Introducing Pay as You Go: Decentralized Access to the Nym Network

The Nym network is now directly accessible through decentralized $NYM token payments with a new pay as you go method. You can route traffic through the network using zk-nyms without a subscription, without an account, and without revealing your identity or wallet history. Just anonymous cryptographic credentials issued against $NYM deposits.

While NymVPN provides the most streamlined point of access and payment methods, new decentralized access via the CLI allows anyone or any software to access the network privately. This means two paths of entry through the world’s most anonymous network.

This is how the Nym network was always designed to work. So let’s break down how Pay as You Go works under the hood, and how you can use it.

What decentralized $NYM payments enable

The Nym network must be accessed using zk-nyms – anonymous cryptographic credentials that grant the right to send traffic through the Nym network. For NymVPN users, this process is fully automated by the app and network.

Now any software capable of performing the steps of depositing $NYM, obtaining zk-nym ticketbooks, and presenting valid tickets to Nym servers can access the network directly via CLI (Command Line Interface).

This is the most direct and decentralized way to interact with the Nym network and mixnet: a simple NymVPN CLI (“nym-vpnc”) workflow, fully decentralized without any central point of command. Importantly, it permits third party applications to have paid access and build on the network with automated steps for users.

Before seeing how the CLI for decentralized access works, let’s recap Nym’s anonymous credential system.

Why zk-nyms matter, and how they work

Using $NYM tokens directly to access the network would reveal a user’s $NYM address and possibly other personally-identifying information, such as public chain metadata relating to their wallet and transaction histories. Zk-nyms solve this problem of paying privately, even when paying with fiat!

To transform your payment into an anonymous credential, your payment is converted to $NYM tokens deposited in a smart contract. In exchange, you are then issued a credential by a decentralized set of validators running the Nym API. These zk-nyms or anonymous credentials can be used multiple times and re-randomized to preserve privacy. The key privacy feature is that they are unlinkable to your original payment data.

You can think of each zk credential as a “ticket,” and a set of zk-nyms as a “ticketbook” for a certain amount of traffic.¹ One ticket gets you on and off the Nym network, and the others you use inside the network to route the amount of traffic you need. When your ticketbook is exhausted, you simply purchase another.

This ticket-based mechanism is the native access model of the Nym network. Any software can now access the network if it is capable of performing these three steps: depositing $NYM, obtaining ticketbooks, and presenting tickets to nodes.

¹ In the Nym whitepaper, ticketbooks are called “bandwidth credentials” and the smart contract the “nympool.”