Nym’s mission is to establish privacy as a default for online communications. Only then can people and organizations make meaningful and secure decisions about what, when and with whom they want to share data.

Reckless data harvesting has dominated Silicon Valley business models over the past decade and has rapidly become the norm for monetizing online activity. Understanding and predicting user behaviour is now the primary business model of the Internet. These data-driven models, collectively known as surveillance capitalism, have produced giant tech monopolies and governments that oversee an unprecedented system of manipulation and control, extracting data and value from society.

It is important to realize just how lacking current technology is with regards to maintaining privacy. Even though a private messenger might encrypt a message’s contents, the metadata (for example identifying the timing of the communications, IP addresses, locations, and lots more) is visible to everyone from the Internet Service Provider (ISP) that delivers the message to the messaging application itself. And in this world of big data, metadata is in many ways more valuable than the content of messages. It can be used by sophisticated and ubiquitous analytic systems to determine the nature of your social relationships and thus predict your personal characteristics and preferences.

The necessary technology to guarantee online privacy has remained underdeveloped - until recently. With progress in computing capacity, networking, research and funding, it is now possible to overcome these limits and deploy technology that avoids trusted third parties and is resistant to surveillance.

The Next Generation of Privacy Infrastructure

Nym is developing the infrastructure to prevent data leakage from existing internet protocols. It does so by protecting every packet’s metadata at the network and application layers. Specifically, Nym protects against even the most powerful network adversaries that can observe every packet going in and out of your internet connection. With Nym, you can use the internet without fear of being watched.

A few reasons that we’re excited about Nym:

• Protect privacy at the network layer - Nym protects privacy at the network layer by encrypting and relaying your internet traffic through a multi-layered network called a mixnet. In each layer of the mixnet, mix nodes mix your internet traffic with that of other users, making communications private and hiding your metadata (e.g., your IP address, who you talk to, when and where, and more).
• Incentivized and decentralized - The Nym mixnet is incentivized and decentralized. Nym includes a reward mechanism called “proof of mixing” where users can pledge an initial amount of NYM (the native token on the Nym network) to run a mix node, and then get rewarded in NYM tokens based on quality of service, doing the work of mixing packets and providing privacy for end users.
• Works with any application - From Bitcoin to ZCash, no current “layer 1” blockchain provides “layer 0 privacy” for the peer-to-peer broadcasts used in every transaction that can resist even an adversary that can observe the entire network. Nym can provide network-level privacy for any blockchain and other generic applications.