About

I'm Hilal Agil. I grew up in the Maldives — a place that gave me a deep and lasting connection with nature. I was drawn early to science fiction and to philosophy about the future of human civilization, and much of my adult life has gone into frontier technology, building toward a future I could picture long before I could build it. Those interests still sit underneath everything I make.

I've been programming since I was twelve — self-taught, starting by coding websites. Today I work as an entrepreneur and technologist, focused on frontier technologies like AI and blockchain, and I trained in Data Science and Machine Learning at the University of Oxford.

Before any of that, there was music. I founded the heavy metal band Nothnegal at a young age, and it went on to tour the world. The vision I've carried through technology was first laid out there, and the same thread runs through everything since — music, technology, academia. I look for the problems that matter to our shared future, and I build toward solutions.

The work, in order

A rough chronology of the ventures and projects — most recent first.

1. Ipnops2026 — present

   Founder

   Making the world’s data — across digital and physical spaces — something AI can reach, understand, and act on safely, with clear rules for how it is accessed and governed. Built for a world where AI needs far more data than the web can provide.

2. Vestigim2026 — present

   Founder

   Living models of artistry — mapping how an artist decides and how they sound into ownable, licensable layers of the catalog. The Vestigim Graph captures an artist’s judgment; Machine Sounds captures their authenticated sound-craft, from instruments to entire rigs.

3. Naturecode Project2025 — present

   Founder

   Frontier technology in service of environmental conservation and biodiversity — research, publications, open standards, and open-source tools, continuing the work begun with The Eco Org in the Maldives.

4. Tenzro2024 — present

   Founder

   An open protocol and network for decentralized AI and distributed computing — built so the future of intelligence isn’t controlled by a few.

5. Boli2021 — present

   Founder

   A blockchain-native rethinking of ownership — alternative asset infrastructure built on the Canton Network, pursuing the economic ideas first laid out in the Ectopia whitepaper.

6. The Eco Org2019

   Founder

   Founded in the Maldives to pursue the ideas described in the Ectopia whitepaper — frontier technology in service of environmental conservation and self-sustaining communities.

7. Ream2018 — 2019

   Founder

   A bet on patterns that would come to define machine learning and AI — placed nearly a decade before the current wave of agentic commerce arrived.

8. Nothnegal2006 — 2021

   Founder

   A heavy metal band founded in the Maldives that went on to tour the world — where the blueprint for everything since was first laid down, in music.

Where this is going

In 2019 I published the Ectopia whitepaper — a framework for decentralized, self-sustaining, self-governed communities, from circular economies to self-sovereign identity. It didn't materialize exactly as described; blueprints rarely do. But The Eco Org and Boli were launched to pursue its ideas, and most of what I build today — open networks, governed data, privacy designed in from the start — descends from that document.

My throughline is simple: intelligence, computation, and data are becoming the foundation of civilization — and their shape shouldn't be decided by a handful of centralized actors. I build open protocols and networks so that no single party controls how the world's data and intelligence are reached, used, or governed — and so that frontier technology serves the natural world as much as the digital one, including the work of environmental conservation and protecting biodiversity.

A large part of that work is AI safety, transparency, and governance. As access to the most capable models becomes gated, conditional, and unpredictable in the hands of a few centralized parties, the case for verifiable, auditable, and distributed systems only grows stronger. I care about building AI whose behavior can be understood and governed — not just trusted on faith.

I'm a firm believer in open-source technology, and I keep embracing it — Tenzro's protocol and network are open source under Apache 2.0, and I contribute to the open-source community through the standards, protocols, tools, and frameworks I build. Most of that work lives on my GitHub.

Find me on Medium and GitHub, or through Tenzro and the Naturecode Project.