Author: CoinList, Translation: Golden Finance xiaozou
On June 20, 2024, Coinlist announced that it would launch the Nillion Network token NIL community public sale from June 20 to 27, with the Nillion community round financing valuation at US$400 million.
What is Nillion Network? Coinlist recently spoke with the Nillion team to discuss the current state of AI, the utility of NIL tokens, how Nillion can help builders develop new privacy applications (Nillion use cases), the Nillion team’s vision for the future, and more. Let’s explore it in depth with 6 questions.
1. What is Nillion?
Nillion is mankind's first Blind Computer.
Imagine a digital clone of you acting as your assistant — an AI that knows you better than you know yourself.
Sound exciting or scary? Either way, it’s coming. But it comes with one big problem: data.
That’s why developers from Uber, Coinbase, Consensys, Google, Nike, Polygon, Amazon, and Hedera spent 3 years building Nillion — the internet’s foundational layer for all private data.
Nillion has entered the data wars and is providing builders with a powerful set of privacy-enhancing technologies (PETs) to develop innovative applications such as personalized AI. This technology allows data to remain invisible (encrypted) while in use - a feature that is critical to the future of AI and other fields. Since then, Blind Computation has attracted the attention of more and more developers in AI, DeFi, custody, wallets, identity authentication, messaging and other fields.
2. What problems does Nillion solve? What opportunities does it provide?
Nillion's blind computation network opens a new paradigm for AI, keeping data and models confidential. Nillion creates a decentralized alternative for data that cannot be entrusted to companies like ChatGPT or the fully open-source Crypto x AI network.
But blind computing goes beyond AI. Nillion provides programmable private data capabilities not available in blockchain and other off-chain coprocessors, unlocking use cases far beyond AI. More than 35 companies have officially partnered with Nillion to build networks. Use cases include decentralized private dark pools, quantum secure messaging, healthcare analytics, crypto custody, identity authentication applications, and more.
How to achieve this vision? Orchestration Layer
In cryptography, there is no silver bullet that can do all the work. Different privacy-enhancing technologies (PETs), such as different kinds of multi-party computation (MPC), fully homomorphic encryption (FHF), and zero-knowledge proofs (ZKP), are designed to solve different use cases. Nillion combines these technologies together to create a foundational layer for encryption and blind computation.
3. How does Nillion solve issues related to scaling, especially as the network's users, transaction volume, and data storage continue to grow?
At the core of the Nillion network architecture is the concept of clusters. Each cluster consists of a different number of nodes, depending on the security, cost, and performance assumptions of the different clusters. Given that the computing network is not a blockchain driven by the concept of a global shared state, it can scale both vertically and horizontally - growth in storage or computing requirements can be absorbed by the entire cluster expanding its infrastructure or by joining additional node clusters.
Each cluster can be set up as a specific group of nodes with different hardware to handle different storage or computing requests, for example, by providing a large amount of storage to handle more secrets, or by providing specific hardware to accelerate specific types of computing. The cluster approach makes the network more flexible.
4. What role does the NIL token play in the network? How can it be used for transactions, governance, or other functions?
Security and coordination layer: Staking NIL obtains voting rights to ensure network security and decide who can become active validators (using the Proof of Stake mechanism).
Managing network resources: Users must pay NIL tokens to use the coordination layer or make blind computation requests, making network resource management possible.
Petnet Cluster Economics: Infrastructure providers joining the cluster to promote blind computing and providing secure storage of resources for the network will be rewarded with NIL tokens.
Network Governance: NIL holders can vote on on-chain proposals at the coordination layer or delegate their voting rights to others.
5. Have you noticed Nillion’s partnerships with projects in various verticals, such as AI, DeFi, healthcare, and messaging? What benefits have these partnerships unlocked? What other use cases are you particularly excited about?
（1）AI
Nillion unlocks private training and inference of AI models, creating a decentralized alternative for sensitive data that cannot be entrusted to transparent encryption networks such as OpenAI or Bittensor (TAO). Specifically, it unlocks the following benefits:
AI Reasoning: Nillion enables enterprises to access private cloud solutions such as ChatGPT without sacrificing privacy and security. At the same time, Nillion enables model sharing without leaking IP. Integration collaborations with companies such as Ritual or Nesa show that existing encrypted AI networks strongly want to integrate Nillion into their networks to meet private AI computing requests, positioning Nillion as a universal backend for private AI computing.
Data Sharing for Profit: The privacy of network data storage enables personal data to be shared for AI training and profit without sacrificing privacy. For example, Rainfall AI is a privacy-based private AI platform that enables users to profit from the real-time intelligence generated by their data. Such products enable businesses to better understand, attract and acquire customers.
