Nym in Dec. 2024 / Jan. 2025

Nym.com live, launch date set, Celestia & Nym partner up

January 22, 20257 mins Read

Dear friends and fellow freedom fighters,

Make some noise for a new year and Nym’s new visual identity! Nym.com was officially launched this month with a brand new skin – going green to signal that the app and network are heading to market readiness. Head over there to get NymVPN (still free to use!), learn all about the Nym network and community, and stay up to date with a new unified blog.

The stable version of NymVPN for all platforms was launched in December. The Nym network completed its Crunch upgrade. Nym’s partnership with Celestia was announced to secure chain consensus through the Nym mixnet’s anonymization – a prelude for the potential of Nym across Web3! With the next release, zero-knowledge payments for NymVPN will be turned on, allowing subscribers to pay in the NYM token and everything from Bitcoin to credit cards.

Then, all roads lead to one thing: the commercial launch of NymVPN! The launch is now officially scheduled for 13 March 2025 and will include all essential security features. Read Harry Halpin’s statement to the Nym community on why this date is important.

With NymVPN, people worldwide will finally have the anonymity and security they desperately need. This is possible through a decentralized, zero-knowledge network and a cryptocurrency with an actual use value.

2025 will be many things, some of which will be difficult. But with NymVPN, it can at least mean an internet free of surveillance for all.

Building with you,

Nym Core

Where Nym is now

In the media

TechRadar: “The 3 biggest VPN innovations of 2024 – what does the future hold?”

“As surveillance technologies improve, mixnets like NymVPN may become the gold standard for privacy-focused internet users.”

TechRadar: “3 VPN rising stars – what will it take to reach the top in 2025?”

“[O]ne thing is certain: this is the VPN to look out for when it comes out of beta.”

PCWorld: “An innovative decentralized VPN with some work to do”

“With a privacy-first model and blockchain foundation, the VPN has the bones to be something really revolutionary.”

How to Geek: “I went hands-on with NymVPN, a new kind of secure network”

“Though it’s far from perfect now, something tells me Nym may be the way forward for anybody who wants a more private internet.”

How to Geek: “The best VPN for crypto users”

“[...] with that multi-hop system built atop a ZK-powered blockchain, this could be one of the most secure decentralized VPN options out there right now.”

Coinaute: “Nym: The Online Privacy Revolution with NymVPN”

“Blockchain projects, like Bitcoin and Ethereum, as well as DeFi (decentralized finance) solutions, benefit greatly from Nym’s ability to offer robust privacy.”“Blockchain projects, like Bitcoin and Ethereum, as well as DeFi (decentralized finance) solutions, benefit greatly from Nym’s ability to offer robust privacy.”

NymVPN

Launch of NymVPN

It’s official! NymVPN will be launched on the market 13 March 2025, live from London, England! The commercial version will include:

Full and tested payment system with unlinkability through zk-nym credentials
A kill switch
Amnezia WireGuard for censorship resistance
Gateway selection

NymVPN for all platforms

NymVPN is now available for free on all operating systems, including WireGuard for Windows. You can even now download the app on F-Droid! Head over to the shiny new nym.com to download the app for Windows and all platforms.

Zk-nym payment system

The NymVPN payment system is in its final testing stages and will be made live in the coming weeks. Users will be able to pay for subscriptions in debit/credit cards, NYM, and other cryptocurrencies like BTC. Keep in mind that no matter what payment method you choose, your financial information can never be linked to your use of the app thanks to zk-nym credentials.

Network

Nym network in numbers

Celestia & Nym partnership

This month Nym announced its partnership with Celestia, the leader in modular blockchain technology. Nym will integrate its mixnet to provide an anonymization layer to protect Celestia’s Data Accessibility Sampling process against potential selective disclosure attacks. Check out Nym’s deep dive into this problem for chain consensus and Nym’s solution. This partnership is just the beginning of Nym’s collaborations across Web3.

Crunch network update

The Nym network went through the Crunch upgrade in December, with a patch shortly after. The network upgrade went smoothly with Nym node operators’ response times at an all time high! This has radically improved the stability of connections. Major changes include:

Rewards rolled out for issuing zk-nyms credentials and enabling privacy-enhanced payments on the Nym network.
A config score was added as a measurement of overall Nym node performance, determining selection to the active set and rewards.
IPV6 support was added for WireGuard.
Client-side stats were aggregated and routed through the mixnet to ensure strong anonymity.

Staking

Are you holding native NYM tokens? Don’t know where to stake them? Go to the official Nym staking program wallet. Scroll down for a list of top performing nodes to stake on! You can also join the new Staking Alpha TG channel and chat directly with Nym node operators.

Explorer v2 in the oven

The new Nym explorer is currently getting hooked up to a new set of APIs and will then proceed through testing environments to launch in February. In the meantime, do continue to use the old Explorer or the SpectreDAO Explorer!

Community

Weekly Community Calls

Nym community calls happen every week on Nym Youtube or Twitch, Thursdays at 14:00 UTC. Tune in for your weekly scoop on all things Nym! You can find all of April community calls on this YouTube playlist.

Nym Squad League

The NSL Fall Season report is here! Highlights include:

Squad Wealth Fund reserves nearly 1m NYM tokens
New Community Hub
Language unlock! NymVPN is fully translated into 7 languages
Spectre Explorer
NymChat: A mixnet based anonymous chat application
Nymja AI is developing nicely!

Most importantly, check out the Winter Season missions and see how you can participate and help ahead of launch!

Community referral program

It will soon become much easier for Nym community members to become ambassadors for the NymVPN. A new referral program is being developed that will easily enable the core community to bring in new users and get rewarded for it.

In other news, there is now a new unofficial Italian language Telegram channel – benvenuto!

Events

The Nym team was happy to make it to CCC in Hamburg just before the end of the year to show the growing need for anonymity protections of NymVPN. The team gave multiple presentations as part of the Critical Decentralization Cluster (CDC):

Alexis Roussel gave a talk on “Digital integrity of the human person: A new fundamental right (Update 2024)” and a lightning talk
Casey Ford and Serinko gave a talk on “Becoming-imperceptible in the age of data capture” and how mixnets can protect metadata against surveillance capitalism.

Next week Alexis will be at EthereumZuri (30–31 January) to give a VPN workshop "A Blockchain-Based VPN for Privacy" (Thurs., 11:40). He will also be a part of 2 panel presentations: