You’ve had this happen.
You size a position properly. You put your stop where it belongs. And then the market comes down, takes exactly your level, fills you, and reverses without you. Not a drawdown, a wick. It came for you, found you, and left.
That wasn’t luck. Your stop was sitting onchain in the clear, and something read it.
Now the same story from the other side of the desk. You ship a vault with a rebalancing trigger. The logic is good, it took months. Within a week, someone has read the contract, worked out what the trigger watches for, and is standing in front of it every time it fires. Your edge lasted exactly as long as it took someone to read your code.
Two different people, one problem. In crypto, the market can see what you’re about to do before you do it.
The alternative that transforms all this is Encrypted Markets. This is how we build it: seven phases, starting on Ethereum mainnet this September.
What’s Actually Exposed
When crypto talks about privacy it means the transaction, the amount, and the sender. Zcash and Monero proved the demand was real. But the transaction is the smallest part of the market.
Market activity has three layers.
- Layer 1: the transaction. What moved, and between whom. The only layer privacy has ever touched.
- Layer 2: the execution. How it moved. The route, the matching, the timing, the sequencing.
- Layer 3: the intelligence. Why it moved. The strategy, the conditions, the agent’s reasoning.
Layer 2 and 3 are where your edge lives, and both are broadcast in the clear, usually before they execute. That isn’t a flaw in any one protocol. It’s the default condition of building on a transparent chain, and it gets worse as more finance and more agents move onchain. An agent can’t compete by announcing what it’s watching for.
This roadmap elevates onchain privacy to Layer 2 and Layer 3. First execution, on one chain and then everywhere. Then intelligence, as conditions stop being a fixed list and become anything a feed can attest. Then hardening and scale.
The Primitive
Nillion is building Encrypted Markets. Covenants are the primitive that makes them possible.
A Covenant is an encrypted instruction that decrypts itself when a condition is met. No single operator holds the key.
You seal an instruction, a trade, an order, a bid, a prediction, a payment to a condition and post it onchain. Nobody can read it: not other traders, not searchers, not the network, not us. When and only when the condition is met, and it opens itself and executes.
You seal it. It unlocks itself.
The Roadmap
Seven phases, from genesis on Ethereum through to everyday scale.
1. Dusk
August – November 2026 · Covenants on Ethereum L1
The first Covenants, created and resolved on Ethereum mainnet with no single trusted party.
- Condition-gated events on Ethereum L1. Nodes decrypt the result when data feeds meet the conditions.
- Permissionless nodes, rewarded according to stake. Baseline tokenomics and node kit released.
- Agent-optimised SDK for condition-native apps. The cryptography stays under the hood.
Milestones:
- Dusk on Sepolia testnet : 28th August
- First app live on testnet : 11th September
- Dusk on Ethereum mainnet : 28th September.
2. Darkfall
November 2026 – February 2027 · Multi-chain and native across the EVM ecosystem
- One network, many EVM chains. All of Dusk’s functionality, across multiple EVM chains.
- Chain specific nodes and tooling. Node operators and developers can work natively on each chain.
- More node accountability through P2P communication. Jailing and slashing enforced by consensus among nodes
3. Skyglow
February – May 2027 · Cross-chain settlement logic, and onward to non-EVM
- Observe on one chain, settle on another. Reference a condition on one chain and settle on a different one.
- Verifiable reconstruction at the destination. Verifiable secret sharing and commitments raise robustness against malicious nodes.
- Beyond EVM. Monitor feeds or settle on Solana, Move chains, and Monero
4. Nightside
May – August 2027 · Any custom, complex user-defined condition logic
- Conditions can refer to any observable data feed. Conditions resolved by any attested feed, rather than a fixed set.
- New feed-specific node roles. Operators can specialise, enabling capabilities like high-frequency trigger checks.
- Optimised conditions when feeds are numerous. Witness aggregation via BLS and FROST.
5. Neon
August – October 2027 · A formal Covenants language and VM
- Developer guardrails and optimisations. Better feedback, stronger compile-time checks, fewer layers, fewer bytes.
- Conditions fully private to nodes. Nodes never see the condition in plaintext.
- A hardened VM. More strongly verified results, and fine-grained slashable and disputable node misbehaviours.
6. Aurora
October 2027 – January 2028 · Post-quantum hardening
- Hybrid post-quantum sealing. Traditional and quantum-secure schemes used at once, safe unless both break.
- Lattice threshold signatures. Quantum-safe attestation of the data feed information powering the network.
- FHE coprocessors. Compute over ciphertexts during condition checking and settlement.
7. Moonshine
December 2027 – February 2028 · Scaling to everyday use
- Data volume reduced by an order of magnitude. Ciphertext on EIP-4844 blobs rather than calldata.
- Aggregated, ZKP-verified reveals. k shares posted together, at one time.
- Heavy work offloaded to coprocessors. Cost scales with the number of shares, not the number of nodes.
Where the Road Leads
Zcash and Monero proved that crypto wants encrypted money. The larger opportunity was always everything money interacts with.
That’s the ground we’re claiming. Encrypted Markets is an open design space that’s mostly empty, making this the perfect time to share our roadmap: the phases above are what Nillion is building, but the planning for the exciting applications it lets you and others build can begin today.
If you’re a builder: Dusk hits Sepolia this month and mainnet on 28 September. Be one of the first to grab the SDK, designed so you never have to touch the cryptography, and start building. Find us in Discord before then.
If you want to go through every phase in detail, you can see our full roadmap here.