Privacy loves company

How when it comes to privacy — the more the merrier!

Author: Nym
4 mins read
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How when it comes to privacy — the more the merrier!

The mass surveillance of today’s internet has to be met by a movement for mass privacy as the communications paradigm of tomorrow.

Privacy cannot be a question of individual preference because the nature of online surveillance means that one person’s choices and actions online reveals a lot about other people too.

Nym makes a collective approach to privacy possible, technically and economically. And the aim is to power up a whole ecosystem of privacy-preserving applications (PEApps).

This blog post gives an overview of Nym and how it is built to bring forth an ecosystem approach to securing privacy. With the launch of the core Nym infrastructure the next phase is for a plethora of privacy-enhanced apps to be built on this network layer privacy system.

As we’re fond of saying: privacy loves company.

A privacy layer for any app, wallet or chain

Nym is a privacy layer for any application and is chain agnostic. Nym is a mixnet that takes any digital communications, encrypts them and mixes them with other communications so that no one can trace the patterns of communication. Even when your communications are encrypted, the timings and patterns of communication traffic reveals a lot about you and your relationships. With Nym, your communications are effectively “lost in the crowd”.

What this means is that the more people communicating through the mixnet, the better for everyone’s privacy.

Whether a Telegram or Signal message or a cryptocurrency transaction broadcast across a peer-to-peer network, the network is designed to provide privacy for any app, wallet or chain. And in turn this generates an income for mix nodes and delegators who are rewarded through fees for providing this service.

This approach is an infrastructural approach, where privacy is not just reserved for technical experts (or those with enough money to hire them), but for everyone — integrated into the very apps and wallets you are already using. In this way, Nym is similar to a public utility. Think of it like the water mains or the electricity grid.

By providing the infrastructure on which a truly private internet can be built and maintained, Nym frees up developer time to create user-facing apps that are private by design — just as protocols such as TCP provide the building blocks for the existing internet.

The Nym ecosystem

Nym is already made up of a global ecosystem of mix node operators and validators who are operating the Nym mixnet (mixing traffic) and the Nyx blockchain (maintaining the reputation and topology of mix nodes).

The Nym wallet is the interface for anyone wishing to get involved with the core infrastructure. The wallet is a simple interface that allows people to either bond NYM tokens and run a mix node themselves, or delegate NYM tokens to mix node operators to earn a share of their rewards.

But this is just the core infrastructure…

It‘s time for PEApps!

This ecosystem now needs to grow, with user-facing apps so that ordinary people can finally go about their digital lives in the knowledge that what they do and say online will not be used to target themselves or others.

As the mass-adoption of Signal and Protonmail has demonstrated, when given half a chance, most people will not hesitate to adopt privacy-preserving applications over other options.

Now is the time for PEApps, the privacy-enhanced applications that will run on Nym.

The Nym docs can be found here.

The Nym Sandbox environment allows developers to explore Nym.

For more information on developer grants, contact: grant@nymtech.net

Join the privacy ecosystem

Privacy loves company

Discord // Telegram // Element // Twitter

The internet is global and so is Nym: join the Nym Community wherever you are and help build the private internet today.

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