Introducing a first round of grantees and the upcoming ‘Nym Innovation Fund’

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Nym is part of a much broader privacy ecosystem. We want to make sure that the ecosystem remains healthy and growing, ensuring privacy as a public good and as the default for digital communications.

For this reason we are in the process of launching a developer grants programme (for one-off projects) and the larger Nym Innovation Fund (for investment funding) — to go to research, projects and applications that make privacy the defining characteristic of the future of digital communications and the internet.

Grants

A first round of three grants has been distributed already. The initial grants are unrestricted gifts (except for Nymbox, which is a directed development project). The four initially selected projects to support are:

1. A Ph.D. student who now gets the opportunity to study with renowned decentralisation and privacy expert, Professor Carmela Troncoso of EPFL, Co-inventor of privacy-enhanced COVID contract tracing DP3T framework and critic of COVID passports. She is one of the foremost experts in privacy engineering and mixnets, and recently held a discussion with Nym’s Chelsea Manning in March called the “Future of Privacy and Data in Wartime” at EPFL.
2. A scholar grant to cryptographer Daniel J. Bernstein (University of Illinois), co-inventor of Curve25519 and other high-speed modern cryptography primitives. Critic of NSA interference in crypto standards, he took on the US government in the Bernstein v. US court case, which recognized software publication as free speech. He will be working on speeding up the Sphinx packet format used in Nym as well as by the Lightning Network
3. Tails: The easy to use bootable Linux distribution with the highest possible privacy and security today, which was used by Edward Snowden when leaking NSA secrets. Tails includes Tor and the Electrum Bitcoin wallet.
4. ‘Nymbox’ (by Pacific Northwest Rural Broadband Alliance): A grant to support community-driven build of an OpenWRT package of the NYM Gateway software, as well as a pre-built OpenWRT firmware image that can be flashed on to any compatible 32bit or 64bit ARM-based home or portable routers (from manufacturers like Linksys, GL.iNet, and others), or single board computer (like Raspberry Pi), with mesh networking support planned. The funds for Nymbox were received by: The Pacific Northwest Rural Broadband Alliance, LTD and the Git repo for the project can be found here: https://github.com/The-Pacific-NW-Rural-Broadband-Alliance/nym-router

Investment funding

In addition to grants for one-off projects, we are in the process of setting up a larger Nym Innovation Fund. This is an ecosystem fund conceptualised and launched in order to boost the overall privacy ecosystem. The fund has secured $300 million of commitments from a range of reputable backers, including Polychain Capital, Greenfield One, Huobi Incubator, Tioga Capital, Eden Block, NGC Ventures, HashKey Capital, Figment, Fenbushi Capital, OKX Blockdream Ventures, Tayssir Capital, KR1, and Lemniscap.

The Nym Innovation Fund will evaluate and strategically invest in a wide range of projects with a focus on:

• PEI — Privacy Enhanced Infrastructure: Layer1, Layer2, Middleware, Communication Protocol, and many others
• PEAP — Privacy Enhanced Application: messaging applications, browsers, browser extensions, dVPN, keys manager, storage, compliance tool and many others
• Selective disclosure and privacy in digital identity systems
• Privacy and trustworthy AI
• NFTs
• DeFi — Decentralised Finance
• DAOs

For any inquiries regarding the grants program, please contact grant@nymtech.net

For any inquiries regarding the upcoming investment funding program, please contact devfund@nymtech.net