I’m pretty sure that millennials and boomers are familiar with the name Mark Zuckerberg.

“Mark who? Zuckerberg? Oh! The Facebook guy! Yeah, I know him... Great stuff he did with Facebook.”

On the other hand, Gen Z and Gen Alpha might have different tastes when the name Mark is mentioned.

For one, they might think of him as the alien-looking, baby-faced dude who has been in hot water for almost half-a-decade for selling user data.

Mark also owns one of the largest social messaging platforms in the world, WhatsApp, which promises end-to-end encryption of user data — and ummm… that’s where the issue lies.

Why should we believe Mark’s E2E encryption? After all, he has had one too many court cases for breaching users' trust with respect to data.

How does Mark make money with WhatsApp? He didn’t build it; he bought it for a really hefty sum.

How can we even believe that data is safe in the hands of centralized off-chain applications, given the fact that just one entity controls the ropes?

Dang Mark! Who are you…. and what do you do with our data?

These questions have me worried, and if you are like me and have a penchant for asking for feet pics from exes or have shared confidential information across encrypted messaging apps, then you should be scared, too!

If you’re a boomer or millennial reading this and thinking, “Well, I don’t care so much about Mark,” well, here’s John McAfee also warning about the downsides of centralized off-chain encryption platforms.  

The bottom line here is that the world needs safer data infrastructure, decentralized privacy in data computation, and robust data security.

If centralized encryption is basically useless, what other solutions do we have? What else can we look up to for privacy of high-value data (HVD)?

Wait a minute? I was just talking about data, but I ended up mentioning high-value data?

Well, you see, high-value data is just regular data’s final boss — it’s any form of data that you or an organization holds, dear!

For example, your personal information or receipts that expose that you’ve been cheating on your girlfriend or Coca-Cola’s secret ingredient.

Don’t just take it from me: this is how the chief scientist of Nillion describes High-Value Data:

"High-value data (HVD) refers to data that is extremely valuable to an organization or individual due to its potential to significantly impact everyone’s lives – from AI to trading information (leverage and limit orders) to identity to healthcare data to access control to decentralized social to passwords to biometrics — high-value data is woven into the infrastructure of our society."

Now that we have established the problem and what HVD is, this is the part where we introduce you to the solution, Nillion.

What is Nillion?

Nillion is redesigning the way we store and secure high-value data on-chain by applying Satoshi's original concept for decentralized transactions — but this time, they're using it for data.

Decentralizing transactions requires using an efficient spread network of computers connected with each other for computing and verifying transactions. This is often referred to as a peer-to-peer [P2P] node network.

Nillion operates in the same manner, storing HVDs on a decentralized P2P network of nodes — but there’s a slight twist to the tale, and that twist basically changes everything.

Usually, to perform computations on encrypted data, it first needs to be decrypted and then re-encrypted — a process that is cumbersome, time-consuming, inefficient, and exposes the data to attacks.

Data stored on Nillion allows for computations to be executed on the stored encrypted data without decrypting it, adding an extra layer of safety in the core.

Nillion achieves this through a process called multi-party computation (MPC). MPC is an aspect of privacy-enhancing technologies (PETs) that ensures data inputs remain private by allowing computation over inputs from multiple parties.

How does Nillion apply this?

Nillion’s multi-party computation (MPC) protocol

Nillion’s execution model of the MPC is why it’s dubbed “The Blind Computer.”

It opens the door to a number of possibilities, such as discreetly facilitating the evaluation of a sum of products of hidden inputs, enhancing efficient pre-processing, accelerating asynchronous computation, and ensuring security against adversaries with unlimited computing resources and time.

Nillion splits its MPC protocol workflow into two phases:

• Pre-processing to create shares: This is basically the preparation stage where the network prepares to handle HDV in a non-revealing manner.
• Non-interactive computation on masked factors: This stage is where the actual computation on the HDV occurs (input, evaluation, and output stages) without decrypting or revealing the data. It is also termed the calculation stage.

There are more parts to Nillion than meets the eye, some of which are highly technical. But one of the most important things to note is that all of these parts form the Nillion network, which is an environment for developers to build apps leveraging Nillion’s MPC infrastructure.

Nillion developed a language called “Nada” for developers to build applications on the network. Devs can write programs in Nada, compile the programs with the Nada compiler, upload programs, store HVD, and run programs to perform blind computation on HVDs on the Nillion network.

So, why is Nillion important?

We’ve already established that the traditional method of performing computation on encrypted data (decrypt-compute-re-encrypt) is a disaster in waiting. The model is unsafe and exposes HVD to vulnerabilities, while Nillion just does it better through PETs (MPC).

But, what exactly is the importance is this upgrade?

