Nym

Nym is a company that provides internet privacy through the use of mix networks, or mixnets. Mixnets are multi-layered networks that encrypt internet traffic by using mix nodes, which mix the internet traffic of various users together in order to anonymize it. The company was founded in 2018 by Harry Halpin and George Danezis.

The Nym network is a decentralized and incentivized infrastructure to provision privacy to a broad range of message-based applications and services.

Nym is a company that provides internet privacy through the use of mix networks, or mixnets. Mixnets are multi-layered networks that encrypt internet traffic by using mix nodes, which mix the internet traffic of various users together in order to anonymize it. The company was founded in 2018 by Harry Halpin and George Danezis.

Nym's mixnet is a three-layer network that combines the internet traffic of many users at once, effectively anonymizing each user's personal metadata. Nym's mixnet is decentralized, enabled through node runners who are awarded in NYM tokens. Nym is workable with any blockchain or generic application. Apps can be built on top of Nym to receive network layer and metadata protection. Nym is more powerful than the Tor browser and virtual private networks (VPNs). Users of Nym pay for the service using NYM tokens. NYM's total supply is 1 billion tokens.

The core component of Nym is a mixnet that protects network traffic metadata for applications, providing communication privacy superior to both VPNs and Tor against global adversaries that can watch the entire internet.

What is Nym?

Nodes in the mixnet are rewarded via a novel proof of mixing scheme that proves that mix nodes are providing a high quality of service. Rewards given by NYM tokens allow anyone to join the Nym network and enable a sustainable economic model for privacy. NYM tokens can be transformed into anonymous credentials that allow users to privately prove their "right to use" services in a decentralized and verifiable manner.

The Nym network can serve as the foundation for a vast range of privacy-enhanced applications that defend the fundamental freedoms of people across the globe against traffic analysis by powerful adversaries.

Nym is designed to support privacy-enhanced access to applications and services, both in terms of protecting communications metadata and privately proving the "right to use" services. Nym leverages token-based incentives to fund operational costs, dynamically scale to meet user demand for privacy, and reward nodes for contributing to the protocols with a high quality of service.

Nym architecture and flows

This section introduces the concept and design goals of the Nym network. The participants in Nym are introduced in Section 3.1. Section 3.2 describes the information flows between participants that enable private communication and access to services. Section 3.3 briefly describes the flow of value in the Nym network. The powerful threat model that Nym is meant to counter is presented in Section 3.4. Section 3.5 explains the main privacy features of Nym, while other requirements are listed in Section 3.6.

Nym’s mission is to establish privacy as a default for online communications. Only then can people and organizations make meaningful and secure decisions about what, when and with whom they want to share data.

Reckless data harvesting has dominated Silicon Valley business models over the past decade and has rapidly become the norm for monetizing online activity. Understanding and predicting user behaviour is now the primary business model of the Internet. These data-driven models, collectively known as surveillance capitalism, have produced giant tech monopolies and governments that oversee an unprecedented system of manipulation and control, extracting data and value from society.

It is important to realize just how lacking current technology is with regards to maintaining privacy. Even though a private messenger might encrypt a message’s contents, the metadata (for example identifying the timing of the communications, IP addresses, locations, and lots more) is visible to everyone from the Internet Service Provider (ISP) that delivers the message to the messaging application itself. And in this world of big data, metadata is in many ways more valuable than the content of messages. It can be used by sophisticated and ubiquitous analytic systems to determine the nature of your social relationships and thus predict your personal characteristics and preferences.

The necessary technology to guarantee online privacy has remained underdeveloped - until recently. With progress in computing capacity, networking, research and funding, it is now possible to overcome these limits and deploy technology that avoids trusted third parties and is resistant to surveillance.

Introducing the Nym Protocol; A Global Privacy Commons.

Nym was founded in 2018 to build a global privacy infrastructure and contribute to ending the era of surveillance as the default technical and business model of the internet.

Nym is an open-source, decentralized and permissionless privacy system. It provides full-stack privacy, allowing other applications, services or blockchains to provide their users with strong metadata protection, at both the network level (mixnet), and the application level (anonymous credentials) without the need to build privacy from scratch.

The Nym architecture is powered by three main technological advancements: a mixnet, private credentials and incentives.

How Nym can make the internet private.

The Nym mixnet provides strong guarantees against the leakage and harvesting of metadata at the network layer. It is a general purpose privacy overlay network that is agnostic and can interface with almost any other digital application or service, enabling individuals as well as digital service providers to be able to guarantee their privacy or that of their users.

The mixnet improves

existing privacy systems by mixing internet traffic in a decentralized network. First, all packets are transformed by the user into Sphinx packets on their device. The Sphinx packet format renders all data packets a uniform size. Then, nodes in the mix network “mix” the traffic, releasing packets probabilistically in order to ensure timing obfuscation. If needed, at each node cover traffic is added, and multiple hops ensure users do not have to trust a single node.

While the mixnet builds a strong foundation by protecting the network-layer, Nym credentials enable fine-grained privacy at the application layer. Nym credentials allow digital service providers and users to engage securely without the need to compromise on privacy.

Nym credentials advances on the Coconut signature scheme, enabling people to prove their right to access and do things online while retaining privacy. Nym credentials encrypt and embed the data needed for a given service, including zero-knowledge proofs of private data. These credentials are validated in a decentralized and public manner, without revealing any link between the user and the service they want to access.

Nym is sustainable because it uses incentives to decentralize and maintain the quality of service of the network. Inspired by Bitcoin, Nym’s breakthrough proof-of-work system rewards nodes for mixing traffic rather than solving arbitrary Merkle puzzles. Nym node operators are rewarded for proof of mixing, ensuring privacy for all.Nym only uses enough electricity as needed to accomplish the work of mixing packets to meet demand, and so should minimize unnecessary environmental costs.

Nym employs a blockchain to decentralize the operations of the mixnet so that the network has no centralized points of failure: the Nym mixnet is run by nodes across the world as a global privacy commons. A major obstacle for any decentralized network is assembling real-world resources to run nodes. Tor and I2P’s volunteer model works but has limitations. With the logistical complexity of finding trusted and reliable volunteers, global reach is difficult: volunteers tend to be centralized in wealthy Western countries, with the majority of Tor relays in places like Germany and the US. We believe economic incentives can fix this problem so that the entire world can have privacy on the Internet.

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