Nym since launch: Building the future of privacy technology

1 year ago this month, Nym launched NymVPN to the world. We knew it wouldn’t be easy. Some said the world was already VPN-overpopulated. But we knew what the world needed was something built differently: a tool where privacy is a design, not another promise.

So we threw all our support behind it: nervously watched it take its first steps, tolerated the occasional network tantrum, and nursed it back to health from bandwidth fevers and API coughs. And now, on just after first birthday, we’re proud to say we’ve raised a fine, upstanding app.

Every pair of eyes on the Nym team is looking forward to what NymVPN will become next, and we hope our new 2026 roadmap will allow you to share that vision with us. But we also wanted to take a moment to look backwards at everything the Nym team accomplished in such a short period of time.

And to say thank you all for being there from the beginning, supporting the Nym project even when it was just an idea. We’re looking forward to the next year of building with you all.

Launching NymVPN

The Nym team had the privilege of streaming our launch live from the legendary Frontline Club in London, the spot where journalists and activists have long come together to defend the freedom of speech and press, from world conflicts to Wikileaks.

We were honored to be joined by Doctors without Borders who saw in Nym a vital tool to defend people’s lives while working in high risk areas. With NymVPN now coming to maturity, we’re looking forward to the work it can do for both ordinary people and institutions in the fight for a private internet.

Built by crypto, for crypto

Private payments

How you pay for a VPN is a huge factor in whether you’re really private. This is why the Nym team developed zk-nyms: a cryptographic means of unlinking any payment information to your use of the service you’re paying for. With NymVPN, you’re unlinkable to your traffic by default, even from Nym itself.

And with the launch of NymVPN as a commercial product, we also wanted to give you the maximal choice of how you pay. Since launch, we have integrated 25 tokens & chains into the nym.com checkout. NymVPN now accepts the largest amount of cryptocurrencies of any VPN, and we’re not stopping.

Making crypto private by default

But the most important thing for the world of crypto is NymVPN itself. With the Noise Generating Mixnet, you can anonymize and protect the metadata trail left by your financial activity. Crypto may not be private by design, but with NymVPN it can become private by default.

NymVPN’s dApp & wallet mode is one step toward a UX where you can use the mixnet for your crypto transactions while staying protected with the Fast mode for all your other apps. Split tunneling across all apps this quarter will take this flexibility even further.

And now privacy-focused Web3 apps are picking up the baton. Edge Wallet is now the first multi-asset crypto wallet with native mixnet integration. Expect more cool collabs this year as the Nym privacy stack assembles.

A tool for global internet access

A VPN is not just a privacy tool: for billions of people living under restricted internet conditions, it can be a lifeline in accessing essential information, services, and communities. The biggest goal Nym set for itself last year was to make the NymVPN resistant to censorship so it can function as a reliable tool for global internet access, for everyone everywhere.

And now NymVPN is working in some of the most censored countries around the world! This is thanks to three additions to Nym’s censorship-resistance tech stack.

AmneziaWG

Immediately after launch, we deployed AmneziaWG (a fork of the WireGuard protocol) as the default transport for NymVPN’s Fast mode. This helps protect against deep packet inspection used to block traffic at the protocol layer.

QUIC

We then made QUIC available as an optional anti-censorship tool for users. By wrapping WireGuard’s UDP traffic with QUIC, your use of the VPN tunnel can be disguised from VPN blocking.

Stealth API Connect

And finally, we introduced Stealth API Connect, an advanced feature that protects communications between your app and the Nym infrastructure so that your traffic can’t easily be blocked if the Nym network is targeted.

But combatting censorship is a dynamic and changing fight. So the leads of Nym’s censorship resistance team have outlined the roadmap for what we’re working on this year so Nym’s technology remains adaptive and dynamic.

Building a robust VPN experience

Nym is more than a VPN. But one of Nym’s biggest tasks in the last year has been improving the app so it meets your needs and expectations from a VPN. This meant building a UI that is accessible, customizable, and robust in privacy protections.

We started with the fundamentals:

• A kill switch cuts your connection if VPN protection drops
• Custom DNS prevents the leaks many VPNs quietly allow
• Account recovery helps those who are not used to handling mnemonic keys

And there are a lot more features cooking. Coming to all apps in the next weeks: split tunneling, so you choose per-app what should be excluded from the NymVPN tunnel, and a built-in ad blocker that stops trackers upstream before they reach your device. VPN parity was never the finish line: it was the starting point.

The Nym network: A growing collective

The Nym network is run by independent operators and now spans 70 countries (up from 30 at the time of our beta launch in October 2024).

So first, we want to send a huge shout out to all the node operators out there who have been so responsive in updating to the latest software, and spinning up things like QUIC transport protocols to help improve people’s access worldwide.

For the Nym network, 2025 saw the beginning of something special: a collective governance process for node operators. With Nym Improvement Proposals (NIPs), operators themselves can propose improvements and vote on the implementation of key technical and token economic changes that affect their operations and rewards. So far, 9 NIPs have been proposed and voted on, ensuring orderly updates to the network’s exit policies as well as changes to the network’s economic parameters.

Next up this year:

• The introduction of node families to strengthen the verifiability of independent routing and ticket rewarding
• Ticket-based rewarding to improve the rewards distribution for traffic routed, as well as to support node operators in essential locations
• Fully decentralizing the network so that it can remain adaptive and functional even in the absence of all centralized infrastructures

Nym infrastructure: From research to security

Behind the scenes of NymVPN is a dedicated team of scientists and network engineers working to make the Nym infrastructure ready for the cybersecurity, post-quatum, and surveillance challenges of the future.

In 2025 they prepared for implementation of post-quantum cryptography and the soon-to-be deployed optimization of the mixnet.

The research team has also been actively studying and testing attack scenarios on the network to stay ahead of threat models before they’re seen in the wild. Check out Nym’s latest research & publications.

The Nym community: Building, debugging, spreading the word

The Nym community has been a vibrant and essential part of making NymVPN what it is today. They were the frontline of early alpha and beta testing, the first early adopters of the paid app, and weekly bug hunters for every new release.

But they are also builders: the Nym community has been working nonstop to build cool stuff on top of the Nym mixnet as part of the Nym Squad League, from private chats to router integrations.

And they have been global ambassadors, getting the word out to people worldwide at conferences and workshops.