Disappear into the noise

A Noise Generating Mixnet (NGM) is a new technology for secure internet traffic routing, developed specifically for the growing challenges posed by AI and malicious government surveillance programs. A NGM protects not just the content of messages but also the metadata and patterns of communication across the internet. 

A NGM performs best in class (over VPNs and Tor) against: 

• Traffic analysis
• End-to-end correlation attacks
• Website fingerprinting
• Protecting your traffic from a global passive adversary able to watch the entire network.

It does this by introducing “noise” into the network to protect users’ metadata and obscure their patterns of communication. On Nym’s NGM, noise includes uniform packet sizes, cover traffic, packet mixing, and timing obfuscation. Network noise makes it so everyone’s traffic cannot be analyzed and used by fraudsters, hackers, and malicious actors to perform a variety of attacks.

Individuals:

You can simply get the NymVPN app to start benefiting from the secure routing offered by the Nym network. The app allows people to choose between two network modes:

• Fast Mode (decentralized 2-hop), optimized for browsing and streaming
• Anonymous Mode (a 5-hop NGM) optimized for anonymity and best for messaging, crypto transactions, email, and other activities that can tolerate high latency.

Enterprise:

For companies seeking to offer superior security and integrity to their customers, the Nym network can be used as a general purpose secure routing network. Nym can be integrated directly with applications and services to secure the integrity of users and systems by providing secure routing for any app, blockchain, or service. Integrations currently in progress include z-cash light clients to protect crypto transactions and Ethereum validators to secure the integrity of consensus and protect against MEV attacks. Contact: sales@nymte.ch

The speed of the Nym network depends on your choice of routing. Through NymVPN, the normal 2-hop (WireGuard) mode has speeds up to 100 Mbps and latency around 50 ms depending on your chosen gateways. This is ideal for things like browsing and streaming.

For maximal anonymity protections , the Anonymous Mode will involve more latency but with advanced protections against surveillance. It is thus recommended for highly sensitive traffic which can tolerate high latency like messaging, crypto transactions, and email.

The Nym NGM is decentralized because that improves privacy properties like ensuring sender (you) is not linked to destination (whatever it is you are doing online).

Decentralization ensures that the full route of a user’s traffic can never be known by any single entity handling user data, and makes external surveillance very difficult to achieve.

Decentralization requires a minimum of 2 intermediary servers (or hops) between a user and the web. The large majority of VPNs are centralized. With NymVPN, there is no single entity on the network, not even Nym, where your full traffic is logable. Nym is a zero-knowledge network by design.

For end users you can use the Nym NGM via the NymVPN. NymVPN has three plans available: a monthly plan of $11.99, or discounted plans of 1- or 2-years. See Nym’s pricing pages for all the details.

For enterprise Any app, wallet or blockchain can integrate with the Nym NGM to secure traffic of users, light clients and validators. For more information on how to integrate and partner with Nym, reach out to: sales@nymte.ch

If you believe in the Nym mission to enable secure traffic routing for all of humanity, you can join the Nym network and earn rewards.

To contribute you will need native NYM tokens. These allow you to stake or be part of operating the Nym network.

Staking is a common practice for tokenized, decentralized networks. It entails temporarily locking up some tokens in order to, for example, signal preference, confidence, or trust by making a temporary economic bet on something. 

In the case of the Nym network, staking means you are temporarily depositing some NYM tokens on a specific node as a signal of confidence in its performance. This stake becomes a trust score for a Nym node and can improve its chances of being selected to route user traffic and earn rewards. 

As a staker, you earn a share of those rewards. You are therefore incentivized to stake on nodes that perform well. By doing so, you are contributing to optimizing a global privacy network!

Staking APY varies significantly depending on which node you stake on. You can browse and search through nodes in the harbourmaster (a new explorer with improved staking coming soon)

Things to look out for:

• Performance score should be between 90-100%
• Versioning: Make sure the node is running up to date software (the latest binary is listed in Harbourmaster)
• T&Cs: Make sure the node has agreed to these, otherwise they will not be selected and will not earn you any rewards
• Stake saturation is when a node is fully saturated, after which there will be diminishing returns. You do not want to stake on a node that is too close to full saturation. Stake saturation point is currently around 1.1mil NYM, so aim for nodes in the mid-range to allow for compounding.
• Stake composition, if possible, check how many other stakers stake on the node. If it has one whale staker, you might be vulnerable to them suddenly removing their stake. 
• Delegations program participant: If you are still in doubt, a safe bet is always to look at whether a node is in the official Nym Delegations Program. If yes, you can rest assured they meet basic performance and config requirements. 

Nym nodes compete to route and mix traffic for users, offering powerful protections against AI-surveillance. In return, they are rewarded with NYM tokens.

The Nym network is permissionless, so anyone can run a node to be part of the Nym privacy revolution – you do not need our permission! All you need is a little bit of NYM tokens, a dedicated server, and a bit of know-how.  To get started, check out the Nym Operator Guide.

Nym node APY is currently approximately 10% for a high performing Nym node. Node rewards are shared among operators and stakers of that node. So the take-home profit for an operator depends on these variables:  

• Their performance in the network
• How much they have bonded on their own node
• What they have set as their operating cost and profit margin

Once an operator has covered their operating cost and received their profit, the rest of rewards are shared with stakers on that node.

How else can you contribute? If you do not have the technical know-how to run a Nym node, you can still contribute to the network by getting NYM tokens and staking these on high performance nodes. Learn more about how to stake.

Join the Nym Squad League to take part in missions every season for the chance to win NYM tokens and get to know some of our operators!

Nym operators are a diverse bunch of individuals, squads, companies, and organizations around the world that run Nym software and offer secure, trustless routing services to end users. This includes hackactivists from Latin America, technologists from Ukraine, SwissCom, Web3 infrastructure operators (from France, the US, and more), and VCs that have invested in Nym.   Nym operators do not know the origin, destination nor content of the data packets they are routing. Multi-layered encrypted routing ensures that they only know the next hop in the path and are not able to connect sender to destination. Operators do not gather user logs and have to agree to T&Cs that legally enforces this no-logs policy. 

You can explore the global Nym network of nodes and their config scores on the Nym Explorer.

For devs looking to integrate the Nym network, there are rust and typescript SDKs. 

The tokenomics of the Nym network runs on the Nyx blockchain. For devs wishing to build out staking services or explorers, or extend the Nym network tooling, there are two ways of interacting with the chain: The Nym-CLI tool and a Nyxd binary.

Contact the team for grants opportunities or any further questions. 

The Nym developer relations team can be found on the Nym community matrix.

Alternatively, join the Nym Telegram.

NYM is available on a number of exchanges, including native NYM on Bitfinex on Kraken, and ERC-20 on Bitfinex, Bybit, Gate.io, and HTX.

You can also get native NYM tokens by joining Nym community channels and earn token by contributing to the seasonal challenges and missions.

Yes, NYM is perfectly legal and available on a number of reputable exchanges. Nym Technologies has a registered prospectus for the token in Switzerland. Nym Technologies is also based in Switzerland and fully compliant with Swiss law.