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What is Nillion

Nillion is building a blind computer - a decentralized network of nodes that stores and processes your and your users' most sensitive data while keeping it encrypted and private.

What is a Blind Computer?

A blind computer stores data and runs programs just like any normal computer, but with a crucial difference: it can perform useful computations on data while keeping it encrypted and private from application backends and the operators running the underlying infrastructure.

Instead of the traditional decrypt-compute-encrypt cycle that exposes data during processing, blind computation uses advanced cryptographic techniques like secure multi-party computation, homomorphic encryption, and trusted execution environments to work directly on encrypted data.

This shifts the trust model from "trust us with your data" to "trust the cryptography" - reducing what organizations and infrastructure must be trusted while still enabling powerful computations on sensitive information. Cryptographic techniques like Shamir's secret sharing, secure multi-party computation (MPC), and trusted execution environments (TEEs) provide mathematical guarantees rather than relying on promises or policies.

Nillion Network

The Nillion Network is a network of specialized nodes (each running one or more blind modules) that provide independent privacy capabilities for the blind computer:

  • nilCC nodes for Private Compute: Nodes perform developer-specified or user-specified workflows within TEEs, enabling general-purpose private computation over sensitive data.
  • nilDB nodes for Private Storage: Data is encrypted and split into secret shares, and these shares are distributed across multiple nodes (typically three) so no single node can view or reveal your original data.
  • nilAI nodes for Private LLMs: Individual nodes run AI models inside of a TEE. You connect to a node of your choice and perform private AI inference without the node viewing your data in unencrypted form.

Developer Solutions

While you can interact directly with network nodes, Nillion provides developer-friendly solutions that handle the cryptographic complexity for you.

  • Private Compute offers a unified API and web dashboard that handles TEE provisioning, attestation generation, and workload lifecycle management - allowing you to deploy any Docker application as a secure computation without modifying your code.

  • Private Storage uses the Secretvaults SDK to automatically manage multiple nilDB nodes, encryption, and orchestration - so you don't have to manage and coordinate individual nodes manually.

  • Private LLMs provide OpenAI-compatible APIs that abstract away TEE complexity, letting you add private inference to existing applications with minimal code changes.

These solutions handle multi-node coordination, encryption, and complex cryptographic operations automatically, making privacy-preserving development as simple as traditional app development.

Why Build a Blind Computer?

The biggest breakthroughs happen when people can collaborate on sensitive data without exposing their secrets, enabling exciting new use cases.

  • Healthcare Research: Pool medical data from hospitals worldwide for clinical research without compromising patient privacy.

  • AI Development: Train better models using aggregated data while keeping individual datasets completely private

  • Government Policy: Use real-time social data to influence policy and help vulnerable populations without breaking privacy.

  • Financial Coordination: Enable coordinated trading strategies without front-running risks.

Ready to build privacy preserving apps? Start building with one of our Nillion Quickstarts.