Mark Mac

founding team @nillion | prev. innovation lead @nike | building encrypted markets | privacy szn | if X happens do Y | opinions = own

[Mark Mac @thatmarkmac]

7 roadmap eras. Here's the rest of the iceberg:

Nillion Dusk, now. Sealed orders on Ethereum that fire on price or time. No bots to run, no one to trust. An SDK built for agents, apps in a few lines of TypeScript, and anyone can run a node by staking NIL. Mainnet early Oct

Darkfall, Nov to Feb. One network across Hyperliquid, Base, Robinhood and the rest of EVM, native on each. Stake NIL once on Ethereum, earn fees from every chain you serve. Misbehaving nodes get jailed and slashed

Skyglow, Feb to May. Watch a condition on one chain, settle on another. Nothing bridged, nothing wrapped, no value locked. Goes past EVM too, Solana and Move chains

Nightside (my fav), May to Aug. Custom conditions of any complexity, resolved by any feed the nodes can verify, checked at high frequency. A wallet moving, a court ruling, a CPI print, a shipment. Nodes specialise in feeds and get paid for the facts they confirm

Neon, Aug to Oct. Covenants get their own language and VM, so conditions become programmable. Nest them, do maths on them, loop them. The design space blows wide open

Aurora, Oct to Jan. Long-dated covenants get a second, quantum resistant seal on top of the first. FHE coprocessors compute on conditions without ever decrypting them

Moonshine, Dec to Feb. Ciphertext moves to blobs at about a tenth of the cost, reveals get verified with a single ZK proof, cent-priced covenants, and you can stake NIL for capacity instead of paying per covenant. As volume grows the network starts paying for itself, so it can print less new NIL

[Mark Mac @thatmarkmac]

Era one of covenants is live. It's called Dusk

A price and a clock. That alone kills stop hunting, launch sniping and bid leaking, and it's just the tip of the iceberg

Underneath sits everything the market doesn't see coming. Six more eras of capability, unlocking use cases nobody has even thought to want yet, surfacing on a public schedule between now and 2028

Dusk broke the surface yesterday. Get your hands on it while everyone else is still staring at the waterline

[Nillion @nillion]

If you interact with this tweet, we'll assume you're bullish on Encrypted Markets.

[Mark Mac @thatmarkmac]

@nillion Hello

[Mark Mac @thatmarkmac]

Five ways to use Covenants as a layer on top of prediction markets:

(1) Events fire bets. CPI comes in above forecast and your YES on a Fed hike in October fires. Same for an exit on a position you hold, or a bet that waits for two events

(2) Odds fire bets. The market on LeBron playing Game 7 resolves NO and your YES on the Celtics winning the series fires. Same for a stop loss on your bet, a bet that fires when a correlated market’s odds cross a level, or an arb between Polymarket and Kalshi

(3) Odds fire trades. The market on a 2026 recession crosses 40% and your ETH short opens. The same market resolves NO and the short closes

(4) Resolutions fire payouts. The market on a hurricane hitting Florida resolves YES and the insurance pays out, no claims desk. Bounties, escrow, refunds and DAO buybacks work the same way

(5) Agents run all of it. An agent seals fifty of these across five venues and goes offline. They still fire

Every one sits sealed off venue till it fires, so nobody can read it or copy it

[Nillion @nillion]

Private transactions ≠ private trading strategies.

Onchain markets have 3 layers: transaction, execution and intelligence.

Even if a transaction is private, your stop losses and limit orders can still reveal your next move.

Nillion's Covenants keep them encrypted.

