Editor: Diane; Maxwell Translater: Diane; Maxwell; Zoe; Carole Twitter: https://twitter.com/D_TigerResearch Discord: https://discord.gg/JDD34Qab6C Telegram: https://t.me/+VyKuATGkFE1kOGFl

Foreword

The three letters of Nym are derived from the English words “AnoNymous” and “PseudoNym”, which both represent the meaning of "anonymity", to some extent, it coincides with the vision of the Nym team: End the monitoring of personal information in the Internet era, so that users' privacy can be truly protected.

Basic Introduction

1.1. Project Brief Introduction

Nym is a project in privacy field researched and developed by Nym Technologies, a privacy technology development startups. By enabling privacy blockchain, based on the Mixnet privacy protocol, it creates a privacy Web 3.0 application development program for users. Nym is a new generation of global privacy infrastructure. Its goal is to expand the scale of the network, develop a basic platform with high privacy protection features, and promote the development of application products that emphasize privacy protection features to improve the efficiency of the network.

1.2. Basic Information

Project Details

2.1. Team

As of 2022-02-17, the project side has announced a total of 25 team members, including members from all over the world, such as Germany, Romania, Britain and other countries and regions:

In addition, Nym consultant George Danezis, who previously worked at PANORAMIX and advised Nym before joining Libra, not only rejoined the Nym project after leaving the project briefly to help design Facebook's digital currency Libra(renamed Diem) Chainspace co-founder Mustafa Al-Bassam is now an advisor to Nym.

And members of the Nym project team also include:

Conclusion: Most Nym team members have more than 10 years of work experience in this field, and also hold important positions in many companies in the past. The Nym team has rich experience; Members are allocated clearly; The development progress is medium, and the total strength of the team is above average.

2.2. Capital and Cooperation

The Investors

The Partners

Nym Founded in 2018, by 2022-2-25, a total of four rounds of financing and investment, average every year will have a certain amount of financing used to fund projects development. And as the financing scale is bigger and bigger, the financing mechanism and cooperation mechanism is also growing year by year, from the current situation, the project has a strong powerful capital support.

With the improvement of development progress and promotion of publicity, Nym project has reached cooperative relations with many public chains and won the favor of many institutions. Including the well-known Binance Labs and A16z and other venture capital institutions. Nym project is good at publicizing the popularity of projects and cooperating with other projects.

2.3. Community

As of 2022-2-25, Nym officially released a total of 1,578 tweets, and the average daily number of tweets is greater than 1. The project community information is updated in a timely manner, which is worthy of continuous attention, and the telegram community has set up different language countries and regions classification groups, which is conducive to promoting users exchanges and discussions.

However, the disadvantage is that the Discord community has not been opened yet. This lacks a unique information classification for people who want to understand the overall planning of the Nym project, which raises the threshold for users to get started. But according to the administrators, the official Discord community will be launched soon. The project team has a medium ability in community operation. After the public sale of $NYM tokens, although the project is currently in an era of transition to a high-speed development period, it still attracts many users who are interested in it, and the popularity of the project is still increasing. The future development potential is medium to upper.

Framework

The Whole Design Concept: Support application and service privacy enhancement.

Keypoint: Protect users' virtual data and privacy proofs.

Operational Model: The token-based incentive model is used to cover the costs incurred during the operation and reward those node merchants who have given excellent node services to the Nym protocol.

Ultimate Goal: To fulfill the privacy requirements of most users.

3.1. Core Technology

Nym uses many privacy technologies and integrates into a cooperative network node system. The main technologies included are:

1. Coconut (Privacy Enhanced Signature Scheme), Allows the inversion of resource channel control, moving from identity-based authentication and authentication based on who you are to usage-based privacy protection planning.
2. Sphinx, a protected transport that packs encryption layer information to make it indistinguishable from other binaries
3. Mixnet, which encrypts and mixes Sphinx packets so that there is no way to distinguish which packet corresponds to the final destination. Mixnet is a revised version of the Loopix design.

3.2. Major network participants

🔑 End user:

The user base of Nym includes the users of all the services available via Nym who choose to communicate privately, whether to anonymously broadcast a transaction, access information, or maintain a messaging conversation with a friend. The larger and more diverse the user base, the better the anonymity provided to all users and the more cost-effective the network becomes.

🔑 Mix nodes:

Mix nodes provision communication privacy to end users by relaying data packets anonymously. Mix nodes are organized in a network, called mixnet, and packets traverse multiple nodes before being delivered to their final recipient.

Mix nodes receive data packets that they both transform cryptographically and reorder, such that it is not possible to tell which input packet corresponds to which output, neither based on data content nor on timing. The Nym mixnet is based on the Loopix design, it uses the Sphinx packet format , a stratified network topology, continuous-time mixes , and loops of cover traffic.

