October 2022 - Universal Privacy Alliance launches in Bogotá
Dear friends, fellow builders, backers and trolls,
Welcome to the monthly highlights from the world of Nym!?We are in the final quarter of what has been an eventful year for privacy-preserving technologies. The Nym core team has just returned from the annual in-person roadmap meeting. Nym has achieved the?majority of this year’s milestones,?with three significant steps?coming up next:?
This summer, in a historical first,?OFAC imposed sanctions on code rather than a country or persons. Interpreted as a warning shot, the privacy tech community is now getting organised…
Nym was in Bogotá, Colombia this week to launch The Universal Privacy Alliance at ZK House, with co-founders and?Edward Snowden as guest speaker.
The first immediate task of UPA is to set up a cross-industry legal fund, with the broader mission being to educate, advocate for and defend ordinary people’s right to strong privacy protections. Find out more and join us in building a post-surveillance:?https://privacyalliance.com/
Privacy is far too often viewed with suspicion. This is the result of years of the surveillance tech industry pushing the idea that surveillance is necessary for security.?
Nym took part in the?launch of the “Geneva Declaration Against Targeted Surveillance and Human Rights”, organised by?Access Now?and the Government of Catalonia, following a series of targeted surveillance attacks harming individuals and undermining democracy as a result.?
It is time to shift the narrative and to take action towards establishing privacy as the foundation of free societies.
Highlights from the past month...
The past month was a busy one for the Nym core team with tech updates, events, new joiners and appearance in the media. Here is a snapshot of what has gone on:
Tech
WebAssembly (WASM) brings Nym mixnet to browsers and mobile devices
The latest update of the Nym WebAssembly client has been released. Users can access the Nym mixnet directly from the browser or web app using?the client.
Check out this?chat app?for a very simple Javascript chat app example that sends text messages from the browser through the mixnet (hint: chat to yourself by copying your address from the first textbox into the second textbox and send messages to yourself through the mixnet).
Research
On the anonymity of peer-to-peer network anonymity schemes used by cryptocurrencies
Authors: Piyush Kumar Sharma, Devashish Gosain and Claudia Diaz
The paper was just accepted to the Network and Distributed System Security (NDSS) Symposium 2023 and will be presented at the symposium next February. The paper provides an analysis of the anonymity of Lightning Network, Dandelion and Dandelion++, and finds that these routing schemes provide very poor protection.?
Paper available here:?https://arxiv.org/abs/2201.11860
Resources
Congratulations on The Merge — now prepare to cure the hangover with a strong dose of privacy!
The transition of Ethereum to a proof-of-stake consensus algorithm was finally completed. While congratulations are in order, it also brings about another set of issues including validator privacy. We go into detail about what is at stake in the transition.?Read the article here.
领英推荐
Tokenomics update for NYM token
We recently provided an update on the tokenomics of the Nym mixnet.?Read the article here.
In the media
Blockchain could help anonymously document war crimes - Cointelegraph
“The intention is for AnonDrop to become a tool that democratises the gathering of evidence that can be used to pursue human rights cases. In the current climate in Ukraine, this would be particularly important for the purpose of securely documenting and sharing evidence of war crimes anonymously.”
Read the article?here.
Community
New Twitter account for our global community
To help the community go even more global, we want to bring news to you in your languages! One more new Twitter account has been created:
Follow this?account if Turkish is your native language.?More languages to come. Massive thanks to our community managers for leading this!
Join the weekly Nym Community Calls!
Nym runs weekly community calls exploring key issues and priorities for the Nym ecosystem, including weekly spotlights of mix node operators. Community calls are free to join every Friday - on?Telegram?and now on?Discord?too!
Coming soon
Can you guess what we are up to next??
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
Noticed our new format of showing you highlights from the past month? Let us know what you think of it!?