'Blind computing' platform Nillion integrates with Arbitrum to enhance privacy on Ethereum

Nillion, the multi-party computation powered “blind computer,” is integrating with Ethereum scaling layer Arbitrum. The tie-up will lower the cost of settlement for applications built on Nillion and bring Nillion’s privacy solutions to Arbitrum, representatives for both networks said in a press release.

“This will enhance the privacy-preserving capabilities of existing dApps and opens up new possibilities for developers to create secure, efficient, and user-friendly applications on Ethereum,” Nillion CEO Alex Page said in a statement.

Although the team raised $20 million from a number of influential crypto participants — including HashKey and OP Crypto, among others — Nillion is not blockchain-based or solely geared towards crypto use cases. At launch, its founders often said that while blockchains “decentralize finance,” Nillion aims to decentralize "everything else."

The distributed network is built for general data computation and processing. Unlike blockchains which require nodes to store a complete record of the transaction ledger, Nillion nodes store and process private, sensitive, high value data without any node seeing anything about the data.

Blind computation refers to the coordination of privacy-enhancing technologies like multi-party computation and fully homomorphic encryption (not to be confused for the term popularized in the quantum computing space). This process helps scale blockchain applications while also improving privacy by enabling them to delegate computation tasks without revealing the input data.

"By combining their advanced privacy features with Arbitrum's scaling solutions, we're creating a powerful foundation for a new generation of decentralized applications,” said Nina Rong, ecosystem lead at the Arbitrum Foundation. 

The integration will now enable apps on Nillion to settle on Arbitrum, tapping into the Layer 2’s liquidity and opening up the design space for dApps on Arbitrum to access private storage and computation. In a sense, Nillion functions like an oracle to blockchains.

Nillion was founded in 2021 by former Uber, Indiegogo, Hedera Hashgraph employees, as well as executives from Coinbase and Nike. Last week, the firm announced a partnership with decentralized AI startup Ritual "to develop decentralized blind AI inference technology that democratizes access to AI."

EDITOR'S NOTE (AUG. 20, 2024): Updates headline and clarifies how Nillion nodes process data.