🔑 Gateways:

Gateways make the Nym mixnet accessible while protecting it from free riding. Participants may choose to always use the same gateway for all their traffic, split their traffic over multiple gateways, or pick a different gateway every day. Gateways also cache received messages for participants who are offline or unreachable, and are instrumental in the implementation of reliable transport features.

🔑 Validators:

Validators collaboratively perform several core functions in the Nym network. They maintain the Nym blockchain, which acts as a secure broadcast channel for distributing network-wide information, such as: the list of active nodes and their public keys, network configuration parameters, periodic random beacons, participant’s stake, deposits into the nympool (the shared pool of funds used to support the Nym network, described below), rewards distributed from the nympool, and any other data that needs to be available to all participants to ensure the secure operation of the network. In addition, validators issue credentials to participants in a distributed manner.

Bandwidth credentials encode a proof of deposit in the nympool made in exchange for an allowance of data to send through the Nym mixnet. These credentials are shown to gateways to prove the right to send traffic through the mixnet. Service credentials can encode arbitrary attributes required for proving "right to access" to a service, including proofs of having made a deposit in the nympool to pay for the service.

🔑 Service Provide:

The Nym network is not a standalone service; It is an infrastructure that supports privacy for a broad range of third-party applications and services accessible through it. Service providers can send and receive messages through the Nym network to privately communicate with their users, as well as optionally use Nym service credentials for granting paid access to their services without requiring privacy-invasive user identification.

Information Flow:

Deposit funds in the nympool to obtain credentials.

Use the bandwidth credential to get access to the gateway.

Establish temporary nym with the gateway.4.

Route traffic via the mixnet.3.

Use service credential to prove "right to use" a service.

Mark a received credential as used.

Distribute rewards from the nympool.

3.3. Advantages and Risks

Adventages:

✅ 1. Nym protects privacy at the network layer: By relying on multiple levels of transmission in the network (Mixnet network), at each layer of the Mixnet network, the Mixnet nodes will scramble your network data, keeping the whole transmission process private and hiding your real metadata.

✅ 2. The Nym hybrid network is motivated and decentralized: users send their data over the Mixnet network by paying a portion of the $Nym fee. By pledging the initial backup of $Nym, anyone can run Mix Nodes, and node operators can earn $Nym tokens based on the quality of service. Work that offers mixed data and end-user-based privacy is called "mixed proof.

✅ 3. Nym is compatible with any application: From Bitcoin to Zcash, in addition to Nym currently providing Layer-0 privacy from the Layer-1 blockchain for every transaction, Nym can provide network-level privacy for blockchain and other applications. From bitcoin to instant messaging, developers can build their applications for the web layer at the top of Nym and protect users at the metadata level.

Risks ⚠️ Nym design and network are no panacea, and there are corresponding risks,such as：

Have global network monitoring: An adversary can monitor aspects of the entire participant and network composition, even if all communication is on the network. In addition, active network adversaries can inject, modify, and discard packets and the underlying Internet infrastructure during transit.
Corrupted participants: potantially thread: Corrupted participants: You can compromise a subset of Nym participants and coordinate hostile resources to guide an attack together. Participants here include verifiers, hybrid nodes, gateways, service providers, and end user.

Development

4.1. History

Nym Project was founded in the fall of 2018 through the Binance Incubator program.
2019-05, Nym completed a $2.5 million seed round of investment.
2019-08, Lead members of the team attended Web3.0 Summit, ETHBerlin (Berlin Blockchain Week is an industry event initiated by the decentralized community) and other related conferences.
2019-12, Nym hosted the first Test network workshop at CCC, covering running, interrupting and building Nym Alpha test network.
2020-05, Advanced workshop on using encryption to protect privacy for team co-creators with complete anonymity.
2020-07-16: Obtained A round of financing of usd 6 million led by Polychain Capital and participated by Eden Block, Greenfield One, etc.
2020-11-27, Nym team released Nym V.0.9.2.
2021-04-22, Nym officially released VERSION V.010.0 - Finney Test net.
2021-05, Nym won the Blockchain Solution of the Year award at the AIBC Dubai.
2021-07, Release Nym V.011.0 testnet and gradually transition Finney testnet to Milhon testnet.
2021-11-12, Nym announces desktop Wallet, will also sync with Mixnet's open-source browser.
21-11-18, Nym won another $13 million B round of financing at an estimated value of $270 million. This round of financing was led by a16Z, and participated by Digital Currency Group, Tayssir Capital, Huobi Ventures, etc.
2021-12-21, Permanent Testnet -Sandbox is launched. This test net is designed to replicate the operation of the main net etc.
2022-02-01, Nym announces the introduction of the native Token Nym and the announcement of the upcoming Nym mainnet.
2022-02-10, 75 million of Nym native tokens $Nym, start ICO token offering at $0.5 / $0.25 on Coinlist.

