User data is extremely valuable, and complex analytical systems can use it to determine the nature of users’ social relationships, predict their characteristics and preferences. NYM wants to make data work for users and keep people safe from abusive data gathering practices.
User’s details have become a money-making tool for many organizations, and people generally don’t understand how much data they offer to the internet every time they are online.
However, not everyone wants to give their data to others for financial purposes. The use of the internet today possibly creates adverse effects and directly violates the privacy of users’ data.
What is NYM?
Founded in 2018 by a group of researchers and programmers working in the field of privacy-enhancing technology, NYM Tech is a secure infrastructure that prevents third-party surveillance over the user’s personal data.
NYM aims to bring total privacy, enabling any application, service, or blockchain to protect its network access against the most sophisticated monitoring systems, pooling resources rather than requiring new permissions while simultaneously ensuring operational and financial viability.
NYM Tech’s goal and vision is to leverage blockchain technology, creating a new generation of the Internet infrastructure that protects privacy and data control rights for users.
How NYM Works
For any decentralized network, the biggest obstacle is gathering the real-world resources to run the nodes to maintain the network’s operation.
NYM employs incentive schemes to decentralize and maintain network quality of service. NYM’s groundbreaking proof-of-stake system, motivated by Bitcoin, rewards nodes that mix traffic rather than complexities with a random binary model.
Rather than a proof-of-work system, NYM node operators are rewarded with blended proofs, ensuring everyone’s privacy.
The NYM network is not a stand-alone service; instead, it is an infrastructure that provides privacy for a wide range of third-party applications and services that use it.
Project developers can send and receive messages through the NYM network to communicate privately with their users and grant paid access to the services using NYM service credentials.
NYM products are available to all users in the NYM ecosystem, including anyone who wants to use the internet anonymously, from communicating to sending transactions, accessing information, and storing messages with friends and private investors.
When users connect to the internet, NYM creates a network that provides an open-source anonymous overlay. NYM outperforms existing alternatives with network aggregation.
Additionally, NYM employs blockchain technology to decentralize mixnet operations, ensuring that the network has no single point of failure.
The mechanism enables decentralized identity and privacy-enhancing data transfers using anonymous credentials based on the Coconut signature scheme.
NYM Products
NYM Mixnet
NYM mixnet is an innovative component of the NYM system. This decentralized network is organized into three layers. To understand the mixnet schematic, imagine you’re on the internet, and you want to send a message to your friend using the mixnet.
Your message (communication traffic) is delivered and covered in multiple layers of encryption. The SPHINX packet format will make your data indistinguishable from other users’ data, which means each piece transferred through the mixnet appears to be identical to the last part of the data.
As your internet traffic is mixed with the traffic from others, it is blended into a thicker slurry of traffic that obscures your personal metadata, such as your IP address, time, and destination.
This means that your messages have “lost in the crowd,” and your metadata, like the content, is secure. In the context of a mixnet, “Privacy loves company” is an expression used to describe how multiple parties help each other maintain privacy.
The more people join the network, the greater the anonymity and efficiency of the network are.
Anyone can learn the following information in the network explorer:
- A multitude of mixnodes, gateways, and validators are currently participating in the testnet.
- Information of the mixnodes profiles and performance.
- Geographical location
NYM Token
NYM token is the utility token that empowers the NYM network.
The way it works is as follows:
- An individual or organization purchases NYM tokens.
- These tokens are then applied to “bandwidth credentials” payment, allowing participants to use NYM mixnet at layer 0.
- These tokens can also be used to purchase “service credentials,” giving access to privacy-preserving services at layers 1 and 2.
- Bandwidth credentials are then displayed at the mixnet gateways, giving access to the mixnet.
- Gateways, mixnodes, and validators are rewarded NYM tokens for contributing to traffic mixing and privacy creation in the NYM network.
NYM is currently in the testnet phase, and the test token is PUNKs. NYMs will be the mainet token and are expected to release later this year.
NYM Infrastructure
NYM is structured in three major groups of nodes that contribute to NYM’s security and privacy.
Mix Nodes: Mix nodes protect end-user privacy by sending data packets anonymously. Before reaching the end recipient, the data packets will pass through the Mix nodes in the network (known as the mixnet). Mix nodes will receive data packets to convert to encrypted form and rearrange, making it nearly impossible to determine what output data is, whether the output is based on content or time.
Gateways: Gateways allow access to NYM’s mixnet while preventing data abuse for personal benefit. Entrants can choose to consistently apply the same gateway for all-access, split access pathways for different gateways, or access a separate gateway each day. Gateways also assist in implementing secure communication features by temporarily storing received messages for users who are offline or have not received messages.
Validators: Validators play a critical role in the NYM network. They manage the NYM blockchain, which serves as a secure broadcast channel for distributing information across the network, such as a list of active nodes and their public keys, network configuration parameters, signaling points, periodic random tokens, participant stakes, deposits to NYMpool (the common fund used to support the NYM network), distributed rewards from NYMpool, and any other data that is publicly available to participants to ensure the safe operation of the network.
Anyone can become a validator and run a node in the NYM network as long as they can contribute capacity to the network while maintaining a commensurate level of service. Participants join the NYM network by staking NYM tokens but are rewarded based on practical work performance.
NYM provides incentives to validators, gateways, and mix nodes with tokenized rewards in order to ensure professional maintainability, high performance, and high service quality, all of which are necessary for applications to run efficiently on the NYM blockchain.
This incentivization ensures the long-term operation and coherence of nodes, which is in the best interests of all network participants.
Meet The Team
The members of the project team come from both the blockchain area and traditional markets. Among the founding members are:
Harry Halpin – CEO: Harry was a former researcher at the University of Oxford and the WWW research organization’s federation president at the University of Edinburgh. Since November 2018, he has put all of his effort into the NYM Technologies project incubated by Binance Labs.
Dave Hrycyszyn – NYM’s Co-founder and Chief Technology: Dave worked on the Scalatra open-source network and published a book about it.
He also helped build NetFlix, the BBC’s Connected Data project, and other projects. He was also a co-founder and consultant for the Vega Protocol invested by many significant funds such as Pantera Capital and Spring.
Ania Piotrowska – NYM’s Co-founder and Head of Research: Ania specializes in research and development at NYM. Her research is focused on internet security, security enhancement technology, decentralized systems, and anonymous communication.
She has a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of London and has extensive background working at DeepMind and Chainalysis.
Keep Watching NYM
NYM created a great platform that will appeal to anyone who wants to be more secure online, and it is continuing to develop useful tools for anyone who values data privacy.
You can keep with NYM via its Twitter, Telegram and Medium accounts. To visit the platform’s website, please click right here!
