If you’re like me, when you first encountered Nillion you probably thought..
Whoa! This looks amazing!…. but what exactly is it?
There is an abundance of resources available written for academics and researchers that explain aspects of the theory, but what about for people who aren’t mathematicians? How do the rest of us know it’s not just more hyped up nonsense hiding behind complex words in order to sell yet another token?
Here I document my journey submersing myself deep into Nillion, to soak up as much as I can and find out if it is worth my time to support.
What does Nillion say it is?
In a lecture given at Cambridge, Nillion’s Chief Scientist Dr. Miguel de Vega gives a presentation on Nillion called NMC and the Future of Decentralization. From the lecture, we can summarize a few points:
- The internet decentralizes the way information flows. If one node goes down, your data can still transfer.
- Decentralization by itself doesn’t solve data integrity problems. When two nodes are sending you different data claiming it is accurate, which one do you trust?
- Blockchain solves this by forcing everyone to store that same data for comparison and then agree by some majority vote what is true or not, regardless of what actually is true.
- Blockchain by itself doesn’t solve the problems of manipulation (what happens when there are a lot of lying nodes?), privacy (all the data is stored by everyone), future security (if the cryptography it uses is broken, everything is broken), and it’s cumbersome and slow because everyone in the network has to talk to everyone else in order to vote, share, and confirm.
- SMPC lets you split up data in a way that each node only has a piece of the data that they can run calculations on, but they can’t see the other pieces. In order to run these calculations they have to all talk to each other. Since this piece of data can also be a functioning key itself, it means you can basically securely store secrets — including keys — inside the network. Fascinating! But…
- While SMPC solves the problem of future security and functional distributed keys, it has the same problem as blockchain with requiring to talk to every other node to do anything meaningful. That’s a significant delay on any useful processing and makes it ultimately unscalable and commercially unviable. This is why you don’t see SMPC being used widely despite being interesting.
- Nillion’s NMC solves the problem of requiring the nodes to talk to each other, meaning it can scale up. It is 1 billion times faster than SMPC, only needing to send one message to every node per process request, and those nodes don’t need to talk to each other for the processing.
- Because the processing happens in shards rather than with all the data present it’s actually-secure and private, unlike blockchains (and fast too!).
So that all sounds neat in theory, but we already use blockchain well enough so what are the practical applications? Why is it even worth talking about?
For that we need to look at a wildly popular technology — Ethereum.
What was Ethereum designed to do?
Ethereum was designed as the “internet computer”, to allow people to store some functionality and have the network process data in a decentralized way. This was a groundbreaking concept at the time that promised to solve a lot of problems — but let’s take a look at how Ethereum works.
Ethereum lets you create a smart contract (if you’re an expert), with fixed conditions (which costs money to change and fix), that you can provide data to directly and have nodes on the network process that data for you (at a typically huge expense and delay).
What if Ethereum instead didn’t need the smart contract at all, and you could just ask the network directly to safely, securely, and privately process and store certain data without the network ever needing to know what that data is, or what your contract is for, all with no delays?
What if Ethereum allowed you to upload your private key for signing things, but could guarantee no entity on the network — even if they colluded — could access the private key, while also enabling them to sign things together with that key whenever you request?
This is the promise of NMC. While there are usecases for smart contracts, NMC’s approach and capabilities makes it a direct contender to Ethereum as a platform for building out decentralized computation and key signing in a way that has never before been possible, and you could even have smart contracts built on top of NMC too.
That means similarly to how Ethereum has L2 (ERC20) tokens hosted on it, NMC could be an “L0” as the foundation for any L1 token or blockchain — even one that already exists — guaranteeing that it is private and secure by default.
What are the use cases for NMC?
- Unified multi-chain wallets
- Decentralized exchanges
- DAO tools
- Private smart contracts
- Decentralized actually-secure file and data storage
- Password manager backends
- Decentralised document signing
- Decentralized notary and verification
- Digital authentication
Virtually any technology that is now used for centralized or decentralized storage, processing, or verification, could likely be replaced with NMC to increase privacy, security, and portability inherently, without worrying about latency.
So it enables you to have a distributed network you trust as much as you trust yourself, all doing computations for you? Wow. Can you imagine it?
Nothing is bulletproof and a successful implementation depends on sound research and proper development, but it’s still pretty clear to me that NMC holds some potential to be the new Ethereum in a lot of ways.
So at this point in my journey I’ve concluded that Nillion is indeed worth my time, but if I’m not a developer, researcher, or academic, how exactly will I support it?
Supporting Nillion
My plan for support is to:
- Join the community and ask questions. The more questions I ask, the better. If I ask something that reveals a flaw, it provides opportunity to fix it. If I ask a question that’s already been answered, it provides others a chance to learn too.
- Participate in any programs, initiatives and hackathons. The more I participate, the more opportunity I will discover for my niche set of skills and the more opportunity I will have to expand them. It may be just educating others, it may be helping make connections, or it may even be giving feedback on user experience.
- Participate in the ecosystem. I can’t spend all my time on my hobbies. Will I then start a project that utilizes NMC? Try to invest in it somehow? Introduce partners for an incentive? Write a blog talking about NMC? I need to figure that out for myself, and so should you! (But keep it classy, no one likes spam!)
Regardless of how I support Nillion, it feels like Nillion deserves my support.
I hope this journey was helpful for others as much as it was for me, and hope to see you in the community.
