Nym Project Overview
Nym is a privacy platform. It provides robust network-level protection against sophisticated end-to-end attacks, as well as anonymous access control using decentralized credentials with blinding and re-randomization.
The goal of the project is to enable developers to build new or upgrade existing applications with privacy features not available in other systems.
The Nym platform integrates several privacy technologies by integrating them into a system of interoperable network nodes.
At a high level, the technologies include:
- Mixnet network, which encrypts and mixes Sphinx packet traffic in such a way that it is impossible to tell who is communicating with whom. Mixnet is based on a modified version of the Loopix project;
- A privacy-enhancing signature scheme called Coconut. Coconut allows you to change the way you think about managing access to resources from an identity-based paradigm based on who you are to a privacy-based paradigm based on right-to-use;
- Sphinx — a way of transmitting armored, layer-level encrypted packets of information that are indistinguishable from each other at the binary level;
- Nyx blockchain — a general-purpose smart contract platform with support for CosmWasm and a home for smart contracts that track the performance of the mixnet.
These technologies provide privacy at two different levels of the stack: network data transfers and transactions.
Developers can think of a network as consisting of infrastructure nodes and clients to interact with that infrastructure through privacy-enhanced applications (PEAP’s).
Roadmap
- 2018 Getting Started.
Creating Nym in the fall of 2018 as part of the Binance Incubator program;
- 2019 Fundraising and prototype.
- Closed a CHF 2.5 million pre-funding round;
- Initial prototypes in Go;
- Litepaper launched;
- First version of a decentralized mixnet with documentation for developers launched.
- 2020 Tokenized Testnet.
- Mixnet rebuilt in Rust to improve performance;
- First tokenized testnet was opened to the public at Chaos Computer Congress, mixnodes were taken on board;
- Decentralized Nym directory service using Tendermint.
- 2021 Path to Mainnet (Phase 1).
- Closed Series A funding of CHF 6 million;
- Launch of Nym Network Explorer;
- Launching Nym Block Explorer and web wallet;
- Enabling validators and gateways;
- Proof of Mixmining (Mixmining) and Delegated Stacking mechanism;
- Creating Nym personal credentials and decentralized public key infrastructure (dPKI);
- Cryptoeconomics of Nym;
- Mainet.
- 2022 Client Applications and Implementation (Phase 2).
Improving the format of Sphinx and SURBs;
- Creating Nym client applications and GUIs, including wallet, dashboard;,
- Wallet integration;
- Support for authentication services using Nym Credentials;
- Support for personal messaging applications and cryptocurrency transactions.
- 2023 Enterprise use and institutional deployment (Phase 3).
- High-speed blending for everyday private Internet use;
- Embedding Nym in the network stack (see TARANET);
- Support for decentralized VPNs;
- Standardization of Nym core components in standard bodies such as the IETF;
- Integration with credential and mixnet partners for diversity and user base building.
Project Resources:
