Nillion Gives Crypto & Data Security a Human Upgrade

… you’ll learn about the frontier of web3 and privacy and what happens to your private data (both on blockchains and in general). You’ll also find out how and why the future moves away from transactions (blockchain) and into computations (multi-party computation). 

Think about where you store your identity and your deepest digital secrets. The current solutions aren’t great — in web2, the Big Tech ‘old guard’ has been quietly storing and monetizing your data for over a decade, and in web3, blockchains aren’t designed to handle private data. A new algorithm, Nillion, inspired Conrad Whelan (the Founding Engineer of Uber) to come out of early retirement and do something about this. 

 This conversation looks at the data you unassumingly give away freely, and how it’s captured, held and used/computed on without your consent by large companies and other parties. Conrad believes in a future where your sensitive data and digital secrets can be fully controlled by you (and you alone) using web3 technology. This means you’d be the final gatekeeper of your data with the power to authenticate, authorize and use it as you see fit.

Conrad’s building that future as Nillion’s Founding Chief Technology Officer.

His background includes electrical and computer engineering. He worked in the fields of computational electromagnetics before joining Uber as Founding Engineer. He’s developed, tested, deployed and architected software projects at all levels of the software stack as both an engineer and an engineering manager. 

In 2016, he retired to focus his efforts on philanthropy and personal passion projects while keeping an eye on the tech world. The promise and potential global impact of Nillion enticed him out of retirement and into the company’s CTO role. 

Conrad says, “When I read the [Nillion] paper, I began to think about, ‘Well, this is a different type of decentralized network with a different functional story as you add more nodes to it.’ Maybe in the future, there’s going to be a bunch of these decentralized networks? Some will be blockchains. Some could be NMC [Nillion’s core technology]. Some could be other networks that haven’t been discovered yet. I put that together when I was reading the paper.”