Nym’s 2024 New Year Resolutions

For Nym, 2024 will be the year that ordinary people all over the world start using Nym to have private access to the internet to enable…

Author: Nym

January 2, 20247 mins read

For Nym, 2024 will be the year that ordinary people all over the world start using Nym to have private access to the internet to enable freedom of communication. Our resolutions are to:

Get NymVPN working on every operating system to onboard thousands of ordinary users, increasing the traffic through the network, and thus the anonymity of users and the revenues of the Nym community via transaction fees — in short, making the entire Nym project financially sustainable.
Integrate against every major zero-knowledge blockchain that wants to deliver real privacy to their users via our new Rust and Typescript SDKs.

One of the open secrets of the blockchain industry is that there are almost no actual people using blockchain tech for anything except for stablecoin transfers or trading, with many projects living off inflation before collapsing. And so, most blockchains are ghost-towns that don’t have anything resembling real-world usage outside DeFi and NFTs. What makes Nym different?

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Nym has one of the few use-cases that actually have a chance at getting massive real-world adoption outside of cryptocurrency: replacing VPNs — which are almost entirely based on false promises — with something that actually works to preserve the security and privacy of end-users. Rather than aim just for a larger share of the tens of thousands of blockchain developers or the millions of cryptocurrency users, we at Nym are serious about our mission to enable privacy for all humanity: we’re aiming at the billion people that use VPNs today.

As the world continues to descend into geopolitical chaos with wars in Europe and the Middle East — and likely an economic war between the US and China over the next few years — the only guaranteed outcome is that internet surveillance and censorship will increase for everyone. The restrictions that we see now in Iran and China will soon spread to America and Europe under the banner of fighting “misinformation” and “fake news.” As we stated in 2019 in our litepaper, surveillance is ultimately about mind control. Against this rising tide of repression, Nym is the only solution out there that can give a person protection against global passive adversaries such as nation-state intelligence agencies that can watch an entire internet connection. Unlike traditional VPNs, thanks to blockchain-based decentralization, in 2024 Nym will also focus on validators and gateways so that the network is resistant to being taken out by powerful malicious actors.

Nym needs an easy way for ordinary people to use it, and that’s why we created NymVPN. In 2023 we launched NymVPN for testing at Chaos Computer Congress, the world’s largest hacker conference, the same conference where we launched the first version of the mixnet for testing in 2019! Under the leadership of Marc Debizet, the plan for NymVPN is to make it available on every operating system, including mobile operating systems. In 2024, the focus will be on enabling every one of our hundreds of mix nodes to also serve as a gateway for open internet access, allowing unparalleled access across different jurisdictions for Nym users. The ability to have zero-knowledge proofs to access for privacy-enhanced payment to be turned on for NymVPN.

The wheel will then start turning: as people start using Nym, with payments being activated and transformed to NYM tokens on the backend, the entire ecosystem will become financially sustainable by receiving real transaction fees, something that only a handful of blockchains have achieved so far. Of course, we don’t know how many people actually want even a truly private communication tool, much less how much they will pay. In 2024, we’ll find out. In order to make privacy a reality in 2024, we will need thousands of NymVPN users.

And NymVPN isn’t the only way we’ll get users. Thanks to the Nym Innovation Fund and our new Head of Partnerships Ade Molajo, Nym is ready to integrate against any application, and blockchain. Autonomous verifiable anonymous computing is revolutionary technology, and every blockchain that uses zero-knowledge proofs should integrate Nym as an anonymous channel, as otherwise there will be no privacy. We’ve started this year with Liquid, Aztec, Firo, Monero, and are now in discussions with many L2s. In 2024, another goal is privacy by default over every zero-knowledge blockchain.

Looking back on 2023

Looking back, 2023 was a year of getting Nym ready for usage. While the mixnet was working via a SOCKS5 proxy even back in 2021 before the token launch, it was not easy to integrate against by programmers and required ordinary people to cut and paste obscure looking “localhost” IP addresses in even more obscure windows in their programs like Telegram and Electrum Bitcoin wallets. Led by Mark Sinclair and the new integrations team, the major focus of 2023 was making it possible for developers to integrate against the Nym mixnet by releasing a Rust API and Typescript APIs, including the wonderful mixFetch that makes integrating against Nym as simple as cut-paste for web applications.

The year closed with Nym Shipyard, a six-week intensive privacy academy training the next generation of Nym operators, builders and community visionaries. The academy enabled the community to get much more organized, forming “squads” that operate mix nodes across the world (especially in LatAm, Russia, Ukraine). Some squads use their rewards to support local hackerspaces and community organizations, others use the rewards to start building apps on the mixnet. This budding, professional operator community is essential for Nym as the industry’s network privacy DePIN. They form the decentralized underpinning for not just NymVPN but any application.

In 2024, Nym will continue with our general principles:

Nym will put the user first. This includes the user experience of the NymVPN as well as all our users of Nym operator binaries, the Nym SDK and people using the NYM token to bond and delegate.
Nym will be community driven. The Nym global community — across 80 countries! — are increasingly our experts on the mixnet and token economics as it operates in the real world. We resolve to have close collaboration and quarterly town halls to enable rapid iteration and improvements on software and token economics as the NymVPN goes to market.
Nym will continue to leverage the latest technological breakthroughs to enable ordinary people’s privacy. Starting with rolling out zk-nyms for the NymVPN to prevent leakage of data when paying for services. The focus will then shift to enabling censorship resistance and post-quantum cryptography with leading academic experts in the field.

As a team, we’ve transformed from a small startup to over fifty people working full-time on Nym, hundreds of mix nodes, and a global community of thousands across different languages and cultures. As the old world of nation-states and the traditional monetary system teeters on collapse, our mission of enabling privacy is critical for the survival of humanity more than ever. Without privacy, there can be no communication. Without communication, humanity cannot empower our collective intelligence to create a new world. It’s our only way out to escape the soul-crushing despair of war, surveillance, bureaucracy, and poverty.

Being able to communicate freely is the first step, but it’s simply too hard for people. For too long, truly private communication has been the province of only an aristocracy of technically-adept hackers, and it’s our turn to bring — as we promised at the Web 3.0 conference in 2020 — power to the people. In 2024, Nym is taking privacy out of the underground, opening a tunnel from this world to the next. Hop on.