4.2. Current Situation

Nym is already running a test Network with more than 5,000 nodes worldwide, testing system security and token economy, and ensuring that nodes work together to provide privacy protection.

Through Nym's official website Network Explorer Data survey shows that as of 2022-02-25, there are 2806 Mixednodes, including more than 600+ Active nodes, 120 Standby nodes, 12 Gateways and 2 validators.

It can also be seen from the global node distribution map that currently nodes are roughly concentrated in the United States, Russia, Germany, the Netherlands and other parts of the world, and the number of nodes is still increasing.

The largest number of nodes is in Germany, It has more than 1809 nodes, accounting for 28.8% of the total number of nodes.
Followed by the United States, which has 1,074 nodes, accounting for 17.1% of the total number of nodes.
The third place is the Netherlands, which has 860 nodes, accounting for 13.8%, followed by Finland, Russia, the United Kingdom, Japan, France and Singapore Canada etc.

📢 Global Overview：
1. Mixnet and validator are now working.
2. Mixnet API is basically stable, at which point you can start building applications.
3. The validator now works in its most basic form. Later, it will also generate the Coconut credential.
4. There is currently a native Mixnet client written in Rust that runs on a desktop or server in a standalone manner and you can use it to connect desktop or server applications to Nym networks, using any Websockets language.
5. There is also a WebAssembly client that can be used in a browser or mobile application and communicate with the gateway again over Websockets The client is not complete at the moment (it does not send overwrite traffic yet), but it is in the development phase, to the point where it can be used for development and overwrite traffic occurs transparently when set up, as Nym application developers need not worry about.
6. SOCKS5 clients and service providers (called Nym-network-requester) can easily adapt cryptocurrency wallets and other existing SOCKS-compliant applications to use the Nym privacy infrastructure.

4.3. Future

The Nym team announced that Nym mainnet deployment will be completed in the first quarter of 2022. And officially launched the mainnet countdown Nym Mainnet operation: people will be able to use $Nym tokens to pay for the hybrid network, staking $Nym to the acting nodes or to the hybrid nodes.

Economic System

$NYM is the native token of the Nym mixnet. It is a utility token, used to access the mixnet for privacy protections, and serving as ‘reputation’ and rewards for the nodes that run the infrastructure. Delegation of $NYM supports decentralization and encourages the mixnet to have a high quality of service. $NYM is not a general purpose payment mechanism or cryptocurrency like Bitcoin, and should only be used inside the Nym network.

⚠️ Notice: $NYM is not a privacy coin. It is a token that runs a global decentralised mixnet, which offers network layer privacy for any other coin, wallet, chain, or application in general. A mixnet is an anonymous overlay network, similar to Tor or I2P, that is built on top of existing Internet protocols like TCP/IP and UDP.

5.1. Token Economics & Release

The total supply: 1,000,000,000 (1B) $NYM.

Initial circulating supply: 63.5M $NYM.

$NYM Release Schedule:

Reserve: 2-year vesting with quarterly releases, starting on March 31st, 2022

Backers, Team: 2-year vesting with quarterly releases, starting on May 3, 2022

Mixmining: Releases on a monthly schedule. Mixing rewards will start on March 31st, 2022 but they won’t become liquid until May 3, 2022

Testnet rewards: The first batch will be released on May 3, 2022 with quarterly releases as needed.

5.2. Token Use Cases

❓ How can I use NYM to run a mix node?

Token holders must pledge $NYM tokens as the initial reputation of their mix node, using command line or the wallet.

The total reputation of a mix node is its total amount pledged in $NYM plus total amount of delegated $NYM. How much $NYM you pledge to your node shows how much you believe in yourself and the mixing work you will do. And how much other people delegate to you shows how much the community believes you will perform the work of mixing traffic and providing privacy.

The higher a node’s reputation (measured in total $NYM of a mix node), the more likely it is to be selected in the reward set of mix nodes to perform mixing, and the higher the rewards they receive when they are selected. There is also a ‘soft-cap’ to keep mixmining work decentralised, ensuring reputation is spread over enough nodes to maintain a sufficiently large network.

❓ If I don’t want to run a mix node, how can I delegate NYM?

Anybody holding $NYM tokens can delegate $NYM to mix nodes.

Delegators play an important role by participating in the assignment of reputation to mix nodes. And because they can earn a share of rewards, they are incentivised to delegate to well-performing nodes who will do a good job of mixing and therefore realize their potential rewards.

❓ What is the mixmining pool and what happens when it runs out?

The mixmining pool is a reserve initialized at the genesis of the network with 250M $NYM tokens (25% of the total supply of $NYM), which are released on a monthly schedule.

