How to Farm the Nillion Airdrop for Free: Pioneering a New Era in Crypto Privacy
A guide to farm the next crypto narrative for free
Anyone remember Zcash ($ZEC) or Monero ($XMR)? If this is your first crypto cycle, you probably have not heard of them. They both are privacy preserving chains that allow you to make anonymous transactions. They were the talk of the town for a while for implementing cutting edge “zero knowledge proofs” before it became popular with Ethereum L2s like Starknet, Zksync, and others.
Despite their technological prowess, privacy coins are cursed in this industry because their only application is, well, private transactions. They constantly face legal scrutiny, don’t have a vibrant ecosystem of applications, and fail to gain any traction. Their most advanced tech is their biggest limiting factor in developing useful applications.
So why am I writing about a Privacy x Crypto x AI coin?
Because Nillion is not meant for monetary transactions.
In the age of AI and data hungry applications, there is an increasing demand for private and secure data computation both from consumer side and businesses. The consumer case is very obvious; we regularly give out our sensitive personal information for authentication, KYC, healthcare, credit and social media. On the other hand, businesses find it hard to trust and collaborate with other businesses, potentially competitors.
Nillion acts as a trustless third party for both consumer applications and businesses. It can perform computations on encrypted data without ever revealing the actual data to anyone, including itself!
How Nillion works
Nillion is not a Layer 0,1,2,3,4... it's a network that lives adjacent to existing networks and web2 applications. It provides them a secure and private platform to perform sensitive computations and store data.
To achieve this, Nillion has developed a Orchestration Layer, a collaborative framework that integrates various Privacy Enhancing Technologies (PETs). The key technologies in this product suite are -
Multiparty Computation (MPC)
MPC allows participants in a network to collaborate on a computation without revealing their individual data to each other. Each party encrypts their input, and the computation is performed on these encrypted inputs, ensuring that no single party has access to the complete set of data.
Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE)
Traditionally, users encrypt data and send to a centralised server for further computation, but the servers can view this data because they must decrypt it to perform computations on it. FHE is a type of encryption that allows computations to be performed on encrypted data without needing to decrypt it first and the output can only be decrypted by the data owner.
Zero Knowledge Proofs (ZKPs)
ZKPs allow one party (the prover) to demonstrate to another party (the verifier) that they know a value or possess certain information without revealing the actual information itself.
These technologies are designed to address different use cases and has varying tradeoff between performance, cost, maturity, and functionality. The Orchestration Layer acts as a conductor to use application specific PETs for maximum efficiency.
There are a lot of buzz words here and it quickly becomes too technical and abstract. Let’s look at some examples to see how it can be useful.
Have you ever lost your private key? or are you scared that someone might steal it from your laptop? Ronin Hack: one of the biggest hacks in DeFi was due to mismanagement of keys, and countless users have lost their private keys like famous early Bitcoin adopters.
MPC combined with FHE can allow you to store encrypted pieces of your private key across multiple nodes in the network. Even if these nodes collude, they can’t use your encrypted private key. But when you need to use this key, you can request for the combined pieces, decrypt the key, and use your key whenever you need it without ever storing or managing it yourself!
This is one of the most basic applications of this technology. Financial applications can use it to build MEV resistant products, businesses can train models on user data without revealing the data. Users can reliably store sensitive data like health records and authentication keys and access it on any device at any time.
How to farm
There are several ways to farm Nillion and based on their blog posts, they will launch various campaigns for the community.
Incentivised Testnet
Nillion recently announced their incentivised testnet which is a 4 week long campaign. It costs $0 and is the easiest way to farm for NIL token drop. To complete various tasks, you would need Kepler wallet.
Here is a step-by-step guide by Nillion Team on how to participate in testnet.
If you are a developer, I would highly recommend you build a small project on Nillion. There is a $1000 weekly bounty in phase one for best implementations and these are the best bounty projects so far. These projects would be deployed on phase 2 for more comprehensive testing of the network.
Given the dev centric marketing of Nillion, I suspect there might be additional rewards for early developers like we saw with starknet, zksync, and other recent airdrops.
Nillion is building it’s network infrastructure from ground up and would need to quickly bootstrap thousands of nodes to be considered a fairly decentralised and secure network. In Phase 2, they have confirmed onboarding nodes.
“This first Phase will be short and intense, and then it’s on to Phase 2 in which the Petnet increases decentralization by bringing external nodes online and thoroughly testing applications built in Phase 1.” - Nillion Docs
We can expect a node sale or limited node selection process or an open incentivised node program to bootstrap the network.
Coinlist Public Sale
Nillion recently launched a “education series” campaign called Nillpill which has 3 short videos and MCQs about AI and privacy. You can submit your Ethereum wallet address to take part in this and after you answer all the questions, you get a unique code tied to your address to mint an NFT.
If you successfully complete the campaign and are not in their sybil or bot list, you can take part in their public sale round. The public round will take place on Coinlist from June 19 to June 26th at $400M valuation, the same valuation as their last Series A round where VCs got in.
However, more information regarding this round is unfortunately not available yet like we don’t know the total amount they are raising with this round, what’s the minimum required purchase, and if the previous investors are exiting through this round.
Even if you don’t want to put any money on the public sale, I would still recommend finishing the Nillpill tasks. It’s completely free and doesn’t take much time. It may qualify you for other rewards in the future. This is what their community post and their discord announcment says -
“As part of our community-first ethos, we’re also allocating a sizeable chunk of the token supply to our community as rewards. The details of this will be shared in part 2 of this series.” - Community Post
“Beyond the community round, you may need the Nill Pill for something else this week… Make sure you screenshot your unique code at the end. This is a crucial step” - Discord Announcement
Community Campaigns
Every week, Nillion organizes a Blind Warrior Ceremony with unique events. Last week, Charlie from their marketing team did a live stream of almost 5 hours and manually put blindfolds on 200 PFPs of community members. 21st June is the last event and might last for 12 hours with no 200 limit like in the past.
We still don’t know what these events entail and if they would do an airdrop to the participants. But the industry tends to reward early participants.
Nillion is taking a very unique approach to marketing and building a community. They are manually selecting active members of the community through various events and unique activities. I have listed the easiest and least time consuming tasks you can do to potentially qualify for a airdrop but if you are more bullish on the project, you can be more active in their discord. They regularly organise events to filter active addresses.
FHE and MPC are very promising technologies with use cases both in crypto and web2 applications. There is a race to launch a FHE based network in the market and some competitors include Fhenix and Inco but Nillion sets itself apart by not restricting itself to a single ecosystem or even it’s own chain. Thus farming Nillion is a great opportunity to put a footstep towards this narrative.
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