Last year was all about readying the Nym network for 2024, the year ordinary people finally get access to real privacy online with the launch of NymVPN. Throughout 2023, the team made great progress on preparing vital infrastructure work to ensure NymVPN is the best privacy-preserving VPN available. Let’s take a look back at the achievements from last year, and what’s in store for 2024.
Among the achievements in 2023 was project Smoosh, to simplify network components and radically improve redundancy. With Smoosh, gateway binaries were merged into mix node binaries, making the backbone of NymVPN more straightforward while also incentivising the community to run gateways. Additionally, network access has been vastly expanded from the NymVPN predecessor, NymConnect: upgrading from a SOCKS5-based ‘allow list,’ where users can only access a small number of online services, to full-stack online connectivity. All together, the result is a stronger, faster, more reliable network that’s ready for mass adoption.
Nym does not operate any nodes, and so the Nym network will always be driven by its community. We strengthened our community even further last year with the six-week privacy academy, Nym Shipyard, a resounding success where thousands attended talks and workshops to join Nym’s bustling community of node operators and visionaries. With these new members onboarded and active, the Nym network grows in health, reputation, geographic reach and resilience.
And we’ve started work on censorship resistance so people can access the Nym network wherever they are, and we began rolling out the zk-nyms anonymous credentials system to prevent data leakage when paying for services like NymVPN.
In December, we closed 2023 with an important milestone – attending Europe’s largest hacker event, Chaos Communication Congress (37C3). Coming full circle, it was at CCC back in 2019 where Nym launched workshops for testing the mainnet. Four busy years later, Nym appeared at the first CCC since the pandemic at the Critical Decentralisation Cluster, joining 10,000+ privacy enthusiasts, activists, and technologists with two main objectives:
- Launch testing for the upcoming Alpha version of NymVPN
- Connect with node operators for feedback and to further build out Nym’s exit nodes.
Feedback around the Command Line Interface Alpha version of NymVPN was positive. With hands-on testing, attendees asked for usability improvements around installation, along with higher reliability and even more privacy, which the team, naturally, is working on. Attendees said that although they used VPNs, they did not necessarily trust them and that they understood all too well the need for an actually private, decentralized option.
Many in attendance knew of Nym already, and plenty more were extremely interested in the Nym mixnet – which will soon be widely available via NymVPN’s 5-hop mixnet mode, putting advanced metadata protection in the hands of users for the first time.
CCC closed a high-octane year for the Nym team while we busily prepared all the components for a successful 2024 launch.
Throughout 2024, Nym will deliver on its new year resolutions to get NymVPN working on every single major operating system, onboarding thousands of users and increasing traffic through the network – and thus improving the anonymity of users as well as the revenues of the Nym community, making the entire Nym project financially sustainable.
As Nym CEO and cofounder Harry Halpin recently said, a billion people throughout the world use VPNs today but the majority of VPNs are built on false promises. Rarely do VPNs actually preserve the security and privacy of end users. NymVPN aims to fundamentally change the privacy landscape with technology that fully protects both the traffic and the traffic patterns of users, even against advanced adversaries with a global view of the internet, using the novel, 5-hop mixnet mode.
Be the first to enjoy real privacy online and sign up to the NymVPN waitlist now.
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