Midnight and Spacecoin partner to secure online conversations against censorship, surveillance, and privacy threats

Spacecoin, the world's first decentralized satellite internet network, today announced a partnership with the Midnight Foundation to explore the development of a private peer-to-peer messaging application built on decentralized satellite infrastructure and enhanced with zero-knowledge proof technology.

The collaboration will investigate how programmable, cryptographic privacy can be applied to messaging systems operating beyond traditional internet infrastructure, eliminating both content surveillance and metadata collection while reducing reliance on centralized networks that can be monitored, censored, or shut down.

Recent internet blackouts in Uganda, where a nationwide shutdown disrupted the general election, and in Iran, where a near-total shutdown has been used to mask a violent crackdown on protests, underscore the urgency of building communications infrastructure that protects both privacy and availability.

Even when networks remain online, governments are exerting growing pressure over how private communications are secured. Authorities from the UK to Australia are demanding encryption backdoors and expanded access to user data, forcing centralized platforms to choose between user privacy and market access. In systems controlled by a small number of companies, political and regulatory pressure becomes a powerful mechanism for surveillance and censorship — without requiring shutdowns at all.

Even the most widely used encrypted messaging services continue to expose critical privacy gaps. WhatsApp collects extensive metadata on more than three billion users, which despite end-to-end encryption for content, exposes who you talk to, when, and how often. Telegram is not encrypted by default and cooperates with government data requests. Signal requires phone numbers, creating linkability between identity and usage patterns. As former NSA General Counsel Stewart Baker observed, “Metadata absolutely tells you everything about somebody’s life. If you have enough metadata, you don’t really need content.”

The partnership explores a complete privacy stack addressing every level of communication. Spacecoin's low-Earth orbit small satellites deliver permissionless internet connectivity with minimal reliance on terrestrial infrastructure. The Spacecoin blockchain protocol coordinates the satellite network through smart contracts, eliminating centralized control points so no single entity can shut down or compromise the system. Midnight enables selective disclosure on-chain through zero-knowledge proofs, allowing users to prove they are authorized to communicate without revealing identity, location, or communication patterns, while also protecting transaction metadata, which has until now been an afterthought for other privacy-focused blockchains.

The proposed peer-to-peer messaging platform would combine these layers to deliver communications that are truly end-to-end encrypted with no server intermediaries, censorship-resistant at the infrastructure level, and geographically resilient, working anywhere with satellite coverage even when terrestrial networks are compromised.

This architecture aims to ensure resilience against shutdowns, backdoors, and other privacy threats—there will be no central servers to compromise, no phone numbers to link to identities, and the Spacecoin blockchain protocol will eliminate centralized control points so no single entity can shut down or compromise the system. By combining Spacecoin's low-Earth orbit small satellites with Midnight's privacy-enhancing infrastructure, users will be able to prove they are authorized to communicate without revealing their identity, location, or communication patterns, creating infrastructure that is verifiably private via open-source, auditable cryptography without trust assumptions.

"Privacy is not a feature or a privilege — it is a fundamental human right. To protect this right, we need to think beyond the application layer. If the underlying infrastructure itself is exploitable, true privacy does not exist," said Fahmi Syed, President of the Midnight Foundation. "Midnight was designed to ensure people can verify and participate in digital systems without exposing who they are, where they are, or how they communicate. Partnering with Spacecoin allows us to explore what privacy looks like when it is protected end to end—from cryptography to connectivity—so people can engage online with confidence and peace of mind."

While the initial focus is on private messaging, the combined infrastructure could support a wide range of privacy-critical applications, from private financial transactions over satellite networks to confidential healthcare communications in remote regions, secure coordination for journalists and activists, anonymous commerce in restrictive regulatory environments, and decentralized social networks with user-controlled data.

"Private messaging solves one problem. But the infrastructure we're exploring to build together solves many," said Tae Oh, Founder of Spacecoin. "Once you can communicate privately over our satellite network, you can transact and access information privately. The same stack that protects a message protects a financial transaction or a medical consultation. The real opportunity here is privacy as infrastructure, not as a feature."