AI Semantic Search: Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) technology is a key part of today’s AI landscape, enabling users to deliver relevant, customized content when running LLMs. Today, the process of semantically searching vector data requires trusting a company’s storage and processing of that vector data. Skillful is a company building a privacy-preserving RAG that stores vector data on the quantum-secure Nillion network while semantically searching that vector data without decrypting it.
AI synthetic data: Synthetic data can be generated while unlocking collaborative model training without leaking any private data. This process produces more data and higher accuracy. Mizu aims to leverage the Nillion network to facilitate the generation of private synthetic data.
Agents: Protocols like Virtuals Protocol aim to use the Nillion network to create personalized private agents. Through Nillion's sensitive personalized data, agents can be widely used without sacrificing user privacy.
(2) Decentralized computing
Nillion provides programmable data privacy features not available in blockchains and other off-chain coprocessors. The blind computation network greatly expands the design space of applications, such as:
DeFi: A decentralized, fully private order book with use cases across crypto and TradFi. For example, Choose K is building a decentralized private order book that supports fully private trade execution without the risk of front-running or bad MEV capture. Aphotic builds on Choose K’s order book to create a dark pool. These two builders build on top of each other’s solutions, embodying the benefits of creating an open public network.
Medical: A fully privacy-preserving approach for analyzing patterns in sensitive medical data. For example, patient data such as blood tests can be aggregated and processed in a fully compliant manner. Maya Health uses real-world evidence to inform clinical practice, drug development, and regulation to support safe, effective, and accessible psychedelic development practices. The company will use the Nillion platform for collaborative computing on secure, private user data.
DAOs: Blind computation enables DAOs to obtain privacy protection before and after voting, shielding users’ votes while generating voting result summaries. DecentDAO is building DAO tools and implementing such solutions.
(3) Secure storage
As a decentralized public network for private data, Nillion can support quantum-safe hidden storage of sensitive data. This security introduces new storage use cases for encryption:
Messaging: A decentralized, quantum-secure messaging system that ensures complete user privacy. Mailchain uses Nillion to enable users to store messages securely and privately while being able to detect and analyze potential scams.
Passwords: NilQuantum is developing a solution based on Nillion to store user passwords in a quantum-secure manner in a decentralized manner.
Documentation: Flux supports group messaging and cryptographic features such as token-gated access, in-app payments, and integration with other web3 services. Flux is built on the Nillion network and stores documents privately and securely on the network.
Custody: By leveraging privacy-enhancing technologies like MPC, the Nillion network also has the unique ability to enable users to store keys and execute transactions in the cluster of their choice. Companies like Ambient, Interstellar, or JLabs intend to develop custody solutions on the Nillion network. In addition, companies like Salt are using blind computation capabilities to create private trading strategies, positioning the network as a truly decentralized MPC custody network.
6. Personalized AI and privacy protection are all the rage in the crypto space these days. What do you think is the most interesting trend in personalized AI?
Since the emergence of generative AI in its current form, the industry has been moving more and more towards enabling these systems to benefit from personalization and customization. Large companies like OpenAI have launched custom GPTs while working to further iterate personalized chatbots, businesses have proprietary models developed in-house, and quite a few startups have been established, all dedicated to bringing personalized agents into people’s lives.
What they have in common is that personal sensitive data is at the core of training and running these personalized models.
Truly personalized AI requires all of your data. Every message you’ve ever sent, everything that makes you you. Ask yourself, would you hand over 10 years of your text conversations to an AI assistant (knowing that data would be owned by OpenAI)? Most people wouldn’t. 59% of consumers are uncomfortable using personalized AI due to data privacy issues. Personalized AI will not achieve mass adoption like the “next internet” without private data processing.
Apple’s recent release of Apple Intelligence and focus on running AI models locally on the device and running more computationally intensive models in a secure hardware environment is a step in the right direction. Their focus on private AI is a huge validation of Nillion’s view on the need for blind computation.
While Apple is taking the first logical steps towards using Trusted Execution Environments, Nillion is developing cryptography that eliminates trust by creating a truly decentralized privacy finality using techniques like Multi-Party Computation (MPC) and Homomorphic Encryption (HE).
Nillion — The internet’s foundational layer for all private data.
When Ethereum decentralized computing with smart contracts, the world changed. Now, Nillion is set to usher in the next wave of innovation by decentralizing trust in your most valuable data.
Let you, and only you, own your data - unlocking the mass adoption of personalized AI and countless other emerging technologies.
Nillion achieves this through blind computation.