Until now, data stored on-chain (decentralized ledgers) were public — inherently anti-privacy — and did not allow for applications that are privacy-focused to be built on-chain without issues. This has limited the range of applications that can exist in the on-chain world, reducing the scope for developers.

Solutions to this issue, like fully homomorphic encryption (FHE), have led back to centralized systems or boxed architecture, which defeats the ultimate purpose of decentralization.

This is why Nillion’s approach is important. It serves as the base architecture to support a lot of use cases on-chain, offering a truly decentralized, private, and secure environment for data computation.

In the next paragraphs, we will explore how Nillion’s design could onboard the next generation of users on-chain.

Onboarding the next ‘Nillion’ users

Satoshi’s vision for a borderless, transparent, censorship-resistant, and reliable financial infrastructure is the reason why crypto exists today.

In fact, this is what attracted the first wave of users into the crypto arena. dApps created new financial possibilities on-chain, thanks to smart contracts.

Now, decentralizing the way we store, send, and receive data in a more private and secure manner will undoubtedly unlock the next troupe of users to join the on-chain economy. How?

Nillion is set to allow apps that are built on the backs of private data to exist on-chain. This will bring a new set of users — particularly those who were previously averse to crypto because of its public nature, yet valued their privacy — on-chain.  

Consider the recent conflict between Pavel Durov and the French government as an example. Social messaging apps operating in centralized, off-chain environments are vulnerable to government censorship.

If an on-chain version of Telegram existed on Nillion, it could leverage its decentralized MPC infrastructure to secure user data and remain fully immune to government interference.

This is a major difference to social apps on-chain. Several other sectors of the crypto industry can also benefit from private data infrastructure, culminating in the onboarding of a large number of users.

Another area where Nillion significantly improves things is in decentralized artificial intelligence (AI).

While the idea of using on-chain technology to decentralize AI systems and eliminate concerns over centralized AI is appealing, it remains unrealistic if AI infrastructure is built on public ledgers.

The core issue lies in data, which is the foundation of AI. Users cannot be confident that AI models aren’t exploiting their data without oversight.

In this context, privacy infrastructure will enhance the usability of decentralized AI applications on-chain, giving users confidence in their interactions with these AI tools and models.

Essentially, it fosters trust between AI apps and end users by guaranteeing privacy, ensuring that users don’t have to worry about their data being harvested or sold in a Zuckerberg-esque manner.

The same goes for organizations with sensitive data (HVD). With private infrastructure like Nillion’s supporting AI tools, they can use AI without worrying about leaks that could put their operations at risk.

It’s not just about following standard privacy policies buried at the bottom of a website, businesses need real privacy built into the core of the technology that they’re using.

This way, they can deliver better services while knowing their data. Alongside, their users’ data is truly protected from the ground up.

With all of this being said, it’s important to look at where Nillion is currently at with projects being built on the network and the progress that it is making towards the mainnet.

Projects building on Nillion  

Nillion’s value offering is pretty clear, and this is visible from the number of projects that are building on Nillion or integrating its blind computer architecture that fosters privacy-focused development on its platform.

For example, in the AI sector, Nillion has collaborated with Ritual to create a decentralized blind AI inference. The partnership will allow Nillion’s blind computation technology to provide backend support for private model inference and storage on the Ritual network.

In the same sector, Nillion has aligned with Aloha, which is building an AI-powered dating app. Nillion’s blind computing will allow users who sign up on Aloha to be assured of infrastructure-based privacy for their personal data.

Outside of AI, projects like Salt Sovereignty — which is building a marketplace where wealth managers can compete for bespoke portfolio management opportunities — and Monadic DNA — which is transforming personal genomics with privacy-first DNA analysis to give users control over their genetic information —  are also leveraging Nillion’s blind compute to ensure a privacy-first approach to their builds.

On the ecosystem level, Nillion has partnered with network chains such as Aptos and Arbitrum to provide access to blind compute to apps natively built on both networks.

Quite a number of projects are also being developed natively on the Nillion network utilizing the Nada language and are getting ready to be deployed on the testnet.

At the moment, Nillion’s verifier program is live and anyone can participate (emphasis is being laid on early participation).

The program will allow users to contribute to the network by either uploading secrets (HVD)  to the network or running a verifier. The project has also announced that there will be economic incentives for performing any of these tasks.

Conclusion

The list of potential use cases that the Nillion network can unlock through its own implementation of MPC is too long to mention exhaustively in this article. We are talking about everything ranging from private DEXs to private perps and dark pools.

The cool thing about privacy is that it aligns with the anonymity nature of this space, allowing users to operate without the fear of being doxxed against their will.

In my opinion, crypto is on the fringes of another Satoshi-level breakthrough if Nillion works. This could fundamentally change the game forever — allowing an on-chain environment to be the go-to for progressive sectors like AI, social messaging, and DePIN, amongst others.