As Web3 gradually enters the public eye, privacy protection, as an "important commitment" of Web3, has also attracted much attention. How did the rising star in the privacy field of Web3, Nym, emerge? Today, Odaily Planet Daily has the honor of inviting Jacky, the Asia Pacific regional manager of Nym, to participate in the community AMA to discuss the current situation and future of the privacy field with the theme "Nym: Protecting Metadata Privacy and Building a New Ecosystem for Privacy Infrastructure."
Super Visit Section
Odaily Planet Daily: Everyone is talking about Web3 privacy, but compared to other features in Web3, such as decentralization, interoperability, and performance, privacy always seems to have a lower priority. Do you think this statement is accurate?
Jacky: This statement is biased. In the world of Web3, the public transparency of blockchain technology allows the transaction and activity records of all on-chain users to be viewed by anyone, and users' data can be accessed and utilized at any time. As on-chain activities become more dense, privacy protection is equally important as decentralization, interoperability, security, and other features. After all, no user is willing to have their data "exposed" in the Web3 world.
Odaily Planet Daily: Currently, there are many privacy protection projects in Web3 that belong to different fields, such as privacy coins, privacy computing, etc. Which specific field does Nym belong to, and what sets it apart from other projects in the same field?
Jacky: Nym is in the sub-field of privacy transaction networks in Web3 privacy. However, what Nym is doing is quite different from well-known privacy projects. Nym's goal is not only to solve simple on-chain privacy issues.
Although many well-known projects have emerged in the privacy field, such as Tornado Cash, Secret Network, Findora, and Oasis, all of these projects essentially address users' on-chain privacy issues. In simpler terms, these projects can only provide coin mixing services for users by mixing encrypted assets from different users in the same fund pool to conceal the true transaction source.
Nym, on the other hand, aims to go beyond just on-chain data privacy protection and provide privacy protection for the entire internet infrastructure that both blockchain and traditional internet applications rely on. In other words, Nym seeks to transform not just a single public chain, but the entire internet.
Nym uses mix-net technology, which can make all traffic on the entire internet untraceable and unanalyzable, adding traffic noise from the data source to prevent metadata from being traced and analyzed, thus achieving the goal of protecting user metadata.
All data transmitted through Nym's mix-net is packaged into Sphinx format data blocks of exactly the same size. Furthermore, to prevent potential end-to-end analysis attacks on the onion network, Nym also shuffles the time order of all these data blocks and randomly rearranges them.
In addition, to further conceal specific traffic sizes and other information used by users, Nym adds additional empty data packets to the mixed traffic in the network, making it more difficult to detect and analyze the user's information transmission time, size, and source, effectively preventing external efforts to reconstruct the traffic in the mix network.
Odaily Planet Daily: As a privacy project protecting metadata, what are the main user groups of Nym? Is it targeted at specific industries or fields?
Jacky: Nym is committed to protecting the metadata privacy of all users on the internet, and the potential is very broad.
Nym provides privacy protection services for all available service users who choose to communicate privately. End users are divided into two categories. On one hand, we provide tools such as Nym Connect for ordinary users, allowing them to protect the metadata used in the apps on the internet, achieving large-scale user adoption.
On the other hand, in 2024, we will focus on providing tools to protect metadata privacy for enterprise-level users, achieving privacy at the institutional and enterprise level. Integrating privacy into infrastructure is crucial for enterprise and institutional use cases, with main partners including financial technology, healthcare, and personal data sectors. These industries are prone to serious privacy breaches that can have a significant impact on ordinary people. In addition, Nym will also promote integration with popular programs in daily life such as Signal, Google, and Brave, with browsers and operating systems, which is a natural extension of the successful application demand for Nym Connect.
Our ultimate goal is to expand Nym's mix network to millions of users, making privacy tools the norm. As digitalization becomes more widespread, the attack surface continues to expand, undermining the privacy and security of individuals and organizations. In the future, our basic infrastructure must respect and safeguard basic privacy rights, and Nym is here to achieve this goal.
Odaily Planet Daily: From a developer's perspective, how can Nym be used to provide privacy protection for their own projects?
Jacky: Nym is an open-source, decentralized, permissionless, and incentivized system, a "full-stack privacy" system. Developers can bind their applications to the Nym system through the Nym mix network, providing strong guarantees for preventing metadata surveillance for their project's users at the application layer through Nym private credentials, and at the network traffic level (mix network) and application level (credentials).
Odaily Planet Daily: For ordinary users, besides purchasing NYM tokens, are there other ways to participate in Nym's development and earn more rewards?
Jacky: Nym creates Web3 application development programs with privacy using the Mixnet privacy protocol by enabling privacy blockchains. Nym has 5 types of network participants: end users, mix nodes, gateways, verifiers, and service providers.
