Nym Community Town Hall Q3 — recap

Key highlights and takeaways from the first ever Nym Community Town Hall — featuring NymVPN, zk-nyms, R&D, business updates and more

Author: Nym

November 3, 202310 mins read

Key highlights and takeaways from the Q3 2023 Nym Community Town Hall — featuring NymVPN, zk-nyms, R&D, business updates and more

This week, Nym core team held our first ever live-streamed community town hall, briefing you on essential updates about the mixnet, integrations, research and development, partnerships, and the upcoming NymVPN — followed by a lively Q&A session.

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

These town halls will be held quarterly. You can watch the first ever town hall here or read on for a TL;DW summary of each talk, and you can find a transcript of the Q&A session at the very bottom of this post.

Key highlights

It’s been a busy time for the Nym core team, readying the mixnet for its first consumer application in the form of the NymVPN, preparing integrations, partnerships, optimisations, and plenty of R&D developments. Everyone is truly firing on all cylinders.

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Here are just some of the key highlights from the last quarter:

Optimising the Nym network for scale ahead of NymVPN launch
NymVPN litepaper released
Zk-nym anonymous credentials systems deployed in testnet, live soon
Project ‘Smoosh’ to reward gateways and simplify operating infrastructure
SDKs for easier integrations with the Nym mixnet
Initial censorship resistance work, new Outfox packet format
Partnership with Near’s L1 blockchain announced — more partnerships to come soon!
Nym Shipyard MOOC with 2k+ participants to scale the Nym community
$300m Innovation Fund to support privacy projects leveraging Nym stack

Nym Community Town Hall — Q3 recap

Hosted by Sudo and Diane from the Nym core team, this well-attended livestream featured updates from Nym CEO and cofounder Harry Halpin; Head of Research and Nym cofounder Ania Piotrowska; Head of Engineering, Mark Sinclair; Lead Product Manager, Marc Debizet; Head of Business Development, Ade Molajo; and community contributor Huxian.

Presentation slide on the Nym roadmap, from Harry Halpin, CEO and cofounder, Nym

CEO and cofounder Harry Halpin provided a roadmap update about the NymVPN and ongoing work to improve the mixnet — including project Smoosh, where gateways binaries are merged into mix node binaries, simplifying the infrastructure while also incentivising more people to run gateways.

Harry also ran through the zk-nyms anonymous credentials system, a core technology that will allow users to pay for the NymVPN with no financial paper trail, unlike other existing VPNs. He previewed upcoming censorship resistance technologies on the Nym network so that in time, anyone will be able to access NymVPN, anywhere.

Finally, Harry dropped some tantalising teasers about upcoming partnerships in addition to the recent Nym-Near collaboration, plus hinted at potential institutional support for 2024 and beyond.

Presentation slide on building, integrating and using Nym from Mark Sinclair, Head of Engineering, Nym

Mark Sinclair, Head of Engineering at Nym gave an update on technical progress around development and integrations, including mixFetch, the drop-in replacement for the Fetch API — so builders can use the mixnet in their applications with just three lines of code. The development team is currently working on a node.js version of both the Wasm client and mixFetch, he said. Mark provided more details on the SDK, and previewed a white-label zk-nyms solution so builders will be able to, in future, integrate the zero-knowledge credentials system in their own projects.

Presentation slide on the NymVPN value proposition, from Marc Debizet, Lead Product Manager, Nym

Marc Debizet, Lead Product Manager, Nym said that NymVPN will give users the best possible combination for enjoying privacy at all times — the decentralised VPN mode for everyday browsing, plus the mixnet mode for even more advanced privacy protections.

Marc also delved into the features of the upcoming NymVPN including private payments and showed viewers a preview demo, before explaining ongoing work for further hardware and software optimisation to improve the mixnet. And look out for the NymVPN website coming extremely soon, he said, where you can sign up to the access wait list.

Presentation slide about achievements and ongoing R&D from Ania Piotrowska, Head of Research, Nym

Ania Piotrowska, Nym cofounder and Head of Research offered a deeper dive on the R&D side behind zk-nym credentials, as well as upcoming work on censorship resistance for the Nym network and by extension, the NymVPN. Also included were details on forward security and replay attack detection to further safeguard both users and the network. Ania teased the new Outfox packet format, a simplified but faster format derived from Sphinx, which is currently used by the mixnet. Keep your eyes peeled for an Outfox explainer on this blog soon.

Presentation slide about the Nym $300m Innovation Fund from Ade Molajo, Head of Business Development, Nym

Ade Molajo, Head of Business Development detailed the $300m Innovation Fund programme, which will foster growth in the privacy ecosystem specifically for projects that leverage the Nym tech stack. He discussed the recent partnership with the NEAR Foundation to bring the privacy protections of the Nym mixnet to Near’s L1 blockchain, and encouraged builders to apply for open grants now.