[blocmates clips 🎬 @blocmatesclips]

John on what a Covenant is and why privacy is non-negotiable for crypto

[Mark Mac @thatmarkmac]

@mirajinkonino24 The market already does the claims desk's job

[Mark Mac @thatmarkmac]

Five ways to use Covenants as a layer on top of prediction markets:

(1) Events fire bets. CPI comes in above forecast and your YES on a Fed hike in October fires. Same for an exit on a position you hold, or a bet that waits for two events

(2) Odds fire bets. The market on LeBron playing Game 7 resolves NO and your YES on the Celtics winning the series fires. Same for a stop loss on your bet, a bet that fires when a correlated market’s odds cross a level, or an arb between Polymarket and Kalshi

(3) Odds fire trades. The market on a 2026 recession crosses 40% and your ETH short opens. The same market resolves NO and the short closes

(4) Resolutions fire payouts. The market on a hurricane hitting Florida resolves YES and the insurance pays out, no claims desk. Bounties, escrow, refunds and DAO buybacks work the same way

(5) Agents run all of it. An agent seals fifty of these across five venues and goes offline. They still fire

Every one sits sealed off venue till it fires, so nobody can read it or copy it

[Mark Mac @thatmarkmac]

Been looking at who actually makes money on Polymarket when big news drops. About 3% of accounts, and most of them are bots

London Business School and Yale went through 1.72m Polymarket accounts. The ones making money buy the right side of the market in the first few minutes after the news, before the odds catch up. To do that you need a VPS, the CLOB API, a websocket feed, a private key on the box and someone awake at 4am to restart it when it crashes. Which is why it's 3% and not 30%. The study looked at Fed announcements, but it's the same on a CPI print, a court ruling, an ETF approval, anything

You can't beat them by hand on the headline markets. And the long tail, the 1,700+ markets under 1m of volume that reprice slower after news because no bot is watching them, is too many for a human to watch either. That's the one place a normal account can win, and nobody's set up to take it

With Covenants you write the trade before the news. Buy YES on a Fed hike if CPI comes in hot, buy NO on a December cut if payrolls come in 100,000 above forecast. Both sit sealed, nobody can read them, and they fire on their own, no server needed. On the headline markets your order goes in the same second as the bots. On the small markets the bots aren't even there, so if you have alpha on one, you're first in line

Gonna spend this week going through everything a prediction market can trigger. A lot more than I expected tbh

[Mark Mac @thatmarkmac]

@cryptobagsbro Nightside, mostly. Limits and stops as soon as we integrate

[Mark Mac @thatmarkmac]

@cryptobagsbro Time to level the playing fields

[Mark Mac @thatmarkmac]

All five of these sit in front of existing venues like Polymarket and Kalshi. There’s another category where a venue builds Covenants into how its own markets resolve. Gonna post about that one later this week

[Mark Mac @thatmarkmac]

Been looking at who actually makes money on Polymarket when big news drops. About 3% of accounts, and most of them are bots

London Business School and Yale went through 1.72m Polymarket accounts. The ones making money buy the right side of the market in the first few minutes after the news, before the odds catch up. To do that you need a VPS, the CLOB API, a websocket feed, a private key on the box and someone awake at 4am to restart it when it crashes. Which is why it's 3% and not 30%. The study looked at Fed announcements, but it's the same on a CPI print, a court ruling, an ETF approval, anything

You can't beat them by hand on the headline markets. And the long tail, the 1,700+ markets under 1m of volume that reprice slower after news because no bot is watching them, is too many for a human to watch either. That's the one place a normal account can win, and nobody's set up to take it

With Covenants you write the trade before the news. Buy YES on a Fed hike if CPI comes in hot, buy NO on a December cut if payrolls come in 100,000 above forecast. Both sit sealed, nobody can read them, and they fire on their own, no server needed. On the headline markets your order goes in the same second as the bots. On the small markets the bots aren't even there, so if you have alpha on one, you're first in line

Gonna spend this week going through everything a prediction market can trigger. A lot more than I expected tbh

[Mark Mac @thatmarkmac]

The bots are fast, so on headline markets I think Covenants levels the playing field for retail, which is huge when the bots have had those markets to themselves for so long

But they don’t play the smaller markets because the low volume isn’t worth their running costs. That’s where retail’s edge will be strongest imo

[Defi Preacher @DefiPreacherr]

Used the weekend to build out the protection side of Latch and based on the feedbacks I got from the team and community

You can now set an automatic stablecoin exit: “Exchange my USDT for USDC if USDT falls below $0.99, but only if I receive at least the amount I choose.”

