We are excited to announce a partnership between Nillion and NEAR Protocol where Nillion is bringing its blind computation and blind storage solutions to NEAR Protocol.

As a user-friendly Layer 1 blockchain designed with speed and scalability as its goals, this integration will combine NEAR’s high performance with Nillion’s advanced privacy tools, further expanding the innovative design space for more than 600 projects in the NEAR ecosystem.

NEAR Protocol: Built for Speed ​​and Simplicity

As a high-performance Layer 1, NEAR stands out from the competition in blockchain with three key features:

  • Nightshade Sharding: As NEAR’s solution to scalability and cross-chain composability, NEAR’s unique sharding design increases transaction throughput and reduces latency, making it ideal for high-performance applications.

  • WebAssembly Runtime: NEAR’s Wasm-based VM supports smart contracts in Rust and AssemblyScript, appealing to developers from a variety of backgrounds.

  • Human-readable account identifiers: NEAR makes account names more intuitive by replacing lengthy crypto addresses with human-readable account names, further improving user experience and accessibility.

These features of NEAR can attract more developers, entrepreneurs and creative people to join its ecosystem and jointly build a prosperous ecosystem. Currently, the NEAR ecosystem has more than 600 applications.

Nillion and NEAR: Combining privacy and performance

Through this collaboration, Nillion’s blind computing capabilities will be combined with NEAR’s efficient transaction processing. This integration will unlock multiple features and bring a more efficient and private development experience:

  • Modular Data Privacy: Nillion’s privacy features are seamlessly integrated with NEAR, allowing data storage and computing operations to be performed modularly in the Nillion network while transparently settled on the NEAR blockchain. This modularity will provide developers with greater flexibility in designing application architectures.

  • Private Data Management: Nillion further extends NEAR’s capabilities by providing private storage and computation for various types of data. This significantly broadens the design and development space for privacy-preserving applications in the NEAR ecosystem, enabling developers to build solutions previously unachievable due to privacy restrictions and attracting privacy-conscious users.

  • Privacy AI: Near is focused on the development of autonomous, user-owned AI, and Nillion’s privacy storage and computing capabilities will help NEAR further realize its vision and open up a broad space for innovative development of decentralized AI.

Free up more space for innovation

With this integration, Nillion will open up exciting new directions for privacy-preserving applications in the NEAR ecosystem, especially solutions around AI use cases, some of which we’ll cover below.

Privacy AI

  • Privacy Reasoning: Nillion enables secure reasoning of AI models, protecting the privacy of proprietary machine learning (ML) models and users who provide sensitive inputs, initially focusing on privacy models such as regression, time series prediction, or classification.

  • Privacy Agents: With the rise of AI Agents, the need for privacy solutions has become critical. Support for intent classification allows users to use agents without revealing information about the original query or the actions taken by the agent based on that query.

  • Federated Learning: While federated learning mainly focuses on training models on decentralized datasets without centralizing the data, Nillion can improve privacy by ensuring the security of the aggregation process, ensuring that sensitive information generated during the training process (such as gradients) remains private.

  • Privacy Synthetic Data: During the GAN training process, Nillion can emerge as a solution to protect the privacy of the underlying data. Applying MPC to the training of GANs ensures that the data used in the training process is never exposed to other participants.

  • Privacy-Enhanced Retrieval Generation (RAG): Nillion can provide a novel privacy-preserving approach for information retrieval, facilitating quantum-safe static vector storage and semantic search evaluation without decryption.

Cross-chain privacy solutions

Interoperability is a point that NEAR places great emphasis on, and integrating Nillion will pave the way for privacy-preserving cross-chain applications and asset transfers.

A privacy-first community platform

Decentralized communities can benefit from the content and social graphs stored in Nillion. These data can be processed with privacy to recommend targeted and personalized content to users, thus combining the advantages of decentralized social networking and privacy protection. In addition, this solution can also promote the development of anonymous voting, privacy proposal submission, and secure financial management.

Secure Decentralized Finance (DeFi)

Nillion’s “blind computation” enables private order books, private lending reviews, and hidden liquidity pools, enhancing the security and privacy of NEAR’s growing DeFi ecosystem.

Privacy-preserving developer tools

Nillion’s “Blind Computation” can further enhance NEAR’s developer-friendly environment by providing privacy-centric tools and APIs that enable developers to easily integrate advanced privacy features into their applications without sacrificing NEAR’s ease of use and scalability.

Recently, NEAR founder Illia Polosukhin was a guest on the Blockworks podcast and shared the integration of NEAR and Nillion and the series of advantages it brings. Interested readers are welcome to click the link below to listen to the full content:

[NEAR founder shares NEAR and Nillion integration in podcast]

Explore the future of blind computing with NEAR

By combining NEAR’s high-performance infrastructure with Nillion’s advanced privacy features, we are creating a more friendly and innovative development environment that enables developers to easily build powerful privacy-preserving applications and scale according to actual needs.

We are excited to join NEAR in our mission to create a new open digital economy ecosystem where people can control their assets and data.

For more information about NEAR Protocol, visit their official website or Twitter.

Finally, feel free to follow Nillion on Twitter or join our Discord community to get more updates from Nillion at any time.