Author: Frank, PANews
Blockchain technology has undergone several major changes, bringing new possibilities to the world. Bitcoin brought cryptocurrency, making peer-to-peer payments possible. Ethereum completed the creation of smart contracts, allowing more applications to be realized through blockchain technology. Although technology continues to move forward, the world is not perfect. Traditional Web2 companies can access and decrypt user data at any time, and user privacy and data seem to be completely transparent. In the world of Web3, transaction information and data are open in real time, which enhances the trust of blockchain but sacrifices more privacy-sensitive users.
"Blind computing" seems to provide a new solution that strengthens privacy protection without sacrificing the trust of the network. Some people believe that "blind computing" may open a new era of blockchain technology.
“Blind computing” combines privacy and decentralization
"Blind computing" is the integrated result of multiple technologies, including multi-party computing (MPC), homomorphic encryption, and other privacy-enhancing technologies (PET). Although the academic community has long had concepts about similar technologies such as private quantum computing and decentralized identity, how to effectively combine these technologies to form a practical privacy protection solution has always been a difficult problem in the industry.
Nillion is a practitioner in the field of "blind computing". Founded in 2022, Nillion is a network of multiple computers that mainly provides new privacy protection solutions through "blind computing" technology. In the Nillion network, participating computers are called nodes. These nodes are able to transmit, store and process data without "seeing" the data. The nodes execute programs blindly, ignoring input data or resulting output. For example, a node can sign a transaction on behalf of a user without accessing the user's private key. Each node obtains the transaction and a key called a "share", which contains no information. However, by running the encryption protocol, the nodes are able to jointly sign the transaction without reconstructing the key. This running process is the process of blind computing.
Nillion's founding team is luxurious. The chief strategy officer is Andrew Masanto, co-founder of Hedera Hashgraph, the chief business officer is Slava Rubin, the founder of the American crowdfunding website Indiegogo, and the general counsel is Lindsay Danas Cohen, the former deputy general counsel for products at Coinbase.
In December 2022, Nillion completed a US$20 million financing round, led by Distributed Global, with participation from AU21, Big Brain Holdings, Chapter One, GSR, HashKey, OP Crypto and SALT Fund.
“Blind computing” may change the data landscape of multiple industries
In March 2024, Andrew Masanto, co-founder of Nillion, gave a speech at Harvard University, in which he focused on the privacy leakage risks that come with the rapid development of artificial intelligence. Andrew Masanto believes that while artificial intelligence provides convenience for people's work and life, it requires users to disclose more high-value data (such as transaction information, passwords, identities, business secrets, etc.) to artificial intelligence. Once this data is exposed to a centralized large company, it will bring huge social risks.
Through the "blind computing" technology, Nillion hopes to change the data world that is not limited to the encryption field. In the Web2 platform, companies can choose to decrypt and access user data. Even if a review mechanism is established, corporate data leaks still occur frequently. There are even many companies that deliberately sell user data for profit. In this case, users cannot protect their personal data, let alone profit from it. In Nillion's solution, blind computing can ensure that the data remains encrypted throughout the entire processing process, and even the nodes involved in the calculation cannot see the data itself. In this way, users are provided with true end-to-end privacy protection, which solves the problem of lack of privacy in the use of data by traditional encryption methods.
In addition, "blind computing" is also a new solution for handling sensitive data between enterprises. At present, although many enterprises have begun to pay attention to the advantages of blockchain technology, they still face the risk of leakage when handling sensitive data. Such as finance, medical and other fields. Blind computing provides a way to safely handle sensitive data. Enterprises can safely use blockchain technology without exposing customer privacy. By ensuring that data remains encrypted even during use, "blind computing" eliminates enterprises' concerns about data leakage and removes privacy barriers for enterprises to adopt encryption technology.
Can “blind computing” bring new user growth to Web3?
In the Web3 field, although decentralization guarantees data security, it can hardly achieve the effect of privacy protection due to the openness and transparency of on-chain data. Nillion pointed out that "current encryption technology not only fails to disperse private data, but makes it public. This is a major setback, greatly reducing the design space and use cases that web3 can solve, because only a few applications benefit from making all data public." Blind computing introduces private computing capabilities to Web3, allowing users to process sensitive data on the chain without having to make it public, thereby expanding the design space of blockchain applications. It makes privacy protection and decentralization possible at the same time, and they are no longer mutually exclusive. For users with higher privacy requirements, "blind computing" provides a new solution to enter the Web3 world.
In August this year, Nillion launched the Nillion Verifier program. The verifier is the node operator of the blockchain network, and maintains the stability of the network through multiple nodes. Nillion officials said that they would provide economic incentives to early verifiers. At present, Nillion has not conducted TGE, and the specific airdrop policy has not been announced. As of September 24, the number of Nillion verifiers was 75,841, the total secrets were challenged 37.33 million times, and the total amount of protected data was 513GB. On September 13, Nillion's privacy function was integrated with NEAR, and more than 750 NEAR ecological projects can access "blind computing". In addition, well-known encryption projects such as Aptos, Bitcash, and Arbitrum have also completed integration with Nillion.
Nillion has established partnerships in multiple fields, including AI, healthcare, DeFi, infrastructure, wallets, DAOs, identity verification, games, etc. For example, in the field of AI, it has established cooperation with projects such as Ritual, Rainfall, Skillful AI, Nuklai, Virtuals, io.net, Capx, Dwinity, Brainstems, etc., while in the field of healthcare, Nillion has accumulated multiple partners such as Agerate, Naitur, MonadicDNA, etc.
Although "blind computing" is still in its early stages of development, as the industry develops, privacy protection issues and research are gradually heating up. Nillion expressed his vision in his official document: "We envision a world where digital services can be accessed without giving up personal data or trusting anyone. We believe that these services should not have any conditions attached." If one day, "blind computing" can become a common term in the crypto world and even the Web2 world like "smart contracts", then it may open up a whole new world for the crypto field.