“Decentralization is a spectrum with many axes,” says the CEO of Nillion.
Blockchain technology has made decentralisation possible, which has led to a number of uses, such as cryptocurrency, nonfungible tokens, decentralised autonomous organisations, decentralised finance, and a lot more. But the future of decentralisation could be bigger than just blockchain technology.
Nillion, a cryptography-based internet infrastructure platform, has made a technology called Nil Message Compute (NMC) that changes how data is stored, processed, and distributed. This new technology could have big effects on how companies and users follow the decentralised philosophy.
When asked how decentralisation was possible without blockchains, Nillion CEO Alex Page explained that NMC-based technology takes any data, changes it and breaks it up into pieces, and then sends those pieces to different nodes in a network.
“The nodes can store the particles or do computations with the pieces of data without sending messages between themselves. They can then send the results to the desired endpoint for reconstruction (without relying on trusted hardware) “Page told Cointelegraph what was going on. “During the whole process, nodes don’t know what they’re working on, but they can do computations at speeds that are often much faster than its predecessor, multi-party computation, or MPC.”
He went on to explain the difference between the NPC technology on his platform and the MPC technology that came before it:
“In traditional MPC systems, the nodes have to talk to each other, which drastically slows down the speed of computation. NMC has taken away this limit, so fast, scalable computation is now possible. The result is a non-blockchain network of nodes that can run secure, private computations very quickly and efficiently. This opens up new use cases that don’t involve blockchain.
Page said that decentralisation will be an important part of the digital world of the future because data, and especially the control of data, has become a big part of our lives. “The future of decentralisation will continue to grow through the adoption of technologies that bring new utility and functionality to blockchain, such as zero-knowledge/succinctness proofs, thresholds, and smart contracts,” Page said.
The CEO also said that “decentralisation is a spectrum with multiple axes” and that “blockchain will be a foundational part of decentralisation, but other technologies will expand the possibilities in ways that blockchain was never meant to do.””
When it comes to the advantages and benefits of decentralisation without using blockchain technology, Miguel de Vega, the chief scientist at Nillion, talked about how NMC technology does not need to be synchronised with the production of blocks or depend on the completion of a computation for inclusion into a block, as is the case with traditional blockchain.
“Instead, it can run when it’s needed, which is better for the user. Also, a computation can be any size because it doesn’t have to fit into a block.”
Even though it’s hard to tell how decentralised technologies will change in the future because there are so many competing platforms, regulatory restrictions, and barriers to adoption, the idea of decentralisation is gaining popularity in mainstream discourse. Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter has once again shown the problems with centralised platforms and started a discussion about decentralised alternatives to social media.
At the moment, people like decentralisation because it makes things more open, less dependent on central authorities, and gives them more control over their own data and assets. Cryptocurrencies have grown a lot because of these technologies or at least the promise of decentralisation.