Presentation slide on the three Shipyard tracks from Huxian, Nym community contributor (featuring visuals from Poppel)

Huxian, Nym community contributor updated viewers on Nym Shipyard and detailed his vision for Nym community squads — what he describes as a ‘social mesh’ system of ‘autonomous collective intelligence agents, weaving trust into the fabric of the mixnet’. He urged viewers to form their own squads, or join existing ones, whether ‘Builders’, ‘Operators’ or ‘Visionaries’, to contribute to the health of the mixnet and build the future private internet.

Community Q&A

The following Q&A session was compiled from the questions received after each individual core team member’s presentation, as well as the open Q&A at the end of the Town Hall. The questions and answers have been lightly edited only for grammar, clarity, and readability.

Are there any specific types of applications you think are more or less appropriate for integrating and using the mixnet at this point, and in the future?

Mark Sinclair, Head of Engineering, Nym: I think for any applications that are written in JavaScript, and that use the Fetch API, mixFetch is a really easy drop-in.

Currently, because of the allow list [for the network requesters], there are only a few hosts on the internet that you’ll be able to use.

But as we go live with the ‘smooshed’ gateways and network requesters from project Smoosh, this obviously opens it up to a much wider piece of the internet. Definitely React applications — say React Native, anything written in TypeScript, or JavaScript, Node.Js. All of those are really good candidates for mixFetch and should be pretty easy to integrate with.

Are there any limitations with the mixnet to be wary of, such as latency?

Mark Sinclair: Obviously, the main purpose of the mixnet is to hide people’s traffic from a global adversary.

Because of the cover traffic — some of the traffic will be cover traffic and some will be real traffic —there will be delays. I think it’s not really appropriate for doing things that are really timing specific. That’s just the sacrifice that you have to pay for things that are private, so please don’t use it to do things that are really time sensitive. The performance will never be as good there because it specifically adds delays to add privacy.

Can Nym work on Solana?

Mark Sinclair: Well, that’s quite a question! I think the thing is that it depends on which bits you’re trying to do. If you’re trying to make sure that any kind of transactions that you’re sending are hidden from a global adversary, and you’ve got a way — like in those diagrams that I showed — to hide portions of the infrastructure from a global adversary, then yes.

Otherwise, there really are two kinds of use cases here: user traffic, and things that have to do with say, consensus or validators. And then the validators themselves would need to have Nym built into them. Because if any part is sticking out, then you’re maybe not getting the benefits there.

So the answer would be yes, but it depends what exactly you’re trying to protect. And I suggest looking at the integration guide on sdk.nymtech.net.

Do you suspect any issues paying for NymVPN on iOS devices, since Apple doesn’t like payments that bypass the app store?

Marc Debizet, Lead Product Manager, Nym: When you buy the subscriptions for Nym directly on the iOS app, you’ll have to follow the rules set by Apple. So if you want to bypass that you will have to subscribe to NymVPN directly on our website.

After NymVPN is launched and efficiently working, is there anything stopping the team from giving us a Nym antivirus?

Marc Debizet: The Nym mission is to enable privacy for everyone. So we’re not into cyber security, we are into privacy.

Are there any plans to make the e-cash system interoperable with other blockchain or payment ecosystems? How would this impact user privacy and cross-platform transactions?

Ania Piotrowska, Nym cofounder and Head of Research: In general, the whole scheme which we designed, which was published at PETS, is quite generic. We use them in Nym for paying for using the Nym network. But they can be used in many other scenarios. They could be used by other blockchains. They could be used by CBDCs, and so on.

So it’s a very generic protocol, which could be deployed in many, many situations. That’s really a little bit up to imagination and the needs of people from other projects.

Right now, we’re not planning to do any big-scale integrations, we’d rather focus on using them within our network. But once we’re gonna polish this, and we’re happy with how this works with Nym, who knows where we are going to look?

What are the benefits that the Nym community can see in the long from the Nym-Near partnership?

Ade Molajo: That’s a really good question. So for the Nym community, obviously, once the Near partnership is live, once the integration has been done, that it means that we’re going to be having more traffic going through the mix nodes, which invariably means there will be more awards for our node operators, as well as validators. So that’s the immediate benefit that we’ll see.

It’s evidently an incredibly exciting time for Nym and the Nym community. We in the core team hope you found the Community Town Hall as enjoyable as we did. See you in Q4!

As always: for more updates as they happen, keep your eyes on this blog, follow Nym on socials, and join the Nym community.