Nillion integrates with NEAR Protocol, enhancing privacy tools for developers

Nillion, a “blind computing” platform, is integrating with the Layer-1 NEAR +2.04% Protocol, its second such network launch in recent weeks. The integration will provide developers with tools to enhance data privacy and storage while designing applications.

“This collaboration is about expanding what’s possible on NEAR and empowering developers to create solutions that are not only powerful but also privacy-preserving,” Alex Page, CEO of Nillion, said in a statement.

Nillion is a distributed network built for general data computation and processing to help scale blockchain (and other) applications. In short, its privacy-preserving tools enable developers to move computation tasks off-chain — thereby opening up the “design space” of what’s possible using blockchains, particularly for the AI experiments running on NEAR, Page told The Block. 

Many decentralized AI projects have tapped NEAR because the protocol’s founder, Illia Polosukhin, helped create the open-source machine learning platform Tensorflow. Polosukhin has said he wants the protocol to be the “home for user-owned AI.”

“NEAR’s vision of expanding self-sovereignty into AI aligns perfectly with Nillion’s privacy-first approach,” Page said. “This aligned vision of a future where users control their data while benefiting from novel AI applications made NEAR an obvious partner for collaboration.”

Nillion, founded in 2021, integrated with the Ethereum scaling layer Arbitrum ARB +2.36% in late August. The project is backed by crypto firms, including HashKey and OP Crypto, and closed a $20 million seed round .