What are Nillion’s Covenants useful for? An auction makes it easy to understand.
Three people are willing to bid 800, 900, and 1,000 yuan, respectively. If bids are revealed in advance, later bidders can simply outbid them. Having everyone submit encrypted bids first and revealing them all together after the deadline can help prevent this.
@Nillion ’s Covenants can be used to build applications like this: encrypt instructions and put them on-chain, then unseal them once the agreed conditions are met and pass them to the application for processing. It’s like an electronic envelope with an agreed opening time, which can hold bids, payment details, or transaction instructions.
Dusk is the first version of this product. It’s already live on Ethereum mainnet, meaning it’s running on the production network where real assets are used.
One distinction to keep in mind: encrypting the instruction’s contents doesn’t mean the unsealing conditions are hidden too. In the early stages, the nodes responsible for checking them can still read those conditions. Only the later Neon stage is planned to hide them as well—that’s a feature I’m especially looking forward to. For users, it can reduce the risk of plans being revealed too early.
I like the sealed-bid auction use case: bids stay confidential while they should, and can be verified afterward.
#nil $NIL @Nillion
Three people are willing to bid 800, 900, and 1,000 yuan, respectively. If bids are revealed in advance, later bidders can simply outbid them. Having everyone submit encrypted bids first and revealing them all together after the deadline can help prevent this.
@Nillion ’s Covenants can be used to build applications like this: encrypt instructions and put them on-chain, then unseal them once the agreed conditions are met and pass them to the application for processing. It’s like an electronic envelope with an agreed opening time, which can hold bids, payment details, or transaction instructions.
Dusk is the first version of this product. It’s already live on Ethereum mainnet, meaning it’s running on the production network where real assets are used.
One distinction to keep in mind: encrypting the instruction’s contents doesn’t mean the unsealing conditions are hidden too. In the early stages, the nodes responsible for checking them can still read those conditions. Only the later Neon stage is planned to hide them as well—that’s a feature I’m especially looking forward to. For users, it can reduce the risk of plans being revealed too early.
I like the sealed-bid auction use case: bids stay confidential while they should, and can be verified afterward.
#nil $NIL @Nillion