Introducing Nym Squads

Meet the top graduates of the incentivised Shipyard privacy academy.

Author: Nym

December 14, 20237 mins read

Meet the top graduates of the incentivised Shipyard privacy academy.

This autumn, Nym held possibly the world’s largest ever online privacy academy: Shipyard. Core team, experts and star guests gave well-attended live-streamed lectures, while core community members held workshops on privacy technologies and the Nym stack.

Languages: Türkçe // Bahasa Indonesia // Español // Русский // 中文 // 日本

The final stage completed two weeks ago and it’s time to spotlight some of the top graduates to have come out of the programme: the winners of Nym Shipyard Level 3.

Meet the Nym squads during the last community call of this year, Friday 15th December at 3pm UTC.

Shipyard Level 3 took place across three tracks: builder, operator and visionary. Participants could follow whichever tracks they wished to based on their skills and enthusiasm — or even follow all three.

By the end of the final two weeks…

Builders were invited to submit a project for selection by the Nym DevRel team
Operators were invited to submit a node for the Delegations Programme
Visionaries were invited to submit impact proposals either as an individual “Nymja” or as a “Squad” — organisations based on camaraderie, shared enthusiasm, group chats and multi-sigs. (If you want to dive deeper into squads, have a read of this…)

Many community members met new people during Shipyard and formed Nym Squads as operators, builders or visionaries.

But you might be wondering what is a squad?? Squads are an organisational form based on camaraderie, shared enthusiasm, group chats and multi-sigs. If you want to dive deeper, have a read here…

How were the winners selected?

Several squads submitted great projects across all three tracks. Winners were shortlisted by the team of track leads, with final winners selected by core team leadership on the basis of quality, completeness and to ensure a good spread across competencies and geographies.

3 builder projects were approved
100 node operators have been selected for the Delegations Programme out of more than 300 applicants and have been notified individually
28 squads have been selected focusing on building software, building community, and building network capacity

Thank you to everyone who applied. Due to the quality of applications Nym rewarded 28 squads instead of the initially planned 10!

This is just the first round, so even if you weren’t successful this time, get ready to organise for next year — where new opportunities will open for promising squads and node operators.

Winning squads: spotlight

To give you a taste of some of the winning squads, here are a few of the most outstanding proposals:

TupiNymQuim Squad

One of the top-performing squads was TupiNymQuim of Brazil. Not only did they apply with a high-quality impact proposal strongly rooted in their community, they also built a Nym integration with Brave during the Shipyard Level 3 hackathon:

Incognito Search

Congratulations!

Rawbox Squad

Rawbox were another top performer, developing a strong proposal to create a Nym router with the mission to “create a basic physical infrastructure for a new generation of decentralized internet.” The RawBox router will be based on OPNsense (FOSS enterprise-grade firewall), BTCPay Server, and Nym services.

Congratulations!

LunarDao Squad

LunarDao Squad hardly needs an introduction among those who have been working and advocating for privacy online. LunarDAO is one of the first truly anonymous decentralised organisations with a main focus on collective investment into privacy projects, while also focusing on education and Lunarpunk culture. An important ecosystem partner for Nym, they enable Nym engagement and adoption among Web3 privacy OGs and newbies alike.

CoinMetrika

If you’re familiar with the crypto scene of the CIS region, or have had a closer look at the nodes making up the Nym mixnet in the network explorer, CoinMetrika may ring a bell. Long-time Nym supporters and node operators, CoinMetrika is a popular Russian-speaking group focused on crypto education and running validators for various blockchain projects. As part of their Squad Grant, CoinMetrika is joining the Nym Delegations Programme as Russian-speaking mentors, and will spread the word about Nym and its mission within the CIS region.

Smaller grants were awarded to squads who are just starting out with their local communities. These included:

Ukraine Privacy Alliance Squad

The UPA squad (not to be confused with the Universal Privacy Alliance) was formed by the growing Ukrainian community. Their objectives include setting up nodes and producing educational material in Ukrainian, pursuing local partnerships and more. Nym has a long-standing relationship with Ukraine as reported so it is only fitting to boost the local community and Ukrainian language content!

WSA Squad (Web3 Safety Advancers)

The WSA Squad was set up by Nymja cadets in Bangladesh to educate the local Web3 community on privacy. The grant will enable them to set up nodes and begin education on Nym and privacy in the region!

Privacy Warriors Squad

The Privacy Warriors squad was formed by Turkish Nym community members with the aim of establishing partnerships with Turkish universities, holding events and creating Nym Turkish language content and educational material. The Turkish community is one of the largest and most active communities around Nym and this will help level up the resources and events available to strengthen the community and make it increasingly autonomous.

And finally the top reward goes to…

The top reward of 100,000 NYM tokens went to outstanding community member Pawnflake for building ExploreNym!

Last year, Pawnflake joined the very first Shipyard Academy and went from being a full time gamer to teaching himself how to code and growing his skills to become a pillar of the Nym community. Pawnflake will be leading mentorship in the Nym Delegations Programme.

Congratulations and a huge thank you to Pawnflake for all his work, enthusiasm and dedication to the Nym mission!

These are just a handful of the many incredible projects — scroll down to the bottom of this post for the full list of fantastic winners.

Nym Shipyard: what next?

Shipyard was just the beginning of training and preparing the Nym community for next year. Nym will be launching its first commercial application, the NymVPN, on the mixnet. This means everyone will need to step up to prove that this powerful privacy infrastructure is run by a strong community of operators and token stakers.

Squads will play a crucial role in 2024, increasingly responsible for autonomously leading the Nym communities across the world. They will act as hubs of knowledge, running channels, running high-quality nodes, organising builders and beta-testers, running workshops, hackathons and more. Each squad will be unique, shaped by the talents of the founding members.

Be among the first to find out more — peek into 2024 on Friday, 15 December for the last Nym community call of 2023!

Full list of winning squads

An enormous 104 squads submitted impact proposals. Out of these, 28 were selected as the top applicants. Here’s the full list:

Top winner

ExploreNYM

Best in class — Nine squads stood out for their professionalism, already proving their value and having clear objectives for work in 2024:

Good — Ten squads submitted very good proposals. They will be awarded a smaller prize and encouraged to clarify their objectives for 2024.

PAROP(Participatory-action-research online privacy)
NymAfrik
PRISM
TopsecretDAO
G pointDAO
Vietnam Loves Privacy
AnonNYMous
Ukraine Privacy Alliance
WSA
Privacy Warriors

Token of appreciation — Eight squads are granted a small token of appreciation for the effort they put into their proposals and encouraged to stake their tokens, develop their ideas more and stay tuned for the next opportunity!