Q1.What is the Nym project?
Nym is the privacy backbone for the Internet. In particular, Nym is a “full-stack” privacy system. Developers can connect their existing applications to the Nym system to protect their users at the network level through the Nym mixnet and protect them at the network level. Apps through Nym private credentials. Combined, these have the ability to add privacy to the broader blockchain industry: Nym mixnet provides layer 0 privacy, which increases data protection. Meta for blockchain projects and other layer 1 cryptocurrencies (such as Bitcoin and Ethereum) and layer 2 (most DeFi projects).
Q2：What made you decide to build NYM?
Nym was founded to end the era of internet surveillance. The motive initially came after the revelation of Edward Snowden, apparently the Internet became a tool for surveillance.
For at least 10 to 15 years surveillance has been the technical and business model of the Internet. Many surveillance is used to extract information. and create profiling algorithms to target people for commercial purposes. or to deal with opinions, elections, military purposes
In fact, early cypherpunks already saw in the 1980s how the Internet could become a mass surveillance system. They campaign for everyone to use encryption so that everyone can protect themselves from authoritarian governments and violence. As well as the manipulative and exploitative tech company Cypherpunks was the starting point for bitcoin and blockchain.
But today encryption is not enough anymore. Where encryption can help hide the content of the message It’s not enough for data protection. Because metadata can reveal where you are. Who are you talking to, how often, what kind of content are you sending? and from any type of device So for Nym, we aim to continue the mission of early Cypherpunks, but tailor it to the privacy needs of the 21st century, including the ability to withstand machine learning techniques and more.
Q3: What is the main product of Nym?
Nym’s flagship product is a decentralized global mixnet, Nym mixnet is a three-layer decentralized computer network. Your traffic and communications are encrypted using the SPHINX packet format, which allows data Every piece sent through the mixnet looks exactly the same. It is then routed through each mixnet layer, where mixnodes mix your traffic with the traffic of others. Enables metadata that specifically identifies your communications, such as your IP address, time and destination. This means that your message “Lost in the Crowd” and not only the content but also the metadata of your message. and your communication is private
Q4: What types of utilities does the $NYM token provide, are there any benefits to owning the $NYM itself?
In a nutshell, NYM is a utility token that powers the network. It can be purchased by an individual or an institution for payment. “Bandwidth credentials” which are allowances for using Nym mixnet at layer 0 and paying “service credentials” which can be used in privacy services at layer 1 and layer 2. NYM tokens are then used. to reward gateway Mixed Nodes and Authenticators in the Nym ecosystem for their job of blending user traffic and providing privacy.
The NYM token is a utility token that provides access to the privacy services of the NYM network. Initially, there are three use cases: NYM can be used by individuals to access mixnet privacy protections, individuals can Use NYM to bind and run your own mixnodes and earn rewards. And finally, users can use NYM to assign other mixes. Node to get a share of the reward as NYM is a privacy token. The demand for NYM tokens will be driven by general and global demand for privacy. which extends beyond the crypto market and token speculation. And this is why we are excited about the investments of institutions such as the European Commission and are looking to collaborate with some of the main privacy technology organizations around the world. Strong privacy protection is becoming increasingly important for individuals, organizations and institutions only. Because without strict privacy people and organizations It will not be able to make a meaningful decision about what information is generated about them and for what purpose. So privacy will undoubtedly be the basis for the future of the Internet. And we hope that the Nym system can serve billions of people online. This process will also drive demand for NYM tokens.
Q5: What are the advantages of Nym compared to competitors?
as many people know The most widely used network-level privacy solution is VPN (Virtual Private Network). But it is often misconfigured. More importantly, VPN providers can fully observe all network traffic between users and the public internet. This means that they know what services the user has accessed at a given time! Your privacy is in the hands of your VPN provider.
Tor will attempt to solve this surveillance problem by providing a ‘cycle’ of three relay nodes, which provides better privacy than a single-node VPN. Tor also encrypts traffic between each hop. However, Tor’s anonymity feature can be overcome by entities that can inspect the entire network’s ‘entry’ and ‘exit’ nodes. will encrypt traffic But it doesn’t add time interference or use deceptive traffic to confuse traffic patterns. which can be used to obscure the user
Tor is the only global privacy system that can be compared. and effective, but with limitations by volunteering It means that global reach is difficult: Volunteers are often centralized in wealthy western countries and the system is unlikely to be scalable. We believe economic incentives can address this issue. So that the whole world can have privacy on the Internet.
NYM tokens play a key role in resolving this issue. With NYM tokens, we aim to make global privacy economically sustainable and scalable by rewarding the nodes running the system.
Tor is good at hiding your IP, but not enough for privacy. This is because other metadata may be exposed, such as who is talking to whom and when.
Q6: What is the use case for Nym?
The simplest use case for Nym is for a decentralized VPN. An individual, company or organization buys some NYM tokens and uses them with their bandwidth credentials, paying mixnodes to mix their Internet traffic. Make text and web browsing private.
Another use case is that Nym is a network-level privacy layer for cryptographic wallets. When a person sends a transaction through mixnet, some goes to mixnodes as a “mixing” fee to add privacy to the transaction.
And more sophisticated use cases can be built with Coconut identity, where people can prove their rights to anonymously access digital services like KYC or voting rights. or anonymously logging into web services
Q7: What goals have you achieved in your plan?
I would like to emphasize our technical strategic plan. And speaking of a recent successful investment round, our team more than doubled. And so far it has managed to achieve our development goals for this year.
– Launched Nym Network Explorer, block explorer and web wallet which we are building in Milhon testnet.
– Onboarding Validator and Gateways, which we are working on right now. Soon the validator will not be allowed. This means that anyone can join to run the Nym network monitoring program.
– Proof of blending (or “mixing”) and staking mechanisms assigned This is an important part of ensuring the quality of service in the network and that the reward system works well.
– The Nym cryptoeconomics – where we did some of the latest simulations. and it looks pretty good We have simulated the financial viability, return and cost of the system, and soon we will be reporting on these results. This should be interesting to anyone who wants to run nodes in the Nym network.
– Creation of Nym private credentials and Decentralized Public Key Infrastructure (dPKI)
– And finally Mainnet! This is an important step that we are aiming for by the end of this year.
Q8: Can you tell us about your new fundraising?
In 2018, we received investment from Binance and were in the first batch of Binance Labs incubators. In 2019, we raised $2.5 million from NGC, Lemniscap, Edenblock, and others. This year, we just finished a $6.5 funding round. M is led by Polychain with participation from a number of smaller European investors such as Eden Block, Greenfield One, Maven11, Tioga and 1kx.
a few months ago We have also participated in the European Next Generation Internet (NGI) initiative to develop the “human-centred Internet” and received two grants in the program: Pointer and Ledger grants.
We also recently announced our newly closed investment round – a Series A round led by a16z and joined by DCG (cryptocurrency group), Tayssir Capital, Huobi Ventures, HashKey, Fenbushi Capital, and investigators. who joined our previous test network
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