Nil Foundation

Nil Foundation

Nil Foundation was established in 2018 by Mikhail Egorov, who also created Curve Finance, the dominant decentralized exchange for stablecoin trading. The foundation emerged as a vehicle to fund core blockchain protocol research, distinct from the product-focused Curve. Egorov's previous work at the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology and as a physicist informed the foundation's deep focus on applied cryptography. The entity operates as a Swiss foundation, a structure common among serious crypto protocol builders, providing a grant-making and employment home for cryptography engineers. The foundation's deployment centers on building open-source infrastructure for zero-knowledge proofs and provably secure computation. Its primary asset is zkLLVM, a compiler that allows developers to write zero-knowledge circuits in C++ and Rust rather than niche domain-specific languages — lowering the barrier for privacy-preserving applications. The team also develops zkSharding, an architecture designed to scale Ethereum-compatible blockchains while maintaining composability. These are not passive venture bets; the foundation acts as a direct builder, funding full-time research teams across cryptography, distributed systems, and compiler engineering. In 2023, Nil Foundation partnered with Dusk Network to advance PlonK-based zero-knowledge proofs for enterprise use. Team size remains undisclosed, though public repositories and conference appearances suggest a distributed group of cryptographers and systems engineers operating primarily in Europe. The foundation's GitHub activity and research papers form its public footprint more than traditional family-office branding. In February 2024, the foundation released a significant update to its zkLLVM circuit compiler, improving proof generation speed — an event that signals continued active development rather than a one-time launch (per public developer updates, 2024). The foundation's architecture blurs the line between a single-family office and an open-source software lab. Unlike most family offices that invest in external funds or operating companies, Nil Foundation is structured as a non-profit Swiss foundation that directly employs researchers and grants code to the public domain. This model — a principal's capital funding public-goods R&D rather than seeking financial return — represents a genuine structural departure, tied to Egorov's thesis that the most valuable blockchain infrastructure must remain credibly neutral and collectively owned.