Nym returns to Chaos Communication Congress

Nym first visited CCC in 2019 — and now the core team returns to demo the alpha version of NymVPN

Author: Nym

December 22, 20234 mins read

This year, Nym returns to Europe’s largest and longest-running hacker event, Chaos Communication Congress, where thousands of activists, technologists, cypherpunks and artists will gather in Hamburg to shape the techno-political zeitgeist.

It was at CCC in 2019 that Nym first launched the workshops to build out its testnet. A great deal has happened since then and now, the core team will be back to sip Club Mate among the crowds and gather vital feedback for the mixnet, before the NymVPN private beta launches in Q1 2024.

Nym cofounder and CEO Harry Halpin at CCC in 2019

At a glance: Nym at CCC 2023

If you’re heading to the 37th CCC, catch Nym at the Critical Decentralisation Cluster where you will find the Nym team at the Swiss Cryptoeconomics space. Attendees will be able to try an alpha version of the NymVPN for the very first time.

Most critically, there will be workshops led by Nym Product Manager Marc Debizet to gather in-depth feedback from some of Europe’s finest hackers around the VPN app.

Meanwhile Nym DevRel, Serinko, will be running a workshop on setting up high-quality Nym nodes and host open discussions about exit nodes and the Tor Null policy.

On the ground you will also find community OG Huxian as well as Nym core team long-timers Jaya Klara Brekke and Alexis Roussel.

The Nym core team will present at the Lightning Talk stage on 28 December at 16:45 in Hall G as well as participate in assemblies, so keep your eyes peeled in the coming days.

WTF is CCC?

Staunchly political, the Chaos Communication Congress has always been fighting government overreach and censorship stretching back to the ’80s with the founding of the Chaos Computer Club hacking group.

The Chaos Computer Club was co-founded by pioneering activist and hacker Wau Holland in 1981 — in what was once a room of Berlin’s Kommune 1, heart of the radical German student movement and later an editorial base for the left-wing newspaper Die Tageszeitung. The group, with foresight, understood that the information sphere was set to change the world.

Along the way, Chaos Computer Club put its ideas into action, like when it created a DIY modem from toilet pipes — the Datenklo or ‘dataloo’ — in the face of a government telecommunications monopoly that viewed connectivity with suspicion and criminalised plugging computers into phone lines. Members even conducted the first digital bank robbery using an exploit in the early Bildschirmtext (BTX) computer network and were regarded by the press as ‘electronic Robin Hoods’ (because, of course, they returned the missing Deutsche Marks).

It was in 1984 that the first Chaos Communication Congress was held in Hamburg. With only 100 attendees at the inaugural event, CCC now attracts over 10,000 participants. It retains its fiercely political heart, a moral compass oriented to ethical hacking, and the idea that technology should be transparent and a public good — and spotlights art, beauty, and humanity as much as it does the digital world.

Nym at CCC 2023: help build privacy for everyone

Perhaps more than most, the philosophical centre of CCC aligns with the Nym mission of decentralisation and privacy for all of humanity.

And it was for those reasons that the first steps of the Nym mission to build a working mixnet, to free people from government and corporate surveillance, were taken at Chaos Communication Congress in 2019.

A few incredibly busy years later and Nym proudly returns to CCC, to ready the mixnet for mass adoption.

The core team will hold a CLI demo, workshops and 1:1 meetings, and is proactively seeking feedback from the attendees of Europe’s biggest volunteer-run hacker event to further refine the Nym network as it gears up for launch.

So if you’re attending CCC, please do drop by the Critical Decentralisation Cluster to meet the team! You will also find friends of Nym from RIAT, Department of Decentralisation, Monero, Namecoin and more. Find Nym in the Swiss Cryptoeconomics assembly along with Alephium, Swarm and Hodling. Come chat with the team and see the NymVPN in action for the very first time.

And if you’re not attending this year, keep your eyes peeled for videos and other updates from CCC in the new year.

While you wait, here’s some Nym lore — the launch at CCC in 2019:

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