Nillion is a decentralized network for Encrypted Markets. Instead of broadcasting an instruction before it executes, a user seals it to a condition and posts it onchain, where it stays unreadable, to other traders, to agents, and to the network itself, until that condition is met. At that moment a threshold of independent nodes unlocks it and it executes automatically. Covenants is the primitive that makes this possible, bringing privacy to the parts of a market that have always run in the open: the order, the strategy, and the logic behind them.

$NIL is the native utility token of the network that is used for:

* Protocol fees for creating and resolving Covenants * Staking to operate a node and secure the network * Rewards paid to nodes that monitor conditions and settle results

Covenants is the protocol powering Encrypted Markets:

* Condition-gated instructions sealed onchain, revealed and executed only when live data feeds meet the condition

$NIL also enables access to Nillion's established privacy infrastructure:

* nilDB: an encrypted database with data split across multiple nodes, where calculations can still be performed on data while in encrypted form * nilAI: AI-focused privacy technologies including AI Virtual Machine (AIVM), nada-AI, and nilTEE