My role at the Midnight Foundation ends this month. The department I sat in will be wound down by end of month. I've been operating in the shadows, making sure you see a block every 6 seconds. For the past several months I've been full-time on protocol operations. Not my team, not my title. But an open source protocol is not just developers. It is the operators, and the network of nodes expressing that technology correctly, block after block. Someone had to hold that. So I did. Throughout our Testnet milestones I grew our operator community to ~200 SPOs. We've done incredible things together including that one time we were migrating to Testnet-02 env but I had to open up my laptop on the hackathon floor and figure out we had a genesis param mismatch which required a hot fix. But you know what? I loved it. I like unexpected, the fringe end of uncertainty, and reeling chaos. Midnight has been live only a few months and going to novel and new evolutions for the forceable future. I'm glad to have been apart of realizing this network's existence. Thirteen node operators through mainnet go-live. Eleven operator companies, roughly 50 nodes, three environments. Midnight has stayed live. Before that, I founded the Midnight developer community and created our Discord. I led the first alpha cohorts, around 700 developers back on devnet-0. Some of those people are Midnight ambassadors now. Some have won hackathons. Some started their career in crypto or engineering in that cohort. That is the part I am proudest of, and it isn't close. I got into this industry to fix systems. I don't agree with the qualified order of value. When I first heard about Midnight, honestly, it sounded cool. Then I actually sat with the vision and liked it: selective disclosure, the ability to choose how much of yourself you reveal. There are real commercial reasons that matters. But at heart, privacy is what freedom requires. This ending was devastating and unexpected. Thank you to the community for the support and the inspiration, and to the partners I onboarded and worked beside to get Midnight live and keep it there. Now I'm looking for my next role. My portfolio is below with far more detail. If you think I'd fit your team, or you know someone I should be talking to, please reach out. stevanlohja.github.io/stevan… And a repost does more than you think. #MidnightNetwork #Midnight #Cardano