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How Blacklight L1 Works

Blacklight L1 is a network for conditional secrets. An author seals a payload so that it can only be opened once a condition they specify has been met on-chain. Until then the payload does not exist in one piece anywhere — not on the author's machine, not on the chain, and not on any single node.

Testnet only

Blacklight L1 is currently deployed to Ethereum Sepolia and is not on mainnet. Tokens have no value, and deployments may be replaced. See Contracts for live addresses.

The problem it solves​

"Reveal this, but only when X happens" normally needs somebody trustworthy to hold the secret and honour the rule. That party can leak early, refuse to release, or simply go offline. Blacklight L1 removes them.

Typical uses:

  • Sealed-bid auctions — bids stay sealed until the auction closes, then all open at once.
  • Timelocked disclosure — a document that becomes readable at a fixed time.
  • Dead-man switches — material that unseals if a heartbeat stops.
  • Conditional order flow — an instruction that only becomes legible once a price is reached.

The lifecycle​

1. Choose a committee​

Nodes register on-chain with a stake and a price (their markup). An author picks m of them and a threshold k: any k of the m can open the payload together, and any k-1 of them cannot.

Selection can be explicit (name the node IDs) or by strategy — balanced, most experienced, highest staked, or cheapest. See the SDK.

2. Seal​

The payload is split into m Shamir shares and each share is encrypted to one node's public key. The author gets back m ciphertext layers and a keccak256 commitment to the payload.

Only the recipient of a layer can open it, and only a share is inside — so a node learns nothing on its own. See Cryptography.

3. Post the trigger​

The author sends the layers and the release condition to the TriggerMarket contract, along with escrow to cover the committee's fees, the reconstruction bounty, and (optionally) gas for a settlement callback.

Conditions come in two modes:

  • Public condition — the condition is visible on-chain. Anyone can see what will release the secret, but not the secret.
  • Private condition — the condition itself is sealed inside the layers, so observers cannot tell what is being waited for.

4. Nodes watch and post shares​

Every node runs a price feed aggregated across several venues, and watches the chain for triggers addressed to its key. When a trigger's condition is satisfied, each node decrypts its own layer and posts its share on-chain.

Nodes are paid for posting. They are not asked to agree with each other, and there is no voting: a share is either valid against the commitment or it is not.

5. Reconstruct​

Once k shares are on-chain, anyone can interpolate them, recover the payload, and reveal it — earning the reconstruction bounty the author escrowed. The contract checks the result against the original commitment, so a wrong payload cannot be passed off as the real one.

If the trigger carried a settlement hook, revealing also calls it, letting a downstream contract act on the revealed value in the same transaction.

What the chain guarantees​

  • No early reveal — fewer than k shares reveal nothing about the payload.
  • No silent substitution — the payload is committed to up front and checked on reveal.
  • No trusted releaser — any k nodes suffice, and reconstruction is permissionless.
  • Paid liveness — nodes earn per share posted, and authors escrow up front so the work is funded before it is asked for.

Staking and rewards​

Node operators bond NIL to register, and set a markup that prices their participation. They earn from two sources: fees paid by authors whose triggers they serve, and protocol emissions distributed per epoch (currently every 6 hours on testnet).

Stake leaves only through an unbonding queue. Earnings and stake are both controlled by the operator's owner wallet, which is separate from the hot key the node itself runs with.

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