The blind computing platform Nillion has announced its integration with NEAR Protocol, offering developers new tools to improve data privacy and security while building applications. Nillion leverages data fragmentation across its nodes to speed up processing, which opens up possibilities for complex computational tasks such as artificial intelligence, according to co-founder Alex Page.

Nillion, a "blind computing" platform, has connected to NEAR Protocol, marking its second blockchain network integration in recent weeks. This partnership will give developers access to tools that ensure both powerful applications and data protection.

"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," said Alex Page, CEO of Nillion.

Nillion is a distributed network built for general data computation and processing, designed to help scale blockchain and other applications. Its privacy-preserving tools enable developers to offload computation tasks from the blockchain, which expands the design possibilities for decentralized applications, especially AI experiments running on NEAR, Page explained.

Many decentralized AI projects have chosen NEAR partly because its founder, Illia Polosukhin, was involved in the creation of TensorFlow, a widely used open-source machine learning platform. Polosukhin has stated that he envisions NEAR as a "home for user-owned AI."

"NEAR's vision of extending self-sovereignty into AI aligns perfectly with Nillion's privacy-first approach," Page added. "This shared vision of a future where users control their data while benefiting from innovative AI applications made NEAR an obvious partner for collaboration."

Founded in 2021, Nillion previously integrated with Arbitrum, an Ethereum scaling layer, in late August. The project has garnered backing from crypto firms such as HashKey and OP Crypto and successfully completed a $20 million seed funding round.