If Your Boss Paid You in Stablecoins, Everyone Could See Your Salary

Here is a thought experiment Fahmi Syed gave me that I have not been able to shake. Imagine your employer pays you in stablecoins, on a public blockchain. The first thing you would do, he argues, is look up the company wallet to check there is enough money to pay you next month. The second thing you would do is check every other wallet your boss paid on the same day, build a little distribution curve, and discover exactly where you sit on it. Suddenly all the warm words about how much you are valued are testable, and you might not like the answer.

Syed is the President of the Midnight Foundation, and that example is the most human explanation I have heard of why blockchain has a privacy problem, and why solving it is the missing piece that could take stablecoin payments mainstream. We sat down at Money 20/20 Europe, where Midnight’s pitch stood out precisely because it was so quiet in a hall full of shouting.

Privacy as the missing “S”

Syed’s central metaphor is worth understanding because it reframes privacy from a niche crypto obsession into a basic requirement for commerce. The early internet ran on HTTP, he noted, but what truly unlocked it, what made Amazon and online shopping and the whole digital economy possible, was HTTPS. That little “S” added the security and confidentiality that let people transact. Blockchain, he argues, is still missing its “S.”

Midnight aims to be that “S,” or part of it. It is a permissionless, private network: anyone can build on it without asking permission, like Bitcoin or Ethereum, but it lets developers create private domains and selectively disclose information. Built as a partner chain to Cardano by the engineering firm Input Output, it uses zero-knowledge proofs to protect data while keeping compliance possible. Syed frames the entire thing as freedom of choice, with a deliberately mundane example: when a café’s Wi-Fi asks for your email, you choose, share it and risk the marketing, or decline and get no Wi-Fi. Midnight gives applications and corporations that same control over what they keep private and what they reveal.

A bank is tokenizing deposits on it, and that surprised even him

The proof that this is more than theory is the kind of partner Midnight is now attracting. Syed revealed that a UK-regulated bank is tokenizing its cash deposits on Midnight, with Bank of England approval, a development confirmed publicly as Monument Bank becoming the first UK bank to tokenize retail deposits on a public blockchain. He was candid about how unlikely that would have sounded recently.

“If you had asked me even two months ago whether we’d have a regulated bank with billions of dollars of assets working with us on Midnight, I would have said no. I would have said it was a year, maybe two years ahead of our time.”

It sits within a broader ecosystem of more than 100 partners, from two- and three-person developer outfits to large institutions. The mainnet went live in March 2026, and Syed said its fullest feature set, the part that really unlocks those partners, was targeted for the end of June (a roadmap he was clearly excited about, though as with any roadmap, worth watching rather than banking on). The applications he is most interested in are the privacy-preserving versions of what already works in crypto: private decentralized exchanges, private prediction markets, private collateral, places where, as he noted, today’s transparent platforms expose every position you hold.

Why stablecoin payments need this

This is where the salary thought experiment pays off. Regulation like the US GENIUS Act is opening stablecoins up for real payments, and giants like Visa and Mastercard are adopting blockchain. But, Syed argues, you simply cannot run payroll or corporate payments on a fully public ledger, for exactly the reason his example shows: total transparency exposes things that must stay confidential, salaries, supplier prices, reserves. Midnight positions itself as the middleware that protects those confidential elements, so stablecoin payments can happen the way they do today, privately, while still running on blockchain. Not a solution to everything, he stressed, but the privacy layer that makes the rest viable. It is the same conclusion Qivalis’s Marieke Flament reached from the issuer side, on a panel the two of them shared: privacy is the precondition for stablecoin payments going mainstream.

The philosophy of being invisible

What made Syed memorable was his refusal to play the Money 20/20 game of being as loud as possible. His definition of success is that you see less of him and more of his partners. “Good technology is invisible,” he said, comparing Midnight to the Uber app: you open it, the driver comes, you arrive, and you never think about the GPS calls, the database calls, the payment processing humming underneath. He wants Midnight to sit in the background like that, privacy embedded in the stack and consumed quietly through its design.

That philosophy shapes how he thinks about the institutions arriving now. He is wary of hype cycles (“very short-lived”) and of the trap that has killed so many blockchains: obsessing over the token instead of building utility. He pointed to a coming convergence he calls “web 2.5,” where traditional firms use blockchain as a neutral truth layer, imagine J.P. Morgan’s private chain needing to connect securely to Citi’s or Goldman’s, with Midnight providing the confidential bridge. Crucially, he said, different partners need different privacy, so the technology moulds itself to each use case rather than forcing one definition on everyone. The thread tying it all together is a simple equation he returned to twice: privacy is not about hiding, it is about choice, and choice is freedom.

Why this is important for the Dutch and European reader

For European businesses and individuals weighing whether tokenized money is something to fear, Syed’s framing is clarifying. The objection that “blockchain is too transparent” is not a reason to stay away; it is a problem with a solution, and that solution is arriving. As MiCA-era stablecoins and tokenized deposits move from conference panels into payroll and corporate treasuries, the privacy layer stops being optional. No European company is going to run salaries on a ledger its employees can audit against each other.

The deeper point is about who shapes this technology as the institutions pour in. Syed’s worry is that the hard-won innovations of the last fifteen years get absorbed and flattened by big players chasing the token rather than the utility. His answer, build privacy as invisible, consumable infrastructure that serves everyone from a bedroom developer to a central-bank-approved bank, is a bet that the future of blockchain is not louder, but quieter. For a region that prizes both innovation and the right to privacy, that is a future worth paying attention to.

This interview was recorded live at Money 20/20 Europe 2026 at the Amsterdam RAI. For more conversations on the future of money and privacy, watch the full Cryptofocus series.