End users: All available service users who choose to communicate privately;
Mix nodes: Mix nodes provide community privacy to end users by anonymously packaging data;
Gateways: Gateways maintain the non-free status of the Nym Mixnet, and participants may choose to run data using the same gateway, diversify into multiple gateways, or select different gateways daily;
Verifiers: Maintain the Nym cross-chain network, distribute and notify all information within the network scope;
Service providers: Send and receive information through private communication between users via the Nym network.
In addition to the above technical participation methods, the Nym community is constantly launching various low-threshold activities every week to encourage more participation.
Odaily Planet Daily: At the end of June this year, we saw Nym collaborating with Aztec. As Aztec is a privacy project in the Ethereum Layer 2, what role will the collaboration with Nym play in the entire Ethereum ecosystem? Is there a competitive relationship between the privacy technology in the zk series and Nym?
Jacky: 1. The collaboration between Nym and Aztec solves a major problem in Aztec's privacy stack, providing a more complete infrastructure for privacy protection on the Ethereum chain, making it easier for Ethereum developers to access the functionality of Nym's mixnet.
To become a private blockchain, all states must be end-to-end encrypted, including a large number of commitment pools and encrypted ticket pre-images. Users need information such as assets, values, and sender data to use the tickets. It is necessary to obtain the state belonging to the user in unencrypted form and obtain global public state to prove ownership of selective parts.
Previously, Aztec Connect used trial decryption to solve this problem, which involved downloading global private chain and public chain data. However, this method has scalability issues, making trial decryption inefficient, and there is currently no single solution. As the transport layer of the privacy stack, Nym's mixnet is an indispensable part of the suite for developers.
Nym's CEO, Harry Halpin, has said, "From preventing MEV to DDoS attacks, you need network-level privacy, and Nym is pleased to provide these cutting-edge features to Aztec. Without Nym's network privacy protection, using zero-knowledge systems to protect privacy is meaningless, like wearing a mask but forgetting to wear pants."
- There is not only no direct competitive relationship between the privacy technology in the zk series and Nym, but Nym's technology also complements areas that current zk series privacy projects cannot cover—the mix traffic network, providing comprehensive and more efficient data privacy protection services for the entire internet under the joint efforts of zk series privacy technology and Nym's mixnet network.
Odaily Planet Daily: Does Nym's future development plan consider integrating or collaborating with other blockchain projects?
Jacky: The Nym team has always attached great importance to actively cooperating with various Web3 projects for mutual benefit. The following image shows the numerous well-known Web3 projects we have already collaborated with. One of Nym's strategic focuses this year is integrating with major Web3 wallets, and we are in discussions with some major Web3 wallets regarding the integration of Nym's mixnet. We hope to start the actual work of wallet integration by the end of this year to protect the network layer privacy of various cryptocurrency transactions.
Currently, Nym has collaborated with various Web3 projects such as Aztec, Monero, Alephium, Keybase, Metamask, Blockstream Green Wallet, and many others. In addition, Nym has reached cooperation intentions with many well-known projects, and we look forward to the official announcement of these collaborations.
Odaily Planet Daily: Compared to Web2, the user base of Web3 is still relatively small. Does Nym have plans to cooperate with traditional internet platforms to promote more extensive privacy protection?
Jacky: What Nym is doing is not only applicable to various Web3 projects, but also to all traffic applications on the entire internet, with even greater potential. Collaboration with major blockchains and applications is a key part of Nym's strategy. By integrating the mixnet into applications and services that people are already using (both within and outside of Web3), we will successfully achieve mass adoption by millions of people.
We have already made a lot of progress in this area. For example, Nym Connect can now be integrated with Web2 applications such as Element and Telegram. In simple terms, when you use Telegram and open Nym Connect to start mixing traffic, all your data on Telegram is protected by privacy. Currently, the various projects we have integrated with are as shown in the image below.
Odaily Planet Daily: Understanding Nym's fundraising experience, it has received recognition from top institutions in the Web3 field, such as a16z, Binance Labs, PolyChain, and DCG. Are there any expectations for listing on Binance in the future?
Jacky: Nym has been widely recognized by top investment institutions and internet users in the European and American markets. a16z, Binance Labs, and PolyChain have been very supportive of our development and marketing activities. Last May, Nym also received a commitment of $300 million from the ecosystem fund supported by a16z and Polychain, and Binance Labs has also participated in several rounds of investment in our project. With the joint efforts of the community, we believe that our token economy will continue to operate better and better.
Odaily Planet Daily: In addition to the mixnet, Nym has also built the Nym blockchain using the Cosmos SDK. Besides providing rewards to nodes, will this blockchain give rise to a new ecosystem? Does Nym have any policies to incentivize developers in this regard?
