January 2023 - Welcome to a better year!
Dear friends, followers, and fellow builders,
In 2022, the industry began to wake up to the need for securing the network layer for people as well as infrastructure - evident in the Infura IP drama as well as MEV attacks and more... It is becoming increasingly clear that distributed systems are particularly vulnerable to traffic pattern analysis due to the sheer amount of traffic that has to be broadcasted between actors.?
In response, there is rapidly growing interest in Nym mixnet integrations. Most recently the Blockstream Green wallet was privacy enhanced via?NymConnect?and we are also seeing significant community-led initiatives, including an?Ethereum RPC mixer?and?Ethereum transaction submitter?over the Nym mixnet.?
In the months to come, we will be creating structures to further support this community led growth in adoption, including a second round of developer grants, community grants for meet-ups and more.?
Last year took us?from token launch to a truly global mixnet, with nodes across five continents. 2023 is the year of end-user adoption of Nym and from what we are seeing, that adoption will be driven by the fantastic community that is forming around Nym!
Highlights from the past month...
The past month was a busy one for the Nym core team with tech updates, events, community highlights, new joiners, and appearances in the media.
Here is a snapshot of what has gone on:
Tech
Following the move to weekly releases by the Nym dev team, here is what has happened over the past few weeks. The Nym?Platform,?NymConnect?and?Wallet?changelogs are available for the complete list of fixes and new features.?
Multi-reply SRBs
In addition to many stability and performance improvements across the Nym softwares, we have implemented Multi-reply SURBs (Single Use Reply Blocks) which allows arbitrarily-sized anonymized replies for sender anonymity. This means that mixnet users can send messages to each other and receive private replies without disclosing their own address.
Distributed Key Generation
We have put a lot of work into Distributed Key Generation (DKG) for the Coconut signing scheme. This allows decentralized key generation where no single authority has the master key. This means that authorities have to co-sign for the issuing of credentials.???
Socks5-client
Our socks5-client now has added support for socks4a. This can allow for integrations with chains like Monero.
Outfox testing
We are experimenting with a new packet format called Outfox for additional throughput in the mixnet. We will still use the tried-and-tested Sphinx packet format by default but these experiments would allow speed optimisations in the future.??
New feature on Nym Wallet
Users can now buy NYM tokens directly from the Nym wallet to run a node or participate in the network by delegating. There is also an APY playground in the wallet that node operators can use to check how different parameters would affect the economics of running their node.?
Resources
Shipyard Academy lectures
A highlight of the first Shipyard Academy cohort was the weekly lectures from the Nym core team. With lectures on the basics of privacy, how Nym works and the tech, our tokenomics and even a cypherpunk history lesson, it was a great learning journey for all. Watch all the lectures?here.
Nym clients - bringing mixnet technology to browsers and more!
Our mixnet is available for integration into a variety of applications and wallets through the various Nym clients. This will allow more developers to build for privacy. Read more?here?to find out which of our clients you can use to privacy-enhance your apps.
Awesome-Nym resource list
Our community members at?No Trust Verify?has published a?curated list of resources?about Nym, other than the?official documents?from the core team. Contributors are invited to add their own tools or resources by doing a PR on the?repository. View the list?here.
Partnerships
Integration of payment gateway with Bity
We have partnered with Bity to integrate a payment gateway. This will benefit our community with increased convenience to use & operate the Nym privacy network by accessing NYM tokens directly from the Nym wallet. Read more?here.
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In the media
"This opens the door to a wider discussion about privacy and transparency."?Our Security Engineer of Hardware Optimization Chelsea Manning appeared on Coindesk First Mover to discuss the state of online privacy in the blockchain space and the trust issues in crypto. Watch it?here.?
"Crypto's privacy problem depends on improving its technology" - Coindesk?
“There are some fundamental aspects of the technology that are interesting,” Chelsea Manning said. She added that the “technical aspects of cryptography and being able to verify information in order to be able to provide for your privacy in the future” are under development. Read the article?here.
“The possibilities that can be kind of unleashed once we've established privacy as the default is going to be so fascinating because the way people will start to deal with data is going to?be radically transformed. We are not going to have just garbage data floating around or super sensitive data floating around. It's gonna be a much more deliberate process. I think we're moving into a very interesting time.” Our CSO Jaya Brekke featured on the Priv8 Podcast alongside other?Universal Privacy Alliance?members to chat about the future of privacy in web3. Listen to the podcast?here.
Community
Test & Earn campaign
Our first Test & Earn campaign was held over the festive season. The fun and interactive campaign had overwhelming participation from the community with a massive number of very creative contributions in performing the tasks. Thank you to all who participated and played a part in our work to build for privacy. Winners will be announced this week. Read more about how it worked?here.?
Shipyard Developer grants awarded
Following the launch of the Shipyard Developer Grants scheme, we announced the winners of the first round of calls:
Congratulations to the grantees! Stay tuned for the next round. Read more about the grant scheme?here.
First cohort graduates from Shipyard Academy
It is our great pleasure to welcome our brand new Sailmakers - the over 200 Shipyard Academy participants who completed all three, increasingly difficult stages of the program, graduating with flying colors!?
The graduates have demonstrated that they can create the sails that will carry the global Nym community across the digital oceans. Besides learning all there is to know about Nym and its vision, technology, and history, Sailmakers also contributed to extending the Nym infrastructure to underrepresented regions, created proof-of-concept applications utilizing Nym technologies, and much more.?By bringing the community together, Shipyard Academy has resulted in some exciting new grassroots community initiatives, such as the?Pineapple Proxy.
Join the weekly Nym Community Calls!
We run weekly community calls with news roundups for the week to catch you up on what the team has been up to. Each week, guests from the Nym core team and other projects alike explore key issues and priorities for the Nym ecosystem, privacy, web3 and more.?
Community calls are free to join every Friday on the Nym?Discord server! Listen to previous episodes?here.
Events
Upcoming
Some upcoming key events that we will be participating in:
For the full list of events and all the details, check out our?website.
One last thing