Nillion has now officially migrated to Ethereum, representing one of the most important milestones in the development of its privacy-preserving network. The transition means Nillion is replacing an Ethereum Layer 2 architecture with a Cosmos-based Layer 1, where its flagship product, the Blind Computer, runs in a more distributed, permissionless and community-run environment.
Nillion is now on Ethereum. $NIL holders can start by migrating their token from Cosmos to Nillion’s L2 to participate.
Details below 🧵 👇 pic.twitter.com/WkdipNyjWW
— Nillion (@nillion) January 27, 2026
Migration is the foundation of Nillion 2.0, a broader upgrade that aims to decentralize the operation of networks and enable everyone to become participants. Currently, the migration of tokens to Nillion’s Ethereum L2 is available to the holders of the NIL, which is a mandatory procedure relevant to involve the latter in the further staking, verification and operation of a node.
Why Nillion chose Ethereum
Ethereum’s involvement as a coordination layer of the open crypto economy was central to Nillion’s decision. The network is known as the settlement and governance layer, where the complex decentralized systems are constructed, assembled and managed in an open manner.
Ethereum’s signature innovation was not decentralization, but programmability. Ethereum enabled the introduction of completely new financial and computational primitives by converting the entire logic into software. Nillion builds on this foundation to extend programmability into the domain of privately executed computations, where the machines can organize themselves publicly without revealing sensitive input or logic to business topics.
The blind computer enters the Ethereum ecosystem
The Blind Computer is an information-sensitive computing and storage system designed by the platform to enable the use of data and calculations without disclosing the information used behind the scenes. In the ecosystem there are already more than 111,000 users of applications running on the Blind Computer, more than 636 million documents have been stored and approximately 1.4 million inferences have been made.
Moving this infrastructure to Ethereum radically expands the places and ways in which private computing can be deployed.
Introducing community authentication with Blacklight
Nillion Blacklight, the verification layer of the project, is presented as a decentralization of control over the network and is expected to be released on February 2, 2026. Community members with a stake in long-term incentives (stake NIL 70,000) will operate blacklight nodes, which will be consistent with network integrity.
How the NIL migration works
To participate in staking, verifying, and running a node, NIL must be ported to Nillion’s Ethereum L2. This transition will remove the staking reward on Cosmos and the Cosmos-based NIL will no longer yield.
The migration process can be carried out in two phases. The first part is the migration from NIL to Ethereum as an ERC-20 token. The tokens are bridged on the Ethereum to the Nillion L2 using a bridge designed into the network.
This migration is the starting point for involvement in Blacklight authentication and networking activities in the future.
What comes next for Nillion
The platform plans to deploy Blacklight in phases due to migration, as the first phase includes computer authentication. A groundbreaking set of authentication nodes is expected to be activated in early 2026, with storage authentication at a later stage.
The platform tries to make programmability personal now that Ethereum has made the internet programmable. The network has now fully transitioned to Ethereum and is now in a new phase of decentralization, privacy and community-related infrastructure.