#nil $NIL @Nillion
Spent a few hours on Nillion and the thing I keep coming back to is boring: where does the sensitive stuff actually live?
Every AI agent onchain demo I've seen hand-waves this. The agent needs a strategy, some keys, maybe user data. Put that on a public chain and anyone can read it. Put it on a normal server and you've rebuilt the thing we all said we were leaving.
Encryption doesn't fully fix it either. You lock the data up, then you have to unlock it to do anything useful with it. That unlock moment is where most leaks happen.
Nillion's pitch is computing on the data while it stays encrypted, which they call blind computation. The nodes do the work without ever seeing the inputs. And it's a network anyone can join, not a vendor you have to trust.
Privacy coins in 2017 were mostly about hiding transfers. This feels like a different question: what can you build if nobody has to see the data at all?
Where I'm still unsure: encrypted compute costs more and runs slower than plaintext. If devs won't pay that overhead, it stays a nice idea. And "private by design" is a hard sell to users who only care that things work.
Still, I'd rather track a team solving the awkward plumbing than another agent narrative with no answer for where its secrets go.
Spent a few hours on Nillion and the thing I keep coming back to is boring: where does the sensitive stuff actually live?
Every AI agent onchain demo I've seen hand-waves this. The agent needs a strategy, some keys, maybe user data. Put that on a public chain and anyone can read it. Put it on a normal server and you've rebuilt the thing we all said we were leaving.
Encryption doesn't fully fix it either. You lock the data up, then you have to unlock it to do anything useful with it. That unlock moment is where most leaks happen.
Nillion's pitch is computing on the data while it stays encrypted, which they call blind computation. The nodes do the work without ever seeing the inputs. And it's a network anyone can join, not a vendor you have to trust.
Privacy coins in 2017 were mostly about hiding transfers. This feels like a different question: what can you build if nobody has to see the data at all?
Where I'm still unsure: encrypted compute costs more and runs slower than plaintext. If devs won't pay that overhead, it stays a nice idea. And "private by design" is a hard sell to users who only care that things work.
Still, I'd rather track a team solving the awkward plumbing than another agent narrative with no answer for where its secrets go.