Paid depeg cover is here too.

Choose a provider, request private terms and review the payout, premium and protection period before paying.

The provider reserves the full payout upfront and activates the policy. If the agreed condition qualifies, the payout can happen automatically.

Providers now have a workspace to manage capital, reply to requests, activate policies and track payouts. Sentinel lets them review exposure and pause new purchases while keeping existing commitments protected.

I also added a one-time email alert for sealing availability. Turn it on, confirm your email, and Latch will notify you when the required three-node committee can be formed. After sending, the alert turns itself off (love this one a lot, helped a couple of times to know when nodes are up more than 3 😄)

The trading agent, chat and MCP tools remain part of the app.

Built with @nillionnetwork Covenants. Available on Sepolia with test assets fully available on the platform to test.

Try it: https://t.co/3EcSIWkVa9

Feedback welcome, especially on the cover and exit flows.

[Mark Mac @thatmarkmac]

@boardyai If they want to be first in line, yes

[Mark Mac @thatmarkmac]

Been looking at who actually makes money on Polymarket when big news drops. About 3% of accounts, and most of them are bots

London Business School and Yale went through 1.72m Polymarket accounts. The ones making money buy the right side of the market in the first few minutes after the news, before the odds catch up. To do that you need a VPS, the CLOB API, a websocket feed, a private key on the box and someone awake at 4am to restart it when it crashes. Which is why it's 3% and not 30%. The study looked at Fed announcements, but it's the same on a CPI print, a court ruling, an ETF approval, anything

You can't beat them by hand on the headline markets. And the long tail, the 1,700+ markets under 1m of volume that reprice slower after news because no bot is watching them, is too many for a human to watch either. That's the one place a normal account can win, and nobody's set up to take it

With Covenants you write the trade before the news. Buy YES on a Fed hike if CPI comes in hot, buy NO on a December cut if payrolls come in 100,000 above forecast. Both sit sealed, nobody can read them, and they fire on their own, no server needed. On the headline markets your order goes in the same second as the bots. On the small markets the bots aren't even there, so if you have alpha on one, you're first in line

Gonna spend this week going through everything a prediction market can trigger. A lot more than I expected tbh

[Mark Mac @thatmarkmac]

Spent the weekend deep diving into the stuff Covenants can do in prediction markets and it’s super exciting

Will be sharing some of that this week. Stay tuned 👀

[nikshep @nikshepsvn]

few understand how widely applicable covenants can be -- when they said encrypted markets, they mean every market -- perps, yield, PMs and more -- the TAM is fucking massive

ethereum:0x7cf9a80db3b29ee8efe3710aadb7b95270572d47

[Mark Mac @thatmarkmac]

Spent the weekend deep diving into the stuff Covenants can do in prediction markets and it’s super exciting

Will be sharing some of that this week. Stay tuned 👀

[Nillion @nillion]

DON'T show your order before it fills.
DON'T show your bid before it clears.
DON'T show your strategy before it fires.
DON'T show your rebalance before it happens.

Covenants seal the instruction until it’s time to act.

[Mark Mac @thatmarkmac]

This is wild. It fired!

19:56 UTC, minutes after I posted. All 250 ZEC sold at $1,049, 53k loss locked in. ZEC printed $1,048.40 for one minute and two hours later it’s $1,100

Brutal. This guy did the responsible thing, set a stop to protect himself, and the venue put it on display for anyone to aim at. 53k gone, and ZEC ripped straight back up without those 250 coins

This needs fixing. With Covenants nobody knows where your line is