bring DAOs to Midnight.

The problem with traditional DAOs

On a regular public chain like Ethereum, you can absolutely build a DAO and let people vote on proposals.

The problem is that those votes are usually visible on the public ledger.

That is great for transparency and verifying results, but not so great if privacy actually matters. In some situations, people may not want their votes, activity, or participation exposed for everyone to see.

That is where Midnight stands out.

Why Midnight changes the game

On Midnight, you can cast a vote, keep that vote private, and still verify that the vote was made correctly.

That is a huge difference.

You still get verifiable outcomes, but without exposing everything publicly. That opens the door for a very different kind of DAO design, especially for use cases where privacy matters.

You can already imagine how this could change the way DAOs work across different industries and communities.

Want to see how it works?

If you are curious about the implementation, check out the GitHub link below.

example-dao/
├── contract/                          # Smart contracts (Compact language)
│   ├── src/dao.compact                # DAO voting smart contract
│   ├── src/dao-witnesses.ts           # DAO witness

You can also check out the YouTube demo linked below and follow along with the walkthrough.

In the demo, I go over the installation process and some of the core differences between a typical DAO and a DAO built on Midnight. The cool part is that you can take this code, customize it, and use it as the foundation for your own DAO.

A quick look under the hood

One big difference is that instead of traditional Solidity-style functions, Midnight uses circuits. These circuits define the logic that gets proven with zero-knowledge proofs.

The proof server then helps generate a proof showing that the transaction followed the contract rules, without exposing the private data behind it.

That means you can verify that something was done correctly without putting all the sensitive details out in public.

What about the data?

So how is that data handled?

Before it ever leaves your machine, it gets hashed. That means the information is already being transformed into something cryptographic before it reaches the proof server. That adds another layer of security to the overall flow.

Why this matters

This is really just the beginning.

We already see DAOs shaping governance, communities, and digital coordination. But privacy-first infrastructure like Midnight could help take DAOs into areas where privacy is not optional.

Think about things like:

• health-related governance
• personal finance
• private organizations
• sensitive voting systems

That is where this starts to feel a lot bigger than just another DAO demo.

Final thoughts

This is where things get exciting blockchain can now start stepping in these more regulated business sectors.Midnight helps with that by puting privacy first.

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