Every month 2% of the funds in the pool are made available as rewards to be distributed to nodes. If all nodes have perfect performance and maximum reputation, all the rewards are allocated; on the other hand, when nodes have bad performance or low reputation some of the funds are returned to the pool.

The mixmining reserve rewards are needed for bootstrapping the service, as nodes need to cover operational costs even if the user traffic is initially insufficient to bring in enough fees to sustain the network. In fact, the mixnet will be freely available for the first months to facilitate testing and usage. As fees are turned on and more applications and users join the service, the hope is that fees will replace the mixmining pool as the main source of rewards.

❓ How are people who delegate to mix nodes rewarded?

The amount of rewards in $NYM that a delegator receives is dependent on their choice of mix nodes, and their unique parameters (such as operational cost, profit margin, performance, amount of pledge, and total reputation score).

A node’s pre-declared costs and profit margin are subtracted from any rewards earned and refunded to the node operator. The remaining rewards are distributed to delegators proportionally. A mix node’s reputation will determine its likelihood of being selected to perform mixmining work and receive rewards, and its performance metrics also affect rewards.

Delegations can be changed to a different mix node at any time. Node parameters and more can be seen in the example mixnet explorer in the Nym Sandbox testnet. Note all NYMT in the Sandbox are valueless, as the Sandbox is a testnet for Nym mainnet.

5.3. Token Sale On CoinList

As of 2022-2-17, Nym's native token $Nym has completed all public sale on CoinList Sale. Details of the event are as follows:

Competition

6.1. Field Overview

Nym project is part of the Web3.0 privacy track.

When the development of blockchain enters a new era, users not only pay attention to the project's economic ability and security ability, but also include privacy protection as an option.

Building applications in the Web3.0 era is inseparable from the improvement of the underlying infrastructure, such as privacy protection, data sovereignty, distributed storage, etc. But privacy is one of the cornerstones of Web3.0, a foundation the Internet has been missing. Different from the centralized management era of Web2.0, users sacrifice privacy in exchange for services, and data ownership is usurpated by platforms. Now Web3.0 is committed to an Internet owned by builders and users, realizing value transfer through cross-chain regions, achieving community-owned platforms, and applying encryption technology to data protection and other aspects.

6.2. Competition Project

Tor (The Onion Router) Traditional project Tor is today's best-known anonymous overlay, offering a three-hop "circuit" that offers better privacy than single-node VPNS. However, Tor's anonymity can be attacked by entities that can monitor the "entry" and "exit" nodes of the entire network, so its privacy design is not secure enough today.

VPN (Virtual Private Network) A VPN connects a user's device to a remote server in a selected country or region through a secure tunnel. This masks the user's IP address and makes it look as if it is accessing the Internet from the remote server's location rather than the user's actual location.

6.3. Competition Analysis

📢 Conclusion:

First, whether Bitcoin, ZCash or Flow, no current “layer 1 blockchain” provides “layer 0 privacy” for the peer-to-peer broadcasts used in every transaction. Nym can provide network-level privacy for any blockchain and other generic applications. From Bitcoin to instant messaging, developers can build their applications on top of Nym to provide network-level privacy for their users.

On the one hand, Nym started working on the private Track project in 2018. Tor was originally released in 2002-09-20, and its most recent release has been updated to 0.4.6.10. In the same way, the longer working hours you are, the more mature working methods and richer working experience you get.

On the other hand, Tor privacy infrastructure is not only involved in the blockchain universe, but also in anonyms that are more easily accessible in daily life. The field of development is also more comprehensive, but notice it, the wider field of development does not mean that the technology is more mature. Because with the update and iteration of the network era, many of the cutting-edge technology of the past is slowly falling behind the current technology. However，the Nym project is based on absorbing the advantages of the previous generation of privacy project technology and continuous innovation. It uses the most suitable blockchain privacy technology to greatly strengthen the privacy intensity of its underlying protocol from the perspective of development layer, so Nym project is undoubtedly more advanced and suitable for blockchain research and user demand.

Summary

To sum up, even the development threshold of Web3.0 privacy projects is high and the development team is small, technology needs to be improved, especially privacy technology. Nym project not only has the support of the underlying privacy technology established by the team, but also has strong financial support. Many users believe that Nym has great potential in the field of privacy when it goes mainnet. Due to the hybrid network technology can encrypt user data and hide metadata, so that communications can be hidden to protect privacy. Will surpass Tor in terms of technology and potential to become a more advanced modern upgrade. At the same time, the Nym project is further accomplished to encourage diversity and decentralization of privacy options and tools for users, software users and operators. So the potential of Nym in the future should not be underestimated.

References

Investment Risk and Disclaimer

All contents of this article represent the author's personal views and do not constitute any investment advice.

Do not make any investment decisions based on this report. The author of this report is not responsible for the investment results of users Provide graphics, charts and other visual tools are for reference only.

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