Hey ????, I’m Dave Butler, Head of Product at Nillion. This is the first time you’ve heard from the product team—we’ve been heads down, iterating, and gathering feedback on our products. But this is just the beginning. In the future, we’ll bring you regular updates on our progress, learnings, and the incredible work happening across the Nillion ecosystem.
2024 has been a year of transformation at Nillion. After laying the foundations of our tech in 2022-23 this year, we launched our first products, opened up our network to developers, and saw our community and ecosystem partners bring it to life. What began as an ambitious vision is now a thriving platform full of builders, products, and innovation. Let’s look back at the 2024 milestones and where we’re heading in 2025.
Looking back: 2024 a year in review
2024 marked Nillion’s shift from a research-driven project – exploring decentralized compute – to a product-driven organisation enabling privacy-preserving applications for our users. Below, we look at some of the highlights from this year, not just for what we delivered but for the tangible outcomes and real-world impact that followed.
- Nillion SDK Launch (April): We launched the first version of our SDK at Scaling Ethereum in April. It was amazing to see the team from MonadicDNA become an EthGlobal Top Finalist project (over 200 teams submitted a project) building with our SDK. Seeing them continue to build on Nillion and join our Nucleus program was even more pleasing. It is precisely this type of conversion – from a hackathon team to a newly formed company that is part of our ecosystem – we want to see, and it gave us great initial validation that we were moving in the right direction.
- Nillion Testnet Launch (July): Our Testnet, comprised of the NilChain (coordination layer) and nilVM, went live in July. The coordination layer forms the backbone of our tech stack, so It was vital that we stress-test it. We could have run load tests on the chain internally and observed the results. However, we wanted to test under real-world conditions. Therefore, we asked the community to help. They more than answered that call, with millions of transactions on the NilChain. This gave us the results we wanted; we validated that one of the core components of our tech stack could perform at scale.
- Verifier Program (October): Having successfully stress-tested the coordination layer, we then asked the community to help us secure nilVM – by running their verifier software, which ensured that stored secrets remained secure in the network. At the same time, this would be a stress test for nilVM, as we did with the coordination layer. The community response, again, was remarkable, with more than 500k verifiers set up and run. While the verifier program has now ended, it provided valuable validation that such a mechanism could hold the network nodes to account. Something similar like this will likely be important as the network continues to decentralize and scale up.
- We released numerous other tools and libraries: We have released a wide variety of products and tools to our users this year, including core AI tools, libraries & demos, developer tools as well as many other demos and POCs (see a full list of tools, libraries, and demos on Nillion Masquerade). We will expand on why it is important that we ship fast and often in this phase of the project when we dive deeper into our product process in the next section.
- 70+ Projects Built on Nillion: Across six hackathons, developers built over 70 projects on Nillion. These builders and events provided us with hands-on product feedback, a vital part of our product cycle, which we will discuss in more detail next.
How We Got Here: Our Product Process
This year, we focused on strengthening our product process at Nillion, grounding it with a data-driven, close-to-scientific approach. While we are continuously refining it, there were three key areas we wanted to unlock:
- Releasing Became a Habit: We made regular releases the norm and not the exception. We now release often, and we have become good at it. However, we constantly remind ourselves that we are not building for the sake of building but to build, measure, and learn. At our stage, shipping quickly is vital as it allows us to iterate more frequently and experiment towards product market fit (PMF)????.
- Iterating Through Experiments: Frequent releases allowed us to test hypotheses quickly and run product experiments more regularly – something we feel strongly about at Nillion. Certainly, not all our experiments were successful, but some of the learnings we made will significantly influence our products and how we think about them in the future. For instance, at EthGlobal, we introduced a RESTful API alongside our client SDKs. The result? Our most successful hackathon yet, with more projects built than ever before and excellent feedback for the new Developer Experience (DX).
- Closing the Feedback Loop: Releasing and running product experiments is just the start of a strong product process. By listening and observing our users—hackathon teams, builders, or ecosystem partners—we could continuously improve our offerings and get closer to our vision of making privacy too easy not to put into your product.
We were only able to start gaining momentum, running effective product experiments, and learning as fast as possible because of strong collaboration between product, engineering, and developer relations. Kudos to all involved!
Looking Ahead: What’s Planned for 2025
We’re just getting started. In 2024, we built strong feedback loops and a habit of shipping regularly. In 2025, we’ll capitalize on these foundations. Here is a sneak peek of what we have in store:
- Blind Modules: We have been working hard on our foundational tech. In 2025, alongside nilVM, we will introduce two other blind modules (our core building blocks) – nilDB & nilAI. Keep your eyes peeled for announcements on these soon. ????.
- Secret SDKs: While blind modules power the network, our Secret SDKs will be the interface developers use. By working closely with our partners and builders and listening to their feedback, we will be launching the following Secret SDKs that will utilise the foundational tech that lives in the Blind modules:
- SecretVault
- SecretDataAnalytics
- SecretLLM
- SecretSigning
- Testnet ➞ Mainnet: It is no secret that we are working towards our Mainnet launch. This will be a massive milestone for Nillion that will unlock even more engagement opportunities for our users.
- Open source: Becoming open source is essential for a project like ours and is a key strategic milestone. It allows the community to get closer to the core tech, review it, or even contribute to it. We are already working hard to make this a reality in 2025.
- Continuous Discovery: We have built a strong and flexible product process; we will continue to listen to our users and iterate so we are consistently positioned to solve their most important problems.
Closing Thoughts
2024 was the year Nillion went from vision to reality. We launched products, powered a thriving Testnet, and saw hackers, builders, and partners come together to show what is possible on Nillion.
Looking ahead, 2025 will be about scaling Nillion’s impact: launching new blind modules (NilDB & NilAI), transitioning to Mainnet, and empowering even more developers to build on Nillion.
We are ramping up – maybe a “Where Are We Now” once a year isn’t enough! Follow us on BuildOnNillion on Twitter for regular updates, new product releases, and builder stories.
Here’s to another groundbreaking year ahead.
Thank you for building with us!
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