Jacky: Solving the incentive problem for large networks is a strength of blockchain technology, so Nym has built the Nyx blockchain on top of the Cosmos SDK. Running Nym mixnet nodes will receive corresponding NYM token rewards based on their contributions and operational performance. Additionally, the increase in new user usage will further raise the incentive level for mix nodes. The increase in node incentives will also lead to the continuous addition of new nodes to Nym's mixnet.
The mixnet is essentially built on Nyx, which allows anyone to write smart contracts in our blockchain. Therefore, developers can directly develop dapps on Nyx to achieve metadata privacy protection. There are plans to launch the governance token NYX for the Nyx chain in the future. Once the PoS governance token NYX is launched, our validator API will be decentralized, and our validator set will be open to the public, allowing the public to run their own validators, making validator rewards possible.
Odaily Planet Daily: What specific collaborations has Nym established with the European Commission, given that most of Nym's founding team comes from the EU-funded privacy project PANORAMIX?
Jacky: The EU's NGI program focuses on protecting user privacy and being user-centric. Perhaps in the future, the NGI of the EU will combine Nym's privacy technology to form EU internet standards, allowing their leaders and people to truly be free from surveillance and eavesdropping by the United States.
Odaily Planet Daily: What recent developments should we pay attention to from Nym? Can you introduce them to everyone?
Jacky: Recently, Nym has three major pieces of news worth paying attention to:
Nym is about to launch a decentralized virtual network service in collaboration with partners to create the world's most powerful anti-censorship privacy protection virtual network.
The annual Shipyard Academy program is about to start its second phase, providing a comprehensive learning program and development funding for all developers.
The Nym community grant program has also started, and everyone can actively apply. We provide comprehensive support in terms of technology, teams, and funding for followers and developers in the Nym ecosystem.
Open Question Section
1. Nym ensures the security of transactions under the premise of privacy. What related work has the team done?
Nym: Nym essentially solves the problem of protecting user metadata privacy by using mixnet technology, which adds several layers of noise to internet traffic, making it impossible for any service provider or hacker to track your data, thus ensuring the security of user data. Regarding the NYM token, the team has built a decentralized staking network to operate the Nym mixnet, so the role of the NYM token is to operate nodes, stake nodes, and pay for mixnet fees.
2. How does Nym's encrypted privacy on the internet and virtual network projects differ, and what are the technical performance advantages?
Nym: Traditional virtual networks may pose a risk of virtual network service providers selling user data due to incentive issues, while NYM directly solves the problem of insufficient incentives by combining blockchain technology.
The proxy access service provided by virtual network providers has a fatal flaw, which is based on the assumption of trust in a centralized node. Users not only need to trust that this centralized node can provide continuous and stable service, but also that this node will not collect user information like internet companies.
Therefore, for an ordinary internet user, virtual network services simply transfer the power of information collection from the original internet giants to another centralized service provider. At the same time, we have no way of knowing whether this service provider has already provided access logs and other information to the government under tremendous pressure.
Compared to centralized virtual network services, The Onion Router greatly improves the centralization problem of proxy services. The Onion Router forwards user traffic through multiple nodes and switches to new forwarding paths at fixed intervals to ensure the security of user information.
However, The Onion Router still has a significant flaw: it currently operates entirely based on volunteer-contributed computing power, leading to a lack of incentives during operation and increasing contradictions between the services the network can provide and the growing user demand.
In contrast, the working principle of Nym's mixnet is that all data transmitted through Nym's mixnet is packaged into Sphinx format data blocks of exactly the same size. Furthermore, to prevent potential end-to-end analysis attacks on The Onion Router, Nym also shuffles the time order of all these data blocks and randomly rearranges them.
In addition, to further conceal specific traffic sizes and other information used by users, Nym adds additional empty data packets to the mixed traffic in the network, making it more difficult to detect and analyze the user's information transmission time, size, and source, effectively preventing external efforts to reconstruct the traffic in the mix network.
3. What are Nym's major plans for the future as a member of the privacy track?
Nym: In 2023, Nym's strategic focus is on extensive collaboration with various Web3 wallets and applications to achieve mass adoption by more users. In 2024, Nym's strategic focus is on achieving privacy protection adoption at the institutional and enterprise levels.
4. Can NYM and Nyx cross-chain with each other?
Nym: NYM is the ecosystem token, and Nyx is our chain, built on top of Cosmos. The NYM token on ETH and the NYM token on Nyx can cross-chain with each other.
5. Currently, there have been many operations related to large-scale censorship and client-side scanning by device vendors. Nym's current focus is mainly on metadata, but will there be targeted privacy protection measures to address client-side scanning in the future?
Nym: The main technical advantage of the NYM mixnet is the mixing of internet traffic to make it impossible for hackers and service providers to collect and analyze user metadata. This is already a significant achievement in terms of data privacy protection. Currently, there are no very targeted measures specifically for client-side scanning.
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