Author: angelilu, Foresight News

According to the ancient Greek historian Herodotus, King Darius of Persia wanted to send a secret message to the Greek city-state of Athens. He selected a slave, shaved his head, and tattooed the secret message on his scalp. When the hair grew back, he sent the slave to Athens, and when he arrived at his destination, he shaved his head again so that the message could be read.

The beauty of this ancient story lies in the fact that sensitive information can be transmitted unnoticed and hidden under seemingly ordinary appearances. However, the challenges faced by the modern digital world are far more complex than those of ancient times. We not only need to hide the existence of information, but also need to process this information without revealing its content.

Therefore, Nillion proposed the concept of a decentralized "blind computing" network. Just like the information of "King Darius of Persia" was hidden under the hair of slaves, Nillion's technology allows high-value data to be stored, transmitted and processed in a fully encrypted state.

Blind computing usually refers to the general term for various technologies and methods for performing calculations without exposing input data. It is a comprehensive concept and the product of the integration and development of multiple cryptography and secure computing technologies, including blind signatures, secure multi-party computing, homomorphic encryption for direct calculation of encrypted data, trusted execution environment, zero-knowledge proof, etc.

What is Nillion

In short, Nillion can be understood as a decentralized secure computing network that aims to build a network for high-value data that is encrypted during storage, transmission, and computing, solving the current problem of "decryption - computing - re-encryption" when calculating encrypted data.

How to achieve

Nillion believes that the various privacy computing methods currently used in the crypto world, such as fully homomorphic encryption (FHE) and multi-party computing (MPC), each have their own unique advantages. There is no panacea for PET (privacy enhancing technology), and all solutions must be organized to achieve the best results. Nillion's goal is to aggregate all PETs and create a framework that allows new PETs to easily join its orchestration layer.

Nillion's ultimate goal is to create a development environment where developers do not need to know anything about PETs and can simply use unique data types, integers, and fixed-point arithmetic to build their privacy-enhancing applications. The compiler will choose the best combination of PETs to achieve the developer's vision.

To achieve this goal, the important components of Nillion include: Nada language compiler and Nillion Network.

Nada language compiler

Nillion provides developers with a Python-based MPC programming language called "Nada". Developers can use Nada to write programs and use the Nada compiler to compile these programs, and then upload the compiled programs to the Nillion Network for execution. With Nada, developers can manage the storage of high-value privacy data and perform blind calculations on this data, keeping the data encrypted throughout the entire processing process.

Nillion Network's two-layer network architecture

Nillion Network is currently in the testing phase, and users can create Nillion wallets through Keplr and Leap to connect to the Nillion test network. Although its test network-related event "Genesis Sprint" ended on July 6, Nillion said it will also launch the second phase of activities.

The main feature of Nillion Network is the adoption of a two-layer network architecture: consisting of the core network Petnet and the coordination layer NilChain to achieve functional separation and decentralized management.

  • NilChain is the coordination layer of the Nillion Network, which coordinates payments for blind computation and storage operations performed on the network.

  • Petnet leverages privacy-enhancing technologies (PETs), including Nillion, to protect distributed high-value data and perform blind computations.

Financing

Nillion completed a $20 million seed round of financing in December 2022 with a valuation of $180 million, led by Distributed Global, with participation from AU21, Big Brain Holdings, Chapter One, GSR Markets, HashKey, and others.

Nillion said that it completed its Series A private token financing this year with a valuation of $400 million, led by Hack VC, with participation from industry insiders such as Ansem and CL, as well as angel investors from Worldcoin and LayerZero, but the specific amount of financing was not disclosed. In addition, Nillion conducted a community public sale of 35 million NIL tokens (3.5% of the total supply) on the CoinList platform last month. The community round valuation is consistent with the valuation of the Series A private token financing, which is $400 million. In addition, Nillion's TGE is expected to be held in late August 2024.

Team lineup

Nillion's team lineup cannot be underestimated. Its development company Nilogy was incubated by CoinList's seed program. Nilogy's founder and CTO is Uber's founding engineer Conrad Whelan, its chief strategy officer is Hedera Hashgraph's founding CMO Andrew Masanto, its chief business officer is Slava Rubin, the founder of the US crowdfunding website Indiegogo, and its general counsel is Lindsay Danas Cohen, former deputy general counsel for products at Coinbase.

References:

https://docs.nillion.com/nillions-mpc-protocol

https://nillion.com/news/564/https://x.com/FHEOnchain/status/1805680294995149275

https://www.linkedin.com/company/nillionnetwork/people/