Today, most user data sits behind APIs. Whether its storage is delegated to an external entity (e.g., a social network), it's stored directly on a blockchain, or it remains on the user's device (e.g., browser history), third-party apps and services request access to that data via an API. But most often, users are not compensated directly for granting such access. This is the case even when the API itself may charge the third-party app for such access! Furthermore, once API access is granted, data is retrieved in its plaintext form. The extent to which that plaintext data is exposed is often at the discretion of the third party.

At Nillion, we're best known for building advanced privacy-preserving infrastructure. However, there's another essential, though often overlooked, concept that we are enabling - trust. One could argue this is the root concept of all, what can I trust, and why can I trust it?

In this article, we explain what motivated us to build Tickr, and how we applied Nillion's technology, nilDB (secure database) and nilCC (confidential computing), to solve very specific, but distinct, problems for traders and their communities on centralised exchanges (CEXs) and decentralised exchanges (DEXs).

At Nillion, we set ourselves the challenge of building the blind computer, a computational stack that makes it easy for developers to build privacy-preserving apps. But as we developed our Private Storage and Private LLMs services, we faced a fundamental contradiction: how do you provide access to privacy first services without compromising privacy from the very first interaction?

The irony was glaring. Here we were, building technology that could process your data without ever seeing it, yet to use our services, you potentially still need to hand over your email, credit card details, and billing address just like every other API provider. For a privacy project, this felt fundamentally wrong, so we built our own solution.

Almost ten years ago, some of the current Nillion team members submitted a National Science Foundation research proposal that envisioned a decentralized secure storage and computation ecosystem in which node operators with various roles would enable, enhance, and monitor web-compatible apps and workflows over encrypted data. Today, we are finally seeing that vision come to life at Nillion as we build infrastructure and tools for creating competitive, usable apps that still protect user data. In this article, we discuss the philosophy and principles that motivate the architecture of the Nillion Network. We also present how the architecture's characteristics support a role-based PETs ecosystem that echoes and expands on the original vision.